Melville J. Herskovits and the Arts of Ancient Dahomey

Blier, Suzanne Preston

doi:10.1086/resv16n1ms20166806

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Herskovits was the first major American anthropologist to work in Africa (travelling to Dahomey in 1931 (Blier 1988: 125)), and he and his students at Northwestern’s Department of Anthropology – including Bascom – would bring Boasian cultural relativist approaches to the continent. American cultural relativist anthropologists thus form an important part of the above discussion, their position similarly ambiguous to that of other anthropologists of their time.…”

Section: Anthropology Art Exhibition and The Repatriation Of Cultural...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Debating the Bascom controversy: revisiting the expropriation and repatriation of the Ifẹ̀ bronzes

Evans

2024

Africa

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In 1937–38, the American doctoral candidate William R. Bascom conducted anthropological research in the sacred Yorùbá city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria. Bascom’s visit was a decisive moment in the history of African art, as, in 1938, he observed the chance discovery of unique copper and copper alloy heads, two of which he acquired and exported to the USA. Bascom’s actions in 1938, and his subsequent conflicts with British officials who demanded the return of the heads in the 1940s, have become matters of controversy and scholarly debate. Historian Robert Tignor and anthropologist Simon Ottenberg have presented contrasting arguments regarding the affair. This article draws on material from several archives to shed further light on this discussion, resolve remaining areas of dispute, and explore what the study of this controversy tells us about the nature and practice of anthropology, the impacts of Western exhibitions of African art, and early cultural preservation and repatriation efforts of the late colonial period. At a time when colonial-era collecting practices are facing increased critical re-examination, and with intensified calls for the repatriation of Nigerian cultural patrimony in Western museums, this article reflects on how the study of this controversy contributes to present restitution efforts.

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Section: Anthropology Art Exhibition and The Repatriation Of Cultural...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Debating the Bascom controversy: revisiting the expropriation and repatriation of the Ifẹ̀ bronzes

Evans

2024

Africa

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“…Over time, priests and devotees change, augment, and add to a spirit's adornments. A shrine's "assemblage" (Blier 1988(Blier , 2004 is made up of a forever "unfinished" (Rush 2013) "accumulation" (Rubin 1974) of objects that art historians have argued is indicative of "Vodún aesthetics" which continuously empowers and strengthens a spirit's acὲ, or in the words of Dana Rush, a shrine's "efficacy" (Rush 2013, 30). I have come to understand that these accumulative adornments, which rest upon a spirit's shrine, serve as the spirits "social skin" (Turner [1980] 2012) and hide the spirit's secret body from those people who do not have the initiatory right (acὲ) to view the spirit's material form (Sansi-Roca 2005, 143).…”

Section: The Power and Portability Of Adornmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incarnating Spirits, Composing Shrines, and Cooking Divine Power inVodún

Landry

2016

Material Religion

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In this article I consider the ways in which shrine building, adornment, and the resulting experience of secrecy that emanates from shrines supports the building of new transnational networks and diasporas that are beginning to encourage a conceptual expansion of the African-Atlantic world. To achieve this I focus on how strategic choices in ritual flexibility and experimentation in shrine-building work to support the transnationalization of religions such as Vodún as they move from space to space, and how the religion's material culture and repertoire re-localize as social and national spaces shift. In so doing, I argue that processes of secrecy, which in Vodún are typically tethered to religious objects such as shrines, encourage -instead of restrict -the global expansion of West African religions.

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“…Kubik (1979) and Côrtes de Oliveira (1992) also discuss the role of the slave trade itself in generating the ethnic groupings known as nations in black Brazil. 5 Blier (1988) and Yai (1992), for example, offer glimpses of how the Atlantic dialogue has shaped aspects of Dahomean culture that Herskovits mistook for primordial. mordial African culture, taken them for granted as natural dimensions of cultural memory, or mistaken them for the arbitrary preferences of EuroAmerican scholars.…”

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confidence: 99%

The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation

Matory

1999

Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist.

218

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argued that African Americans in virtually every American nation "retained" some greater or lesser cultural "memory" of the African past. Assuming that the cultures of the West African Fon, Yorùbá, and Ashanti (as reconstructed in the "ethnographic present") represented the extant "base line," or starting point, of African-American cultural history, Herskovits' "ethnohistorical" method posited that less-acculturated African-American groups instantiated the earlier historical stages of the more acculturated African-American groups. Thus, for example, spirit possession in the Brazilian Candomblé, could be taken to demonstrate the African derivation of "shouting," or the behavior of those "filled with the Holy Spirit," in black North American churches (Herskovits 1958[1941]:220-1). No less, the Candomblé, could be taken to represent an earlier stage of black North Americans' gradual syncretic adaptation, accommodation, and acculturation (Herskovits 1958[1941]:218). 1 Dozens of scholars have usefully employed similar methods in the study of African cultural "memory" and adaptations. 2 This study revises Herskovits' cultural history of the African diaspora and proposes, at the Afro-Latin American locus classicus of Herskovitsian studies, some non-linear alternatives to Herskovits' and others' visions of diasporas generally. The Jeje-Nagô, or Fon-and Yorùbá-affiliated temples of the Brazilian Candomblé religion are a locus classicus in the study of memory, retention, and 72

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Melville J. Herskovits and the Arts of Ancient Dahomey

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

Debating the Bascom controversy: revisiting the expropriation and repatriation of the Ifẹ̀ bronzes

Debating the Bascom controversy: revisiting the expropriation and repatriation of the Ifẹ̀ bronzes

Incarnating Spirits, Composing Shrines, and Cooking Divine Power inVodún

The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation

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