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Examines the traditional economy of indigenous forest communities in the Zaire Basin , and the pressure put on it by commercial interests, competing cultivators and national governments. ... Read more

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At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture--subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In a striking example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies.

Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion. ... Read more

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Interstices of the traditional and the modern
Piot's book is a work of ethnographic mastery.

The author shows how we can think gift economies, translocalities, ritual, commodities, gender, etc. in terms of dynamic interplay in which traditional societies are not passive absorbers of colonial power, but rather inform their own cultural categories by appropriating the colonial.

Piot here exposes the error of seeing traditional societies as ahistorical, static societies, when they are actually as much modern as traditional; societies which dynamically communicate with the 'outside'.

Piot's reflexivity in writing is stimulating as it rejects the Western analytical gaze, informed by individualization, essentialization and all too often seeking for mechanical solidarity.

A new "take" on the history of colonization in West Africa.
The thesis of Remotely Global is complex yet condensed: current Kabre culture, a classic remote African people of Northern Togo, illustrates a specific melding of influences both modern and traditional, global and local that is clearly driven by the desire to imitate or usurp the powersof the colonizers.

"As should be amply clear by now, the Kabreworld is one ofpromiscuous mixing, in which sacrifice and MTV, rainmakersand civil servants, fetishists and catechists exist side by side andcoauthor an uncontainable hybrid cultural landscape...They (the Kabre) areas at home in the world of so-called tradition as in that of the modern,and see the mixture of the two not only as unproblematic but also asdesirable...An empty signifier whose content is forever shifting, modernityitself is not only intrinsically impure and hopelessly hybridized, but alsoincorrigibly plural and forever incomplete." (page 178)

RemotelyGlobal has a refreshing, astringent tone.It is clearly written with richdetail.As an ethnographer's outlook, it provides a new 'take' on theprocess of colonization and offers much to challenge or complete the commonWestern viewpoint of colonial civilization. ... Read more

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This history of the Taita people during the 20th century focuses on their gradual adoption of a novel ethnic identity. The author shows how ethnicity became a language through which prior struggles were reframed and continued. North America: Heinemann ... Read more

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Robert Launay has been observing the changing religious practices of the Dyula, a Muslim community in West Africa, for more than a decade. In Beyond the Stream, he examines the ways in which this religious and ethnic minority group living on the fringes of the Muslim world maintains its ties to the universal Islamic tradition while adapting everyday religious practices to the local context. Through the lens of this specific community, Launay elucidates the interaction between fundamental Islamic beliefs, anchored historically in the Arab Middle East, and the continually changing ways that Islam is lived, wherever it is professed.By focusing on the tension between "particular" and "universal"on how a given religious morality must function simultaneously within a tightly knit community and a larger global arenaBeyond the Stream addresses issues of broad concern to the anthropology of Islam and to world religions generally. ... Read more

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Although many societies in the Congo were once renowned for their vibrant carved masks and architectural sculptures, these phenomena have only been studied as living traditions among a handful of peoples, most notably the Pende.Lavish illustrations evoke the full range of Pende expression and offers a unique window into both masquerade and architecture in Central Africa.Part of the Visions of Africa series. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Quick and Clean
Delivery was super quick for this item and I got it in time for my classes.Hard part now, I have to force myself to do the readings... haha.Thank you!

Good reference and text for teaching
I studied and taught African art before this text existed, using mainly exhibition catalogs and theme-based books such as Frank Willet's "African Art." This book presents the information found in those sources in a single source. It moves around the continent by geographic area, which is the way African art is usually taught, so it is easy to adapt to a course. It is readable without dumbing down. Students like it. Beyond the classroom, it is a good reference source because it includes information about so many ethnic groups--far more than a single course can cover. I have a few criticisms. For one, I would like to have a more continuous thread in the treatment of non-Islamic art of Northern Africa. In the account of material from Zimbabwe, I would like the authors to mention Peter Garlake's interpretations of Great Zimbabwe and rock paintings. Visona et al. illustrate a rock painting that Garlake calls "The great recumbent figure of an archetypical trancer" (The Hunter's Vision, pl. XXXII). While Garlake makes a persuasive argument that paintings such as this reveal substantial continuity with the modern-day San, Visona et al. simply say that the painting is too old to interpret. They shouldn't disregard the views of the preeminent scholar in the area. Also, I wish the components of the captions were more clear, such as by following the example of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.It would help to use the term "peoples" after ethnic groups so that the ethnonyms are easier to distinguish from from place names, etc. They could include the names of major groups along with the subgroups in the captions, as the Met does--for example Kota peoples, Hongwe subgroup. That would help to unify the style areas. There is usually a place in the text that clarifies the groupings, but it would help to do so in the captions, too. Still, the book is an excellent introduction to African art by prominent scholars.

blah
hated the book, hated the class i got the book for and hated the teacher even more. so i guess the book was the best thing out of the process.

Final Grade: 85%
The good thing about this collection is that it includes art and architecture from not only all regions of the continent, but also of the African diaspora from the 16th Century onward.

The other good thing is that it includes architectural works, such as those of Great Zimbabwe, Lalibela, and Djenne.

The bad point of this book is that the selections are limited.For example, the art of the Nok (the oldest African art outside of the Nile Valley)includes only a few pieces.

The worst thing about this collection is that nearly all of the photos are in black and white.It's difficult to appreciate art of such a vibrant nature (with the exception of photography) without colour.

Great!
I bought this book for an African Art class that i was taking.This book is overly informative and captivating.I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about African Art! ... Read more

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This book traces the visual cultures and histories of Mami Wata and other African water divinities. Mami Wata, often portrayed with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, is at once beautiful, jealous, generous, seductive, and potentially deadly. A water spirit widely known across Africa and the African diaspora, her origins are said to lie "overseas," although she has been thoroughly incorporated into local beliefs and practices. She can bring good fortune in the form of money, and her power increased between the 15th and 20th centuries, the era of growing international trade between Africa and the rest of the world. Her name, which may be translated as "Mother Water" or "Mistress Water," is pidgin English, a language developed to lubricate trade. Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic as part of that "trade" brought with them their beliefs and practices honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities. ... Read more

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Great and Informative!!!!
This author shares their personal connection about the Water Goddess and gives you the most profound tour throughout the book!!!!.

Mami Wata
This is an amazing book. While created to accompany the museum show on Mami Wata (beginning its tour at the Fowler Museum, UCLA) the book stands totaly alone in it's scholarship and artwork, most of which is in color.
Scholars of African/African Diaspora religions, mermaid and snake fanciers and lovers of exciting art will swim alongside Mami Wata as she travels from Europe to Africa to the New World and back. ... Read more

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Who invents masks, and why? Such questions have rarely been asked, due to stereotypes of anonymous African artists locked into the reproduction of "traditional" models of representation. Rather than accept this view of African art as timeless and unchanging, Z. S. Strother spent nearly three years in Zaire studying Pende sculpture. Her research reveals the rich history and lively contemporary practice of Central Pende masquerade. She describes the intensive collaboration among sculptors and dancers that is crucial to inventing masks. Sculptors revealed that a central theme in their work is the representation of perceived differences between men and women. Far from being unchanging, Pende masquerades promote unceasing innovation within genres and invention of new genres. Inventing Masks demonstrates, through first hand accounts and lavish illustrations, how Central Pende masquerading is a contemporary art form fully responsive to twentieth-century experience. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A modern art form
In the country then known as Zaire, and now as the Congo, Strother spent some time studying the Central Pende ethnic group. Specifically, she analysed the role that masks played in their society. The book has many photos of intricately designed masks. Pretty!

But the book is more than just nice pictures. Strother has conducted a serious anthropological study of what the masks represent and their history. Essentially, she shows that the construction and symbology are not some age old ritual. Rather, a virtue of her study is that she places the Pende masquerade as an active, modern art form. As legitimate as any contemporary art movement in a developed country. Too often, African art is only studied in retrospective mode. Strother shows otherwise. ... Read more

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Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human.

Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell. ... Read more

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Arusha National Park in northern Tanzania, known for its scenic beauty, is also a battleground. Roderick Neumann's illuminating analysis shows how this park embodies all the political-ecological dilemmas facing protected areas throughout Africa. The roots of the ongoing struggle between the park on Mount Meru and the neighboring Meru peasant communities go much deeper, in Neumann's view, than the issues of poverty, population growth, and ignorance usually cited. These conflicts reflect differences that go back to the beginning of colonial rule. By imposing a European ideal of pristine wilderness, Neumann says, the establishment of national parks and protected areas displaced African meanings as well as material access to the land. He focuses on the symbolic importance of natural landscapes among various social groups in this setting and how it relates to conflicts between peasant communities and the state. ... Read more

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A spirit-led war in Uganda
When a spirit named Lakwena possessed Alice Auma in 1985, it led to the raising of an army called the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces. The story is told in this book. To Western ears it is a bizarre tale. Alice went through two unsuccessful marriages then spent some time working as a prostitute before converting to Catholicism. She was then violently possessed by the "Christian" spirit of a deceased Italian soldier, Lawkena, and she disappeared into the Paraa National Park for 40 days.

On her return, Alice spent some time working as a spirit medium and faith healer, until in August 1986 the spirit Lawkena ordered Alice to lead a war against evil in Uganda. Alice was able to recruit about 80 rebel soldiers and train them up in Holy Spirit Tactics. Soldiers were forbidden to take cover when attacked. They had to face the enemy standing erect with naked torso, and they had to sing church hymns as directed by the spirit. They were not allowed to aim their bullets at the enemy, as the spirits themselves had the job of deciding who deserved to die. Before a battle the spirits would decide how many rifles and how many bullets should be used. Soldiers were anointed with shea butter oil and ochre to make them bulletproof.

After some initial failures, the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces had some surprising successes against the government army, and with each success Alice's reputation grew, as did the number of recruits. The rebel army aimed to capture the nation's capital, but it was resoundingly defeated by government forces in October 1987, and Alice escaped to Kenya where she died some 20 years later. The book is written as an anthropological study, so it is fairly dry and academic in places, but the underlying story is fascinating and helps to explain why instability still prevails in Northern Uganda today.

A Scholarly Look at Alice Lakwena's Holy Spirit Movement
When most people think of cults in Uganda, three groups come to mind: Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, Joseph Kibweteere and Credonia Mwerinde's Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, and Alice Lakwena's Holy Spirit Movement. This book seeks to chronicle the formation, growing success, and ultimate failure of Lakwena's movement. As an anthropologist, Heike Behrend seeks not only to describe this cult, but also to set it in its historical and social context.

The author begins by struggling through the issues of writing an anthropological study on Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirit Movement. Then she recounts the history and development of the ethnic identity of the Acholi people from Northern Uganda. Next, she writes about Alice Auma as she becomes the medium for the (male) spirit Lakwena and begins to form a military mobile force to purify the land from evil in the midst of political and military turmoil. This history continues to unfold from the humble beginnings in Paraa and Opit to the several thousand member army marching toward Uganda's capital. Finally, the downfall and final defeat of the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces is summarized. The remainder of the book is given over to further analysis of what happened, as well as briefly looking at developments since the fall of the Holy Spirit Movement.

As one who is in the process of becoming a missionary in Uganda, I found this book to be exceptionally informative. I've learned a lot about the history of Northern Uganda generally and of the notorious Lakwena's Holy Spirit Movement specifically. And by reading about the context in which these events took place, I was able to better understand the traditional beliefs and practices of East Africans as well as the syncretism that forms from combining these traditions with elements of Christianity.

At the same time, this work is an academic tome and can be hard to read. The author assumes a certain amount of previous knowledge of anthropological and sociological concepts and issues. She also regularly points to and interacts with various scholarly theories. Thus, this book is not an accessible treatment of the history of Lakwena and the Holy Spirit Movement.

As a result, one may or may not find reading this book to be beneficial. Anthropologists, missionaries, and others looking to learn more about this important sect in Ugandan history will surely want to read Behrend's study. But more casual readers will likely find themselves lost in the scholarly discussions and analysis. For those willing to dive in and develop their understanding of these key events, I recommend consulting this work.

John Divito, Director
Africa Center for Apologetics Research ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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Part of the Visions of Africa series, this is a fascinating and essential overview of the Baule people who inhabit Ghana and the Ivory Coast.Their art is so varied and made with different media, and is shown here through fifty exemplary pieces. The book is based on field research and written by a leading expert in the field. ... Read more

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Beautiful examples of Baule art
This is an excellent book, in my opinion, if you are interested is seeing outstanding examples of Baule art captured in exquisite color photographs.These are the most important features of the book to me, because my primary focus is on the art itself.Having said that, the text is certainly of equal value for its coverage of the significance of different pieces and how they relate to the mythology of the Baule people, and how the pieces are and were used.Seeing photographs of the carving of masks and ceremonial use in dance, etc., further helps tell the story of the Baule.I have a significant collection of books on African art, and I personally like all the books in the Visions of Africa series. ... Read more

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From June of 1941 through the following summer, Fredericka Martin lived with her husband, Dr. Samuel Berenberg, on remote St. Paul Island in Alaska. During that time, Martin delved into the complex history of the Unangan people, and Before the Storm draws from her personal accounts of that year and her research to present a fascinating portrait of a time and a people facing radical change. A government-ordered evacuation of all Aleuts from the island in the face of World War II, which Martin recounts in her journal, proved but the first step in a long struggle by native peoples to gain independence, and, as editor Raymond L. Hudson explains, Martin came to play a significant role in the effort.

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Two young Americans take us to Humla, an ancient territory at the edge of Nepal where no Westerner has ever lived before. In breathtaking photographs and evocative prose, Thomas Kelly and Carroll Dunham capture Humla's limitless vistas and disclose intimate details of the lives of its extraordinary people: yak herders, caravan drivers, shamans, and brides who are shared among brothers.

Here is a land of eternally snow-capped mountains and sweeping valleys. A land as eerie and forbidding as the landscape of some distant moon, its people all but forgotten by the rest of the world. Their lives are a struggle--the alpine soil metes out sustenance grudgingly, and long winters threaten to banish the warmth of life forever. Yet these lives yield untold riches. As if the splendid isolation and sheer altitude of the hidden Himalayas bring them closer to the gods, the people of this land are possessed of a spirituality few Westerners will ever know.

Kelly's extraordinary photographs are accompanied by Dunham's evocative and lyrical account of life as the people of Humla conceive it: a cycle of fall, winter, spring, and summer. In a world made easy, accessible, and all too familiar by supersonic travel, television, and communication at the click of a mouse, here is an enlightening glimpse into the lives of a virtually untouched people. ... Read more

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I saw it at a glance
I was in Kathmandu in Novemver of 1998, staying at the Hotle Vajra and had the opportunity to meet Thomas Kelly. He gave a signed copy of this book to the host of our trip and I got to flip through it. What a fabulous book! Iwasn't aware that The Hidden Himalayas and Kathmandu City on the Edge ofthe World were out of print until I returned to the states. I've tried tolocated it everywhere and I'm not having any luck. Can you help me get acopy of these books? ... Read more

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With close to one million members, the Church of the Nazarites (ibandla lamaNazaretha) is one of the most popular indigenous religious communities in South Africa. Founded in 1910 by Isaiah Shembe, it offers South Africans--particularly disadvantaged black women and girls--a way to remake and reconnect to ancient sacred traditions disrupted by colonialism and apartheid. Ethnomusicologist Carol Muller explores the everyday lives of Nazarite women through their religious songs and dances, dream narratives, and fertility rituals, which come to life both musically and visually on CD-ROM.

Against the backdrop of South Africa's turbulent history, Muller shows how Shembe's ideas of female ritual purity developed as a response to a regime and culture that pushed all things associated with women, cultural expression, and Africanness to the margins.

Carol Muller breaks new ground in the study of this changing region and along the way includes fascinating details of her own poignant journey, as a young, white South African woman, to the "other" side of a divided society. ... Read more

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The life and work of an internationally acclaimed nonfiction filmmaker in words and images.

Despite Primo Levi's dire warning about the "inadequacy of documentary evidence", Robert Gardner's work shows that capturing the light reflected from actuality has its revelatory moments. Including nearly 500 photographs, The Impulse to Preserve contains the thoughts and images of a lifetime spent probing human experience in the world's most remote corners. In each undertaking, an issue or condition common to humanity is intently observed. In Neolithic West Papua in 1961, it is ritual warfare and revenge; in Nigeria 1965, ritual pain; in Ethiopia in the late sixties, male supremacy; in Niger 1978, envy; and in Benares, India, 1985, mortality and its expression in worship. Includes 466 color and black & white photographs and other images throughout. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Impulse to preserve Gardner himself?
Review by Jan Broekhuijse, key advisor and antropologist with the Harvard Peabody expedition.

Gardner's `Impulse To Preserve' together with the earlier `The Making Of Dead Birds' are both based on the results of the Harvard Peabody expedition to the Dani tribe in the Baliem valley (Highland of New Guinea) in 1961. The Dutch colonial government had appointed me as the key advisor and antropologist to that enterprise in order to execute the necessary antropological research to shoot a film. As a result, prior to the actual expedition I spent about a year to research the Dani tribe in detail and establish the contacts with the tribesmen. The findings were extensively reported and analysed (see reports Royal Library Netherlands, Broekhuijse 1960a and b, 1961, as well as my dissertation The Willigiman Dani, 1967, in Dutch).
All antropological knowledge and insights thatGardner needed to shoot a film I have put to his disposition: the framwork and the basic understanding of Dani culture and all particular antropological elements that together could constitute a useful film scenario. He himself had no knowledge of that culture and language whatsoever (there were no written resources at the time). From the abundance of my information Gardner selected those parts that would be useful to shoot a film of his taste.
Gardner, coming in straight away from Boston, was urgedto makeextensive use of my research findings. I allowed him to do so in the understanding that he would later on acknowledge that he had used my intellectual property and how. However, Gardner fails to include acknowledgdements of any significant detail in both books.
In his book `Making Dead Birds' he never properly explains how the concept of the film was developed and by whom. He carefully avoids to mention this particularly relevant theme. The book presentsthe factually true story ofthe occasional events and technical futilities that took place during the expedition. The really intolerablebehaviour and performance is that on many occasions he makes use of facts, events, insights, mostly of an antropological nature, all of which I transmitted to him and which he now presents in his books as his ownfindings while in fact they are acts of outright plagiarism.
Gardner was in the unfortunate position of having no access to the Dani culture, lacking any capacity to understand what he saw or to interpret the background of the Dani culture. To overcome this insurmountable arrears, Gardner deprived me of my dignity by plundering my intellectual property. He identified himselfwith the only one who really understood the Dani culture, i.c. the Dutch antropologist, the one he had wanted to be. In fact, he totally depended on me.
In his book `The Impuls to Preserve' he follows the same procedures. He kept a diary, noting daily my observations of the events, narrated them together (the first 71 pages), added sometimes his own feelings and presentedthe whole as his own work. These acts of plagiarism ought to be known by the readers of both books.
Readers should be aware that without the involvement of a knowledgeable Dutch antropologist and all field research executed beforehand, the realisation of the film `Dead Birds', the subsequent book `The Making Of Dead Birds' and `The Impulse To Preserve' would have been completely impossible. Without my guidance and advice the Harvard Peabody expedition would no doubt have become a complete failure and its members would have been fully unable to survive among the Dani tribe.

Brian L. Frye - Bomb Magazine
by Brian L. Frye
Robert Flaherty invented ethnographic filmmaking, and Jean Rouch transformed it into sociology. But Robert Gardner made it an art form. If his predecessors created films of practical beauty, Gardner infused his own with an exquisite aesthetic rigor. While documenting life in pre-modern--sometimes nearly primeval--societies, they preserve something of the pleasures peculiar to such a life, sacrificed for the pleasures of modernity.

Over nearly 50 years, Gardner has assembled an eclectic collection of documentaries, notably DEAD BIRDS, on the primitive Dani of Papua New Guinea, RIVERS OF SAND, on the Hamar of southern Ethiopia, and FOREST OF BLISS, on funeral practices in Benares, India. THE IMPULSE TO PRESERVE: REFLECTIONS OF A FILMMAKER compiles journals Gardner kept while making those films and others, as well as essays on his subjects and documentary filmmaking more generally. Copiously illustrated with photographs, stills, and documents, most created by Gardner himself, the book is a pleasure to browse. And Gardner's spare, lucid prose makes it a pleasure to read, too. Not to mention a perfect complement to his occasionally enigmatic movies.

But it's also an elliptical polemic on the ethos of ethnographic filmmaking. Gardner rejects relativism, advocating a kind of aspirational ethnography. "I don't think anthropology is doing its job by being value free. I do think it should accept its responsibility to look for larger truths." And yet his aspirations are less ideological than aesthetic.

Rather than merely catalog human existence, Gardner searches for particular expressions of human genius. "I have always thought populations undergoing change were the business of sociologists and of those anthropologists interested in change for its own sake. My own interests are to look for that which is an apt symbol or sign and, at the same time, is distinctive in and of itself." He finds it in traditions truly born of time immemorial, the remnants of a history as archeological as anthropological.

As Isaiah Berlin explained, in admiring the virtues of classical society we recognize their incompatibility with our own. Gardner admires the mythical world of the Dani, despite its brutal violence, and despises the preening puerility of the Hamar. Unlike his postmodern peers, he realizes refusing to judge a society is the profoundest form of contempt. In judging, he testifies to the fantastic truths only history and experience can reveal.

A vision, a prayer, a cry from the heart
I think Wade Davis (AUTHOR: Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), Shadows in the Sun (1998) and Light at the Edge of the World (2001)) said it best:

"This book is less a text than a vision, a series of reflections and recollections that come together as a prayer, a cry from the heart of an extraordinary artist and ethnographer who long before anyone else noticed recognised and described the central backdrop of our age.In the year Robert Gardner was born there were 6000 languages spoken on Earth, each a flash of the human spirit, an old growth forest of the mind.Today fully half of these are not being taught to children or whispered into the ears of infants.Within a generation we are, by definition, losing half of humanity's intellectual, social, and spiritual legacy.He saw this unfolding in New Guinea, South Asia, Africa and in the mountains of Colombia, the Kogi heart of the world.He has devoted his life to this tale, inspiring generations of students, firing the heart of scores of young scholars of anthropology.I know this to be true, for I was one of them." ... Read more

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The Senufopeople live in C-te d'Ivoire, in Mali and in a lesser measure in Burkina Faso, in the heart of the West-African savannah. This book explores the ways in which this population produced and employed art to structure their life. One perspective is how art highlights the cycle of life among the Senufo, another is how art and the performances in which it is embedded create meaning in their multifaceted world. What sets this book apart from others on African art is that it examines the practice of Senufo artists and performers in relation to the ambiguities of the colonial and postcolonial condition.It addresses how the changing experiences in their society affected the production and appreciation of art. ... Read more

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The Grassfields of Cameroon are notable for their hierarchically stratified chiefdoms and their discrete, though related cultural identities which are reinforced and defined through the production, acquisition and use of a range of artifacts. This paper focuses on the pottery of the Ndop Plain, including pipes, bowls, cooking pots, water and wine containers, and washing basins. From this evidence, Argenti deduces certain centres of production and routes of distribution. An important ethnographic study of regionalism in pottery style and production. With many illustrations. ... Read more