One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art

Abstract

While the historiography of art as an academic discipline can hardly be construed as a science, it is nevertheless governed by certain dominant paradigms in both of the senses that Thomas Kuhn intended. First, at any point in time there is a constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by the community of scholars who comprise the discipline known as art history. This can be further broken down, altered, and refined for the various sub-fields, but taken together, the separate facets constitute a “way of seeing” art history which differs substantially from the “way of seeing,” say, political history.Applying Kuhn's second and more rigorous sense, the historiography of art is dominated by certain paradigms which serve as exemplars or models of puzzle-solutions. While these change over time (it is no longer permissible to ascribe German expressionism to “national character,” for example), they are so powerful that they function as unquestioned assumptions when in force. Even more importantly, they are frequently invisible because they are rarely made explicit. In European art history, the dominant paradigms have coalesced into entities such as “The Baroque” or “Mannerism” which are largely ontological models used to simplify the otherwise intractable complexity of European art styles and movements.

African Traditional Sculptures: An Appraisal of Classification Paradigms

“…If these kinds of contact took place in ancient times, the evolution and development of African artistic traditions and heritage cannot, therefore, be a hermitic one as the strictly aesthetic and ethnological approaches tend to present. It is these weaknesses that are highlighted when Kasfir (1984) stated that there is the need to dislodge the 'conceptual model' and adopt one that is more heuristically-derived because the former is no longer adequate, especially as "the broader underlying paradigm by historians and anthropologists to explain the entity called 'traditional African society' has not itself been overthrown". In order to get a complete story and to arrive at fool-proof classification, therefore, these approaches (the aesthetic and the ethnological) need to complement each other.…”

Playing (in) the Market

“…models and melding them with still others, in the context of the Visages project Youmbi has been designing striking hybrid masks: wooden carvings, covered in multicolored beads and buttons, which are characterized by a mix of elements that stands on its head the traditional Africanist canon 12 . While the latter has long insisted on a strict delineation between individual genres, styles and regional affiliations (Kasfir 1984 6).…”

Politique des objets de musée en Afrique de l’Ouest

“…En Afrique de l'Ouest, dans les sociétés précisément visées par le travail critique de Bazin, les musées forment ainsi des lieux complexes de production et de reproduction des identités ethniques appliquées aussi bien aux humains qu'aux objets. Dans ces institutions d'origine souvent coloniale, le « paradigme ethnique » (Ravenhill 1996) prédomine en effet : la muséographie reste généralement tributaire de l'équivalence entre le style des objets exposés et le groupe ethnique de leurs producteurs et utilisateurs, équivalence depuis longtemps dénoncée par les historiens de l'art africain (Kasfir 1984). Comme l'a récemment noté Jean-Paul Colleyn :…”