"A splendid standing is the feast-making spoon, or wunkirmian, which is the prerogative of the most generous woman of a village, she identifies herself though living generously, through showing that she knows how to share by throwing enormous rice feasts. And the ladling of her rice, generously shared with her kinsmen and her kinswomen, is put back into a standing figure, sort of monumentalized, really a spoon that has become a woman.

The Dan, like their neighbors the Baule and their neighbors the Senufo, love rounded calves. As muscular arms are to a Western guy, rounded calves are an expression of great feminine beauty that's put into the spoon. Her powers link her to ancestral insights and blessing, and so you have a lizard which is incised across the spoon, the lizard moving on the earth, and the earth is where the ancestors dwell."

--Commentary by Robert Farris Thompson, January, 2002, "Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back"