African Material Culture

INTRODUCTION: Efficacy and Objects

IHrRODucrlOH EFFICACY AND OI3JECTS BY I(RIS L. HARDIN AND MAF~Y JO ARNOLDI In l 91 7 a young Luo woman decides to wear a nanga at the urging of foreign missionaries (Hay, below). Shortly after a 1935 exhibit, a Musee de Trocadero employee relegates a Bamum throne to the African storage area, where it sits in disarray until the 1980s (Geary, below). When a Somali nomad settles outside of Isiolo, his wives leave a life of continuous movement through space and reassemble their houses in his compound. His mother commissions a carpenter to build her house nearby (Prussin, below). Each of these vignettes involves choices. Some are relatively commonplace and everyday, others appear monumental. Each situation also implicates the use of objects in some way and when explored fully draws atteIltion to the complex ways in which humans shape the material world as they are simultaneously shaped by that world. We contend that the production and use of objects have the capacity to transform situations as well as people. This capacity is not inherent in material form per se, but is mediated by or realized through human agency.l Objects are one means, then, by which hUITlanS shape their world, and their actions have both intended and unintended consequences. The essays in this volume explore African material culture and the process of shaping or fashio11ing from a number of different perspectives . Most contributions share the emphasis on the constructive aspects of material culture. This emphasis places these essays at the forefront of recent developments in social theory that focus on the importance of agency and practice in the construction and reconstruction of social and cultural forms. The work collected here reflects two particular historical moments in the study of material culture. Pirst, it clearly demonstrates that the classic dichotomy between "form"-based and "context"-based analyses needs to be rethought. While scholars have tended to perceive this dichotomy as a difference between art historical and anthropological analyses, these essays show ways that antlLropologists have dealt with form, art historians have dealt with context, and other scholars have used both to great advantage. Thus they suggest ways of bridging disci- 2 [(ris L. Hardin and Mary Jo Arnoldi plinary boundaries, perhaps even suggesting that disciplinary boundaries are largely artificial. Second, these essays emerge from an era that recognized the influence that changing modes of representing Africa and Africans in the West have had on the ways African objects have been approached in scholarly study. While such influence is an underlying assumption of most intellectual ponderings, this volume tries to illuminate local categories and definitions and the ways they shift and change over time, whether they are African or European. As recent research on museums and representation has demonstrated, outsiders have long used African objects to construct ideas and images of Africa.2 Work by numerous scholars has revealed that the politics of defining or representing African objects often has more to do with the interests of those with the power to represent than it does with understanding those being represented. In other words, definitions of African objects, and by extension Africa and Africans, have often been tied to the political, economic, and intellectual interests of non-Africans in significant ways. Much of the history of African material culture studies must be viewed through the lens of national interests, economics, and the scientific and theoretical concerns of the day. This complex provided much of the rationale for research, collection, and display by defining which articles would be collected as well as how they would be seen. The result was a particular shaping or construction of Africa, but always in European terms. Several recent studies have documented the relationship between changing interests in material culture and changing ideas or conceptions of Africa or other non-Euro-American settings. Nicholas Thomas correlates the changing nature of collecting in Fiji with the changing interests of early settlers and later colonial administrators. While early settlers collected objects that signified cannibalism and savagery as a means of justifying their"civilizing" presence, later colonial interests turned to a more ethnographic approach through which administrators were able to categorize Fijians by the kinds of objects they produced. In this way they were able to "construct and rigidify 'Fijian society' as a totality to be acted upon" (Thomas 1989:41). In a slightly different vein John Mack discusses how Emil Torday's ethnographic and collecting interests in Central Africa were shaped by A. C. Haddon's work on...