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African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a ShadowAuthor(s):
Sidney Littlefield KasfirSource: African Arts, Vol. 25, No. 2
(Apr., 1992), pp. 40-53+96-97Published by: UCLA James S. Coleman
African Studies Center
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fricanr ta n d uthenticity
T e x t w i t h a ShadowSIDNEYLITTLEFIELDASFIR
There re thosewho want a text (anart, a painting)withouta
shadow,without the "dominantideology";but this is to want a text
withoutfecundity, without productivity,asterile ext....The ext
needs ts shad-ow....subversion must produce tsown chiaroscuro.
Roland BarthesThePleasureoftheText,p. 32
controversialebate boutAfricanart that has surfaced in the
pastfew years concerns its role asa mirror of Western colonial
history.The criticism prompted first by the"'Primitivism' in 20th
Century Art" ex-hibition at the Museum of Modern Art(Rubin 1984)
was reopened and alsosubverted by "Magiciens de la Terre" atthe
Centre Pompidou in 1989. In the for-mer, precolonial African and
Oceanic artwas presented as a set of powerfuldivining rods for
proto-Cubists, Ex-pressionists, and Surrealists. In the lat-ter,
the enigmatic (to Westerners) natureof contemporary African, Asian,
andDiaspora art was translated into the artof the conjurer
(magicien), and at thesame time this act of conjuring wasequated
(quite misleadingly) with thecultural production of a Western
avant-garde. In both exhibitions there was anattempt to demonstrate
the "affinities"between "the tribal and the modern,"Third World and
First World.Postmodern critics have used theseexhibitions (the
first a powerful articu-lation of the Modernist paradigm, thesecond
a flawed attempt at paradigm-breaking) to comment upon the
intellec-tual appropriation of African and otherThird World art by
Western museums
and collectors (Araeen 1989; Clifford1988; McEvilley 1984, 1990;
Michaud1989). Meanwhile most mainstreaminstitutions and a
surprising number ofscholars continue to think about Africanart and
its public presentation as if thisdebate were not taking place at
all. Inmost of the major exhibitions of Africanart currently
circulating in the UnitedStates there is little attempt,
eitherexplicit or implicit, to subvert omni-scient curatorial
authority.' Perhaps it istime to cast a shadow on this authorityby
reexamining the way it operates indefining African art, both as
commodityand as aesthetic act.The West and the Rest2Two questions
are central to this debate:Who creates meaning for African art?And
who or what determines its cultur-al authenticity? The authenticity
issuehas been raised many times in the pagesof this journal,3but I
want to examine itspecifically in the light of the
currentdiscussion of cultural appropriation,since in the past it
has been reviewed interms of fakes, forgeries, and
imita-tions-terms that themselves are heavilyladen with the weight
of earlier ideasabout African art and culture, mostspecifically the
primacy of "traditionalsociety." To talk about authenticity it
isfirst necessary to unpack the meaningsassumed for "traditional
society," andby extension, "traditional art."A major underpinning
for the argu-ment I am making here is that what wecall "traditional
society" is a legacy ofour Victorian past, owing as much
tonineteenth-century Romanticism andthe social-evolutionary notion
of disap-pearing cultures as to any reality foundin Africa itself.
In African studies it con-tinues to function as a more
benign,euphemistic version of that recentlyshelved artifact,
"primitive society"(Kuper 1988). The idea that before colo-nialism
most African societies were rela-
tively isolated, internally coherent, andhighly integrated has
been such a pow-erful paradigm and so fundamental tothe West's
understanding of Africa thatwe are obliged to retain it even when
wenow know that much of it is an oversim-plified fiction.This
assumed combination of isola-tion and a tightly knit inner
coherencehas given rise to a presupposition ofuniqueness in
material cultures (WilliamFagg's "tribality," eading to unique
trib-al styles), ritual systems, and cosmolo-gies. Nowhere has this
orthodox andconservative view of African culturebeen so obvious as
in Dogon studies,where the Dogon were made to seemunique not only
in Mali but in all ofAfrica.4 Such ideas are losing their
cur-rency, but only slowly.In African art studies our most
uncrit-ical assumption has been the before/afterscenario of
colonialism, in which artbefore colonization, occurring in
mostplaces from the mid-nineteenth to earlytwentieth century,
exhibited qualitiesthat made it authentic (in the sense ofuntainted
by Western intervention). Mostcrucially it was made to be used by
thesame society that produced it. In this sce-nario, art produced
within a colonial orpostcolonial context is relegated to anawkward
binary opposition: it is inau-thentic because it was created after
theadvent of a cash economy and new formsof patronage from
missionaries, colonialadministrators, and more recently,tourists
and the new African elite.This view of authenticity, thoughnow
questioned by many scholars, is stillheld firmly by major art
museums andthe most prominent dealers and collec-tors. It is,
almost by necessity, the implic-it principle of selection for the
art seenon display in large-budget, foundation-supported
circulating exhibitions such asthe recent "Yoruba: Nine Centuries
ofAfrican Art and Thought" and "Gold ofAfrica" as well as in the
permanent dis-plays of the National Museum of African
T:Lu.
wzbF-x L1. RENEGOTIATING HE PAST INTHE PRESENT:WHATWAS ONCE
THEHOME OF A WEALTHYARABMERCHANT,WITH TSINTRICATELY
ARVED19TH-CENTURYPOSTS AND LINTEL, S NOWA PLACEWHEREVIDEOSHOWS ARE
HELD.LAMU,1991.
41
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?Nil
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A. -74
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PHOTOS SIDNEY L KASFIR
Art, the MetropolitanMuseum'sRocke-feller Wing, and the National
Museumin Lagos. In addition such art, ideallyprecolonial or more
often dating fromthe earlycolonialperiod,is the subjectofvirtually
all the advertisements placedby dealers in the pages of
AfricanArtsand Artsd'Afrique oire.Ironically,what we could call
canoni-cal Africanart-that which is collectedand displayed and
hence authenticatedand valorized as "African rt"-was andis only
produced under conditions thatought to precludethe very actof
collect-ing. Seen from an anticolonialideologi-cal
perspective,collectingAfrican art isa hegemonic activity,an act of
appropri-ation; seen historically, it is a largelycolonial
enterprise;and seen anthropo-logically, it is the logical outcome
of asocial-evolutionary view of the Other:the collecting of
specimens as a corol-laryof "discovery."Evenif none of thiswere
acknowledged,one cannot escapethe internal contradictionin the
work-ing definition of authenticity-namelythat it excludes
"contamination" (tocontinue the specimenmetaphor)whileat the same
timerequiring t in the formof the collector.It is possible, in
wishful thinking,tocircumvent his collectoror at least neu-tralize
him or her: a simple gift from a
local ruler to a colonial administrator(Ruxtonin the Benue), to
a missionary(Sheppard in Kuba country), or to anexplorer(Vascoda
Gama on the Swahilicoast) might seem noninterventionist.sBut we
know from Frobenius'sdiarieshow very acrimonious, even hostile,such
exchanges could become withinthe web of conflicting nterests that
sur-rounded them. The notion that theywere somehow devoid of
political oreconomic motive on either side seemspatently
ridiculousnow, yet that is theimplicit assumption in the
"invisiblecollector" required of paradigmatic"authentic" rt.A
second fiction in the constructionof the canon is that no
importantchanges occurredin artisticproductionduring the period of
early-contactcol-lecting-that is, neitherstylenoriconog-raphy nor
the role or position of theartistwas affected n any importantwayby
the initial European presence. Thatthis is an equally dangerous and
naiveassumptioncan be shown by lookingatthe radical transformation
in warriormasquerades in the Cross River andOgoja region of
southeastern Nigeriawith the comingof the
British.Theearlydocumentationof thesemasks describedthem as skulls
worn atop the dancer'shead (Talbot1926,vol. 3: 788-89).Very
LEFT:. BONIFACEIMANI, ASTER ARVERINSHED
A-2,AKAMBAANDICRAFTOOPERATIVE.CHANGAMWE,OMBASA,991.RIGHT:.
LAWRENCEARIUKI,HEONLYKIKUYU
EM-BEROFTHEKAMBAARVERS'OOPERATIVE.AIROBI,KENYA,987.
few examples exist in collections,sincethese were not "art"by
any stretchofthe colonialimagination.Thosefew stillextant are
starklyreal skulls over-mod-eled with mimetic touchessuch as
hairand false eyes, or rearticulated lowerjaws. As the
paxBritannicadepleted theavailabilityof enemy skulls, these
werereplacedby carved wooden imitations,in some areas (Cross River)
coveredwith skin for greaterrealismand in oth-ers (Igede, Idoma)
painted white withblackcicatrizationpatterns Kasfir1988).It is
these, and not the trulyprecolonialdecorated skulls, which have
beenaccepted into the canon and are highlysought after by
collectorsas authentic.Here Western taste, not
WeSterncon-tamination,has dictated what is artandwhat is
merelyethnographic pecimen.Another example is Yoruba resist-dyed
textiles.Priorto the importationoffactory cloth from Manchester,
thesewere made fromhandspun,handwovencotton that was too coarsely
textured,too soft, and too thick for complexadiretechniquesand
patternsto develop. Yet
42
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the elaboration of adirein the heavilymissionized town of
Abeokuta and thegrowthof its productionwere in no waythought of as
inauthentic by collectorsuntil the 1960s,when it beganto be
pro-duced for a Peace Corps and touristmarket in colors other than
indigo. Inboth of these examples it was not theintervention of
Europeans and subse-quent modification of a tradition thatmarked
its "authentic"and "inauthen-tic" phases. Rather, "authentic"
wasdefinedin terms of the collectors' aste.If therewere no such
thing as collec-tions, if the processes of
appropriation,reclassification,and public display didnot exist, it
might be possible to pushback the before/afterscenario o a
muchearlierdate-say, to the advent of Islamin West Africa or to the
coming of thePortuguese. Seen strictly in terms oftheir cultural
impact, these earlierencounterswere surely as
importantascolonialism.But because such a revisionwould limit
authenticity o a handful ofcollected objects,almost none of
whichwould be sculpture in wood, it couldnot possibly find
acceptance in theworld of museums and collectors. Thecanonical
"before" therefore was de-fined originally in terms of a
Victorianideology fed by a felicitous combinationof imperial
design, social Darwinism,andcollectingzeal.But the fact is that
Africa s a partofthe world and has a long history.Thereare
innumerable befores and afters inthis history, and to select the
eve ofEuropeancolonialism as the unbridge-able chasm between
traditional,authen-tic art and an aftermath polluted byforeign
contact is arbitrary in theextreme.While it is very true that
boththe nineteenth and the twentieth cen-turies were periodsof
"fasthappening,"in Kubler'sphrase(1962:84-96),t wouldbe naive to
assume that no other suchperiodsexistedin Africanarthistory.What is
far more likely is that therewere several-some associatedwith
thespread of new technologies (brasscast-ing, weaving,
tailoring,the introductionof the horse),others with the spread
ofideas (Islam, a sky-dwelling creatorgod, the conceptof masking).I
am sug-gesting that there is no point in timeprior to which we
could speak of theascendancyof "traditional ulture"andafter which
we could speak of itsdecline. The old biological model ofbirth,
flowering, decay, and deathimposes on culture not only an orderthat
is seldom there but also, in thiscase, the strong temptation to
identifythe onset of "decay"with the onset ofcolonialism. This is
the historicist flaw
in the authenticity est used to constructthe canonof
Africanart.The third fiction concerningAfricanart is that it has a
timeless past, that inthe long interlude before
colonialism,formsremained more or less
staticovercenturies.Occasionalpieces of evidencethat support this
view, such as theYoruba-derived divination board col-lected at
Ardra before 1659 (Vansina1984:2),have been extrapolated o createa
mythicsteady-stateuniverseof canon-ical art. The logical corollary
of the"timeless past" is the fiction of the"ethnographic resent,"
hat eve of con-tact foreverfixed in the narrativestruc-tures of
contemporary ethnography.Even scholarswho readilyacknowledge
the absurdity of the former may fre-quently cling to the latter
as theirputa-tive time frame. In doing so theyprivilegethis
artificiallyconstructedeveof contactas if what came afterward sby
definition less relevant, and (onehardlyneed say) less
authentic.Yetonlysocieties in which all change was com-pressed into
a cataclysmic surge ofWesternpenetrationcould be imaginedto cease
to exist afterthat moment. Fornonexistence, in the cultural sense,
isassumed when change is read asdestructionof a way of life,
ratherthanits transformation.And indeed, in muchof the writing on
Africanart, this after-contact period is simply a blank
whitespaceon the page.
?
4. EXAMPLESOF BRICOLAGE:OILLAMPSMADE FROM
DISCARDEDMETALCANS.
NAIROBI,KENYA,1991. PHOTOIDNEY. ASFIR43
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zI-
Thus in typical exhibition cataloguesof Yoruba art, we learn
that there areorisas and their ritual objects, but as arule there
is no mention of how these fitinto the complex
twentieth-centuryrenegotiation of orisadiscipleship, Islam,and
Christianity that now characterizesYoruba religious life. Instead
the readeris invited into a fictional ethnographicpresent where
these radical changes donot intrude.6Just as casting African art in
anambiguous ethnographic present deniesit history, insistence on
the anonymityof African artists denies it individuality(Kasfir
1984, Price 1989). Far from seeingthis anonymity as a result of the
wayAfrican art is usually collected in thefirst place-stolen or
negotiated throughthe mediation of traders or other out-siders-we
have come to accept it aspart of the art's canonical character.
Thenameless artist has been explained as anecessary precondition to
authenticity, afootnote to the concept of a "tribalstyle"that he
has the power neither to resistnor to change (Kasfir 1984,
1987).Although the principal architect of thetribal style notion,
William Fagg,nonetheless recognized that "the workof art is the
outcome of a dialecticbetween the informing tradition andthe
individual genius of the artist"(1982:35), it has been more common
to
speak of the artist as simply bound toand by tradition (Biebuyck
1969:7).7Among French dealers and collectorsof African art,
"authentic" frequentlymeans "anonymous," and anonymityprecludes any
consideration of the indi-vidual creative act. One Parisian
collec-tor told Sally Price (1989:69): "It givesme great pleasure
not to know theartist's name. Once you have found outthe artist's
name, the object ceases to beprimitive art." In other words, the
act ofascribing identity simultaneously erasesmystery. And for art
to be "primitive" itmust possess, or be seen to possess, acertain
opacity of both origin and inten-tion. When those conditions
prevail, it ispossible for the Western collector toreinvent a mask
or figure as an object ofconnoisseurship. But when Price askedone
such connoisseur whether hethought the creator of such a workmight
be aware of these same aestheticconsiderations, the answer was
anemphatic denial (1989:70). The "primi-tive" artist, in this
Africa of the mind, iscontrolled by forces larger than himselfand
consequently knows not the subjec-
tive feelings of aesthetic choice. In suchan equation, the
Western connoisseur isthe essential missing factor that trans-forms
artifact into art.8Brian Spooner, ina seminal essay on issues
surroundingthe authenticity of Oriental carpets(1986:199, 222),
argues that an importantaspect of the carpets' appeal to
Westerncollectors is this marked cultural dis-tance between maker
and collector, andthe corresponding lack of informationabout the
artist that this usually implies.In such situations the collector
is ableto construct a set of attributes thatdescribes the "real
thing." Ironically it isnot knowledge but ignorance of the sub-ject
that ensures its authenticity.The corollary of this all-in-one
ano-nymity is that one artist's work canstand for a whole culture,
since thewhole culture is assumed to be homoge-neous (though at the
same time unique).Although it is a tautology, this has longbeen a
major argument for the conceptof a tribal style: an identifiable
culturalstyle is a major ingredient in definingethnicity, and a
Yoruba (Idoma, Kala-bari, etc.) artist is one who works inthat
identifiable style. In a video ac-companying one currently
circulatingexhibition, a pleasant-voiced narratorexplains, "The
Yoruba believe...." Icouldn't help wondering, Which Yor-uba?
Muslims? Baptists? Aladura?Those who still follow the orisas?
Lagosbusinessmen? Herbalists?9 Omniscientcuratorial authority has
the power toflatten out these hills and valleys, butshould it? Is
the public really incapableof understanding that African
cultures,and the arts they produce, are notmonolithic? Do we really
want a "textwithout a shadow"?The faraway collector also
reinventseach mask or figure as an object ofdesire: a projection of
alterity (in earliertimes, the colonized "primitive"), seenin
whatever intellectual fashion prevailsat the moment. The Kongo nail
figurebecame a "fetish," every female image a"fertility emblem,"
and so on. Namingand categorizing are interventions asimportant as
connoisseurship. Whencatalogues of collections appear, theyare most
frequently organized under adual "tribal style" and "culture
area"rubric. While classificatory principlesmay be necessary to
organize a largebody of material, they obscure
certaincorrespondences as well as illuminateothers. Although Yoruba
Gelede andMaconde Mapiiko masks often bearstriking visual
similarities, these arenever recognized or commented uponbecause
the masks appear in widelyseparated parts of any catalogue
orexhibition: the Guinea Coast and EastAfrican sections,
respectively.The most powerful of the classificato-ry interventions
are the words "tradi-tional" and "authentic," which become
TOP:5. SHETANIFIGUREIN AN OPENWORKSTYLE.COLLECTIONOF ANTHONYJ.
STOUT,WASHINGTON,D.C.BOTTOM: . AN UNFINISHEDSHETANIFIGUREINTHE
"DRIFTWOOD"TYLE.COLLECTIONOF ANTHONYJ. STOUT,WASHINGTON,D.C.
44
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PHOTO SIDNEY L KASFIR
7. THEFUNDI(ARTISAN)ATWORK:A BLACKSMITHN
KAMAKUNJIMARKET.NAIROBI,KENYA,1991.
8. THE FUNDIATWORK:DRUMMAKERS N A NAIROBIALLEY.1991.
PHOTO SIDNEY L KASFIR
shorthand designations for "good," andtheir negations
"nontraditional" and"inauthentic," which become synony-mous with
"bad." In the same way, aDogon mask to which a recognizedexpert
applies the epithet "export piece"is instantly transformed from an
objectof desire with a high market value to apiece of flotsam
afloat in the postcolo-nial world. The language of classifica-tion
used to canonize or decanonize apiece of African sculpture is
powerful,one sided, and usually final. A sculp-ture's worth as an
aesthetic object, apiece of invention, a solution to a puzzleof
solids, voids, and surfaces, is lefttotally unexamined unless it
first passesthe authenticity test. No Kamba carving,however
brilliant or extraordinary,would get past the front door of
anyreputable New York gallery specializingin African art. It would
be said to "lackintegrity," implying that somehow non-traditional
artists have detached them-selves from their cultures and that
theirwork is therefore inauthentic.In the earlier debates about
authentic-ity in African art, much discussion cen-tered on copies,
replication, and fakes.We may ask what kind of assumptionsunderlies
such questions. What is beingfalsified? And in whose eyes? On the
onehand the construction of the idea of"tribal" style presumes a
fairly highdegree of uniformity from one artist'swork to another,
and such replicationhas been accepted as part of the "tradi-tional
art" paradigm. But when a con-temporary carver from another
ethnicgroup (or "tribal style area") intention-ally takes up this
same style, the result-ing object is said to be a fake because,
itis claimed, there is conscious intent todeceive. The same claim
is made evenif the carver is a member of the "tradi-tional" culture
that produced the objectin the first place, if he artificially
agesthe piece or allows it to be thought old
by the buyer. Given the absence of asignature or known artist's
hand inmost cases, intentionality is seeminglycrucial in deciding
what is authenticand what is fake.But it is not so clear that
theseWestern collectors' distinctions are veryresonant in the mind
of the Africanartist. Asante carvers are an interestingcase in
which artists' attitudes towardcopying successful forms have
beenwell documented (Silver 1980, Ross &Reichert 1983). For
Asante (and manyother10)carvers, imitating a well-knownmodel is
considered neither deceptivenor demeaning; rather, it is viewed
asboth economically pragmatic and a wayof legitimating the skill of
a predecessor(if an old model) or paying homage to afellow artist
(in the case of a recentinnovation) (Silver 1980:6).This attitude
stems directly from theway carving is regarded as a
livelihood.While this view is well known, it bearsrepeating in this
context: whereasWestern artists often see their work pri-marily as
a vehicle for self-realization,that attitude is as unfamiliar to
Africanartists as it is in African culture general-ly, unless we
refer to elite artists trainedin Western-type art schools.
Typicallythe carving profession, or any other thatresults in the
construction of artifacts(brasscasting, weaving,
pottery-makingetc.), is seen as a form of work, not qual-itatively
very different from farming,repairing radios, or driving a taxi.
Thisdoes not mean that it is not "serious"-work is indeed
serious-but that it isviewed matter-of-factly as aiming to sat-isfy
the requirements set down bypatrons. One does whatever is
necessaryto become a successful practitioner.Furthermore, in
precolonial patron-client interactions, it was the custom
forartists to try openly to please patrons,even if this meant
modifying form. Notsurprisingly, that attitude has carried
over into colonial and postcolonial rela-tions with new patrons,
including for-eigners. It is unclear why making whatthe buyer
prefers should be regarded byWestern collectors as acceptable in
thepast but opportunistic now. One reasonmay be that they see types
of paymentfor traditional commissions-yams,goats, iron rods-as less
commercialthan currency transactions, and this hasthe effect of
"softening" the economicmotive for the transaction. But the
morelikely reason is the Western collector'sfailure to recognize
that even precolo-nial African art was essentially "client-driven"
(Vogel 1991:50).The other major difference betweenAfrican artist
and foreign collector is theantiquarianist mindset of the
latter.African art in a Western (or equally,Japanese) collection
takes on greater sig-nificance, prestige, and market value if itis
old. While most Africans do not sharethis attitude toward their
art, they arewilling to accept the fact that collectorsprefer
"antiquities"" and consequentlysee nothing wrong with
replicatingthem. The intentional deception (and ithappens with
regularity) occurs morefrequently in the marketing of a work
bytraders and later by art dealers. It is usu-ally less a matter of
collusion betweenartist and trader than of the marked dif-ference
between African and Westernthinking about the significance of
one-of-a-kind originality.On the question of imitation and
itsrelation to deception, we could con-clude, first, that Western
collectors have
45
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PHOTO SIDNEYL. KASFIR
9. SAMAKILIKONKOA,THEMACONDECARVERWHO INTRODUCEDFIGURES OF
THESPIRITSCALLEDSHETANIIN DAR ES SALAAMIN 1959.DAR ES
SALAAM,1970.
nothing against imitation in the sense ofartists following
time-worn proto-types-in fact a completely unsurprisingmask or
figure in a well-documented"tribal" style is usually preferable
tosomething wildly original and idiosyn-cratic, since there are no
standards forjudging the worth of the latter. Second,the same
Western collector (or museumprofessional) is distinctly
uncomfortablewith any tampering with the prototypi-cal imitation,
through attempts to makeit look old or through imitation by
anartist outside the group with whom theprototype is thought to
have originated.Either of these serves to inauthenticatethe piece,
regardless of its merits as awork of art. Third, most (I am
guessinghere, but based on fairly broad experi-ence) non-elite
African artists, whetherrural or urban, would find these
ideasarbitrary rather than obvious, and morethan a little baffling
in their seeminginconsistency toward imitation.If we now go back to
the question ofwhat is being falsified in the case of"fakes," we
might wish to look beyondthe short range. In a center
versusperiphery view of cultural production,the center defines
legitimate means andends, to which the periphery can onlyrespond.
If we allow that collecting thenbecame the colonizer's role, can it
besurprising that the colonized respondedwith the willing supply of
what the cen-ter seemed to demand? That the "antiq-uity" may have
been new both compliedand retaliated-subversion producingits own
chiaroscuro.
Authenticity as an ideology of collec-tion and display creates
an aura of cul-tural truth around certain types of
African art (mainly precolonial andsculptural). But the
implications ofauthenticity extend even further into anideology of
recording culture, whetherthrough film or through writing.
Theethnographic film is particularly vulner-able to this form of
selective perception.In 1978 in Ibadan I watched a crew ofperfectly
serious German filmmakerssystematically eliminating the JimmyCliff
T-shirts, wristwatches, and plasticin various forms from a Yoruba
crowdscene at an Egungun festival. They wereattempting to erase
Westernization fromYoruba culture, rewriting Yorubaethnography in
an effort to reinvent apast free of Western intervention-apure,
timeless time and space, an"authentic" Yoruba world.Charles Keil
relates the story of theTiv women's dance known as Icoughand how it
was modified by filmmakers(in the face of considerable Tiv
resis-tance) to fit the requirements of culturalauthenticity and
the attention span of aWestern audience (1979:249-50). Adance
sequence of eight segments last-ing well over an hour was reduced
tothree; the usual audience of "enthusias-tic supporters pushing
forward for abetter look or breaking into the dance topress coins
on perspiring brows" wascompletely absent (Keil 1979:249). Butmost
serious, the aesthetics governingthe dance itself-what Keil refers
to asthe Tiv expressive grid-were modifiedby the insistence of the
filmmakers thatthe women change their costumes fromthe
Western-style circle-skirted dressesand pith helmets usually worn
for thisdance to the more common Tiv "native"wrappers. What is
subsequently lost in
the film is the interaction of costumeand movement that is
central to this par-ticular dance:The dresses in the original
dance,all flounced and starched out incircular hems around the
knees,provided a moving circumferenceagainst which knee bends,
elbowactions and neck angles couldcounterpoint
themselves....theremoval of pith helmets from theheads of the dance
co-leadersseems a petty suppression to com-plain of until one
realizes that twopivotal hubs that literally cap thepresentation
and balance the skirtcircles are missing....Not only werethe
central ymbols fa "riteof mod-ernization"akenawayor repressed,but
thepower fTiv traditiono mas-ter thosesymbols, ncorporateheminto
Tivmetaphor,asbeingdenied.(Keil 1979:250;emphasis added)
Having been shown David Atten-borough's film Behind the Mask, my
stu-dents are always shocked to learn thattourists regularly visit
certain Dogon vil-lages. The film artfully presents theDogon as a
"pure"culture, untainted bycontact with outsiders. In an
equallypopular film, Peggy Harper and FrankSpeed's Gelede, he
western Yoruba maskfestival is performed in a nearly emptyspace
with almost no audience, eventhough we know that in fact it
takesplace in a crowded marketplace amidstnoise, dust, and
confusion (Drewal &Drewal 1983). Presumably, clear cameraangles
took precedence over contextuali-ty. By strict definition these are
not doc-umentary films, because they controland regulate the
participants. Yet theyare widely used in both museums anduniversity
classrooms. Despite theirflaws they have defined and authenticat-ed
the performative aspect of African artfor a generation of
students.I have quoted at length the instanceof the filming of the
Icough dancebecause it provides such a striking anal-ogy to the
redefining of objects such asmasks in the process of removing
themfrom the scene of their production anduse and installing them
in a museum.This reduction and stripping away ofmeaning by the
removal of "extraneous"facts-whether a decaying masqueradecostume
or a starched dress and pith hel-met-serve seemingly opposite
purpos-es in the two cases. In the dance itself-consciously
traditionalizes he perfor-mance for a film audience that expectsthe
exotic; in the example of the mask
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installed in a museum, the removal ofaccoutrements reduces it to
unclutteredsculpture that can be displayed in theModernist idiom,
as pure form. But bothcases involve the same act of erasure
andimposition of new meaning. And bothare so frequently done that
we take themwholly for granted.Art and Artifact:The Creation of
MeaningThis leads to a very troubling question:who creates meaning
for African art? Itis difficult not to conclude that it is large-ly
Western curators, collectors, and crit-ics (whose knowledge, as we
will see, isdeftly mediated by entrepreneurialAfrican traders along
the way) ratherthan the cultures and artists who pro-duce it. This
is not to suggest that theoriginal work possesses no
intentionali-ty. It is fully endowed with intention byits creator
as well as by its patrons. Butthe successive meanings an object
isgiven are fluid and negotiable, fragileand fully capable of
erasure as it passesfrom hand to hand and ultimately into aforeign
collection. Here it must beinvented anew, most often in the
contextof a museum culture dominated eitherby a Modernist aesthetic
that looks for"affinities" from the Third World or by apotentially
deadening "material culture"approach. A handful of museums
havefound other ways of reinventing Africanart that strive
consciously to be anti-Modernist and anti-hegemonic, such asthe
Centre Pompidou's 1989 installationof "Magiciens de la Terre"
(McEvilley1990:19-21), or richly contextualist, suchas the Museum
of Mankind's Yorubainstallation of the mid-'70s; they are
rein-ventions nonetheless, since that is aninescapable aspect of
what museums do.Even the contextual approaches that areconsciously
designed to preserve theintegrity of cultures represented are
farfrom neutral. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett reminds us that
designing theexhibition is also constituting the subject,and that
"in-context approaches exertstrong cognitive control over the
objects,asserting the power of classification andarrangement..."
(1991:389-90).James Clifford further reminds usthat prior to the
twentieth century,African artifacts were not "art" in eitherAfrican
or Western eyes (1988:226-29).Jacques Maquet made the same
pointearlier (1979:32), referring to African artas "art by
metamorphosis." In Westernmuseums these objects underwent adouble
taxonomic shift-first from exot-ica to scientific specimens when
the ear-lier "cabinets of curiosities" gave wayto newly founded
museums of natural
history in the late nineteenth century;and following their
"discovery" byPicasso and his friends in the earlydecades of the
twentieth century, theyunderwent a second promotion into artmuseums
and galleries where theywere recontextualized as art
objects(Clifford 1988: 227-28).This migration of objects
throughclassificatory systems can be mappedtopologically as well as
diachronically.The experienced museum-goer knowsthat the art-museum
display policy inwhich an isolated mask or figure isencased in a
vitrine or lit with tracklights means to convey the informationthat
the object is to be apprehended as"art";the same object embedded in
thebusy diorama of a natural history muse-um display is meant to be
read differ-ently, as a cultural text. In the former itsuniqueness
is stressed, in the latter its(con)textuality. Yet, as museums,
bothconfer cultural authenticity upon theobjects displayed there,
which are can-onized in the popular coffee-table title,Treasuresof
the-.That from an African perspective,these objects are not art in
the currentWestern sense is too well known to dis-cuss here. Our
museum collections, onthe other hand, are constituted by crite-ria
that we, and not they, devise. Thefact that the various Idoma
(Alago, etc.)lexical terms for "mask" are wholly non-aesthetic will
not perturb even the mostinexperienced museum docent. AsMaquet
suggests (1986:15), why notdefine art as those objects which are
dis-played on museum walls?Every collected mask or figure isdefined
and given boundaries by its sur-roundings: the village shrine
house
(where it is wrapped in burlap andhung out of the reach of white
antswhen not in use), the trader's kiosk inan African city (where
it rests amonghundreds of other de/recontextualizedobjects and is
first given an "art" identi-ty), the Madison Avenue gallery
(whereit is put through the "quality" sieve andaestheticized with
other "quality"objects), and finally the home of thewealthy
collector (where it is reincorpo-rated into a domestic setting, but
unlikethe situation in the village, is on con-stant display,
"consumed" visually bycollector and friends). Taken in se-quence
the definitions overlap at leastsomewhat, but between the first and
lastthere is an almost total reinvention ofhow and what the object
signifies.Tourist Art and AuthenticityOf all the varieties of
African art thattrigger the distaste of connoisseurs andsubvert the
issue of authenticity, surelyso-called tourist art is the
worst-casescenario. In the biological model ofstylistic development
it exemplifies"decay" or even "death"; in discussionsof quality it
is dismissed as crude, massproduced and crassly commercial; in
themetaphors of symbolic anthropology itis impure, polluted; in the
salvageanthropology paradigm it is alreadylost. The Center for
African Art in NewYork decided to omit it from its suppos-edly
definitive contemporary art exhibi-tion "Africa Explores,"
presumably forsome or all of the above reasons.At the same time it
is a richly layeredexample of how the West has inventedmeaning (and
in this case denied authen-ticity) in African art. Without
Western
10. A MACONDE CARVERATWORKON THE BAGAMOYOROAD INTANZANIA.1970.
PHOTO:IDNEY.KASRR
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patronage it would not exist. It is aMarxist's nightmare,
hegemonic appro-priation gone wild. But what actually is"it"? The
rubric "tourist art" seems toinclude all art made to be sold
whichdoes not conveniently fit into other clas-sifications. It is
easier to state what itexcludes: "international" art made
byprofessionally trained African artists andsold within the gallery
circuit, "tradi-tional" art made for an indigenous com-munity, and
"popular" art that isnontraditional but is also sold to, per-formed
for, or displayed to "the people."To someone only passingly
familiarwith the African urban scene, this defini-tion might seem
to leave only curios-"airport art"-the carved giraffes andelephants
seen in any Woolworth's or infront of any tropical Hilton. In fact
itleaves a great deal more, from the inge-nious (embroidered
helicopters and jew-elry from recycled engine parts); to
theinevitable (Samburu beaded watchstrapcovers), as well as various
types of sculp-ture and painting. But by assigningeverything else
under one classificatory,and inevitably dismissive, label,
Westernart museums and galleries cause allother "unassigned" forms
to becomeinvisible, to fall through the canonicalsieve. The erasure
is as complete as theremaking, on film, of the Icoughdance orthe
Gelede estival.
Conversely, the fact that considerablenumbers of tourists buy a
type of artdoes not make it tourist art by currentdefinitions.
Osogbo art is sold mainly totourists and expatriates resident
inNigeria, but having been canonized asauthentic contemporary art
back in the1960s, most writers do not treat it astourist
art.12Yoruba ibeji figures, origi-nally used to commemorate dead
twinsbut frequently transformed into artobjects in galleries from
Abidjan toNairobi, are also sold to tourists in greatnumbers (being
small and usuallycheaper than masks) but are not consid-ered by
anyone to be tourist art. The rea-sons are different in the two
cases.Osogbo art escapes the tourist label bybeing the work of
several individuallyknown artists, each with a recognizablestyle.
The most famous of these, TwinsSeven Seven, was included in
the"Magiciens de la Terre" exhibition in1989. When he first came to
prominencein the 1960s, he received the sameextravagant praise and
adulation fromthe art world as Ch&riSamba garnerstoday. But
what of the host of imitationsTwins's work has spawned, each
beingpeddled on the sidewalks of Lagos andIbadan? Most are lacking
in skill andinventiveness, but one or two are almostas good as the
work of Twins himself. Isthat work tourist art? Neither
patronagenor quality seems to be the crucial factor.In the case of
the ibejis, this statusdemotion is avoided by virtue of the
artist's intention: they were made to beused by a Yoruba patron
in a sacredcontext. The fact that they are sold totourists nowadays
cannot dislodge theirplace in the canon. Yet even intentionali-ty
is not a reliable test for admission to,or exclusion from, the
canon. Let us takethe frequently cited case of the Afro-Portuguese
ivories. While clearly madefor foreign consumption, they suffer
nodisapprobation and are not classified astourist art by museums or
collectors.13For one thing they are precolonial indate and
therefore do not fit the view oftourist art as a colonial and
postcolonialphenomenon. The antiquarianism ofWestern museums and
collectors strong-ly predisposes toward their admissionto the canon
on the basis of age. Butthere is another, equally important
rea-son: they are technically works of greatvirtuosity and they are
carved fromivory, a material associated with ex-pense and rarity in
Western taste.Tourist art is thought to be both crudeand cheap.
Objects seemingly escapethis classification by being old,
veryexpensive, or technically complex.14We have seen then that the
"tourist"in "tourist art" is not the crucial distinc-tion that
keeps Western authorities fromadmitting it to the canon. Rather it
is thebelief that it is cheap, crude, and mass-produced. But all
African art is cheap, inart market terms, prior to its arrival
inthe West. Much "authentic" art is crude-ly fashioned-Dogon
Kanagamasks, forexample-but this seems no deterrent toits
popularity with collectors. And whatof mass production? Even a
humblecurio is hand crafted. Mass productionimplies the use of
standardization tech-niques and assembly lines-hardly adescription
of what goes on in a carvers'cooperative. What the Western
connois-seur imagines, with obvious distaste, isa kind of
machine-like efficiency, a per-ception that totally obscures the
fact thatthe working relationship among thesecarvers is
fundamentally no differentfrom, say, that of a group of
Yorubaapprentices in an Ife workshop turningout everything from Epa
masks to nativ-ity scenes (Kasfir 1987). Even in verylarge Kamba
cooperatives, such as thatat Changamwe outside Mombasa, thehundreds
of carvers are broken downinto separate sheds of a dozen or
fewermen who maintain close ties over manyyears, who train new
apprentices, andwho may even be relatives from thesame village in
Ukambani, the Kambahomeland. Within these cooperativesapprentices
learn from, and are perma-nently indebted to, master carvers inmuch
the same way as in the past.Although the Kamba were not makersof
wood sculpture in the precolonialperiod, they were celebrated as
black-smiths, ivory carvers, and by the latenineteenth century, as
beadworkers.
Their ability to take up curio carving ona wide scale did not
suddenly appearone day out of thin air, but was madepossible by
their long collective experi-ence as craftsmen.John Povey's
comments on Kambacarvers are typical of the inaccuratewaycarvers'
cooperatives are envisioned:"The conveyor-belt system of their
pro-duction prevents any suggestion thatthey can offer career
options for localartists. They require factory workers"
(1980:5). There is role specialization inmany cooperatives,
which leads to repe-tition of certain forms in response toconsumer
demand. On the other handthere are also superior carvers (Fig. 2)
aswell as "hacks" in these groups-every-one does not work at the
same technicallevel. This fact is well documented forthe Kamba
(Jules-Rosette 1986), Asante(Silver 1980), Kulebele (Richter
1980),and Maconde (Kasfir 1980). Workingalongside a young
apprentice whocarves only spoons may be a mastercarver such as
Lawrence Kariuki (theonly Kikuyu member of the NairobiKamba
cooperative), who may work onthe same piece for weeks and
carvesonly on individual commission (Fig. 3).But once again it
would appear that theforced anonymity that results from acollective
group identity-the "tribalstyle"-causes Western critics to
lumptogether the good, the bad, and theindifferent under a single
rubric.Even originality, the sine qua non for"significant" Western
art, occurs as fre-quently in tourist art as in other
types.Innovation, after all, is fundamental to agenre that depends
upon its novelty foracceptance by the foreign patron. Yetthis very
inventiveness is found offen-sive by connoisseurs of African
art.Why? Perhaps because it violates thecanonical model of a
timeless and event-less past. Paula Ben-Amos, in an
incisivecomparison of tourist art and pidginlanguages, argued for
another impor-tant difference between traditional andtourist arts:
a different set of rules forthe manipulation of form itself
(1977:130, 132). Whereas precolonial Africansculpture was
characterized by "rigidsymmetry and frontality," the devianceof
tourist art from that norm results ineither "surreal distortion" or
a movetoward naturalism. The former is oftenseen as "grotesque" by
connoisseurs oftraditional art-a normative judgmentbased on the
preference for the more"classic," self-contained precolonialstyles.
This comes down to the problemof taste, an important issue
oftenneglected in the authenticity debate andone that I have
treated elsewhere(Kasfir,in press).Behind and beneath many of
theattempts to dismiss the authenticity ofso-called tourist art is
its inability toresist commodification. No collector
48
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PHOTO:JEN BOTSOW
11. MAASAIWOMENMAKINGBEADWORK.NAMANGA,KENYA,1987.
wishes to see a piece nearly identical tohis or her own in a
shop window, sincein Western culture there is no prestige(and
little investment potential) in own-ing a thing that is not
one-of-a-kind.Spooner calls attention to the "obsessionfor
distinction" that motivates many col-lectors of Oriental carpets
(1986:200).Kirschenblatt-Gimblett notes the sameproblems of
commodification in the col-lection of American folk art
(1988:148)and relates this to the Modernist agendaas it is spelled
out by the critic FredricJameson: "Modernism conceives of itsformal
vocation to be the resistance tocommodity form, not to be a
commodity,to devise an aesthetic language inca-pable of offering
commodity satisfac-tion...." It would be difficult not to seethe
relevance of these arguments to thefears of collectors or to the
acquisitionpolicies of art museums.15Maconde16 sculpture, which
since1959 has been produced in two sub-styles, one naturalistic
(binadamu,"human beings") and one anti-naturalis-tic (shetani or
jini, "spirits"), is a perfectillustration of the bifurcation
between aprecolonial self-contained symmetryand a postcolonial
expressionism (Figs.5, 6). It is routinely rejected by fine
artmuseums and owned mainly by thosewho do not collect canonical
Africanart.17But not all museums are concernedwith canonicity. A
Maconde collectionhas been accepted by the Smithsonian'sNational
Museum of Natural History, astestimony to the role played by
aesthet-ics in the processes of cultural change.The ecumenically
inclined organizers of"Magiciens de la Terre" at CentrePompidou
also ignored precedent andincluded the work of one Macondesculptor,
John Fundi. He is quoted in thecatalogue with a single
sentence:"Toutes mes oeuvres ont une histoire"(Centre Pompidou
1989:137). This story-telling is one more violation of the
rules
of the canon, since "traditional" sculp-ture lacks a narrative
character.Fundi's art is indeed "grotesque" bythe prevailing canon
of taste that pre-colonial art has generated. It is also anact of
bricolage.What this means is per-haps clearer if we begin with the
artist'sname, one more "subversion which cre-ates its own
chiaroscuro." In KiSwahili, afundi 18 is an artisan (Figs. 7, 8),
but theword also carries the connotation of"one who fixes things."
If my bicyclechain is broken, I take it to the bicyclefundi. Also
to the point, it may connote aperson who has the peculiar skill or
tal-ent needed to "bring things off."19He isthe East African
equivalent of Levi-Strauss's bricoleur(1966:16ff.), mendingwhat is
broken with whatever materialscome to hand. In the Third World
every-thing useful is collected and recycled(Fig. 4): old rubber
tires become sandals,
cows' tails become flywhisks, safety pinsand zippers become
jewelry (Cover).This inventiveness, which requires aconstant
shifting about of means andends, causes the products of the
fundi'slabor to be constantly in flux.This habit of mind, making a
virtue ofnecessity, is as true of the woodcarver asit is of the man
who repairs bicycles. Thefirst Maconde shetanicarving is
attribut-ed by the carvers themselves to SamakiLikonkoa (Fig. 9),
who in 1959 was car-rying a "normal" binadamufigure to thetrader
Mohamed Peera in Dar es Salaamwhen, accidentally, one arm was
brokenoff (Kasfir 1980). Disconsolate, Samakireturned home where he
dreamed that
night of his dead father. In his dream hisfather instructed him
to smooth the bro-ken shoulder socket and gouge out theeyes. It
would then represent a bushspirit, a djinn (KiSwahili:jini,
shetani).The fact that none of the Dar esSalaam immigrant Maconde
had made ashetani before was immaterial, since thiswas not intended
for use within the
PHOTO SIDNEYL KASFIR
12. MAASAIWOMENAT THEAFRICANHERITAGEGALLERY.ON
TUESDAYMORNINGSARTISANS LIKETHESE WOMEN BRINGINTHEIRWORKTO
BEPURCHASEDBY
AFRICANHERITAGEBUYERS(HOLDINGCLIPBOARDS).NAIROBI,KENYA,1987.
PHOTO. SIDNEY L KASFIR
13. MAASAIWOMENAT THEAFRICANHERITAGEGALLERY,WEARINGTHE
BEADEDJEWELRYTHATIS ALSO SOLD AT THEGALLERY.
NAIROBI,KENYA,1987.
49
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Macondecommunity.It would be soldby Peera to anyonewho walked
into hisshop and fancied it. Samaki's act ofbricolagecame to him in
a dream inwhich tradition (his father) sanctionedinnovationby
relating t back o tradition.(Bush spirits are an integral part
ofMacondebelief.) This spiralingoff intonew forms would have
beenmuchmoredifficultin the precolonialpast. But
theradicallydifferentsituation introducedby foreign patronage
opened the wayfor invention. In precolonialart, object,symbol, and
function have been repre-sented as tightly bound up with eachother
in a highly structured system,leaving little room for
eithersubvertingor extending meanings (e.g., Levi-Strauss
1966:26).20But the new genresdeveloped under colonialism (and
Iinclude in this categoryboth "popular"and "tourist"art) feed upon
the fluid,highly situational patronage of theAfrican city, not the
more predictableneeds of chiefs,age grades,and descentgroups.This
city is linked in turn to theformer colonial center, with its
foreignpatrons and exotic culture, and to thevillages to which its
inhabitantsregular-ly returnand from which they draw
animportantpartof theiridentity.21Paula Ben-Amos marshalled
Levi-Strauss's argument that the semanticfunction of art tends to
disappear n thetransition from "primitive"to
modern(Ben-Amos1977:131). n modern art (ormore accurately,
Renaissance to nine-teenth-century European art), it isreplaced by
a mimetic function. Thatthis has happened in Benintouristart
isclear from her interview with SamsonOkungbowa: "The
commemorativehead [madeby a traditionalguild] rep-
resentsthe head of a spirit,not a humanbeing.Itspurposes to
instill earand it ismade for a shrine.No
onewaseverafraidofanebonyhead "emphasisadded).Thisexample likens
tourist art (the ebonyhead) to pidgin languages,
Ben-Amosconcludes,because in bothcases thereisa restricted emantic
evel and a limitedrangeof subjectmatter 1977:129).Questioning these
limitations, Ben-netta Jules-Rosettehas argued that thesemiotic
content of tourist art does notdisappear but only becomes
hidden(1987a:3;1987b:93).Although operatingin a few standard
ormatsand a more orless "generic"style of representation,both
tourist and popular painting "usemetaphor, metonymy, and allegory
topoint to an unvoiced layer of meaningthat remains mplicit n the
artist'srendi-
tion"(Jules-Rosette987a:3). ignificant-ly the subjecthere is
painting,not sculp-ture. Painting has a more literary,"message
bearing" characterthan theplasticarts and is also a
greaterartifice,collapsing three dimensions onto a flatsurface. As
such it is riper for semioticanalysis than sculpture. Building
uponthe classificatory ystem of Ilona Szom-bati-Fabian nd
JohannesFabian(1976),Jules-Rosettextends t to includetouristas well
as popularart.In her
argument,bothtouristandpopularZairianpaintingexpress collective
memory and con-sciousness through the employment
ofstereotypicthemes such as idyllic land-scapes
("thingsancestral"), oloniebelgepaintings ("things past"),and
scenes ofcitylife("thingspresent") 1987a:4).An interestingquestion
then is howapplicablethese categoriesare to otherforms of so-called
tourist art. Trans-ferringthis typology to Macondesculp-ture, one
might classify ujamaapoles(family trees) and Mama Kimakonde("Mother
of the Makonde," derivedfromthe matrilinealancestor)as
"thingsancestral,"the well-known caricaturesof Europeans,
especially priests, as"things ofthe colonial)past,"andgenrepieces
such as the barbergiving a hair-cut as
"thingspresent."Unfortunately, the most innovativesculptures, the
shetanifigures, are too
PHOTO IDNEY.KASFIR
PHOTO IDNEY KASFIR
PHOTO:IDNEY.KASFIR
CLOCKWISEROM OP:14.KAMBANDKIKUYU ATS.AFRICAN
ERITAGEALLERY,AIROBI, ENYA,987.15. MAASAIUNGUTHROWINGTICKS)
NDBEADEDKEYRINGS;NTHELEFT RENON-MAASAIEADS.THESE TEMS
RESOLDATTHEAFRICAN ERITAGEGALLERY.AIROBI, ENYA,987.16.MAASAI OURDS
NDLEATHERORAGINGAG,BOTHMADE NDDECORATEDYWOMEN.AFRICAN
ERITAGEALLERY,AIROBI, ENYA,987.
50
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17. MAASAIBEADWORK,SHIELDS,ANDKENYANKHANGACLOTH FOR SALE
NEARTHEROAD TO THEAMBOSELIGAME RESERVE.
NAMANGA, KENYA,1987.
complex to work into a simple chrono-logical scheme such as
this. In a memoryframe they represent a qualitatively dif-ferent
dimension, a persistent "past inthe present." Yet except for the
"thingsancestral," they are the most powerfulexamples of collective
memory at workin Maconde sculpture, referring as theydo to a set of
beliefs about nature spirits,nnandenga, embedded in Maconde
oraltraditions and masquerade perfor-mance. At the same time, as
shetani,theyare inventions for a modern audience offoreigners. As
effective as this schema isfor eliciting the "messages" of
popularand tourist paintings in Zaire andZambia, it requires
recasting to fit theproblem of Maconde sculpture. Theissue of
collective memory, I will argue,is crucial in this rethinking,
though notin quite the same way as it works for thepatrons of
Zairian popular painting.The Maconde carvers of Dar esSalaam and
its environs are immigrantsfrom Cabo Delgado province in
theirMozambican homeland. They reinventtheir culture in the alien
landscape ofTanzania, usually in scattered settle-ments outside Dar
and Mtwara (Fig. 10).In the early 1970s they still harbored
areputation for fierceness among thelocal Tanzanians, partly
because theychose to live apart and partly becausethey alone
continued to cicatrize theirfaces and file their teeth: the same
actsof cultural inscription that appear ontheir mapiiko nitiation
masks. This highvisibility is shared by their shetani fig-ures,
which deviate so radically fromthe typical curio shop repertoire.
Onemight say that the uneasiness felt by theDar es Salaam locals is
equivalent to thediscomfort of "proper" art collectors,both of whom
see the Maconde as cul-turally alien to their landscape. Howthen
are we to understand what theMaconde are doing? And why should itbe
rejected by Western cultural institu-tions as inauthentic?
My own sense is that they areengaged in a complex renegotiation
ofMaconde identity, particularly the iden-tity of the artist, in
this new cultural set-ting. It is this which gives shetanicarvings
their "emergent" quality, iden-tified by Karin Barber (1987) as the
mostdistinctive feature of the popular arts(which, ironically, are
rejected by fineart museums and collectors for this
veryreason).22In Dar es Salaam the Macondecarvers were at pains to
separate them-selves from local Zaramo carvers whoproduced small
curios. The Maconde,unlike the Zaramo, could not be com-missioned
by a trader to produce a cer-
PHOTO SIDNEY L KASFIR
tain number of carvings of a certain typein a certain number of
days. To the con-sternation of the traders, they regardedthemselves
as "artists," meaning thatthey made whatever they felt like mak-ing
that day, week, or month. Theywould also travel back and forth
fre-quently, crossing the Rovuma River andascending the Maconde
Plateau innorthern Mozambique.This seemingly casual attitude
towardcarving could not have improved theirfinancial status, since
an unpredictableoutput could only make an already mea-ger living
more precarious. Rather it hadto do with the Maconde carvers'
self-per-ception. Carving is work, but it is also a
form of mediation between the old life,still very much alive in
collective memo-ry ("We come from Mueda, we all comefrom Mueda"),
and the new one outsidethe Maconde homeland. Some carverscontinue
to make the mapiikomasks forinitiation rituals while
fashioningbinadamuor shetanifigures for sale to for-eigners. There
is no overlap in style, con-tent, or clientele between these two
typesof transactions.But it would be wrong to conclude,as Vogel has
done (1991:41-42, 238), thatonly the mapiikomasks are authentic
cul-tural expressions. In the artists' eyes allof their sculptures
are equally so: onemakes "what people want," whether in
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14/
the indigenous or the foreign patronagesystem.23 Barber's
example of WestAfrican bands who record differentmusic for the
local and the foreign mar-kets is an excellent analogy (1987:27).On
the one hand, as JeanComaroff com-ments (1985:119), in a situation
of con-tradictory values introduced throughradical social change, "
'traditional' ritu-al [or here, art] serves increasingly as asymbol
of a lost world of order and con-trol." But we might also
hypothesizethat new forms of cultural expressionserve to anchor the
immigrant's experi-ence in a series of mediations requiredby the
adopted culture and its setting.The shetanicarvings do this very
suc-cessfully because they are in demand bya new clientele and also
serve to legiti-mate a set of beliefs about the Wild thatencompass
both the old and new home-lands. Like the carved door illustrated
inFigure 1, they are "signs ...disengagedfrom their former
contexts" that "takeon transformed [and visually concrete]meanings
in their new associations"(Comaroff 1985:119). In short, the
artistcontinues to play the role of the fundi orthe bricoleur.
Why this role should be regarded byWestern connoisseurs as
inauthentic isperhaps because authenticity, until now,has been
intimately associated with that"lost world of order and control,"
butnot with any of the cultural renegotia-tions following that
loss. We need firstof all to recognize that the precolonialpast,
seen from the present, is an ideal-ization for Europeans and
Africansalike; second, it is crucial to relocate thenotion of
authenticity in the minds ofthose who make art and not those on
theother side of the Atlantic Ocean whocollect it.Context s
Everything:TheStreet,theTrader, ndthe MarketIt is not only in
museum displays and inthe houses of connoisseurs that themeanings
of African art are reinvented.Until now, I have focussed on the
con-temporary artist and the collector. Butunless we consider the
intermediary inthis transaction, the description isincomplete in an
important way.Christopher Steiner in two seminalessays (1989a,
1989b) has drawn atten-tion to the mediation of knowledge bytraders
in African art, using as his exam-ple the Hausa, Mande, and
Woloftraders in C6te d'Ivoire. I will attempt toexpand this world
to encompass theircounterparts in Nairobi.Unlike most cities in
West Africa,Nairobi is awash with tourists everyday of the year.24
It has many moreboutiques and galleries than one findsin a typical
West African capital, andthese exist at every rung of the econom-ic
ladder. Most noticeably, there is
almost as much West African andZairian art for sale in Nairobi
as thereis art emanating from Kenya, Tanzania,Uganda, and Ethiopia.
Yet these aresurface differences: underneath, thesame principles
apply as in Abidjan,Douala, or Kano. The dealer, whether aKamba
market trader, a Gujarati shop-keeper, or an expatriate gallery
owner,plays the same role in framing, contex-tualizing, and
authenticating the arti-facts that are for sale.For example, a
brisk business existsin Maconde sculpture as well as incopies of
it. The Maconde do not live inKenya, but it is still profitable to
taketheir work across the Kenyan-Tan-zanian border from Dar es
Salaam.First, there is the full-fledged gallerytreatment given to
major works byestablished Maconde sculptors. Theseare displayed in
isolation under spot-lights and authenticated by storiesabout
origin myths concerning theimage of Mama Kimakonde, the
"firstwoman." 25 As with Zairian painting,sellers understand that
the storytelling
aspect of the figure is important toWestern buyers. As a result,
ingenioushagiographies of this or that shetaniabound ("the shetani
who causes roadaccidents," "the shetaniwho lurks in thepit latrine
and causes dysentery," etc.).Everyone is satisfied: the gallery
ownermakes his sale, the buyer feels she hasbought an authentic
artifact, and theMaconde carver is allowed to keep hisown cultural
knowledge to himself.There is also an active book market forMaconde
sculpture. Its inventivenessknows no bounds, and every year thepile
of romanticized fiction (mainly byGerman authors) written about
theMaconde grows a bit higher.While a practiced eye can tell the
dif-ference, street hawkers in both Nairobiand Mombasa manage to
sell "Maconde"carvings that are made by non-Macondecarvers working
in the industrial area ofthe two cities. Various hardwoods can
bemade to look like ebony by a judiciousapplication of black shoe
polish. (TheMaconde themselves do not use theseother woods, but
ebony is scarcer inKenya than in Tanzania.)Smaller in scaleand
price and more clearly commodified,these are often the "Maconde"
carvingsthat make their way to American depart-ment stores. All of
these marketingstrategies correspond closely to
Steiner'sobservations on the presentation,description, and
alteration of objects byIvorian traders(1989b:3).Not only Maconde
and pseudo-Maconde sculpture but other popularartifacts can be
purchased, on a slidingprice and quality scale, in galleries
orboutiques near the large internationalhotels, from
dukawallahs(petty traders)in small Indian shops near the city
cen-ter, in the City Market or in one of the
nearby overflow markets, and finallyfrom street hawkers. Between
the side-walk entrepreneur and the well-appointed boutique or
gallery there maybe a ten-fold difference in price. Buttechnical
quality will vary too, becauseboutiques are willing to pay artists
morethan a street hawker would. For exam-ple, Maasai women from the
Ngonghills outside Nairobi (Fig. 11) go to thecity once a week to
sell their beadedneck rings and ear pendants. First, theytake their
work to Alan Donovan'sAfrican Heritage Gallery where hisbuyer will
evaluate it and purchase onlythe best pieces (Figs. 12, 13). What
is leftover is then taken to street vendors, whowill pay
considerably less for it (and sellit for less). Finally the women
visit Laljiand Sons, the trade-bead shop that hasbeen in business
on BiasharaStreet sincethe early 1900s. Here they stock up onbead
supplies for the coming week andreturn to Ngong.26Inside African
Heritage, a combina-tion of sophisticated marketing tech-niques and
superior-qualitymerchandisemakes it an irresistible beacon for
bothcollectors of ethnic jewelry and collectorsof art.27 Original
designs by AngelaFisher (author of AfricaAdorned)as wellas new and
old pieces of Maasai,Samburu, Rendille, and Turkana bead-work are
sold in an ambience of authen-ticity and casual chic (Figs.
14-16).Mijikenda grave markers sprout in thegarden beside the
coffeeshop (Fig. 18).West African sculpture, from the
strictlycanonical (Yoruba ibejis)to the recentlyinvented (large
Akan masks), gracesanother section. Decorated gourds andintricately
woven baskets mediate theart/craft boundary. Upstairs there
arebatik shifts and safari clothes. Like aRalph Lauren
advertisement, AfricanHeritage evokes the quintessentiallyKenyan
Settler/Hunter style of KarenBlixenor Denys Finch-Hatton.It
remindsus that objects have the ability to createpersonalitiesfor
their owners, not just fortheir makers. And no one is more awareof
this than the trader. Not only is theMaasai woman renegotiating her
ownidentity as an artistby selling her work toa boutique, but the
woman buying andsubsequently wearing it is also inventinga new
persona for herself. That theMaasai make subtle differentiations
inthe colors and patterns of things madefor strangersversus those
made for eachother does not matter here. What issalient is the
playing out of new identi-ties on both sides.
In the none-too-distant past (say, fif-teen years ago) it would
have beenclaimed that both of these renegotiationswere culturally
spurious and that only aMaasai woman making beadwork forherself and
other Maasai could lay claimto cultural authenticity: anything
elsewould be an illustration of the cultural
52
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"decay and death" theme that inevitablyfollows colonial
contact.28 But thisnomadic jewelry, now much in demand,coexists
simultaneously in four or fivedistinct cultural settings in Nairobi
alone.Unlike precolonial African sculpture,which migrated over time
from cabinetof curiosities to natural history museumto fine art
museum with accompanyingchanges of status, we can, on the sameday,
see all of this and more. Beginningat the ethnographic gallery of
theNational Museum in Nairobi, we mayview Maasai or Samburu
beadwork dis-played as part of a standard "natural his-tory"
functionalist array with gourds,spears, and the like. Near the
frontentrance, the museum shop does a briskbusiness in pastoralist
jewelry, especiallyearrings, as souvenirs. At AfricanHeritage we
may see not only this samework being sold as aesthetic objects
butalso (on Tuesday mornings) the Maasaiwomen selling it to the
buyer and at thesame timewearingit themselves.Or the arti-facts may
be seen on dancers performingat the Nairobi tourist village, Bomas
ofKenya. Finally, bookshops all overNairobi sell Tepilit Ole
Saitoti and CarolBeckwith's Maasai, Mirella Ricciardi'sVanishing
Africa, Angela Fisher's AfricaAdorned, Mohamed Amin's Last of
theMaasai, and most recently, Nigel Pavitt'sSamburu, in which
photographs of thesame objects and their wearers are nowrecast as
evocations of a vanishing"golden land." (In fact we recognize
thatcoffee-table books such as these are thetwentieth century's
"cabinets of curiosi-ties.") Each of these
realities-functionalartifact, art object, souvenir, article
ofdress, and body arts refracted throughthe lens of the
camera-exists simultane-ously in a dialogic relationship to
theothers, each with its own fragment of thetruth (Fig. 17).But the
ultimate artifacts in thisfreeze-frame view are the Maasai
them-selves. In 1987 one enterprising Mom-basa curio shop employed
a Maasaimoran (warrior), resplendent in all hisfinery, to stroll
about the premises andattract potential buyers. Tourism itself isa
form of collecting, and taking pho-tographs its most aggressive act
ofappropriation. The Kenyan parliamentfinally felt impelled to pass
a law forbid-ding tourists to take pictures of Maasai,
aself-defensive act analogous to thosetaken by tribal councils much
earlier inthe American Southwest. But where isthe "authentic"
Maasai culture in allthis? As with the Maconde shetani carv-ings,
if we shift the locus of authenticityto the minds of the makers and
not thecollectors, the issue must be recast. Themoran in the curio
shop is real;he is nei-
ther David Byrne playing at being amambo king (Cosentino 1990:1)
nor thefolkloric "Indian" of cigar-selling days.He has lived in
cattle camps and beeninitiated with his age group into moran-hood,
which does not normally includewage employment. But perhaps heneeds
money for school fees or to pay afine. By the act of standing
outside thecurio shop he has become, in effect, a liv-ing sign of
himself.29I began with the questions of whocreates meaning for
African art andwhat determines its cultural authentici-ty. In one
sense they are rhetorical,because we already suspect the answer.If
"tourist art," the lowest common
denominator of what is thought byWesterners to be inauthentic in
Africanart, can be deconstructed in ways thatmake the definition of
authenticity fullof self-contradictions, then the samekinds of
questions can be asked evenmore readily about other
noncanonicalcategories such as "elite" or "interna-tional" art.
Now, in the closing years ofthe twentieth century, it is
perhapstime to bring the canon into betteralignment with the
corpus, with whatAfrican artists actually make, and toleave behind
a rather myopic classifica-tory system based so heavily on anAfrica
of the mind. D
Notes,page96
18.
MIJIKENDAGRAVEMARKERS.AFRICANHERITAGEGALLERY,NAIROBI,KENYA,1987.
PHOTO:IDNEYKASFIR53
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ARTFROMANTIQUITYANDTRIBALCIVILIZATIONSMusee Barbier-Mueller,
eneva,SwitzerlandAFRICANARTMuseed'EthnographieNeuchatel,SwitzerlandAFRICANAND
OCEANICARTThe von der
HeydtCollectionMuseumRietberg,Zurich,Switzerlandf r i c bvcour
SANAAGATEJABarkcloth aintings
romUgandaAfricanHeritageGallery,Nairobi,KenyaEXPRESSIONSOFAFRICACrafts
xhibitKimSacksGalleryJohannesburg,
outhAfricaAFRICANARTANDANTIQUITIESTotem-MeneghelliGalleryJohannesburg,South
AfricaWESTAFRICAN NDSOUTHAFRICAN RTTotemRosebankJohannesburg,South
AfricaTRADITIONALFRICANARTNationalMuseumPietermaritzburg,outh
AfricaHISTORICAL EVELOPMENTOF
SOUTHAFRICANARTPretoriaArtMuseum,Pretoria, outhAfricaAFRICANARTLes
ArtInternational,axonwold,SouthAfricaPERMANENT
OLLECTIONNationalGalleryof ZimbabweHarare,ZimbabweasiaMATISSE'S
ECRET80 Kuba
extilesApril7-28GalleryNogizakaRoppongi,Tokyo,Japanaustralia (by
losinadateARTOFTIBETThroughMay15ArtGalleryofWesternAustralia,PerthCONTEMPORARYBORIGINALRTISTSFROMTHEKIMBERLEYEGIONAugust20-October
31NationalGalleryof
Victoria,MelbournecontinuingxhibitionsARTFROMABORIGINAL
USTRALIAAustralianNationalGallery,CanberraAUSTRALIAN
BORIGINALRTArtGalleryof
WesternAustralia,PerthmiddleastFAITH-DORIANND MARTINWRIGHTGALLERY F
AFRICANARTIsraelMuseum,Jerusalem,Israelsouth americaACERVOAFRICANO
AFRO-BRASILEIROMuseude Arqueologia EtnologiaSao Paulo,Brazil96
notesSTANLEY: Selected bibliography of writings by Jean
Kennedy,frompage38Forthcoming. New Currents, Ancient Rivers:
ContemporaryAfrican Artists in a Generationof Change. Washington,
DC:Smithsonian Institution Press. Expected pub. date May1992.1991.
"Haitian Art: Inspired by Vodun," American Visions(Washington, DC)
6, 3:14-18, June.1987a. "Visionen vom Baum des Lebens,"
Tendenzen(Munich) 158:71-75.1987b. "Wosene Kosrof of Ethiopia,"
AfricanArts 20, 3:64-67,89 (May).1986. "The Art of Kiure Msangi,"
The Special (published byTheDaily Californian)1, 2:3, 11 (Feb.
11).1984. "Bruce Onobrakpeya: An Art of Synthesis," Printnews(The
World Print Council) 6, 5:8-11 (Sept.-Oct.).1981. "Speaking of
Myths" (rejoinder to Stephen Naifeh's"The Myth of Oshogbo"),
AfricanArts 14, 4:78-80 (Aug.).1973. "Muraina Oyelami of Nigeria,"
AfricanArts 6, 3:32-33(spring).1972a. "Bruce Onobrakpeya," African
Arts 5, 2:48-49 (win-ter).1972b. "The City as Metaphor" (on Adebisi
Fabunmi), AfricaReport17, 4:27-29 (April).1971. "Senabu Oloyede,
Kikelomo Oladepo: New Heirs toTalent in Oshogbo," AfricanArts 4,
4:24-27 (summer).1968a. "I Saw and I Was Happy: Festival at
Oshogbo,"AfricanArts 1, 2:8-16, 85 (winter).1968b. "Renaissance in
Oshogbo: Part 1: The Shrines," WestAfricanBuilderand
Architect(Ibadan)8, 3:71-74.1968c. "Printmaking in Nigeria,"
Artist's Proof(New York) 7.1968d. "Two Nigerian Artists" (Asiru
Olatunde and Jimoh
Buraimoh), Nigeria Magazine(Lagos) 96:2-11 (March-May).
KASFIR:Notes,from page531. A partial exception to this is the
contemporary-art exhibi-tion "Africa Explores," organized by Susan
Vogel for theCenter for African Art in New York. I have tried to
addressthe somewhat different problems raised by this exhibition
inanother article, "Taste and Distaste: The Loaded Canon ofNew
African Art" (Kasfir,in press).2. Chinweizu, The West and theRestof
Us, 1978.3. See especially the symposium in AfricanArts, vol. 9,
no. 3,1976.4. An important recent restudy (van Beek 1991) attempts
toreturn the Dogon to the same universe as other SudanicWest
African cultures.5. Seen in Gramscian terms, the giving of such
gifts simplyunderscores the hegemonic relationship of the colonizer
overthe colonized.6. Diaspora studies are of course the exception.
Here changeis the sine qua non of aesthetic activity of all kinds
and isthought to be axiomatic.7. Anonymity is an issue on which
scholars (who in mostcases have done field-collecting themselves)
tend to partcompany with dealers and collectors, who in turn are
farfrom homogeneous on both sides of the Atlantic. A numberof
American collectors take pains to discover the authorshipof pieces
they own, while the conversations Price reportswould seem to
reflect a more European (and more romantic)sensibility toward the
art of "exotic" people.8. Price quotes the well-known dealer Henri
Kamer, whomakes this point precisely: "Theobjectmade in
Africa...onlybecomes an object of art on its arrival in Europe" (in
Price1989:70).9. The problem is historical as well as sociological:
the veryidea of "being Yoruba" as a commonly held cultural
identitydates only from the nineteenth century
(Doortmont1990:102).10. My own fieldwork was based on many Idoma, a
few Tiv,Afo, and other carvers in Nigeria, Maconde immigrantcarvers
from Mozambique in Tanzania, and Kamba carversin Kenya; all support
the Asante data.11. Because Nigeria has an antiquities law and
considerableillegal trafficking in sculpture, "antiquity" has
become thepidgin term for any artifact that changes hands
illegally.12. The Nigerian art historian Babatunde Lawal has
beenarguing since 1975 that it is, but once again, this is
anattempt to deny it authenticity by associating it with
thislabel.13. They are included for example in the current
exhibition"Circa 1492," a show intended to display masterworksfrom
around the world, at the National Gallery inWashington.14. A
parallel example is the intricately carved Chinese ivorypuzzles
intended for the export trade but now seen as worksof art in their
own right.15. For an incisive treatment of the issue of collectors
andcommodification in African art, see K. Anthony Appiah'sreview of
Perspectives:Angles on African Art (exhibition cata-logue, The
Center for African Art, New York, 1987)
inCriticalInquiry(1991:338-42).16. I use the spelling "Maconde" to
differentiate the immi-
grant Mozambican carvers from the indigenous TanzanianMakonde
whose cultural production is distinct and who areonly marginally
involved in the carving profession.17. The typical collectors of
Maconde sculpture are aca-demics and journalists, people who can
not easily afford tocollect "traditional" African art. Thus there
is a class distinc-tion implicit in the purchase and display of an
acceptedcanon on the one hand and "tourist-art" on the other.
Thelatter is much cheaper to own.18. The KiMakonde term is puundi
(Wembah-Rashid 1989:5),but in Dar es Salaam the language of
dominant discourse isKiSwahili.19. I am grateful to Allen Roberts
for this second meaning.East African and Zairian usage appear to be
similar, thoughnot identical, on this point.20. This formulation is
necessary to LUvi-Strauss's argument,but is overdrawn. As I
indicated earlier, this sense of "one-ness" about precolonial art
is as much a Western predisposi-tion to idealize Primitive Society
as it is an observable fact.21. I am grateful to my colleague David
Brown for urgingme to re-examine the concept of bricolage in this
context."JohnFundi" was of course a happy coincidence. For a
treat-ment of bricolage in an Afro-Cuban Diaspora context,
seeBrown's description of the self-conscious cultural style of
losnegros curros in early-nineteenth-century Havana(1989:35-38).22.
Barber'stypology does not demote tourist art to a liminalcategory
but refers to it as commercially motivated popularart, "produced
but not consumed by the people" (1987:26).23. Vogel herself makes
this point earlier in the same text(1991:50). Part of the
difficulty is that very few art historianshave done field
interviews with those who make tourist art.24. Tourism has now
replaced coffee as the major source offoreign exchange earnings.25.
Although this story has been published several times, Iwas never
able to find a Maconde carver who had anyknowledge of it.26. I am
grateful to Maasai art specialist Donna Klumpp fornumerous insights
concerning the bead trade in Nairobi, andto Melania Kasfir, who was
then a secondary-school student,for helping me to trace the
Ngong-Nairobi bead circle out-lined by Klumpp.27. Donovan is in a
position to do both very well: he istrained in marketing and is
also a field collector and connois-seur of pastoralist arts. See
his essay on Turkana containersin AfricanArts, vol. 21, no. 3,
1988.28. The parallel debate in folklore studies ("folklore
versusfakelore") engaged many of the same issues, though the
bat-tle-lines were drawn somewhat differently, between puristsand
popularizers rather than their texts. See Dorson1976:1-29.29. See
also Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1991:388 for a discus-sion of this same
phenomenon in the sponsored culturalfestival.
References itedAmin, Mohamed, et al. 1987. The Last of the
Maasai. London:Bodley Head.Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1991. "Is the
Post- inPostmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" Critical
Inquiry17 (winter):336-57.Araeen, Rasheed. 1989. "Our Bauhaus,
Others' Mudhouse,"Third Text 6 (spring):3-14.Barber,Karin. 1987.
"Popular Arts in Africa," African StudiesReview30, 3:1-78.Barthes,
Roland. 1975. The Pleasureof the Text.Trans. RichardMiller. New
York: Hill & Wang.Bascom, William. 1976. "Changing African
Art," in Ethnicand Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions rom
theFourthWorld,ed. Nelson Graburn,pp. 320-33. Berkeley.Ben-Amos,
Paula. 1977. "Pidgin Languages and TouristArts," Studies in
theAnthropologyof Visual Communication ,2:128-39.Biebuyck, Daniel.
1969. Traditionand Creativity in Tribal Art.Berkeley: University of
California Press.Brown, David H. 1989. "Garden in the Machine:
Afro-CubanSacred Art and Performance in Urban New Jersey andNew
York." Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.Centre Pompidou. 1989.
Magiciens de la terre.Paris.Chinweizu. 1978. The West and the Rest
of Us. New York: NokPublishers.Clifford, James. 1988. The
Predicamentof Culture.Cambridge:Harvard University Press.Cole,
Herbert M. et al. 1976. "Fakes, Fakers, and Fakery:Authenticity in
African Art," AfricanArts 9, 1:20-31, 48-74.Comaroff, Jean. 1985.
Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance.Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.Cosentino, Donald J. 1990. "FirstWord," AfricanArts 23,
2:1.Donovan, Alan. 1988 . "Turkana Functional Art," AfricanArts21,
3:44-47.Doortmont, Michel R. 1990. "The Invention of the
Yorubas:
Regional and Pan-African Nationalism Versus
EthnicProvincialism," in Self-Assertion and Brokerage:
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ROBERTS: Notes,frompage63This paper was submitted to African
Arts in April 1991 andaccepted for publication in June 1991. It is
substantiallyrevised from one presented at the first "Redefining
theArtisan" conference sponsored in the spring of 1989 by
theUniversity of Iowa Museum of Art and Center forInternational and
Comparative Study (Greenough 1991). Mythanks to the participants
and to Professor Richard Schectnerof New York University,
discussant for the conference, fortheir pertinent comments. A
teaching packet of text andslides based on the original
presentation has been preparedby Kay Tu