Argenti(AfricanAesthetics)

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JASO 23/3 (1992): 197-215

AFRICAN AESTHETICS: MOVING TO SEE THE MASK

NICOLAS ARGENT)

The world is like a mask dancing,if you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.Chinua Achebe

1. IntroductionTHE highland region of Northwest Province, Cameroon, known as the Grassfields,is a homogeneous culture area made up of many small polit ies headed by chiefs,or kings, known locally as fons. Al though the languages spoken in the area areall semi-Bantu, and the various chiefdoms have been coexisting, trad ing andintermarrying for centuries, group identities and languages are upheld extremelyconservatively. Oral historical aceo.unts of the migrations of the variousgroups-Chamba, Tikar, Barnum, Bamileke-and their supposed cultural origins

This essay is a revised version of part of a pre-fieldwork Ph.D. proposal presented to UniversityCollege, London, in 1991. As such, it represents reflections on the approach I intended to takein the field to the material in question. I am indebted t o S al ly C h il ve r, J er emy Co ot e, S us an neKUchl er , David Napier,Michael Rowlands, Buck SchieffeJjn andmany others for theircommentson the research proT' , itself and on earlier drafts of thisessay. Having now (April 1992) spentthree months inthe .:. ld I am pleased to say that, thanks to their help, the ideas presented heredo not aoeear wholl\?vide of the tn~rlr


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~98 Nicolas Argent i Afr ican Aes thetics 199are maintained as meticulously as are the genealogies of clan heads, which go backon average six generations or so.

One of the character is tics noticed by the f irst Europeans to reach the area in1889; and much commented on ever s ince, is the abundance of mater ial culture,and the elaboration of everything from household utensi ls and furniture to royalportrait sculptures, architecture, secret society masks and divination figures. Theseobjects were enthusiastically and exhaustively collected, first by German, then byFrench and English colonial officers, missionaries, explorers and ethnographers,and later by an international body of patrons , buying either in Cameroon or on theEuropean and US markets. This has resulted in an enormous stock of Grassf ieldsartefacts in Western museums. Both these and those still in situ have beensubjected to analysis by researchers interested in the possible meanings to be foundin thb rich iconography of the material.

Throughout the Grassf ields , decorat ion of carved and/or beaded artefacts ischaracterized by geometric designs associated with certain animals, which . in t umsignify s tatus ascript ions or other associations in the social structure. The majordesigns are those of the s tylized frog, spider , l izard, python, bush cow, elephantand leopard. The las t four are associated especially with the fon, while the frogis often spoken of as symbolizing fert ility and the spider as symbolizing thesupernatural (through its connection with the ancestor spirits in the ground). Thespider, accordingly, is used in divination practice throughout the area. All of theseassociations between animals, motifs and social or cosmological categories formpart of the informants' overt knowledge, and can be elicited readily in interviews.Over the pas t twenty years or so, these motifs have been researched by anthropo-logists interested in linking them to Grassfields social structure. For example, theAmerican scholars Christraud Geary (1983, 1988), Paul Gebauer (1979) andTamara Northern (1973, 1988) have set out detail ed schernas of the symbolsinvolved and the at tributions that informants in the Grassfi elds gave them. Inaddit ion, Harter, a medical doctor who spent a lot of t ime in the area in the 1950s,hasproduced a large, well-researched and lavishly illustrated volume on the subject(1986), which takes an art-historical approach to the appreciation of the artefacts.Harter concentrates on formal appreciat ion of the works he presents. Objects areassessed on the basis of finesse of execution, quality of the medium, balance,proport ion etc. In this type of analysis the overt , verbalized and relat ively s taticmeanings of the Objects are focused upon. .

Brain and Pollock (1971) l ikewise conducted very good field research, butwent further than Harter in firmly sett ing the ir analysis in the local context,providing a r ich social backdrop for their account of the production of artefactsarriongs t the Bangwa people. However, their approach was also beholden to theart-historical tradition. This means that although their work is to a large degree'contextualized ' in the manner of Baxandall's (1972) analysis of QuattrocentoItalian painting, the presupposit ions of their research were still by and largeethnocentric ones. Although the rituals during which pieces are displayed are welldescr ibed, Brain and Pollock 's appreciat ion of a sculpture is couched in terms of

the 'beauty' of lWeobject , the accomplishment of the carver' s style and so on. AsIh.alltry to show, however, these factors are not paramount in how the infonnantsa~tnbute value to a piece, in spite of the verbal test imony they might sometimesgive.

In her publicati~ns on.t~e Barnum, Ge~ry (1983, 1988) goes further than anyof the other authors in avoiding Western-orientated interpretations of the material.Rather,. she offers the alternative model of a symbolic system based on theexpression of power. Her view of material culture as of greater communicativethan 'decorative' value has suggested the direction taken in this essay. Like Brainand Pollock, she has elici ted many verbal s tatements regarding the relat ion ofobjects of material culture to s tatus and polit ical power. In this essay, Intend toproceed from her theoretical position-that i conography serves to preserve orenh~ce !he. ?owe~ of the elite-to examine how objects signify and how theyremain significant III a dynamic socio-political setting.

Most of the ~orks on Grassf ields iconography mentioned above tend not to gobeyond an exegesis of the representational or symbolic meanings of artefacts basedon taxonomic identifications obtained from informants. While such research ha sadvanced the understanding of objects taken as isolated entit ies, as well as ofmuseum collections and photographs, it does not address the question of theinteractive social significance of the artefacts, beyond making a few suggestionsas to the functional roles the Objects might have played. '

My aim in this essay is, therefore, a twofold one. On the one hand, Iwish toshow how the overt definitions and correspondences gathered in fieldwork can beused to examine a whole other set of associations and signifiers in a realmcommonly represented as quite dist inct f rom the aes thet ic , On the other , I wishto suggest ways in which the prevalent views on African aesthetics, including theassumption that we are dealing with 'art' , which is to be appreciated in 'aesthetic'terms, can be re-evaluated. The very concept of 'African aesthetics' is too oftena transposition of Western aesthetic standards to non-Western artefacts, a conceptborn of the purely visual interest that European painters and sculptors working atthe tum of the present century began to pay to this class of objects. As statedabove, there have .been some effor ts at contextualization, but here too, once thematerial has been set in i ts geographical and social context i t is too often assumedthat it plays a s imilar or identical ideological role to that played by Western art inthe analyst'S own society.

1 . One p rob lem that t hi s st yl e of r es ea rch do es no t e lu cidat e, an d which ne ed s to b e a dd res se d,is tha t o f the preva lence in museum collect ions of ambiguous representat ions (monkey /man ,leopard/elephant) and of a number of exceptions t o th e norms of Grassfields iconography thatwould rende r the sys tems e labora ted in many s tud ie s me an in gl ess un les s tho se ex cep ti on s arerej ected out of hand as 'anomalies' at ypical t o the styl e. I t is my opi nion that such exceptionsf orm part of a system of dissent f rom t he status quo of Grass fields s ty le s tha t cou ld be examined(for example)i n the l ight o f the int ernal c ul tur al di ff er en ce s b etwe en the Gras sf ields p ol it ie s soemphasized by t he p e op le t hem se lv e s (Wamier 1985) .


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200 Nicolas Argenti Afr ican Aesthetics 201

We need to rescue some concept of the aesthetic both from the imperialistic claimsof the most radical sociology of art which would equate aes thet ic value withpolitical worth, and also from the total relativism and incapacity into which theself-reflexivity urged by the social history of the arts and of criticism might leadaesthetics.

Jules-Rosette' s ' aesthetics of l iberat ion' (1984: 230) may prove to be seminalin forging a move away from art-hi storical ana lysis, for which an emphasi s oncontext and process over iconography in the construc tion of meaning is vi ta l.Armed against adopting any overly subject ivist or essential ist models , thanks toJules-Rosette's explanation of the importance of economic conditions, this essayexamines the possibi li ties for a return from her concentration on s tructures andmarket forces, and their implications for an extreme relat ivism, to the artefact.Artef act produc tion and sty list ic variat ion in the Grassfi elds is l arge ly aninteractive process , and following Jules-Rosette we can pose the quest ion of theextent to which economic, social and polit ical factors in the area determine formand meaning in objects of material culture, in comparison with the degree ofinfluence that objects have on these factors. This question of the ratio of thedirection of causation between histor ical conditions and individual ingenuity ,action/reaction, begs investigation.

The art his torian Michael Baxandall (1985) sees the artefact, not as a symbol,or conca tenation of symbols, the hidden mean ing of which i t is his job to reveal,but rather as a record of the events leading to its existence. In this sense, hisapproach is akin to Kopytoff's (1986), with i ts concentration on the biography ofobjects as constitutive of their significance. This diachronic approach is one of thepos it ive contr ibutions . that traditional art his tory makes to the s tudy of mater ialcultu re-provided it i s seen , not as an explana tion of an object 's 'meaning', butis used rather as a means of examining the processes that lead to the affective andpolitically significant loading of an artefact.

Paintings are seen by Baxandall as acts, efforts in problem-solving thatembody the s trategic intention of the maker in response to the context inwhich helives and works in specific, observable formal quali ties: ' the maker of a picture orothe r hi stori cal a rte fact is a man addressing a problem of which his produc t is afinished and concrete solution' (1985: 14~15). This position suggests helpful waysin which to approach the analysis of artefacts in the f ield , through the elucidationof topical social problems, aspirations and goals, and their formal interpretation.Seeing the artefact occurring in t ime as the solution to a problem provides a meansfor acknowledging the maker's volition and intentionality in his particular responseto a given se t o f c ircumstances. Thi s view of the active posit ion of the producercan be applied to the consumer in the Grassfie lds as wel l. In the case -studiesbelow I try to point out how the movement ( the process of acquisi tion, display andresale or gift) of artefacts is a complex, dynamic process of creative interaction inways s imilar to the creat ion of artefacts . Inboth s ituations, what Wolff (1983: 19)calls the 'aesthetic disposition' is applied to socio-political ends, with respect bothto the producer, and to what Eagleton calls the "consumptional producer' (1976:166-7) or active consumer. Seeing the work of a Grassfields scu lpto r, pott er orweaver in terms of a "pa tte rn of intent ion', as Baxanda ll (1985: 70) does Pierodella Francesca's painting, not only makes it possible to see innovation as dynamicresponse to the producer's environment, but also suggests that artefacts can supply

It must be emphasized, however , that I do not intend to devalue Grassf ieldsartefacts by reverting to pre-aesthetic, evolutionist models of non-Western artefactsas merely functional objects . The category of the aes thet ic plays an important rolein the model I shal l use, but my purpose i s to place the aestheti c in its social andpolitical context. To this extent, I agree with Wolff's (1983: 21) timelyexhortation that

2. The Theoretical BackgroundUnt il re la tive ly recently, the vast majori ty o f studies o f the mate ria l cul ture ofWest and Central Africa were based in a popular Kantian tradition and essentialistin out look, viewing 'art' as a unive rsal ca tegory in which 'gifted' individualsexpressed purely aes thet ic categor ies with l it tle or no relat ion to. a wider s?~ialcontext. Itwas in reaction to this tendency in the subject that studies emphasizingcontext above form began to emerge. While many innovative sociological studiesof aesthetics were produced in the 1970s, Flores Fratto (1985), amongst others, hascalled for a return to form-a move that need not entail the essentialism andreductionism of ear lier analyses, and which would avoid the ear ly sociologicaltendency to reduce the f ield of mater ial culture to the s tatus quo o~a s tatic socialstructure: it has the potential to react against as well as represent It.

A balanced analysis of non-Western aesthetics must, therefore, be founded ona solid grounding in the social context in which the artefacts are produced and/orconsumed but will also consider seriously iconographic and formal questions andtheir relevance for the signi ficance of the objec ts. What is needed at this stage isa theory that distances itself from the reductionist interpretation of material cult~reas the object ifi cat ion of verbal thought processes and addresses the relat ionbetween the objective his torical conditions within which the individual operatesand his experience of cultural objects and events (or objects as events) .'

2. See Deliss (1990: 11) for a perceptive description of the origins of the reduction!st tende,ncyin Western criticism and its perpetuation in the 'primitive' art market. Her suggestion that theWestern defini tion of art fa ll s in to disarray the moment i t a ttempts to come to tenns withtransformations which have taken place in these cultures since the 1%0s and decolonization' isapplicable to later explanatory models, both objectivist and SUbjectivist, that are steeped in orinfluenced by the Western tradition.


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202 Nicolas Argentiopportunities for performative constructions of meaning (~ solutions) forsubsequent owners and viewers , as well as for the original maker.

Objects signify in terms of the actors' exper ience, but this exper ience oftenref lects concerns that go beyond the aes thet ic . In address ing the problem of whythe aesthetic is especially suited to non-aesthetic roles, Baxandall goes beyond themaxim that objects are 'good to think with' to the suggestion that an artist'sreact ions to his aes thet ic exper iences can be trans lated into a coherent system ofchange in, or even subvers ion of, the s tatus quo. I would s tretch this proposition,with Kopytoff (1986) and Bourdieu (1972) in mind, and draw it into a properlyanthropological theory, interpret ing the stated goals of the actor in terms of his orher (partial) understanding of the objective historical conditions in which he or sheoperates.This understanding is not of a literary or scientific nature, but rather anaffective one, in which limitat ions are ' felt ' rather than explici tly understood, ina way that could be achieved only through a process of aes thet icizat ion. A senseof the limitations of the sphere of possibil iti es, which Bourdieu (ibid.) t erms'habitus', is often expressed metaphorically in the material world, either asnaturalized and self-evident, or as undesirable or risible and therefore contested.The case-studies below examine the ways in which the actor or interes t group canor cannot reinterpret s ignificant artefacts in a dynamic interaction with their ownaspirat ions ana histori cal situation. Kuchle r (1988) shows how this processoccurred cross-culturally with respect to New Ireland malangan sculptures in thehands of Western art historians, dealers, collectors, curators and.anthropologists.Even more significantly, however, she points out how the aesthetic plays anessential role in the creat ion of a memory that mediates the struggles for identityand land in nor thern New Ireland. The inf luence of this approach on my treatmentof the case-s tudies that fol low has been to demonstrate how undeniably aes thet icexperiences can relate to social and political ends without losing their specificityin the process. Kopytoff (1986; 84 ) makes the rela ted point that objects are notonly ordered according to social rules, but are also constructed/reconstructed anddefined/redefined by people , and tha t through thi s process people construc tthemselves.Ever s ince the publication of Esquisse d 'une theorie de la pratique in 1972,Bourdieu's a im has been to t ranscend the object ive/ subjec tive , struc tural ist!phenomenological dichotomy with his 'praxiological' position, according to whichthe significance of artefacts is examined in terms of internal systems of homologyand differentiation that provide the context for the express ion and jus tification ofsystems of social distinction. The praxiological approach i.nterprets t~e spoke.n,overt understanding of naturalized, seemingly arbitrary practices as a misrecognu-ion of interested activity strongly influenced by forces in the agent's socialenvironment, or habitus.The aestheti c t astes and pre ferences of groups, as desc ribed by Bourdieu(1984), can be read as thrusts in a perpetual struggle to gain control of the socia lspace within which re lat ions of power a re enacted. To this extent, Bourdieu's

African Aesthetics 203study is very u~~ful in gett ing at the heart of the soc ial signifi cance of art, yetwithout rel inquishing a focus on the mater iali ty of the artefact in quest ion and onthe stra tegic importance of percept ions and cri tical opinions in the ongoingformation of the social structure.

Bourdieu's real innovation resides in his moving away from abstractstructuralist models without reverting to the political triviality implied in textualanalyses of fonn and s tyle as more or less self -referential sys tems (see e.g . Geertz1983). Bourdieu achieves this by drawing attention to the process whereby.objective historical realities are felt rathe r than thought , by being embodied oraes thet icized as l ived exper ience (and, therefore, made natural , self-evident)through patterns of behaviour and, by the same process , the aes thet icizat ion ofmate rial culture ; tha t is to say, the c rea tion of the impression that the ir socialsignificance actually inheres in them, rather than being expressed merely throughthe systems of dis tinction that operate through them (1984: 29) . This focus on thesoc ial relat ions underlying the c reat ion of meaning, and the means by whichBourdieu transcends the subject ive/object ive oppos it ion, nei ther alternative ofwhich is finally satisfactory in accounting for the emotional and political value ofmaterial culture in West Africa, is the most important aspect of his theory for theproblem at hand.

Bourdieu' s avers ion to 'subject ivis t' aes thet ic analyses pushes him too faralong his continuum to take ser iously into consideration individual s trategies.However, a focus on such stra tegies makes it possible to examine-s-wi thoutnecessar ily fal ling prey to phenomenological descr iption-the construct ion ofsocial pract ice and polit ical reali ties and their emergence from the fundamentallevel of individual discourse about, and use of, artefacts; i.e. the constant inventionand creation of the habitus through the created world rather than its reproduction.

Bourdieu' s notion of symbolic capital (1972) is also very useful for buildingan anthropological understanding of material culture. It sets the aesthetic spherefirmly within the grasp of anthropological enquiry by revealing the vitalimportance of that which is usually misrecognized inWestern academia, and in theWest more general ly , as dis tanced from necess ity when, in fact, i t is so often at the.crux of the s truggle of groups and individuals for self- representation and self-definition.' In fact, the social drive to maximize symbolic capital, whether

3.The presentsituationin the Britishart world is a good example. Privatecompaniesarenegotiatingfor greater involvement; a situation in which they would not only sponsorindependentlyproducedworksand exhibitionsbut actuallybe includedin planningthemfromtheearlieststagesof productionanddesign.Accordingto a reportinthe Independent newspaper,the audienceat a BBCRadio 4 debateon thearts gaspedwhen John Owens,director-generalof the BuildingEmployers' Federationand a memberof the councilof the AssociationforBusinessSponsorshipof the Arts, addressedthem in the followingterms:'Sponsorshipis nota charitableactivity;it is a marketingactivity. Butthe artsorganisationsareproducer-led.Theythinkfirst of an exhibition..and then theygo to thesponsor. If they wentto the peoplewhoprovidethe sponsorshipat an earlystageand discussedwiththem howto meettheirmarketingneeds,therewouldbe moresponsorship'(quotedin Lister1992). Thestrongemotivereaction


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204 Nicolas Argenti African Aesthetics 205a wish to fetishize his or her material production as imbued with a perfect! If-. d' lft' ,. , y secon tame gi t or mark of genius , but rather to emphasize the format ive relationbetween the affective potential of artefacts and the historical conditions in whichthey operate. It isonly by concentratingon the individual's embodied understand-ing of the historical conditions (his experience of them, or, more exactly, his senseof . the s~lf-e~idence of the res tr ictions they place on his act ivi ties ), in this caseevinced III hi s or her material production and form of consumption, that the dualcurrent of formative influence running between the ac tor and his or her socials tructure is to be understood. The f ield of aes thet ic statements and interactionsthus built up f~rms a dis~~rse ~hatis both enr iching and enr iched by its aff inityto separate social and political fields of discourse.

Grassfields iconography represents a rich field for interpretation, but the most~i~~ificant. '~eanings' .to ~e ~rawn from it are not those that the ethnographer willImtl~ll~ elicit by.q~est.lOmng l~formants. The apparent banality of single-strandedascrtpt ions of signifying relat ions between cer tain geometr ic des igns and theirequivalents in the animal kingdom needs to be reconciled with the very real fear,respect and strong emotion with which the people of the Grassfields respond to thesud~en. appearance of a mask or a ' th ing of the palace' . These s ingle-strandedascnptions, al though they certainly exist as normat ive ideas, do not suffice toexplain the changes that occur regularly in Grassfields art--changes that emphasizethe appropri~tion of 'foreign ' objects, whether from the West or from other partsof West ~fnc~. The ascrtption of uni l ineal correlations between the iconographyand certain animal Species IS not an end in itself, but rather instrumental in thecreation of a structure of greater significance. In other words, the verbalstatement~ regarding the material eli cited by ethnographers to date are onlymarkers, instrumental as label s for identifying designs and placing them in acosmological schema for future reference.

The failure of the meaning-centred approach to account for the emotive valueand imm~iacy. ~f~e~thetic objects-wh~t Wolff (1983: 84) and Fuller (1980) referto as the specif icity of art-or for their dynamic movement and transformationin the Grassfields, points to the need for a theory that wil l account for theseshortcomings. In the next sect ion Ishall try to show how the immediacy of theaes thet ic and its dynamism make it an optimal field of discourse in which torepresent and affect the soc io-polit ical fi eld. In this manner, with the help ofmaterial from Brain and Pollock' s Bangwa Funerary Sculpture (1972) and anarti cle by Eugenia Shanklin on the Afo-a-Kom (1990), I hope to show that thematerial culture of the Grassf ields is s ti ll more versat ile and sophist icated thanprevious analyses have suggested; and perhaps to point the way to a moregeneralizable approach to West African material culture. The example fromBangwa Funerary Sculpture illustrates the point that 'meanings' elicited throughver?al statements and Western art-historical exegesis furnish only the markers uponwhich an aesthe tics of inte raction is based. Eugenia Shanklin's arti cle is thenreferred to in order t o illustrate how these markers are used in strategies servingpolitical ends.

'conscious or unconscious' (1972; 81), permits Bourdieu tosee behaviour as underthe control of the agent while at the same time emphasizing the directed anddirect ing nature of practice. Furthermore, the notion of symbolic capital as 'misrecognized, or only partially apprehended, by the actor-in-time addresses thequestion of why the sphere of material culture should be . chosen over a verbalmedium: he/she can move within it according to implicit or ambiguous feelings orpreferences, which are not thought out expli citly enough to be verba lized butwhich never theless can form the basis of a rational , working system of pract icesthat are made all the more effective through their aestheticized self-evidence.The specificity of aesthetic experience that Bourdieu shies away fromrecognizing can actually be reconci led with the sociological significance ofaesthet ic objects. In Wolff's words, 'the experience and evaluation of art aresocially and ideologically situated and constructed, and at the same timeirreducible to the social or the ideological' (1983: 84). With respect to thecontempora ry use of material culture artefact s in West Africa, it need not beidealistic or essentialist to acknowledge the power for social change of the makerand consumer of art 'as a kind of rhetoric, a mechanism by which people mayinfluence, persuade, define or redefine the social world around them' (Flores Fratto1985: 32) . Picton exemplifies this point in a s tudy of the connotations of the hoefor the Ebira: 'a simple "utilitarian" thing turns out to have wide-ranging"symbolic" connotations. We see the hoe transformed thereby, though it wouldbe difficult to talk in this way in Ebira for our "seeing" is so taken for granted asto render such discourse meaningless ' (Picton 1990: 56).

Meaning, or rather significance, lies not in the objective historical conditionsof an artefact, nor in a set of supposedly dis interested aesthetic considerations ofthe maker'S, but rather in the relations between the object, the maker, theconsumer and their ever-changing socio-political conditions. This is not as tructuralist theory of meaning, arising from the relat ions of par ts to each other inan aes thet ic sys tem, but rather a reconstruct ion of the social signif icance of theartefact, and those involved with i t, f rom the way individuals interact with andsucceed in causing others to react to i t for specific ends. The aim of the presentessay is to show how this reconstruction can address 'humanity's most basic workof invention and freedom' (Flores Fratto 1985: 38) in relat ion to the inf luence ofthe 'structured and structuring environment' (Bourdieu 1972: 174-5; 1990: 55-6).

While acknowledging Del isa 's attack (1990: 5) on the feti shizat ion of theindividual that runs through the art-historical tradition, Ishould s tress that myemphasis on the importance of acknowledging the individual does not stem from

of the public to these sallies from the corporate world reveals well the prevalent notion intheWest that aesthetics is, or ought to be, a quasi-sacred field separate from economics.Although themarriage of the twocategories of art and socio-economic relations is seldom sogross asthis example implies, the hermetic separation of the two is a c''urally specific idealthat even in the West only emerged in the nineteenth century.


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206 Nicolas Argenti African Aesthetics 2073. Bangwa Sculpture to be held is dertved from, and serves as shorthand for, i ts s trategic s ignificance(defined as the opportunities for the accumulation of symbolic capital or changes

in the social s tructure to which an object can be applied). The exper ience of thispower, embodied as fear and respect, emphasizes the particulariza tion of theartefact , which is s ingled out as extraordinary in i ts treatment from then on. It iscustomarily hidden from the sight of all but a few powerful initia tes for most ofthe year and only taken out for certain rituals, or in such exceptional circumstancesas war or regulatory society activities. This exceptional treatment is likely to lenda fur ther significance to the object, or to validate i ts or iginal s tatus, through itsindividualization in the creation of a biography (Kopytoff 1986).These ceremonies, like the objects displayed during them, are not significantindividually, but form part of a process of s ignification. They provide the s ite fora f ield of reasoning that is quite separate from the sphere of oral communicat ion,and which is not generally understood through consecutive reasoning butemotionally experienced by the association of the artefact with the experiences ofthe individual, for example, of his or her subordination to and/or implementation

, of power. This means that when assessing the value of a piece, a Bangwainformant wil l be less concerned with i ts execution than with i ts biography . . It isnot aesthetic standards that will constitute the pertinent criteria for the elaborationof its signi fi cance, but , on the one hand, the biographical details concerningwhether or not the piece has been sacralized, which secret society i t belongs to,which r ituals i t has been displayed in, how many times it has proved its eff icacy,and, on the other hand, formal quest ions regarding its ' fi t' in the s tyle category inwhich it is placed and how conformist or subversive of the dominant style i t is.Biography and fonn are two fields regarding which a social and political discourseCBnbe engaged in through artefacts.The distinc tion between what the maker and the consumers see in a singleartefact is best examined by qualifying the distinction between these twocategor ies. The formal elements of' an artefact comprise the sphere in which themaker exercises his will vis-a-vis the social structure, while his critical success orfailure in the eyes of the dominant culture , hi s social career and the biographyelaborated around his product after it leaves his ownership are the points at whichthe consumer takes over the creative stance in relation to the artefact and becomesa producer in his or her own right-the points at which production and consump-t ion merge in a single c reative process." Secrecy and regularized r itual help toform the framework within which objects become emotionally loaded for theirviewers. The exceptionality of revelat ion, the brief gl impse of the mask or royalfigure controlled by a few individuals, mark those objects that have been sacralizedover those that have not and help to sustain or chall enge the existing t radition,Within the ca tegory of those that have, secrecy also marks those that are moreeffective, and thus more powerful.

In Bangwa Funerary Sculpture, Brain and Pol lock offer a good example of thedisjunction that results from analysing non-Western artefacts according to Westernvalues. For example, the statement that 'some Bangwa pieces in Europeanmuseums are no more distinguished than rough-hewn carvings made by youths topass away a few minutes' (1972: 60) may be true from the sculptor' s point ofviewbut it is not pertinent in social terms since it isnot i ts execution that lends a piecei ts importance. Again, in a comparison between two sculptures ( ibid .: 61, plates31 and 32) the authors descr ibe how one of them is badly carved, ' an example ofuncer tain, unskil led workmanship ' ( ibid .: 60). The authors realize that this doesnot have anything to do with the age of the object or declining standards, s ince thething in question i s 'a highly valued old work' (ibid.), but they go on to describethe nefar ious effect of European interest in old-looking carvings as the root of theproblem of alleged shoddy workmanship. Their acceptance of European standardsat face value does not s it comfortably next to their own admiss ion that aestheticcriteri a are not pertinent in assessing a piece's va lue in the Grassfi elds. This i sevident in the s tatement, which the authors themselves supply ( ibid. : 64), that

to many Bangwa what the European isbuying is not an object of aesthetic interest;they do not believe that a night mask is really going to sit in a museum for peopleto stare at. For them, the huge prices are being paid for their supernatural powers,which the anc ient ritual experts gave them and which wi ll be used to theiradvantage by the Europeans.

What is needed for a sociological ana lysi s of West African artefact s is not anassessment of quality based upon Western standards, but a contextualized exegesisof the dynamic creat ion of s ignificance-both evaluative and s trategic, or socio-poli tical- in a diachronic model.This accords with my view that Grassfields sculpture is not judged indigenous-lyon aes thet ic cri teria in the conventional sense of the term. Rather , there is_analternative interpretation of value, linked to the maximization of symbolic capitalon several levels, that is often expressed in the l iterature on the Grassfields, andby informants themselves, as power. Power in the Grassfields is stronglyassociated with masks, divination figures and other objects. It is notconceptualized in an abstracted, politico-theoretical form, but experienced as thefear of certain objects that have undergone ritual processes and interdictions, andembodied in ways of act ing, social choreography, and so on. The examples thatfollow are attempts at interpreting Grassfields aesthetic notions as objectificationsof social, polit ical and cosmological categories and values in the product ion,display and movement between owners of artefacts.Ceremonies and rituals are not inherently empowering (although they may bespoken of as such). Nor is the carver's product inherently powerful, although itis experienced as such through processes of aestheticization and objectification.The respect in which a secret society sculpture or royal por trai t eventually comes 4. Thisidea is analogoustoBarthes ' activereader(1970) whostructuresthetext asmuchas thetext affects him; the signification flows in both directions.


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208 Nicolas Argenti A f r ic a n A e s t h e ti c s 2 ( ) 9If we accept this view of things, for the time being at least, many of the

statements tha t Brain and Pollock make come to fit more neatly into place. Itbecomes understandable, for example, that the only people assessing sculpturalwork on purely formal grounds are the sculptors themselves-from whom muchof the authors' data in fact came. The sculptors are the only ones concerned withproducing the raw material that is seen by the rest of the society as unfinisheduntil consecrated by the ritual experts, at which stage supplementary decorationand colour is often added. Only at this stage does the object assume its fullident ity and integrity. Before this, all sculptures form part of the hi storical lyundifferentiated production of the sculptor. Furthermore, we can easily understandhow the formally awkward piece inBrain and Pollock 's plate 32 (1972: 61) couldbe valued more highly than i ts more finely carved counterpart in the ir plate 31(ibid.). When biography is the main criterion of significance, the question of valuedepends upon the hi story or historicization of the piece. This, rathe r than itsformal characteristics, is what will dictate the way it is perceived..The greater value of the rougher piece can also be explained formally,in terms

of i ts l iminali ty in relat ion to the accepted category of such works. The carver' sbehaviour is definitely extraordinary according to the authors ' informants (ibid.:43). Although Brain and Pollock interpret this according to the modem Westernperception of art is ts as Bohemian types , all these (select ive) detai ls add up to asocial cons truction of the carver Atem as a liminal character , outside the boundsof ordinary Bangwa behaviour. Similarly, Ben, another well-known Bangwacarver, ' like many other art is ts . .. is cons idered odd by his fr iends and relat ives '(ibid.: 44). This liminality is emphasized by the fact that most carvers are of noblebirth. Indeed, carving is one of the few occupations that a noble can be involvedin wi thout adversely a ffect ing his status (which leads to questions out side thescope of this essay regarding the occult power of the nobles of the Grassfields).Thi s l iminality is not surprising when the arti san is considered in te rms of theextraordinariness of his production. He whose role it is to produce the rawmaterial of what will become objects of such arres ting s trategic and emotionalsalience is bound to be set apart to some degree.

The evidence that Brain and Pollock supply concerning the constant innovationof Bangwa carvers i s also interest ing in this vein. Atem is reportedly 'apt to beswept up by any fad' ( ibid .: 43) and 'new ideas and foreign paints and ornamentsmay be added [to the artefacts] without upset ting traditions' (ibid.: 59). Thisliberal attitude extends even to the post-modernist 'bricclage" of using industriallyproduced plastic doll s and guardsmen's bearskins in dances. Considering thegenerally conservative self-representation of the Grassfields people, however, andtheir emphasis on tradition and ancestry, the carver finds himself trapped betweenthe horns of a dilemma: to provide a conservative society with a l iberal , dynamicinterpretation of what 'good sculpture' is, yet without transgressing the stylisticnorms to such an extent as to isolate his work from references to them, thusattract ing r idicule or reject ion. Forced to walk this dangerous l ine, the carver ismarginalized by the mainstream of society. Both horn: . this dilemma do,

however, stem from the same impulse: that of local different iation within anotherwise homogeneous cultural superstructure.This impulse to different iate is expressed at the I~cal level of chiefdom

affiliation, as well as at the national level of the Francophone/ Anglophone division,an increasingly hot issue in Cameroon that forms the tacit or over t bas is for much-of the polit ical struggle occurring in the count ry. Just as the preserva tion ofdiscrete languages and distinct customs serves this end, so does the ongoingcreat ion of dif ference through varied s tyles in the production/consumption ofartefacts of material culture. Change and continuity can thus both be applied tothe same ends, and traditionalism and iconoclasm can serve equally well asstrategies of dissent from the dominant order.

Having posited the particularization of the artefact-the marking of itsidentity-as a major aspect of the significance of the performance in which it isinvolved, i t remains for me to explain the pert inence of this process. In the f irstplace, meaning in the conventional, overt sense is rejected in favour of a moredynamic , plasti c model. According to this analysi s, the object accumulatessignificance through its biography as "Yellas through its form. To a certain extent,form wil l influence subsequent biography, but the a rt ist is not the only agentengender ing s trategies through the use of material culture. Those who interactwith it after him also can. The following example, taken from an article byEugenia Shanklin on a commemorative sculpture from the chiefdom of Kom,illustrates the process by which individuals can appropriate an object at any stageafter its production and recreate it to strategic ends.

4. The A/o-a-KomThe Afo-a-Kom was stolen from the chiefdom of Kom in the CameroonGrassfields in the ear ly 1970s and eventually turned up for sale at a pres tigiousNew York art gallery in 1973, at which stage the New York Times began topublicize certain details of the sculpture's history. The articles, along with othersin Esquire and National Geographic (for specific references, see Shanklin 1990:96) precipi tated a national appeal for the rest itut ion of the sculpture to i ts place oforigin. Even the name Afo-a-Korn, 'Thing of Kom', was only applied to theobject by a Cameroonian diplomat in the United States after the matter wasmaking headlines. Thus we can see from the outset that the object i tself, let alonethe circumstances of its appropriation, is extremely ambiguous.

In her article Shanklin examines the nature of this ambiguity by elucidating the(very diffe rent ) perceptions of the Afo-a-Kom that va rious interest groupspromoted during the course of negotiations for i ts return to Korn, In the UnitedStates, journalists working for the New York Times and staff of the NationalMuseum of j ;an Art in Washington, DC, formed a l iberal pressure group


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2 10 N i co la s A rg en ticampa igning for the return of the sculpture to Kom. The Cameroonian centralgovernment in Yaounde, ini tial ly represented by its embassy in Washington,formed another interest group, while the fan-and eventually the people-s-of Kornformed a third group. When the Americans began to campaign for the re turn ofthe object on the grounds of i ts 'sacred' significance to the benighted people ofKom, the local fon quickly capitalized on this American tendency to paternalismby spreading rumours of local droughts, crop failures, mass depression andhysteria, all associated by the local people with the loss of the Afo-a-Kom.Ostensibly, he did this with the object of pushing the Americans in the direct ionthey were already showing s igns of fal ling: of returning the object as a means ofenhancing their self-image of benevolence and open-minded honesty.

By getting them to return the objec t, however, the fon rea lized he would beincreasing his prestige enormously at both the local and national levels by havingtri cked the powerful, rich Americans into giving up the Afo-a-Kom to a tinyAfr ican chiefdom. The Cameroonian central government, who constantly urgenational unity over local identity in the fledgling independent republic, were verymuch opposed to this interpretat ion of 'events . To them, the Afo-a-Kom becamean embarrassment and a nuisance. Seeing that the fon was using it to gain prest igefor one ethnic group, and hoping to dif fuse the s ituation, they tried, but eventually .fai led, to exhibit the Afo-a-Kom in Yaounde as a national treasure belonging toCameroon as a whole.

Apart from providing an example of radically divergent ideologies regardingObjects of material culture in separate societ ies with dif fering cosmologies andexpectat ions , what is most interest ing about this chain of events, in the context ofthis essay, is the view of the Afo-a-Korn taken by the fon and people of Kom.Shanklin' s f irst point is that the rumours of crop fai lures and other cataclysmicpremonitions were all a tongue-in-cheek construction of the fon's, designed for thebenefit of the American press with the aim of get ting the object returned. Thepeople of Kern, as Shanklin explains, see royal memorial sculptures as highlyimportant , and even powerful, but not in any sense divine or sacred. This is veryclearly illustrated by an anecdote told me by E. M. Chilver, who was in theGrassfields in 1963 with Phyll is Kaberry. On a vi sit to the pa lace in Korn, theysaw the Afo-a-Korn lying face down on the muddy floor of one of the compoundhuts, its decorat ive bead covering strewn about the place. When Mrs Chilverasked what i t was, she was given the unceremonious reply: 'furniture'. Thisepisode demonstrates perfect ly how an artefact can repeatedly pass in and out ofa s tate of emotive sal ience according to i ts treatment. The Afo-a-Kom may havefall en out of use, or simply been seen by Chilve r a t a t ime of yea r during whichits significance was dormant, waiting to be activated through annual display, buti t gained power immeasurably as i tcame to be viewed in the context of the eventsdeveloping around its life history.The precedent for the sense of the importance of the Afo-a-Kom is, however,rooted in the secrecy with which such objects are usually treated. Such things aret raditionally closely guarded by a small group of eli te palace official s, who

African Aesthetics 211~: >undergo r i~es to enable them to withstand the object' s power and display it only

once or twice a year to the general populace. Before the return of the Afo-a-Komfrom New York, most of the people of Kom had in fact never laid eyes on i t. Thesecrecy surrounding the object, and the ritualized respect with which it was treatedled to its perception as a thing of great power. But what did the power itselfsignify?

The explanation that something has some attribute X or Y because it is treatedas if i t does seems tautologous. As with the Bangwa case, however, the power ofthe objec t st ems from it s fit in a category of object s that embody aestheti cizedsocial values. The discourse an artefact is engaged in begins wi th its formalrelat ion to i ts s tyle category ( the class of objects it is perceived as belonging to):a relat ion that ca rri es the potential to signify. This potent ial can be exploit edthrough the elaborat ion of events in the biography of the object by interestedindividuals and groups . Being emotively charged, yet ambiguous enough to beapplied to changing contexts, these objects represent valuable opportunities forappropriation to strategic ends.

This isnot the case, however, i f t reat ing something in one way conveys somemessage on a different level. In the case of the Afo-a-Kom, what is mostsignificant about the high degree of respect surrounding the object isthe emotionalintensi ty generated around it. This isnot to say that some specific message is thuscommunicated, but rather that whatever message is associated with the Afo-a-Komwill bear the poignancy and vividness of something deeply felt : the object turnsany matter associated with it into a 'hot' issue . Given this st ate of affai rs, it isvery much in the interes ts of anyone trying to fur ther his or her ends to associatesuch an emot ively charged object as the Afo-a -Kom with them, thus lending asal iency and vindication to the matter at hand.

This i s exact ly what the fon of KQm did so successfully when he plot ted forthe return of the 'sacred' object. Suddenly, an emotionally loaded object came tobe associa ted with the whole question of ident ity, boundary and power in theCameroon Grassfields, giving the fan an extremely powerful symbol with whichto enhance his local and nationa l prest ige and influence. In this situation, i t ishardly surprising that the central government was so opposed to the organizationof a major public ceremony welcoming the object back to Kom-a pos it ion whichthe American escort s of the a rtefact did not understand and about which theyregistered great frustration.Whatever was stressed in the fen's interpretation of the Afo-a-Kom, 'aesthetic'consideration of the object in the conventional sense of the term was pretty lowdown the scale, though this isnot to say that matters of form were not important .. The fact is tha t the artefac t had to conform, or a t least rela te, to the norms of acertain category of Grassfields sculpture before it could be mobilized successfullyto politi cal ends as an emotiona lly sa lient marker. Given the objec t's value as agood example of a particular category of Grassfields aesthetics, the pertinent butambiguous, relative and ephemeral constructs that define the region of a symbolicdynamics of poli tics, could then be engendered. The biography of the object is


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212 Nicolas Argentirelated to its form in the same way as its consumer is to its producer. In bothcases, the seeming distinction gives way to a diachronic perspective that treats bothsides of the syllogism as s trategies carried out by individuals in interaction withthe social structure.

Concerning the Afo-a-Kom then, the overt significance of ancestral association,timelessness and allusion to the history of the people of Kom was enormouslyenhanced by the object's peregrination through the prestigious art establishmentsof the First World, but dependent upon the niche the artefact occupied in thetradition as a fine example of a relatively rare style. At the ground-levelunderstanding of the object, this cha in of event s enriched the Afo-a-Kom'sbiography beyond measure, thus increasing its power accordingly. This under-s tanding of the artefact is clear ly expressed by Shanklin (1990: 67) :

In Kom eyes, the s tatues are not sacred but they do have great power, and theirpower makes them objects of reverence, beyond monetary value...Whoever carvedthem [the Ufwu-A-Kom statues, of which the Afo-a-Kom is one] they are productsofthe reign of the most powerful Kom Fon; their power derives fromhis aegis andfrom the reverence for age that is characteristic of Kom culture.This power can be seen as resulting from an objectification of the symbolic

value of the object as an opportunity for the enactment of strategies by interestedindividuals and groups. This is not to say, however, that the formal s ignificanceis impass ively cons ti tuted by the social s tructure; rather, all later elaborat ionsdepend primari ly on what they can signify from the raw material of the form andiconography of the object, their relat ion to the categor ies they operate in, and theemotions consequently attached to them from their original production. No artefactis a tabula rasa; this is at the heart of the connection between one's personalexper ience of the artefact and the object if icat ion of one' s objective his toricalconditions.

Shanklin goes on to describe how the death of Fon Nsom in 1974 wasattributed to the Afo-a-Kom, which he set eyes upon twice, whereas a fon isonlyever meant to see it once during his reign. In this process of emotional loading,the biography of the object funnels attention toward it. A progression from thisprocess into higher levels of metaphor and abstraction plays upon the fit of theobject in it s formal category and on its biography as a springboard for a widersystem of social and political ramifications, which validate the emotional salienceof the artefact. I twould not be out of keeping, therefore, if the s tory of the Afo-a-Kom were seen on this s liding scale as at once par t of a process of his toricizationand (at least originally) as an appropriat ion of the object to a specif ic interest orstrategy.

It fol lows from this that elaborated significance is not t ied inherently to thestuff of the artefact s that it springs from, and tha t it is versatil e and dynamic,forming part of a complex of construction and reconstruct" that works in atriangle of influence between form, biography and individual ana group strategies.

~ I 1 , . 1- : _ . .. . _ _ 1'1noo4 'l~


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214 Nicolas Argentiperspective, of the signifying integrity o f an o~ject will not be. app re~en~ed withrespect to the single object, nor to the relations of one object with Its stylecategory (form) or its life history alone. Rather, I have tried to advocate that it isthrough a diachronic study of the relationship between a style category and theobjective conditions in terms of which that category gains its salience-and whichcan themselves be affected by changes in the category effected by producers andconsumers , or productive consumers, in the society-that an understanding of anobject's socio-historical significance is to be reached. .

The last paragraph o f section 2 above suggests that there are parallels to thisapproach that could be applied fruitfully to the analysis of ceremonial andperformance in Africa, both of which are so intimately related with artefacts.Again, it is not the single event, or parts of it, that are si~~i~cant in a~y:hing buta trivial way. For one thing, and this essay could be criticized for failing to doth is, it is essential to recognize the enr iching echoes and interrelations betweenaesthetic fields in a connnunity-masking and dancing or masking and music-aswell. as between these aesth etic fields and the socio-political realm. Secondly, th esignif icance of an aes thet ic f ie ld l ie s l argely in the oppor~nit ie s th~t a lte ra tions inits pe r fo rmance , or control of i ts production and consu .mpt ion, pro~lde not onlr forreflecting but also for constructing and reconstructing t he SOCia l and poli t icalcondit ions of th e i nte rest ed indiv idua ls and groups.

Fina lly , amongs t the many ends lef t unt ied here, three quest ions a re par ti cu la r-ly in need of attention. First there is the. means by whi~h th~ :mefacts th~t wehave been discussing come to be appropnated by the vanous elite groups m theGrassfields (or elsewhere). Secondly (though this is perhaps not a separatequestion), how they manage to model the' ~ning to thei~ intentions more o~ lesssuccessfully in different situations. And thirdly, how this relates to the mamten-ance or alteration of power relations. These questions could lead to more concreteones regarding the creation and maintenance of dif ference and social closur7 , andhow transgressions of these conservative practices come to be accepte~ or ~eJe~tedthrough local systems of criticism, which are the observable face of socio-historicalchange.

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ACHEBE,CHINUA1964. Arrow of God, London; William Heinemann.BARTHES,ROLAND1970. S/Z, Paris; Seuil.BAXANDALL MICHAEL 1972. Painting and Experi ence in Fi ft eenth-Century I ta ly : A

Primer in the Soc ia l Hi story of Pic toria l S ty le , Oxford: Oxford Univers ity Press .BAXANDALL, MICHAEL 1985. Pat terns of Int ention: On the His tori cal Explanat ion of

Pictures New Haven: Ya le University Press .BOURDlEU,PIE~RE 1972. Esquisse d'une theorie de Lapratique, Paris: Minuit. .. .. 1984. Distinc tion: A Social Cri tique of the Judgement of Taste (trans I.Richard

Nice), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

African Aesthetics 215BoURD!EU, PIERRb."990. In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology,Cambridge, Polity Press .BRAIN, ROBERT, and ADAM POI..LOCK 1972. Bangwa Funerary Sculp ture (Art andSociety Series). London: Duckworth.DEUSS, C~MENTINE 1990. 'Lot te or the Transformat ion of the Object' , i n Clementine

Deliss (ed.), Lott~ Or the Transformation of the Object (DURCH 8/9), Graz:Grazer Kunstverein, pp. 3-28.EAGLETON,TERRY 1976. Crit ic ism and Ideology: A Study in MarXist Li te rary TheoryLondon:Ve~o. 'FLORESFRAlTO, TONI 1985. 'The Anthropology of Aesthetics', Dialectical Anthropo-logy, Vol. X, nos. 1{2, pp. 27-41.FULLER,PETER 1980. Art and Psychoanalysis, London; Writers and Readers .GEARY, CHRISTRAUDM. 1983. Things of the Palace : A Catalogue of the Bamum Palace

Museum ~ Foumban (Cameroon) (Studien zur Kulturkund No. 60). Wiesbaden:Franz Steiner ,1988. Images From Bamum: German Colonia l Photography at the Court o fKingNjoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902-]915, Washington, DC: SmithsonianIns tit ut ion Press for Ihe National Museum of Afri can Ar t.

GEBAUER,PAUL 1979 . Art of Cameroon, Portland: Portland Art Museum.GEERTZ,CLIFFORD 1983 [1976]. 'Art as a Cultural System'; in his Local Knowledge:

Further Essays in Interpret ive Anthropology, New York: Basic Books , pp, 94-120.HARTER,PIERRE1986. Arts anciens du Cameroun, Arnouville: Arts d'Afrique Noire.JULES-RoSElTE, BENNETIA 1984. The Messages of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic

System in Comparative Perspective (Topics in Compara tive Semioti cs) , NewYork: Plenum.KOPYTOFF, IGOR 1986. 'The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as

Process', in Atjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities inCultural Perspective, Cambridge : Cambr idge Universi ty P res s, pp. 64-91.

KOCHLER, SUSANNE 1988. 'Malangan: Objects, Sacrifice and the Production ofMemory', American Ethnologist, Vol. XV , no. 4, pp. 625-37.

LISTER.DAVID 1992. 'Arts Sponsors Seek Greater Inf luence for thei r Money ', TheIndependent, no. 1676 (2 March), p. 4.NORTIIERN,TAMARA 1973. Royal Art o f Cameroon, Hanover: Dartmouth College.

1988. The Art o f Cameroon. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Insti tution Press .Ptcrox, JOHN 1990. 'Transfonnations o f the Artifact: John Wayne, Plastic Bags and

The Eye- That-Surpasses-All-Other-Eyes', in Clementine Deliss (ed.), Lotte or theTransformation of the Object (DURCH 8/9), Graz: Graze r Kunstve rein, pp. 37-65.

SHANKLIN,EUGENIA1990. 'The Odyssey of the Afo-a-Kom', African Arts, Vol. XXIII,no. 4, pp. 62-9 , 95-6.WARNIER,I.-P. 1985. Echanges , deve loppement s et h ierarchies dans le Bamenda pre -

colonial (Cameroun) (Studien zur Kulturkundej, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner.WOI.FF, J . 1983. Aesthe ti cs and the Sociology of Art (Controvers ies in Sociology 14),

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