African Visual Arts From an Art Historical Perspective

African Visual Arts from an Art Historical PerspectiveAuthor(s): Monni AdamsSource: African Studies Review, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Sep., 1989), pp. 55-103Published by: African Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/523970 .Accessed: 05/12/2013 03:29

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AFRICAN VISUAL ARTS FROM AN ART HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Monni Adams

INTRODUCTION

This overview assesses the study of sub-Saharan art by art historians in the United States, as a complement to the earlier examination by Paula Ben-Amos (1987) of African art studies from an anthropological perspective.1 Academic status for African art history, focused on sub-Saharan Africa, began in the 1950s, when a small group of scholars assigned style categories and broad social functions to works of West and Central African sculpture. With the expansion and development of the field, linked to the use of anthropological methods, the emphasis in research has shifted towards adopting multiple perspectives of analysis and seeking African categories in relation to varied artistic production. Nevertheless, study of sub-Saharan art has achieved only a marginal status in the disciplines of art history and anthropology. This essay examines the problems of these relationships, the types of changing scholarly activities that have characterized the field of sub-Saharan art, and considers options for the future.

The Double Heritage From the early 20th century, when wood sculpture from sub-Saharan Africa was first

recognized in European art circles as art, it has been studied by a miscellaneous group of people, neither trained nor identifying themselves as art historians. Ethnologists and ethnology museum curators, colonial administrators and teachers, anthropologists and mis- sionaries-all have contributed, and in some cases continue to contribute, to art scholarship. In spite of the appreciation of sub-Saharan sculpture as art, it was not accepted within the European discipline of art historical studies. However, in the US in the 1950s, African sculpture made its entree into academia. At that time, private collectors and art museums revived interest in African art-first aroused in the '20s-primarily because of the role attributed to it in the rise of modem art style. For this reason, two professors at major universities in New York, Robert Goldwater at New York University and Paul Wingert at Columbia University, began to offer occasional courses on African art styles. "African" was used to refer to the sub-Saharan western and central regions of the continent where the larger wood and metal sculptures originated. Following categories established in Europe, only sculptural forms in wood and metal-mainly figures and masks-were considered "art."

The placement in art departments (and art museums) did not free the study of sub-

African Studies Review, Volume 32, Number 2, 1989, pp. 55-103.


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Saharan sculpture from its earlier links with ethnology or anthropology. The great differences in cultural practices meant that simple questions such as "What is it?" "How is it made?" and "What is it for?" had to be addressed, and this information had to come ini- tially from ethnographic accounts, most of it deriving from European publications. Thus, sub-Saharan art studies came into being in the United States inextricably bound up with a double heritage of art and anthropological concerns.2 It is this double relationship that gives rise to the central problem faced by sub-Saharan art scholars: that recognition of African art studies as an integral part of the disciplinary study of art history has lagged (See discussion in Blier, 1987a).

To account for this lag, I will review first the problematic relationship with art history in the '50s and '60s, and second examine and critically appraise the types of scholarly activity that characterize the period of the '70s and '80s, when research results emerged in specialized publications and resembled anthropological research. The principal reason for the marginal status of sub-Saharan art studies that emerges from this review is its fail- ure to satisfy the demands of either of the two disciplines. Current developments in the field of sub-Saharan art studies suggest the potential for an improved standing within the discipline of art history, but the future is uncertain, due to the radical and rapid changes in the character of art in sub-Saharan societies.

Locating Sub-Saharan Art Within the Field of Art History The marginal status of sub-Saharan art study was especially notable in the '50s and

'60s, when only a few professors were teaching at the university level. This was not caused by simple neglect, by the obscurity of the subject as compared with, say, French impressionism. Rather, it seems to have been a condition that grew out of the methods and underlying philosophies of traditional art history as an academic discipline. But the lack of recognition also had to do with the way sub-Saharan art was taught at that time. It is worth noting that an art historian is not anyone who "studies art," but a scholar who has been educated in certain, very specific techniques and beliefs.

Style and the aesthetics of art historians Analyzing style is a cardinal technique of art historians. Style, the manner in which a

work is articulated, including both conventional and unique features, has long been an ap- proved means of classification of works of art, based on the assumption that style is unique to a specific place or period (Schapiro, 1953). The early African art scholars had several motives for pursuing the subject of style. Ethnological museums in Europe pos- sessed thousands of objects from Africa with insufficient documentation to establish provenience. A number of European curators had been able to organize brief expeditions to sub-Saharan Africa to obtain identified works for their collection, and these in turn were often used to help assign an origin to similar works through stylistic comparisons.3 In the US, emphasis on stylistic analysis (Wingert, 1950) was encouraged by the popularity of formalism in studies of modern art, the field most sympathetic to African art. We can understand how scholars of a marginal subject such as sub-Saharan sculpture might choose to work within the dominant intellectual paradigm of style as a strategy to bring their subject into respected status in art history. Style also afforded a unified approach to the diverse sculptural forms confronting them.

The most prominent presentation of African art in these decades was the survey picture book, illustrating a variety of sculptural styles which could be termed "classic modern." These figures and masks were produced, for the most part, in the last part of the


African Visual Arts 57

19th and first third of the 20th centuries and, on the basis of some earlier ethnographic reports, were judged to have had an important place in the religious and social life of their communities of origin. However, the categories of style were gross and rigid, and did not show the subtlety and development desired by art historians. Typically, in these surveys, a striking figure or mask was shown devoid of any accoutrements, accompanied by a par- agraph describing the style and use of the object. The authors, most of whom were curators of ethnology museums, selected the formal features of one or two works as typical of a "tribal" style. William Fagg, then keeper of the African collections at the British Mu- seum and the most influential authority for the US public, actively promoted the view that each tribe was a closed cultural universe, expressing itself in a distinct, recognizable and unitary "style."4

The language of analysis was another distancing element. The terminology of stylistic analysis in art history was shaped by qualities particular to painting (e.g., linear vs. painterly) and to naturalistic sculpture, unsuited to African three-dimensional forms. However, the ethnologists were concerned with "objective" description, as if African works were specimens of natural science. The two approaches had little in common.

Compared to scholarship in European art, the study of sub-Saharan art suffered from several severe lacks that detracted from its potential as art history: lack of demonstrated historical evolution of forms, lack of information about the artistic personality of the sub- Saharan carver,5 lack of written documents as a basis for historical or interpretative study, and the perception that Africa lacked the kind of cultural values that gave significance to European art.

The art historian's aesthetics presented a series of tacit barriers to acceptance of sub- Saharan art as worthy of academic study. First, art scholars since the Renaissance have honored a hierarchy of media and artistic traditions in which painting is privileged for its representation of exalted religious or historical scenes, as well as for its formal qualities. Lasting materials and age are also valued. Second, art history in the '50s and '60s defined a visual work of art as "unique, complex, irreplaceable, nonreproducible" (Kleinbauer, 1971: 2). Sub-Saharan sculpture, shown in numerous survey books, seemed to be an array of types, repeated endlessly by an anonymous person in a perishable material. Re- producibility, coupled with lack of uniqueness, innovation or change, suggested the work of a "craftsman." Thus, sub-Saharan sculpture deserved to be excluded from serious consideration by the art historian whose first task is to select works (of quality) that fit the category of art.

A third philosophical barrier lay in the assumption that art requires a self-composed, contemplative, aesthetic attitude on the parts of artist and viewer. European thinkers had long before faced the problem of how contemporary man could appreciate the arts of the past-how, for example, one could appreciate the art of antiquity in a later time without access to its original religious and social meaning. This problem received its first resolu- tion by placing value on style. Others called for an empathetic experience, that is, that one share in the elevated subject matter or in the creative gesture of the artist. Others urged simply that sensuous enjoyment be taken in pure perception.

This barrier may have had several effects. For some viewers it doubtless permitted the enjoyment of African art, despite its strangeness, especially as a stripped-down museum object, free of theoretical baggage. On the other hand, the value placed on order and elevated subject matter may have contributed to a prejudice against an art so different from established European canons of taste and culture. In appreciating European art the viewer allied oneself with all that was highest in one cultural tradition through one's own discernment and visual taste. Would the same viewer wish to ally oneself through Afri-



can art with African traditions? In addition, this aesthetic attitude promoted an understanding of art as something

uniquely free of any worldly imperative, as the very opposite of a tool. Alas, many sub- Saharan sculptures were objects of use-as thrones, stools, bowls, staffs. Under the influence of the functionalist theory, prominent since the '30s in anthropology, sub-Saharan sculpture was seen as something that was "used" in religious rites and ceremonies. The more the social functions of sub-Saharan sculpture were discussed in the '60s, the less the sculpture was defined by the uselessness that, increasingly since the late 18th century, has marked the category "Art."

Content In the '50s and '60s, art historians in the United States began to give more attention to

the content of a work of art because of the influence of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), a German art historian teaching in the US. He (1955) proposed a three-stage method of analyzing content through careful identification of imagery. In the first two steps of "iconography," the scholar determines what the image represents from nature or practical life, and then, by referring to other works and documents of the time, he or she posits a conventional identity for the image, that is, who or what the image represented for the people of the time. The third, iconological level of analysis involves identifying the symbolic significance of images and motifs in relation to larger cultural themes or "essential tendencies of the human mind."

According to Panofsky, iconological analysis is achieved by scrutinizing "documents bearing witness to the political, poetical, religious, philosophical, and social tendencies of the personality, period or country under investigation" (1955: 39). The scholar then links 'he forms in the work of art to the tendencies selected from the documentary evidence. These links of a symbolical nature may have been part of a preconceived program or a disguised symbolism, or they may be unknown to the artist him- or herself. Because the links between the image or art work and selected tendencies are indicated on the basis of "synthetic intuition" or intuited judgment of similarities, this last step in the method lacked conviction for scholars who placed their faith in objective facts. The appeal of this method is that it interprets art in relation to thought, assuming that art is an analogue of discursive rationality. In practice, the documents that Panofsky and his colleagues drew on for their interpretations were limited to higher-level philosophical ideas (linked to the Graeco-Roman or Biblical traditions). According to Orwicz (1985), the focus in the '50s and '60s on cultural themes obstructed the development of a social history of art.6

There were obvious difficulties in applying this art historical method to sub-Saharan sculpture. The nature of the sub-Saharan representational system posed difficulties on both the first and second level of iconographic analysis. Forms were schematically shaped and motifs from nature or practical life were difficult to recognize. The isolated object, outside time and place, exhibited no apparent narrative references or pictorial cues. In survey art books, a conventional identity was simply assigned-for example, ancestor or commemorative figure, fetish, king, deity-without thorough presentation of supporting evidence or compelling reasoning. There was no critical evaluation of the largely secondary sources on the basis of which the images were identified. With so little knowledge of the culture of origin, iconology could not be attempted.



Strategies of Accommodation

Academic art historians The differences in scope and method between the studies of sub-Saharan art and Eu-

ropean art that became apparent in the '50s and '60s led art historians to believe that the study of sub-Saharan art within their discipline was marginal, if not wholly misplaced. If there were a place for it in the history of art, it was located with the artifacts of a distant primitive period. When the widely used textbook on the history of art by H. W. Janson began including African art (1969 and subsequent editions), it was placed after prehistor- ic art and before Egyptian art, yet most of the works he illustrated date from no earlier than the 19th century (Blier, 1987a). A different strategy for skirting around the problem of lack of disciplinary fit was the characterization of sub-Saharan art as a qualitatively different, distinctively "other" art by freely contrasting it to European art. The art could then be valued and enjoyed for precisely these qualities of otherness. Otherness was indicated by the term "primitive art," a term applied in the '50s and '60s to all arts produced outside literate cultures. For many art historians, this special category of art had a low status.

Ernest Gombrich, an art historian whose numerous essays (e.g., 1960) reached a wide public, repeatedly characterized all "primitive art" as rigid, frontal, timeless, marked by undifferentiated expression. This type of representation belonged together with the art of children. Herbert Read, another influential writer on art (e.g., 1956), took care to separate the arts of the primitive-inspired by emotions, mainly fear-from the intellectual efforts of civilized artists. Behind these observations lies the widespread, negative notion of sub-Saharan African thought as superstitious practices, lacking the higher values in- trinsic to European civilization. Motivated by the unthinking, childlike violence and fearful irrationality, Africans had customs, not culture.

Sub-Saharan art scholars These attitudes about the mind and culture of the black African, together with the

problems in methodology mentioned above, account for the disparity in the scholarly world between the recognition of African sculpture as art and the lack of acceptance of it as a field worthy of investigation. Winning respect for the culture of Africa was the first monumental task of art scholars who appreciated the work of the artist and refused to classify it as the art of childlike or ignorant savages. It has been said that scholars of sub- Saharan art simply assembled an eclectic collection of methods drawn from art history, anthropology and history. However, this process has not been random. In the '60s and '70s, scholars were inspired by a tacit mission to counter the perceived negative opinions of African culture, and this shaped the character of their investigations.

Functionalism in anthropology offered a suitable avenue for their aspirations (For the sources of this paradigm in art and anthropology, see Ben-Amos, 1987). Roy Sieber's observations in a 1959 catalogue are typical of subsequent messages. African art, he says, should be seen as "a positive, integrated cultural manifestation" (1959, opp. B-6). It is involved in sensible and spiritual goals, it symbolizes security, reinforces the positive as- pect of the African's world view, and participates in fulfilling his needs, which are couched in practical terms: wealth, prestige, health, wives, children, crops, and a glimpse into the future. In this version of the functionalist message from anthropology, art scholars found a means of showing Africans' concern for social order and the well-being of the community, such as European philosophers limn for their own societies. It offered an ac-



ceptable combination of attention to objects and a placement of them as part of an intelli- gible social order. The most obvious effect of this uplifting mission was that attention turned from the insistent emphasis on religion (seen as superstition) to include the in- volvement of art in social life.7

Early Academic Leaders Progress toward something more than accommodation began in the '60s with the en-

gagement of three professional art historians at major American universities, with each responsible for teaching and inaugurating research programs in sub-Saharan art. This ad- vance came about as a result of changes during the decade in the larger political and social scene: the rising public interest in the newly independent sub-Saharan African nations and the civil rights movement, the response to the rising assertion of public identity by black Americans. I will describe these academic leaders and the steps they and subsequent principal figures took in inaugurating changes in the way sub-Saharan art was studied.

The three professors-Douglas Fraser at Columbia, Robert Farris Thompson at Yale and Roy Sieber at Indiana-all initiated changes in sub-Saharan art studies, each in his distinctive way. Timing maximized the impact of their careers. Prior to the independence of African nations in 1960, it was rare for a student in the US to visit Africa in order to study art; independence made sub-Saharan Africa more accessible to such projects. Therefore, all three professors required Ph.D. degree students to conduct research in Afri- ca. All three saw themselves intellectually as art historians, even as they were aware of stretching the boundaries of the discipline by adopting some aspects of anthropological theory and method.8

Sieber (1967) addressed principally the problems of style and history, and he has directed over 30 dissertation projects along these lines. He encouraged his research students-among whom were several Africans-to improve and refine style classifications, to seek the origins, sequences, dates, and distribution of styles of areas and tribal units. Drawing on earlier published sources, his two major publications surveyed the context of uses for materials and objects which rarely achieve fine art status: textiles and decorative arts (1972), and furniture and household objects (1980). Sieber became a connoisseur of the first rank, occupied with authenticity, attributions, dating and evaluation. With his many academic and public activities, he contributed significantly to dissolving the image of the fearful artistic savage and replaced it with one of people who create art to foster communal values.

Fraser focused on content through a process he called "motif chasing." His interest in interpreting motifs according to their function within elite political institutions resulted in his most influential book (1972, written with former student Herbert Cole), African Arts and Leadership. Fraser's concern with interpretation shows most clearly in his book on village planning (1968) and in his structuralist theories. In African Art as Philosophy (1974), he and his students interpreted simple contrast of materials, form or motifs as symbolic statements about ideas or social relations. His several Africanist graduates conducted their primary research on sub-Saharan architecture.

Thompson made the most radical shifts in perspectives, particularly in relation to the topics subsumed earlier in the section on art historians' aesthetics. He began with an innovative study (1969) of an individual woman artist (Abatan), tracing the sequence of style in her figurative pottery. His questioning (1968, 1973) of Yoruba people in various walks of life about their aesthetic preferences and interpretations of form in Yoruba



sculpture opened a new and lasting topic for research. Most radical was his effort to look at Yoruba art from the perspective of the users, according to the natives' point of view. He carried this perspective through in his exhibition catalogue Black Gods and Kings (1971), the first widely influential book to focus entirely on the arts of one people (admit- tedly a very large group), thus breaking away from the superficial survey compendium. Thompson grouped the art objects not according to type, but within the context of their sponsoring institutions and, most importantly, as being integrally related to ideas expressed by the Yoruba in poetry, music and discussions. His catalogue, African Arts in Motion (1974), in which he pursued typical interests of art historians in exploring the meaning of postures and stylistic relationships among various art forms, brought national attention to the study of African art. His greatest contribution has been to treat the art forms as products not simply of a rich visual tradition, but of individuals of spirit, imagi- nation and mind. He attributes these qualities equally to the artists and to members of the community who participate in the art events. He has attracted several highly independent-minded students and encouraged their diverse research interests.

Publications of these academic leaders and their students in the late '60s and early '70s announced a rupture from the stilted paradigms that dominated the '50s. Two of Sie- ber's former students, Arnold Rubin (1972; Sieber and Rubin, 1968) and Rene Bravmann (1970), challenged the notion of unitary tribal styles. Styles, they said, were not to be seen as bounded entities but were extended by contacts, migrations, wars and trade routes, all of which should be investigated historically. Tribal boundaries, many of which had been set by colonial authorities, were gross distortions of cultural and historical reali- ties; some art elements did fit within particular groups while others clearly cut across such lines (See a review of this topic in Kasfir, 1984). In another catalogue, entitled Open Frontiers (1973), Bravmann argued that state building and expansion were the most important historical forces that opened frontiers, and that the dynamics of market networks had a direct influence on material objects and art forms. Rubin took another step toward recognizing the Africans' point of view in a catalogue entitled African Accu- mulative Sculpture (1974), published by a major New York art gallery. Hoping to reduce the stripping of images, he argued that the accumulation of varied materials (from animal claws to shells to metal or cloth, combined as ensembles or as additions to sculptures), usually removed as trivial or offensive because they were so unlike Western notions of valuable art materials, were meaningful to Africans.

The most explicit plea for attention to Africans' conception of art came from Cole (1969), following his field inquiries among the Igbo of Nigeria on the extended process of constructing an Mbari ritual house. He claimed that art historians' stress on form, indi- viduality and permanence was at variance with African values which, as expressed in the art of ritual, emphasized transience and communal art-making. Shortly thereafter, in Afri- can Arts of Transformation (1970), he explored what the rituals of masking meant to those who experienced it. Thus in accord with the anthropologist Victor Turner (1964), whom he cites, Cole shifted the plane of analysis to a search for meaning.

Another important breakthrough concerned identification of imagery (iconography). In a catalogue entitled Spirit Images and Identities (1976), Leon Siroto, an anthropologist who is also an expert in the art and material culture of Africa, challenged the prevalent identification of many human figure carvings as either ancestors or fetishes. Close attention to the ethnographic evidence from numerous African communities, he said, con- firmed a relative scarcity of images that could be designated by the term "ancestor," if defined according to Africans' concepts. Statues were more frequently identified as tute- laries or guardian spirits with a distinct name, identity and powers that were appealed to



for protection and help.9

Problematic Aspects In the '70s and '80s, the pressure to "do fieldwork" was intense, due to the feeling

that African societies-already altered during the two generations of colonial rule-were changing so rapidly under independence that knowledge about "traditional art" would soon disappear. Therefore, researchers went to places that seemed to maintain institutions associated with classic modem pieces and tried to refine style classifications, determine the conventional meaning and establish the context of use. With the increasing number of students in the '70s, and particularly because of Sieber's concern with bringing works other than wood masks and figure sculpture into the canon, research projects shifted to little-known crafts that were still being practiced. Another expansion of scope- especially notable in the '80s-was geographic. An increasing number of scholars extended their research into Central Africa, especially Zaire.10

The pursuit of fieldwork as a method and the commitment to the study of crafts wid- ened the disciplinary distance from academic art historians. Catalogues for the increasing number of exhibitions continued to appear in the survey format of the '50s, showing an endless array of types. Articles on field research appeared principally in a glossy journal (African Arts) filled with advertisements for art galleries, an acceptable format for art scholars but a dismaying one to social scientists. Anthropologists were unimpressed with the art scholars' lack of training in social structure, linguistics and fieldwork techniques, with their tendency to collect information travelling from one place to another, rather than by remaining for an extended period in one community. Most uninteresting was the reliance on positive functionalist explanations, long abandoned in anthropology.

Sub-Saharan art scholars inherited from academic art history of the '50s a reluctance to engage in theoretical discussion. As the art historian Svetlana Alpers admits: "It is characteristic of art history that we teach our graduate students the methods, the 'how to do it' of the discipline (how to date, attribute, track down a commission, analyze style and iconography) rather than the nature of our thinking" (1977: 9). Roy Sieber, the leading academic in the field of sub-Saharan art, expressed doubts about the value of theory: "I am suspicious of data collected according to theoretical needs. Rather, more like the archaeologist, I consider the "excavation" of data as a great responsibility.... The responsibility for objectivity, completeness, and caution is considerable" (1986: 7,8). As Sidney Kasfir (1986: 12) has noted, the work of sub-Saharan art scholars was rarely accompanied by theoretical insights that an anthropologist would be expected to achieve. The atheoretical orientation did not satisfy the standards of anthropology, which require explicit theory-development and, increasingly over the past generation, have become self- conscious about theoretical underpinnings and method (See Ruby, 1982; Geertz, 1983; Clifford and Marcus, 1986). In the course of the '70s and '80s, modern art historians, inspired by theoretical debate in literary criticism, history, philosophy and gender studies, began to reexamine their methods and boundaries; by the mid-80s Columbia University offered an advanced degree in art theory.

Changes gradually appeared in the study of sub-Saharan art, but they have taken place without explicit attention to theory or critical analysis. These changes were due to the guidance of the institutional leaders, to the increased opportunities for direct research among Africans, more varied people entering the field, and some degree of influence from changing paradigms in anthropology and academic art history. The major research efforts have remained in the studies of style, type and usage, and most scholars continue



to concentrate on the classic modern sculptural art of sub-Saharan West Africa, especially the anglophone regions. An expanding number of scholars developed more flexible categories for tracing style history. Diversifying the identification of subject matter, they began a search for meaning, and ultimately they perceived the importance of historical studies. Nevertheless, there was a lack of intellectual debate on theoretical issues and the results of these shifts of perspectives were not fully realized in monographs until the '80s. Therefore, the types of scholarly activity have been presented here in the order in which they emerged in time: the reliance on style for classification and for relating objects to other topics, iconography, function and process; and the search for meaning and historical studies of art, offering criticism perceived long after the event.

MAJOR PARADIGM OF THE '70s AND '80s: STYLE

Connoisseurship, Type and Style Area The pressing needs felt by US art scholars were to map styles in little-known areas

and to establish, correct and note the diversity of style (and use) of types of objects within geographic, ethnic or sub-ethnic groups in West or Central Africa in order to improve the quality of connoisseurship (e.g., Rubin, 1967; Cole and Ross, 1977; Bourgeois, 1984; Cole and Aniakor, 1984). The typical method for art scholars was to make short trips or to travel from one village to another seeking indigenous classifications for a "tribal" or geographic region, but a few benefited from extended stays or repeated visits. Some studies of sculpture (Glaze, 1981) and architecture (Prussin, 1969) reported firm links between a typological style and an ethnic group. Anthropologists (e.g., Ottenberg, 1975; Brain and Pollock, 1971) also published on the art of a localized ethnic group, specifying styles and types. An outstanding differentiation and localization of sub-styles of figure sculpture among the several groups subsumed as Dogon, a prized art form neglected by art scholars, was produced by a dealer, He61ne Leloup (1988), who used hundreds of pho- tographs to aid her inquiries in the Dogon region.

In this period, however, the use of style as a means of fixing provenience became a controversial issue. In 1972, Louis Perrois, a French scholar at the National Museum of Gabon, applied a method of comparative morphological analysis to 350 figure sculptures from the Fang of northern Gabon. (This kind of formal analysis, which was inaugurated in art historical studies in the late 19th century, was introduced into sub-Saharan art studies by Frans Olbrechts in his 1946 book on the art of the former Belgian Congo.) By taking precise measurements of large and small body parts and of their relative proportions, as well as style of hairdress, postions of arms and legs, and the detailed shapes of facial features, navels, and breasts, Perrois distinguished a "longiform," and "breviform" style and, on the basis of known place of origin from some examples, assigned each style to different ethnic subgroups among the Fang in Gabon along a line from north to south (see also McKesson, 1987).

The usefulness of morphological analysis in localizing styles was challenged by studies of artists and their careers. The first critic was an anthropologist, James Fernandez (1977a), who studied several Fang carvers in Gabon. He showed that spatial and ethnic distributions of Fang styles would be skewed by the peripatetic nature of the carvers who cross ethnic boundaries (and possibly by the remaining greater number of unexamined carvings). Thus he rejected the possibility of neat categories of style and area. The blurring of style boundaries either across ethnic lines or within a well-defined ethnic region was also found in other studies of carvers' careers (see Himmelheber, 1964; Fischer and


64q AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW

Himmelheber, 1984; Vogel, 1984). In classifying the local styles of the Hemba of Zaire, Frangois Neyt (1977), a Belgian

scholar, adapted a concept proposed by the art historian George Kubler (1962), that one can discern by objective analysis superior examples which become prototypes or prime objects, and thereby identify replications or adaptations, which in turn will indicate historical relationships. The danger with the prime object thesis, as historian Jan Vansina pointed out (1984: 87-9), is subjectivity in selecting units for measurement and category. He noted, however, that such an analysis is open for inspection where intuition is not.

Vansina (1984: 89) favors a search for stylistic groupings linked by origin in a common workshop, which he considers a more significant category than ethnic groupings. However, as Kasfir (1986) has cautioned, in numerous areas workshops do not characterize the setting for the carver. An illuminating comment on this lack among Lagoon peoples (COte d'Ivoire) was made by Monica Visona (1987b): their firmly expressed belief that talent is given to individual carvers by divine inspiration is a factor that prevents the formation of workshop groups. Where workshops are found, tracing the nature and ex- tent of the style and its radiating influence has become an increasing focus of research (e.g., Henry Drewal, 1977; Roy, 1987; Rubin, 1987).

A few technical studies have added to the quality of connoisseurship. X-raying sculptures has revealed inner contents and anachronistic materials (Sieber and Celenko, 1977). The Royal Museum of Central Africa at Tervuren, Belgium, has made a major contribution in supporting wood analysis of African sculpture (See Roger Dechamps's series of 11 articles on wood analyses from 1970 to 1982, all appearing in Africa-Tervuren; see also Verger-Fbvre, 1980). Increased use of radiocarbon dating of wood sculptures would be beneficial (See Bedaux, 1988).

Style can be a valuable first step in analyzing a corpus of art objects from the distant sub-Saharan past. In 1959, Fagg dated a corpus of ivory bowls and musical horns, found mainly in European collections, on the basis of imagery. With Ezio Bassani, he believed that these objects were made in Benin and in coastal Sierra Leone, commissioned by Por- tuguese traders in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. (Stylistic comparison with the ivories suggests similar dating for small stone sculptures found on or near the surface in Sierra Leone and Guinea, probably carved by the former inhabitants. See Bassani and Fagg, 1988.) After a comprehensive survey and classification of these ivories, Kathy Curnow (1983), an art scholar, has traced prototypes, determined workshops and individual artists.

Style and Rank An influential art historical effort at classifying style was initiated by Fraser and Cole

in their book African Arts and Leadership (1972). For the authors, the style of royal or elite arts was designed to distinguish them from non-elite arts, and in sub-Saharan Africa it was characterized by several features: the use of more precious materials, more complex techniques, more variety of forms and more elaborate compositions. Typically in style and rank studies, art scholars focused on a particular type of sculpture: Yoruba beaded crowns (Thompson, 1970), aristocratic Luba stools (Flam, 1971). In contrast, the anthropologist, Christraud Geary (1983), studied royal arts-the "things of the palace"- remaining in the Bamum court of Cameroon and placed them within the historical context of the rise and decline of the Bamrnum state, giving detailed consideration of the media and techniques of the craftsmen and artists of the court and describing the use of art works within local institutions and practices, such as the military festivals and men's soci-



eties.

Style and Seriation The best known developmental schema based on style is the seriation of the Benin

bronze corpus developed by Fagg (1963) and elaborated on by an anthropologist, Philip Dark (1975), and an archeologist, Frank Willett (1967). Cast figurative sculptures from this corpus became known in Europe when they were recovered from the palace at Benin City in the late 19th century. Both Fagg and Willett favor linking art traditions known from archaeological finds (approximately 200 BC to 200 AD) at Nok in northern Nigeria via Yelwa to Ife (1 lth-15th c.) and thence to Benin styles. Art historians Rubin (1970) and Fraser (1972) disagree with the Ife-Benin link on the basis of style analysis, among other points (See also Denis Williams, 1974).

Thurstan Shaw (1978), an archaeologist with much experience in Nigeria, has denied any factual basis for the seriation or dating and holds little hope for further archaeological work or decisive results from chemical analysis of the materials (See summary in Freyer, 1987). Two Benin specialists in Berlin (Tunis, 1981; Tunis and Tunis, 1984) also cast doubt on the Fagg and Dark chronologies and offer technical analyses that indicate an early period for certain works considered stylistically "late." The historian Jan Vansina (1984: 181-87) has effectively argued against the kind of single-tree line of reasoning that Fagg and Willett have developed from Nok to Benin in favor of a model comprising multiple streams of tradition, some of which may intersect. For several wooden figures of Kuba kings, Joseph Comet (1982) of the Institute of National Museums of Zaire was able to improve the identification and to establish a credible sequence of the 18th century by seriating size and stylistic details, correlated with Kuba court traditions (See also Vansi- na, 1972; Adams, 1988a).

Style History Increasingly in this period, style was seen by art scholars as affected by historical ex-

periences (See Poynor, 1987). Daniel Biebuyck (1969: 2-3; 1986), an anthropologist and specialist in Zairian art, emphasized that styles spread across "tribal" or ethnic lines by means of institutions such as initiation or other religious sodalities. The move away from the earlier belief in one style being normative for each "tribe," as suggested by Bravmann and Rubin, revived interest in distributional studies to illuminate style history. Interest in borderland styles is especially strong among those who study peoples of the West African Sahel, an easily traversed region with ancient traditions of long-distance trade (See Frank, 1987; Green, 1987). Another improvement is that borrowing was perceived as a complex process. It is not enough to reveal that the populous Baule borrowed their masks from the small, neighboring Wan communities: the significant point, as Susan Vogel (1977) dem- onstrates, is that the Baule restructured the system according to their own world view (See also Visona, 1987a).

Henry and Margaret Drewal (1985) have provided the most complex account of style history among the western Yoruba by showing the effects, on a family-owned corpus of sculpture over five and six generations, of lineage histories, diviners' and clients' decisions, patron/artist interaction, and the itineracy of artists. As creators of culture, men and women, they conclude, make decisions about the character of art objects on the basis of personal self-interest as much as on the basis of accepted societal norms; a systematic study of individual decisions would disclose why certain choices were made and how change came about.



Vansina's emphasis on oral tradition as a historical source (e.g., 1965) surely influenced US art researchers to take account of local tradition in their search for style history (See Kasfir, 1982; Jean Borgatti, 1979a). In these decades, however, Vansina's use of oral tradition buttressed by methodological cross-checking was challenged; other historians and ethnographers have been more inclined to see much of orally transmitted information as governed by narrative structures and symbolic content that limit its usefulness in reconstructing history (e.g., de Heusch, 1982; Willis, 1980; but see Vansina, 1983). As a result of these challenges to oral tradition and the increased attention to debates on evidence in archaelogical studies in West Africa, art scholars are drawing on a wider variety of sources: linguistic and archaeological evidence and field research on local beliefs, ritual and oral traditions regarding interaction and borrowing (e.g., Berns, 1986).

Style Development and the Artist The combination of a focus on recovering information about the art object and the

assumed collective inspiration by an anonymous sub-Saharan artist have fostered a neglect of the relationship between the artist's biography and the art he or she produces, a principal concern of art historians. Studies of wood carving and traditional carvers in sub-Saharan Africa focusing on style and technique have in the main been conducted by non-art historians, principally ethnologists.11 These studies have made it clear that the traditional carver follows a learned set of procedures, implicitly among the Dan (See Fis- cher and Himmelheber, 1984) and explicitly in named stages among some of the Yoruba (Carroll, 1967; Thompson, 1974). John Pemberton (1987), a specialist in Yoruba religion and art, recently offered a detailed account of carvers and their styles from various com- pounds in the Igbomina town of Ila-Orangun; he was able to trace the Ila style tradition back to the first half of the 19th century (See also H. Drewal, 1980; on the Dan, Barbara Johnson, 1986, 1987).

Considerable differences in personality emerge in the anthropological studies; for example, the Dan carver, as described by Himmelheber (1960: 136-88) together with his son Eberhard Fischer (Fischer and Himmelheber, 1984) was sober and desirous of communal esteem, in comparison to the individualistic gusto of the Gola artists reported by Warren d'Azevedo (1973a); see also Kasfir, forthcoming). Accounts of the individual carver's career become more meaningful when placed within the framework of available career patterns and social organization, such as the distinctive craft communities in the Sahel, the lineage-family traditions of the Dan carver, the guild organization of urban centers and court dependents, or the tourist orientation of former court-dependent craftsmen (See Kasfir, 1980: 70).

Arts Other than Wood Sculpture Artists of other than wood and metal sculpture have attracted increasing attention

during the '70s and '80s, and more attention has been given to the style of individual women artists, such as potters (Wahlman, 1974), textile dyer-designers (Wahlman and Chuta, 1979), costume-makers (Borgatti, 1979c), calabash decorators (Chappel, 1977). Joanne Eicher, a sociologist of costume, and an Ijo colleague, Tonye Erekosima (1981), have revealed not only an innovative technique in textile work among the Kalabari Ijo but have also detailed its significance in the complex funerary arts of the region. Studies of non-sculptural arts have focused on techniques, style, usage, social function and, more rarely, the changing conditions of patronage and marketing (Perani, 1977). Most of the detailed work on techniques has been conducted by European scholars.12 Perhaps the art



form most removed from the boundaries of art is body decoration. Nevertheless, it has become imbued with the kind of values that are associated with European art: as a mark of civilization (Thompson, 1971; Adepegba, 1976; Rubin, 1988).

The status of the smith among the Mande-speaking peoples of the West African Sa- helian region has long been problematic since, although indispensable to the cultivators' work, he is said to be feared, even despised by them. An art scholar, Patrick McNaugh- ton (1988), linked this double-edged attitude to the ambivalence felt concerning the specialized secret knowledge the smith is believed to possess. In the conceptual contrast between objects functioning in the everyday, open world of communal values and those in the potentially dangerous spheres of secret knowledge, he (1982) could discern the basis for the contrasting styles of clarity and obscurity that characterize Mande sculpture and costume.

The issue of the relationship of style to media and technique has not been examined sufficiently (On wood carving, see Willett and Picton, 1967). There is a tendency to as- sume that metal and wood techniques invevitably produce different styles. Although it is true that in some localities these styles diverge (Flam, 1982), one has only to look at pec- torals in Benin royal art to see that the carving style in ivory and casting in brass can fol- low similar lines. To counter Vansina's statement-"the fluid line of the cast metal could not be achieved in stone or wood" (1984: 83)--one need only look at the sinuous loops of Gelede headdresses or large Ikenga figures. It is preferable to consider style in media in terms of historical contacts, social setting and agents' purposes and not according to a uni- form assumption of technical constraints. It is likely that where skill is emphasized, artists try to go beyond the constraints of the medium.

As in academic art history, little attention has been given to design (See review in Adams, forthcoming a). The first systematic approach came from a mathematician, Don- ald Crowe (1973), who assessed the degree to which artists of Benin, Cameroon and Kuba exploited various forms of symmetry (See also Washburn, forthcoming). One of Robert Farris Thompson's important insights was to note the multirhythmic, self- interrupting character of music, textile design, and sculptural forms in sub-Saharan art. Linked with an analysis of speech and writing styles, Sarah Brett-Smith (1984) has proposed that irregularity in designs on Bamana mud-dyed cloth is a systematic tactic to ac- knowledge and yet hide secret knowledge that women possess.

To summarize from an art historical viewpoint, there was significant improvement in connoisseurship by locating sub-styles, distinguishing leadership arts, and in drawing greater attention to the artist. The major change in style studies was the gradual break away from fixing a particular style within a "tribal" boundary. Diverse reasons for style similarities were perceived. Some interesting questions were not asked: Why are small size and schematic forms the predominant mode of human figure sculpture? (But see Adams, 1980) Why in certain instances is style precisely defined by the ethnic group? To whom is maintenance of a style significant? What is the relationship between style as a system of order and social order?

PARADIGM: IDENTIFICATION OF IMAGERY

In spite of the importance of figure sculpture in the art world, little research has been devoted to it by US art scholars. Analysis of the complex imagery in the metalwork from the former Benin kingdom in Nigeria has been done mainly by anthropologists (Dark, 1962; Ben-Amos, 1983a). However, the art historian Barbara Blackmun (1984) under-



took the long task of recording by computer the abundant imagery of the large Benin corpus of carved ivory tusks, and by correlating historical documents and court-maintained traditions with a comparative analysis of the imagery, she distinguished royal from chiefs' tusks and (1988) traced the changing identity of one figure from trader to priest over a 200-year period.

The greatest quantity of figural wood sculpture is produced by the populous Yoruba of Nigeria, who in spite of regional variations adhere to an easily recognizable style. By the '70s, English scholars (e.g., Wescott, 1962 and note 7) had already indicated the identifying features for figures used by the various religious groups and established that the figures were not deities but devotees of the various cults. US scholars (e.g., Houlberg, 1973) contributed refinements to this body of work. Margaret Drewal's (1986) observation that, in Yoruba cult theory, the identities of the devotee and deity are joined in the ritual process raises the point that identification may not be as fixed as in the one-to-one formula so ingrained in Christian religious art (For identification in other ethnic areas, see Bastin, 1965; Glaze, 1975).

One problematic area of identification lies in the figure sculpture of the Dogon. Al- though numerous French scholars have reported extensively on many aspects of Dogon thought, drawing principally on the Sanga area, few have thrown light on the figure sculpture in wood, or the various kinds of small brass castings (Ezra, 1988). However, J. Laude (1964), a French aesthetician, attributed identities to various figure sculptures based on Sanga myths, and since the translation of his essay appeared in 1973, such attributions have been repeated. Kate Ezra (1988), on the other hand, has emphasized alter- native sources for identification in the ritual prayers and songs associated with the objects, as well as practices of the living community. Recently, a Dutch scholar, Walter van Beek (1988), issued a brief report based on his extended fieldwork both in and outside Sanga. He found that figures, carved in a conventional style, are said to "represent" the client--even with added details related to the client's needs-while serving as a tem- porary altar to the deity being addressed. He denies the statuary's initial character as an ancestor or as a figure in myth. Is this difference the result of the passing of old men who knew the meditations of three generations ago, a reflection of the changing interests of the populations around Sanga, or a difference in the kind of "Other" constructed by diverse researches?

The anthropologist Robin Horton (1963) introduced a new kind of identification of imagery in his study of Ijo masks as water spirits, a link with the local ecological setting that significantly affected art studies of figures and masks. Fernandez (1966) introduced the notion of dualism into sculptural analysis, by showing that Fang concepts favoring opposing but balanced forces were evident in the symmetrical balance in Fang figures as well as in other aspects of social life. His publication (1977b), based on a widely circu- lated earlier paper on Fang architectonics concerning the structure of villages and social and cult organization, was influential in establishing an awareness of dualistic distinction in African categories, such as male/female and bush/village. Vogel (1973) found dualistic Baule terms categorizing their figure sculpture not as ancestor figures but as auspi- cious spirit mates associated with the village, or as disruptive spirits from the bush (See also Fischer, 1978; Ravenhill, 1980).

Much of the fieldwork of art scholars in this period focused on masqueraders; their main achievement was the diversification of mask identities. The Drewals (1983) provided major models of iconography in their work on masks used in the Gelede festival of the western Yoruba; they identified male and female types and divided the imagery into five subject matters. Vogel (1977) further distinguished Baule masks into youthful and adult



forms (See also Borgatti, 1979b; Adams, 1987a, 1988b). Phillips (1979) and Boone (1986) identified the conventional meaning of the helmet masks worn by Mende women during the initiation of girls as the epitome of female beauty. However, Frederick Lamp (1985), who benefited from language competence, reached the third level of "iconology" in a study of the neighboring Temne, first by linking the women's mask form-which re- ferred to a butterfly chrysallis-to the ritual transformation of immature girls into beauti- ful adult women, and then by relating it as a cosmographic index to the female domain and regeneration. Ultimately, he identified the figure wearing the mask as the reincarna- tion of the primordial founder of the women's metamorphizing ritual. A similar kind of mask used by Gola women nearby was identified by Warren d'Azevedo (1973b) as having a male identity. Lamp's discussion is useful for an understanding of the shifting nu- ances of gender identity in the region.

Although most scholars have sought to identify types or categories of objects, one can detect two other directions in recent studies. One is toward consideration of art- works, figures or masks as a group within their original setting (See Northern, 1973). George Preston's (1985) catalogue highlighted his view that objects within an emsemble, although in seemingly casual array, may work together to express an idea. This point is finely demonstrated in Paula Ben-Amos's (1988) analysis of an Edo ancestral alter in Benin City, on which an assortment of objects are united as a testimonial to a life well- lived (See also Anderson, 1983; Kraemer, 1987).

The other direction elaborates the earlier focus on the single object, not in order to fix a type, but to yield an identification of a unique work, such as Jack Flam's (1970) de- tailing of the features of a Bamana female figure, or Joseph Comet's (1982) identification of individual Kuba king figures. Suzanne Blier (1985) combined these two directions by first confirming the identification of a unique head cast in copper as an 18th century Ife king, Obalufon II, then placing it within a context of coronation ceremonies, and then suggested the famed Ife bronze and copper heads supported crowns in such rites. It is especially interesting that this complexly constructed argument draws heavily on studies by Yoruba scholars on the history and relegion of Ife, as well as on archeological data and stylistic analysis.

There has also been the occasional new insight into a visual motif, such as Margaret Drewal's (1977) essay on the significance of projections from the top of the head, or a new question from the bosom of art history, such as the inquiry into portraiture by Jean Borgatti (1980). Doran Ross (1982) made fresh use of Asante proverbs to identify individual motifs in the figurative imagery of Asante court staffs (On verbal and visual aspects of Akan brassweights for gold, see McLeod, 1978, and G. Niangoran-Bouah, 1984- 87). Henry Drewal, thanks to his knowledge of the Yoruba language and the supporting work of Yoruba scholars, has (in press) been able to show that the focal female figure of the Ogboni/Oshi~gb6 council was mistakenly identified as the Earth Goddess; properly that figure refers to the original founders of the community and of the Oshuigbd lodge.

Again, some important questions were not asked. Why, for example, are plants not represented even though names of designs referring to plants are very important in other modes of expression and action? In a corpus dominated by the human figure, one would want to know how the image is related to concepts of the body, or of the self. Except for Thompson's discussion of postures (1974) and identification of poses and gestures in Kongo statuary and behavior (Thompson and Comrnet, 1981), little effort was made to in- terpret gestures. There were no inquiries into the meaning of self-absorbed or exaggerat- ed facial expressions, except for a brief report on the anthropological studies of Thomas and Pamela Blakely (1987) among the Hemba. Although anthropologists seek detailed



information on local conceptions of animal imagery (Ben-Amos, 1976; Ravenhill, 1988), art scholars were often satisfied with simple identification of the motif.

PARADIGM: PROCESS AND FUNCTION

As already noted, assignment of social functions has long been a leitmotif in sub- Saharan art writings; Biebuyck (1969) promoted this perspective in African art studies. In general, figure sculpture was interpreted as contributing positively to the maintenance of community order and cohesion. The prominent function ascribed to the widespread use of masking rituals was social control, an attribution inspired by the essay "Masks as Agents of Social Control" by George Harley (1950), a medical missionary in Liberia, and supported by Sieber's (1962) offering of several other examples. In this light, masking ritual was seen as a contribution to social order (But see Magid, 1972).

Art scholars tended to focus on highlights of ritual, such as the appearance or behavior of a masked figure or the moment of display of a carved figure, but some moved away from these static vignettes. Zdenka Volavka's (1972) attention to art prior to and after the moment of display led to a significant realization: that the final aesthetic effect of Congo nail or mirror fetishes was a result of a series of decisions by the diviner and the ultimate owner (See also Bourgeois, 1984: 262; Blier, 1988a). The joint research of the German scholars Hans Himmelheber (1964) and Eberhard Fischer (1978) also created an awareness of process within the art sphere by reporting that the formal types of Dan and Guere (We) masks were not locked into certain functions, since lowly maskers could rise under certain conditions to fulfill more important tasks (See also Adams, 1987a). That is, in some cases functional process can override formal features, once again showing that the static one-to-one, form-identity relationship expected in European art is not consistent in sub-Saharan art.

However, an active concern with process is not apparent until after sub-Saharan art scholars took an interest in artistic ritual complexes, probably influenced by the popularity of the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner (1964, 1967), who undertook analysis of ritual in the service of social function. Without adopting the specifics of Turner's method, that is, analyzing ritual into transformative phases according to nominal, exegeti- cal and positional techniques, art scholars expanded their documentation to include many facets of performance (costume, dancing), entire sequences of which they now described. This new emphasis on ritual process is evident in the early '80s in three focused monographs on community ritual (Glaze, 1981; Cole, 1982; Drewal and Drewal, 1983). All three spell out the full performance ritual sequences under the overarching framework of ideal spiritual and social functions.

In Art and Death in a Senufo Village, Anita Glaze (1981) provided detailed descrip- tions of sequences in initiation rituals for youth and for funerary rites. She affirmed a division of social responsibility between men and women: male leadership ensures stability and continuance of the social and political order; female leadership is responsible for con- tinuity of kin group order. Based on her observation of local practices, she noted that figure sculpture belongs primarily to the women's sphere and masquerades to the men's. Because of the descriptive essay style, it is not clear if these bounded categories are held by the Senufo community. Her central thesis is that the elaborate funeral ritual is designed to ensure the continuing integration of the community with the spiritual world, as well as serve an integrative function within the community and among the multiple groups subsumed as the "Senufo" community. Her thesis seems credible because these



rituals are sponsored not only for important persons but cyclically in communal rites for all other deceased. However, her argument would gain authority by presenting dialogue with the participants as part of the interpretation, or by marshalling a complex of data on function into a more elaborate argument, instead of relying on appearances and asser- tions.

Cole's (1982) monograph described the long Mbari house-building ritual among the Owerri Igbo, emphasizing aesthetic choices and analysis of form. Cole makes one aware of this difficulty, even in an anglophone area, in constructing a coherent explanation for this community effort because, other than "spiritual malaise," the local people provide only brief and widely varying definitions of Mbari and its meaning. However, in conclusion, he supplied other interpretations: one is based on Mircea Eliade's model of man- kind's spiritual need for cyclical renewal, possibly paralleling the Owerri people's need to repeatedly move their community; in another, by setting up categories of events and ac- tions in an ordered way, the community achieves a sense of control over their future. Al- though his treatment of the interpretive problem makes one aware that his constructions are those of an outside observer, ideally, more attention should be focused on formulating explanations from the specific contents of the African artistic materials.

That the people of these communities phrase their activities in religious or spiritual terms is not only familiar from other reports (e.g., LeMoal, 1980) but seems amply supported by the evidence. It may be understandable that these studies by art historians did not take into account real-life processes of tensions, conflicts or consequences, or of art performance as social action motivated by multiple interests, because for so long the art historian's interpretive task was bounded by ideal "higher values." Since the '60s, however, anthropologists have been more inclined to recognize the expression of tensions between groups within a community (See Ottenberg, 1972, 1973). Cohesive and beneficient "functions" are not always apparent in African ritual. For example, Siroto (1969) described a mask festival among the BaKwele in which competition for leadership was played out in terms of the compelling artistic quality of performance. Usually as a result of the competition, the original community broke apart. Siroto (1972) also explained how the fierce Gon masquerader was used as a disruptive predatory force to take over small villages. (See also Hersak, 1986).

The report of a French anthropologist and a Senufo colleague (Jamin and Coulibaly, 1979), although similar to Glaze's account on descriptive points, illustrates this recognition by emphasizing different aspects of funerary rites among Senufo communities near those studied by Glaze. These authors saw the rites as a kind of dramatization of the social and economic inequality that must be hidden in daily life; in addition, the ostenta- tious

"wastage" of wealth conceals the relationship of power that enables the sponsors to acquire wealth and justifies future inequalities. They interpreted the gestures of the masker over the corpse not as the "initiation" or symbolic birth of the ancestor, as Glaze reported, but as a mocking parody of life in the form of sexual posturings that breaks af- fective ties between the dead and the living. The motivation for the rites is psychologi- cal, to fulfill the "working of mourning." Using different perspectives, these writers perceived "functions" differently than did Glaze.

In the Drewals' (1983) book on the Gelede festival, one is brought into the "experienced world" of the organizers and participants via Yoruba song texts, invocations, lexi- cal analysis, performance style, and interview statements. The explicit purpose of the festival, according to the sponsors, is to honor women so that they will not exercise their secret powers to disrupt the social order. By viewing all aspects of Gelede as honoring women, the Drewals intended to improve on earlier negative reports of Yoruba men's atti-



tudes toward women. It is to the Drewals' credit that their scrupulous and abundant reporting, especially in the form of directly quoted material, enables the reader to pick up more ambiguous and diverse messages about women than they wish to communicate directly (See Adams, 1984, 1987b). This study also recalls the problem with Panofsky's model (Forster, 1972) that assumes a consensus notion of a single central high culture, in which an interpretation is offered from the perspective of an elite or a particular group.

Furthermore, in the light of recent criticism in anthropology about representations of other peoples (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Clifford, 1988), one can fault these authors for conveying an impression that they have discovered a coherent "system" of action and have given a complete and transparently realistic picture of the function and meaning of these artistic endeavors. The usual reply to the first criticism is that art, in contrast to the improvisations and contingencies of social life, is a product of deliberate ordering. How- ever, even in this apparent order, there may be, as the literary historian Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) has claimed for literature, multiple voices or "heteroglossia." Today, recognizing the complexity of cultural domains or "texts," one looks not only for the dominant "message," but also the muted and resistant voices. One should look at a cultural domain as an assemblage of texts, subject to varying readings, or consider that the artistic community may be, as Clifford (1988) affirms of culture, composed of seriously contested codes and representations, and that the poetic and political are inseparable.

SEARCH FOR MEANING

Symbolic Analysis Prior to the 1970s, Claude Ivi-Strauss's structural method of analyzing kinship and

myth had led to an awareness of dual categories, mediators, reversals, and transforma- tions in other cultural material. Africanist anthropologists analyzed elements of sub- Saharan art from this perspective (e.g., Fernandez, 1966; Ben-Amos, 1973; Jedrej, 1980; MacCormack, 1980). This ferment had little effect on art scholars (But see Adams, 1981a). The only explicit foray into structuralist method by an art scholar was Barbara DeMott's (1982) book Dogon Masks. DeMott considered masking ritual as a spiritual quest, but the main thrust of her book is a search for cognitive order, or art as thought. Her thesis is that art is structured according to an underlying conceptual system, discovered by analyzing relations between pairs of cultural phenomenon through reversals, transformation, and other permutations. First DeMott reclassified Dogon masks not according to subject matter, as Marcel Griaule (1938) did, but according to binary opposi- tions such as male/female, realistic/abstract, predatory/non-predatory, and danced/non- danced characters. She then portrayed their interpenetration in the performance sequences. DeMott adopted Turner's perspective in noting that the separate categories that oper- ate in daily life are brought into symbolic union in ritual not simply as a mental exercise but for the ritual's transformative effect on the spectators. Most of Cole and Aniakor's book (1984) Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos is devoted to the iconographic level, that is, the conventional meaning of objects and imagery, but in the conclusion, they relate the structural dualisms they have discovered (e.g., black/white, male/female, youth/age) to social relations. They avoid a static view of structuralist paradigms by emphasizing that these binary pairs shift in meaning according to different contexts. To anchor these interpretations and to avoid the trivial, one must discover the conceptual frame that shapes the motivation for representations in art.13

Suzanne Blier's (1987b) book on the architecture of the Batammaliba in Northern



Benin offers another approach to symbolic analysis, one that draws on a combination of rhetorical devices and semiotics. Using participant observation and over 300 interviews, conducted in the local language, she illustrated the way the architects and priests construct their material and intangible symbols through such mental operations as nesting, reversals, condensation, skeumorphs, synecdoche, metonyms, directional affiliation, language classes, color categories, and large-scale metaphors. These metaphors, such as architecture as cosmos, paradise, temples, and self-images, are drawn from a long history of concepts in art historical writings. In this way, she links the African structures to the kind of grand higher ideals that are associated with art in European art historical tradition. This work, along with Thompson's investigations among the Kongo (Thompson and Cor- net, 1981)-which links gestures, graphics, and sculpture to cosmological thought-and Allen Roberts's anthropological researches on Tabwa cosmology (Roberts and Maurer, 1986), challenge the earlier assumption that only the Dogon developed cosmological thought.

Blier (1988a: 83-4) was the first to essay a critique of art historical method. She crit- icized the predominant frame of reference in Panofskian iconological studies that empha- sizes a search for "the" meaning of a work of art, because this requires the outside observer to resolve (suppress, exclude) differences and contradictions in order to arrive at a synthesis. She found that within different conceptual domains, the Batammaliba en- dowed their architectural features with variant and divergent meanings that could not be placed within a hierarchical frame of values. As yet, there are few symbolic analyses by sub-Saharan art scholars; most of their efforts are directed toward discovering the conventional (or iconographic) identification the people themselves attach to the work.

Long association and knowledge of the local language enable Sarah Catherine Brett- Smith to explore practices and beliefs in the Kolokani sector of the Bamana people in dialogic depth and to avoid reaching outside the cultural context for an explanation. Brett- Smith is less impelled by the positive-functionalist imperative or by an idealized art historical approach. Hers is a different voice because she tries to understand local practice within its own logic, even when it seems to violate our feelings or values. One could say she constitutes a different "Other" by her selections and exclusions. In "Symbolic Blood, Cloths for Excised Women"(1982), she reported a protective function for the cloths, protection that is needed because of a fear of sorcery, a subject that like the ritual itself usually falls outside art scholars' discourse. In this account and in "The Poisonous Child" (1983), an investigation of the sculptural boli, she raised a series of logical questions and answered them through a dialogue with local beliefs, practices, and persons. Quoting her interlocutors at length in relation to a detailed examination of the object (including X- rays), she arrived at a complex of meanings in relation to the constraints and the extremes of competitive struggles for wealth and power.

Art as a Strategy in Social and Political Affairs The emergence of a notion of art as a strategy in social and political affairs was due to the revival of interest since the late 1960s in Marxist critical thought and to the increas-

ing awareness of gender discrimination. Anthropologists (See Siroto, above) have been sensitive to the use of art as an instrument of policy and its effects.14 In an article entitled "Royal Art and Ideology in Eighteenth Century Benin," Ben-Amos (1984) specified how art forms were used to create and sustain a political ideology; for example, imagery on a royal staff evoked the source of a particular king's power and indicated how he could exercise it. William Siegmann (1980) analyzed the regional variations in the use of mask-



ing as a strategy in Liberia (See also Binkley, 1987). Christraud Geary (1988b) detailed the political and military efforts by which rulers of an expanding Cameroon polity ac- quired artisan groups needed to create a court splendor that qualified as royal.

A few art scholars expressed awareness of the strategic relationship of art to the political sphere without demonstrating the processes involved. Bravmann (1979: 46) in- sightfully linked the lack of masking among Akan people of Ghana to political structure, noting that the political and policing functions, often handled elsewhere through the medium of a masking association, are discharged through the operations of the state system. Adams (1980a) observed that as a political strategy, royal art accomplishes paradoxical aims: on the one hand its richness and splendor attract the admiration and loyalty of the population; on the other hand, these qualities create an unbridgeable distance between the royals and the commoners who by rule and circumstance can have no access to such things. In a more detailed study among the Bamana of the Segu region in Mali, Mary Jo Arnoldi (1986) recognized that by defining young men's assertive puppetry performances as "play" and employing other definitional and behavioral strategies, the elders diffuse this challenge to their authority.

It is evident that art scholars are shifting their focus to the way in which Africans construct their society and their conceptions of art and of artists. This inevitably raises issues, based on cultural differences, that do not conform to the positive vision that has so long been associated with art studies in our own tradition and particularly in sub-Saharan art studies. Many sub-Saharan Africans are sensitive to the image of their culture and their past that is presented to the international public. In humanistic scholarship by Afri- cans, this is particularly clear in the numerous studies of African philosophy and recently in the efforts to publish a multi-volume work, The Arts and Civilization of Black and Afri- can Peoples (Okpaku et al., 1986). This sensitivity in art scholars and in Africans be- comes a problem when studies appear that perpetuate stereotypes. This kind of problem is not likely to fade away.

Concepts of Power The relationship of imagery to concepts of political power was examined by Ben-

Amos. She (1976) showed that animal imagery in Benin art was structured according to concepts of power relations among people and between them and their kings. McNaugh- ton (1979, 1988) has made the most explicit effort to explain a concept of power in relation to art among the Bamana, speakers of one of the Mande language groups. Special knowledge permits the accumulation and manipulation of energy, nyama, to produce either good or ill. Persons thought to possess this kind of power, that is, those who could perform difficult or dangerous tasks without being harmed, such as blacksmith-carvers or leaders of men's associations, are consulted, respected, and feared. According to common belief, objects associated with such men can be imbued with deadly power and can be used by the men's associations to take punitive action against persons who commit an- tisocial acts. Secrecy and ambiguity are seen as sources of power; for example, masks whose initial form is secret, hidden under layers of amorphous substances, are perceived as having greater power. Building on these ideas and his own anthropological research among a Mande people, Peter Weil (1988) developed a model of 11 variables that consti- tute a template that underlies the creation of a wide variety of mask and masquerade forms created during the 19th and 20th centuries in the Mande zone. This model indicates that the more amorphous, more powerful masks were involved in major transitional social events. Weil's model is the most thorough formula for investigating masks and



their powers.

Art and Gender In the midst of great interest in gender in both art history and anthropology in the

1970s, d'Azevedo (1973b) brought the issue forward in the article "Mask-Makers and Myth in Western Liberia," by emphasizing that ritual leadership roles among the Gola in Liberia alternated between male and female leaders. The first explicit presentation of gender as an issue in sub-Saharan art studies was made by Glaze (1975), who has repeatedly visited the Senufo area for over 20 years, in an article, "Woman Power and Art in a Senufo Village." Women diviners, she said, were indispensable intermediaries with the supernatural world; neither male nor female leadership would make an important deci- sion or undertake ritual acts of importance without consulting one or several women diviners. However, Glaze did not intend to diminish the authority of the male in the socio- political order. Rather, because conflicts in the real world threaten the wholeness of the man/woman pair (Glaze, 1986), the Senufo seek a higher unity through art and ritual, which projects a transcendent restorative vision of balance between male and female components (See also Duquette, 1979). As appealing as this argument is, one would like to see more kinds of "dialogic" evidence to contruct this as a convincing interpretation. In contrast to this image of balance, the ethno-archaeologist Ian Hodder (1982) considered both women and young men in the Baringo district in Kenya to be dominated by older men, a condition he used to account for the similarities between women's decora- tions and those of young warriors.

In the literature, the relationship of women to masking has been problematic. With the exception of studies of several populations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where women wear wooden masks, the scholarly emphasis has been on masking as a male province. However, Henry Pernet (1982), a Swiss scholar, proposed that a closer examination of ethnographic accounts would lead toward a reassessment of women's place in these rituals (See also Adams, 1987a). It is, of course, widely recognized that conceptual systems of balance and complementarity between the sexes presented in ritual do not necessarily relate to the status or condition of women in non-ritual contexts. That a woman is the tit- ular head of the men's Poro society does not award her a significant role in the men's de- liberations (Glaze, 1981: 31). In We/Gu6r6 men's masking, Adams (1988b) found, within a symbolic spiritual message for the community as a whole, a gender strategy that projects an image of men's superior powers.

Interest in gender aroused some discussion of sources of creativity. Adams (1980b) posited that men's creativity, expressed in the carving of small wooden figures which the men care for and depend upon for assistance, was inspired by the strategy of women who cultivate their children in the expectation of ultimate benefits. However, Ben-Amos (1986), taking the insider's view, emphasized that the explicit source of inspiration claimed by artists in Benin City was either divine or in the form of dreams from the ancestors who mediate relations with the divine.

Gender issues brought attention to the division of labor which seems to have been strongly marked in terms of art production. In any given community, men and women are likely to produce different kinds of artistic work (See Teilhet, 1978; Ottenberg, 1983). However, as Aronson (1984) and Adams (in press b) emphasized in an overview of women's arts, blurring of the boundaries is increasing because of social and economic change. In her study of Akwete women's specialized weaving, which is important in regional trade networks, Aronson (1983) considered the women's mythic claim for the ori-



gin of weaving in the village of Akwete as the women's way of legitimizing ownership of the craft so that the weaving in its improved state would remain localized in their village and under their control. The tacit aim is to prevent other weavers from intruding on this profession.

Whether one seeks to delineate aspects of the social or symbolically defined role of women or to examine gender practice as power strategy will determine research results. The difference in level of analysis is especially notable where two or more scholars study in the same or in closely related neighboring regions. For example, among the Mende, M.C. Jedrej (1980) sketched the Sande society as guiding young women through a symbolic transformation into properly socialized persons, while Caroline Bledsoe (1980) perceived it as a means for Sande women leaders to aggrandize their position. The Drewals (1978) saw the Egungun festival as a means of distributing authority among titled elders both men and women, while Pemberton (1978) reported that the leaders told him it was to demonstrate the superiority of men over women.

PARADIGM: HISTORY OF ART

Due to the emphasis on collecting data on style classifications and usage by direct research in contemporary African communities, in-depth study of documentary evidence or museum collections was neglected until the late 1970s. Occasionally, attention was given to the possible influence of early-contact European imagery on sub-Saharan art forms (Fraser, 1962; McGaffey and Janzen, 1974; Garrard, 1984).15

Sieber has been a particularly strong force in the United States in encouraging historical studies of sub-Saharan art by combining documentary research with fieldwork. His former student Rene Bravmann opened an important historical subject by acknowledging the hitherto ingnored presence of Islam in relation to West African art. Although Brav- mann's (1974) main thesis, that the commitment to Islam did not mean the end of figural art traditions, is of marginal validity, his work encouraged others to engage in reconstruc- tive historical research on Islamic influence on artistic efforts (See Cole and Ross, 1977; Silverman, 1986). However, through analysis of documents and technical details, Timo- thy Garrard (1980) argued that Akan brassweights had an indigenous origin, derived from gold-working traditions (See also Ross and Garrard, 1983).

In general, research has focused on objects of lasting materials, such as ivory, brass, bronze or gold, because these are associated with trade with outsiders who kept some kind of records. As already noted, the Benin corpus of metal and ivory has received the most attention. Marian Johnson (1980) produced an exemplary study of gold history by tracing the rise from the mid-19th century of a cosmopolitan culture among the gold- smiths in Senegal through their participation at colonial expositions in France. She located official documents concerning grandmasters from 100 years ago and their descendants who continue as smiths, and developed a catalogue raisonni of this refined art form. An- other historical review sensitive to the "colonial situation" was produced by Christraud Geary (1982). She considered brass-casters in the Bamum kingdom in relation to trade and court policies in an analysis tightly controlled by 19th- and 20th-century primary documents and local lineage traditions.

Rather than tracing conditions of the production of art, Ben-Amos attempted to arrive at a concrete historical interpretation of Benin art forms of the past. Based on attention to motifs, interviews with persons in Benin City, and early published sources, she

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African Visual Arts From an Art Historical Perspective