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Ancestors and Elders: Personal Reflections of an Africanist Art Historian

2017; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_a_00353

1937-2108

Robin Poynor,

Financial Crisis of the 21st Century

My research in Owo, Nigeria, revealed to me three broad ways ancestors were remembered there. In the ako ceremony hundreds of pieces of commemorative cloth were woven and a life-sized effigy of a recent ancestor was carried through the streets before it was buried (Poynor 1987) (Fig. 1). Commemorative rituals at paternal ancestral shrines (oju'po) venerated several generations of named ancestors. A retablo carved or modeled in relief backed the altar, and sculpted heads (osanmasinmi) decorated it (Fig. 2). Annual egungun masquerade events entertained and honored unnamed ancestors in general through the performance of masquerade (Poynor 1978a) (Fig. 3). Each family created its remembrances in its own way.In this issue of African Arts, several elders have chosen to remember, through different means, those who paved the way for our own explorations of the histories of the African arts—our academic ancestors. We recognize our predecessors from many places and over great spans of time. We are indebted to generations of African elders who not only passed information from one generation to the next but also shared their knowledge with those who visited their communities inquiring about the art, performances, rituals, and practices they created.1 Another set of antecedents includes those European colonial officers, missionaries, and eventually scholars, who provided a wealth of information in colonial reports, travel writing, mission accounts, academic papers, publications, and other sources that formed a strong foundation on which to build our investigations of the arts of Africa.2 However, for this issue in celebration of the fifty years of African Arts, we limit our discussion to individuals who were working fifty years ago and the preparation of their students—the precise time African Arts made its appearance. It was a time marked by the end of the colonial era in Africa and the beginning of African independence.We chose to limit our study to these “ancestors” for several reasons. It is that generation that was active in North American academia at the time. For the most part the scholars discussed here trained a large number of students who carried out fresh research on the continent. Arnold Rubin's vision for African art studies is acknowledged in Monica Visona's First Word. Roy Sieber's impact is remembered by Roslyn Walker. Herbert Cole reminisces about Douglas Fraser's career. Lisa Aronson acknowledges Joanne Eicher's role in looking at the arts of textiles and dress. Although he was not working in the United States at that precise period, Ekpo Eyo, as Director of the Nigerian Department of Antiquities, welcomed great numbers of American researchers to Nigeria and encouraged their work. He also emboldened young Nigerians to pursue graduate studies in the United States. One of those, Babatunde Lawal, pays homage to him in this issue. Finally, Henry Drewal and Danny Dawson have solicited oriki (praise poems) that honor Robert Farris Thompson. We trust that in remembering these ancestors, memories of other elders and ancestors will be evoked.In preparing for dissertation research in Nigeria, I planned to study leadership arts as indexes of change, connecting the court of the eastern Yoruba kingdom of Owo to that of ancient Ife and the Edo court at Benin. My proposal had been inspired by Ekpo Eyo, whose recent excavations at Owo demonstrated that the oral histories of ancestral connections to Ile-Ife were backed up by terra cotta objects found at Igbo ‘Laja3 (see Figs. 8a, 9b, and 10 in Lawal, this issue.) Eyo talked with me at Indiana and convinced me that I might use objects, performances, and oral histories to investigate those relations. On arrival in Nigeria, however, I realized that political realties required me to change topics. I recognized that an array of arts memorialized the lives of ancestors, connecting them to elders, who in turn linked living progeny to forebears (Poynor 1978b). Ancestors and elders played vital roles in that culture even into the late twentieth century, and their importance, memories of them among the living, and links to the spirit world were still experienced through ritual, performance, and art.In discussing the importance of ancestor veneration in Africa, Igor Kopytoff pointed out that “the African emphasis is clearly not on how the dead live but on the way they affect the living” (Kopytoff 1971). In considering the “ancestors” of our discipline(s), we too look at the different ways in which our academic forebears have affected us—providing foundations on which to build, expanding the range of arts we investigate, influencing our thinking and our methodologies. While this anniversary issue explores those scholars who were working at the time of the journal's introduction, I also argue that they worked at a time when a new world order had only recently been forged and explore how they used it and took advantage of many forces at work beyond the academic world.I was privileged to come into one of the disciplines (art history) at this precise moment—1967. I thus bore witness, sometimes unconsciously, to those numerous factors. Fresh from completing a BFA in sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute, I was ignorant of both art history as a discipline and of African studies as a focus.4 In my first African art history class at Indiana University I sat shoulder to shoulder with a young Nigerian, Babatunde Lawal. Our position at the center of the first row demonstrated our intentions to listen closely to Roy Sieber, a driving force in African humanities at Indiana. At the end of one class, Sieber distributed subscription cards for a new publication: african arts/arts d'afrique. I subscribed, and the first issue arrived in my mail soon after (Fig. 4). Little did Tunde and I know that history was in the making—that the magazine would become the major academic journal for the young discipline, that our instructor would be recognized as one of its ancestors, or that the two of us might one day be among its elders.While we benefitted fifty years ago from a wide range of circumstances, we did not fully understand them or question them. What was it that brought together clusters of Africanist academics to explore such a wide range of topics in the African humanities? We accepted that specialists in African art history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, literatures, linguistics, and folklore were in place, but we did not wonder why or how these scholars had come together at Indiana or had been funded. We accepted NDFL and Fulbright fellowships, but we did not question how or why they were available. We took advantage of weekly speakers and enrolled in courses taught by internationally known visiting scholars, but we assumed this was standard for any ranking university. But the scholars researching and teaching African expressive culture in the decade in which African Arts made its appearance were not only connected to the academic study of the visual arts on the continent, but they were also part of a dizzying set of political, ideological, and international phenomena.The era in which the journal entered my consciousness was one that saw the culmination of events that dramatically changed the world over several decades: the end of World War II, the Korean conflict, and the Cold War. And Vietnam was still something students thought about on an almost daily basis. The period preceding the 1960s had evidenced shifting global political, economic, and military alliances. It seemed the map of Africa was in constant change. By the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, almost all African nations had wrested independence from colonial overseers. The prevailing emphasis within these countries was self-determination; each newly independent nation focused on nation building, its own survival, and achieving unity within its own borders. But it was apparent that cooperation across national boundaries was essential to development as well. Global and regional organizations quickly emerged to address political, economic, and security concerns. Moreover, the United States and the Soviet Union were entangled in a contest over the ideologies and allegiances of nonaligned nations, especially those just gaining independence.The purpose of this article is not to critique the roles of Africanists within the framework of the Cold War, but those circumstances do raise some questions. Were Africanists merely agents of hegemonic American imperialism? Were our ancestors merely tools on one side of the Cold War? Were our disciplines' beginnings compromised by their association with the nation's military goals in relation to the Soviet Union? I think not, although I did wonder why my study of the Yoruba language was through a “National Defense” fellowship.5 The Africanists and students in African Studies that I knew were genuinely interested in the pursuit of scholarly enlightenment and were deeply intrigued by African peoples, African history, African nations as they freed themselves from the bonds of colonization and, in my case, the captivating visual cultures of the continent. We were not merely pawns in a new type of cultural imperialism. If anything, we saw ourselves as idealists, out to improve the world. In fact, many of my fellow grad students had just returned from stays in Africa sponsored by the Peace Corps, and it was that venture that attracted a large number to our campuses (Fig. 5).The Peace Corps was among the signature achievements of President John F. Kennedy. Established in 1961, its purpose was to provide opportunities to serve the country and the world. Great numbers of idealistic college graduates volunteered. Their experiences in other lands, mingling with people of different cultures, exposure to other languages, led many returnees to enter graduate programs at universities that offered art history, anthropology, history, folklore, or environment and design to learn more about the cultures they had experienced. Among the Peace Corps returnees who studied with me at Indiana were Anita Glaze and Judy Perani in art history, Bill Siegmann in history, and Phil Peek in folklore.6However visionary the intentions of academics and students were, the political aspects of the coming of age of African Studies loomed large, and the circumstances of the Cold War did provide funding for those interests. In my own naïve mind at the time, the abundance of financial backing for centers, faculty research, international education, language study, or research travel was not political. I thought it had to do with an American emphasis on education, on extending knowledge beyond boundaries, in creating bonds with other peoples.Ironically, it was space exploration that emerged as a major area of contestation between the Super Powers during the Cold War and brought about funding for our academic studies of Africa. The 1957 launch of Sputnik suddenly focused attention on the development of sophisticated technologies that could place satellites into orbit. Western nations trembled at the prospects of Russia as an international security threat. Catching up to the Soviets in science and related fields became the mantra for American politicians. It was indeed “the race into space.” Fears of a technological gap and threats of superior performance by the Soviets brought a deluge of funding—for aerospace activity and for technical and scientific educational programs. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). But NASA was not the only thing to come from this new inferiority complex imposed by Sputnik. Part of the scramble for a position in the international scuffle was the enactment of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), also in 1958, providing funding to prepare a generation of students to vie for supremacy in science and technology.NDEA did not, however, address scientific and technological concerns alone. It established funding for developing and building foreign language and area studies programs. A major focus of the American government was developing relationships with nonaligned nations in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, South America, and the Caribbean. NDEA thus provided funding to establish international studies centers under Title VI of the act. Title VI centers brought together clusters of scholars interested in various aspects of African Studies, encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation. Most centers addressed material culture and the expressive arts, some through anthropology, others through history, some through archaeology, and still others through art history or environment and design. While scholars in these various disciplines interacted on their own campuses, perhaps more importantly, they met colleagues at conferences and symposia.In 1961, Senator J. William Fulbright succeeded in persuading Congress to pass the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act, or Fulbright-Hays, which supported Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, Faculty Research Abroad, Group Projects Abroad, and Foreign Curriculum Consultants. The Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program allowed doctoral candidates who had already acquired language and area expertise to carry out overseas research. With their expanded knowledge, they would be ready to become part of a pool of highly qualified international experts. At the time that I received a Fulbright Hays fellowship to work in Nigeria for a year, nine other students in the Indiana program received them as well. Among those studying the arts were Judy Perani and Fred Smith in art history, Bill Siegmann in history, Norma Wolff in anthropology, and Phil Peek in folklore.Indiana University had developed its African Studies Program through a five-year grant from the Ford Foundation beginning in 1961. The program quickly grew, and in 1965 it was funded as a Title VI National Resource Center. Gus Liebenow, then the driving force behind Indiana African Studies, began to develop Indiana as a program with a strong humanities component. In 1962 he was successful in recruiting two of the most promising Africanists specializing in African art and ethnomusicology, Roy Sieber and Alan Merriam.Sieber had been the first person to earn a PhD in African art at an American university. He tied the study of the object and its style to linguistic groups and to the cultural complexities that led to their production. His investigation of the body as an armature for ornament and decorative manipulation and his study of dress and textiles and crafts helped to expand the boundaries of what we consider art.Always addressing “the object” before exploring its ramifications, Sieber was constantly involved in the museum. His students could explore objects first hand in the Indiana University Art Museum collection and curate exhibitions.7 Sieber produced more PhD students specializing in African art history than any other Africanist, but he also mentored students in folklore, anthropology, archaeology, and history, and most of them have been involved with exhibitions and curatorial practice8 (Fig. 6).Alan Merriam specialized in both Native American and African music, developing a theory and method for studying music from an anthropological perspective as outlined in his book The Anthropology of Music (1964). Merriam's fieldwork in Central Africa among the Songye and the Bashi of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) in the 1950s and in Burundi in 1973 established him as a driving force in African ethnomusicology.Students in history, art history, folklore, anthropology, and archaeology participated in weekly humanities seminars under the direction of Sieber and Merriam. As Sieber's assistant, I shepherded Daniel Biebuyck, Leon Siroto, Robert Farris Thompson, Daniel McCall, Frank Willett, and others from and to the Indianapolis airport. In addition to sponsoring weekly seminar speakers, the African Studies Program also brought key scholars in for semester-long stays. Thus, I studied African anthropology with Daniel Crowley, African folklore with Wande Abimbola, African linguistics with David Dalby, and African architecture with Libby Prussin. Later additions to the faculty at Indiana in the arts of Africa include Thompson's student Patrick McNaughton in art history, who shared many graduate committees with Sieber.9 Paula Girschick, who had completed her work at Indiana, returned to serve on the faculty of the anthropology department.Although my personal experience was primarily through interactions at Indiana, my education in African Studies was broadened and enriched by exchanges with scholars and students from many of the universities in which Africa was actively being studied. Many of them I met when they participated in the weekly humanities seminars or served as visiting faculty. The following recollection is based thus to a large extent on personal connections.10Yale boasts that its interest in African studies can be traced back to the late eighteenth century with the study of African languages. Prior to World War II, Yale had already incorporated African subject matter into the mainstream curriculum. Perhaps the best known of those involved in African humanities there during the period in review was Robert Farris Thompson. He had completed the PhD at Yale in 1965 and stayed on as faculty. His interest in specific cultures on the continent, notably Yoruba and Kongo, led him to trace the trajectory of descendants of those peoples across the Atlantic to tease out ways the visual antecedents explode creatively in the Caribbean and the Americas. Thompson's dramatic and performative presentations inspired not only students of African art but also great numbers of descendants of Africans outside the academic study of the arts.Thompson mentored many students at Yale,11 but his support for grad student research went beyond the halls of that institution. When Thompson visited Bloomington, he advised me on ways to approach my intended research. Having visited Owo himself, he named specific rooms in the palace that would be of interest for my research. He graciously shared Yoruba slides with me.Another center for African Studies that traces its interests in the continent from quite some time ago is that at Howard University. Although I did not have contact with Howard when I was a student, I learned of its programs through graduate students of my own who had studied there (Shaw 2011). The university's interest in Africa was evidenced more than a century ago, when Alain Locke joined the faculty in 1912. Locke's thinking on social issues and ethnicity was embodied in his concept of cultural pluralism. James Porter, head of the art department there, had studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and had done an art history MA at NYU. Despite having met West Africans and seen and appreciated African art while in Europe, Porter found himself in disagreement with Locke on whether African American artists needed to look toward the heritage of African art or whether they should consider themselves Americans first. In fact, he published an attack on Locke's views in Art Front in 1937. However, after Porter toured West Africa and Egypt himself from 1963 to 1964, visiting museums and interviewing artists, he began to be much more expressionistic in his paintings and introduced African themes. Photographs of art and architecture he had taken on his tour became the basis for his course on African art and architecture, but he used African art primarily to motivate students to be proud of their heritage (Davis 1985).Another Howard artist, however, had heeded Locke's advice much earlier. In fact, Lois Mailou Jones had turned her interest to Africa and had incorporated African masks in her paintings in the early 1930s. On meeting Jones on her return from study in Paris in 1937, Locke urged her to paint black subject matter and to respond to African forms. Jones recalled,By 1938 Jones had completed thirty illustrations for Carter G. Woodson's book African Heroes and Heroines. The same year she painted Les Fétiches, inspired by African subject matter and forms12 (Fig. 7).At Columbia University, Paul Wingert had expanded the art history curriculum in the 1930s to include study of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native America under the heading of “primitive art.” His student Douglas Fraser joined him in 1955 and produced a number of students who specialized in the arts of Africa, Pre-Columbian America, Indonesia, and Oceania. Upon his early death, several scholars, sometimes coming from museums in the area, worked to keep the momentum going. Enid Schildkrout of the American Museum of Natural History and Susan Vogel, founder of the Museum for African Art, taught classes and mentored students. Polly Nooter taught at Columbia briefly before going to Iowa. Suzanne Blier was at Columbia for a decade, 1983–1993, before going to Harvard. Zoë Strother joined the Columbia program in 2000.13The anthropologist Melville Herskovits and his wife Frances founded the first major interdisciplinary American program in African studies at Northwestern University in 1948 (Fig. 8). Herskovits was perhaps the most powerful voice in academia at the time to suggest that African culture continued across the Atlantic. Among their many interests were the arts as expressed in African cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. A cohort of young anthropologists trained at Northwestern continued Herskovits's interest in Africa, the Diaspora, and the humanities. They firmly established African and African American Studies in American academia. Some of Herskovits's students, such as Simon Ottenberg, Daniel Crowley, and Justine Cordwell, specialized in the study of the visual arts in culture. After completing his PhD at Iowa, Roy Sieber spent a year at Northwestern to absorb Herskovits's ideas.Herskovits's students made a significant impact on my own development.14 My anthropology course in grad school was with Crowley when he visited Indiana for a semester. But it is perhaps Cordwell who sticks most firmly in my mind. She had carried out research in Nigeria the late 1940s and had spent time in Owo, where I did research some quarter century later. Like so many “ancestors,” she was generous with her knowledge, as I know from my own experience. She was always ready to talk on the phone. After we discussed my research, she sent me a Kodak box full of 8 × 10 glossies from her time in Owo to use as I saw fit (see Figs. 1–3).Robert P. Armstrong, another Herskovits student, directed Northwestern University Press from 1960–1973. His interest in African art was manifested in research, in collecting art, and in writing. His book The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology (1971) provided possible alternatives for looking at the arts of Africa, ideas he shared with Sieber students.The archaeologist Frank Willett arrived at Northwestern in 1966 to serve as professor of African art and archaeology for a decade after having served at the Nigerian Department of Antiquities for some years.15 His close observation of objects from Nok, Ile-Ife, and Benin, coupled with excavations at Ile-Ife, resulted in publications that attempted to reconstruct a history for African art and place it in time (Willett 1967). Willett had a collegial spirit, and he, like Cordwell, wrote to me about his 1958 visit to Owo, clarified information he had published on Owo, and even conceded that some of my contradictory findings superseded his information. He printed photographs taken there to send to me. While some of the photographs documented objects he had encountered on his trip to Owo, he also included images that documented fellow “ancestors,” such as William Fagg, at work in the field (Fig. 9). Willett invited me to participate in a CAA panel16 and to contribute an article on Edo culture and its impact to his guest-edited issue on the arts of Benin for African Arts (vol. 9, no. 4).The African Studies Center at Boston University, founded in 1953, was championed by Daniel McCall, an anthropologist who joined the department of sociology in the 1950s. By 1967 he was successful at founding the anthropology department. There he nurtured an ethos in which historical approaches were foremost, combining ethnology, historical linguistics, archaeology, and biological anthropology (Fig. 10). Although his fieldwork had been in Asante in Ghana, he was interested in old connections between the Sahel and North Africa. Not content to dwell in the “ethnographic present,” McCall addressed the importance of chronology and history in anthropology. His Africa in Time Perspective (1964) greatly influenced not only his own discipline but the whole field of African studies. Among McCall's many interests in anthropology was the role of art. He published African Images: Essays in African Iconology (1975), which included contributions by seasoned scholars like Vinigi Grottanelli and Philip Dark. But like many of the Africanists of the time, he was generous as a scholar, sharing the editing of the publication with his student Edna Bay and offering a chance for beginning scholars recently returned from fieldwork to publish. Among them were Bay, Herbert Cole, Perkins Foss, Rene Bravmann, Paula Girschick (then Ben-Amos), Terenz Walz, and Babatunde Lawal.17UCLA's African Studies Program, dating into the 1950s, encouraged interest in the many expressions of the arts in Africa. It was here that John Povey and Paul Proehl founded the journal african arts/arts d'afrique in 1967. UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture sponsored the Museum of Cultural History (now the Fowler Museum), which explored not only global arts but the cultures that produced them.18 The Fowler's intention was to enhance the understanding and appreciation of diverse peoples, cultures, and religions. Through its collections, exhibitions, and publications, the museum has been a driving force in the study of African humanities.Arnold Rubin began teaching at UCLA in 1967. His examination of the arts of the Benue River Valley in Nigeria was based on four years of on-location research, from 1964–1966 and again from 1969–1971. Rubin encouraged students to look at the production of art in other cultures from a Marxist perspective. For his brief tenure at UCLA (he died in 1988 at the age of 50), he produced a great number of students not only in the study of African and Diaspora art but also in Pre-Columbian and Native American arts.19 Rubin led a later generation to examine body art, resulting in Marks of Civilization (1992). His innovative teaching encouraged students to look not only at “exotic cultures” but also to examine their own culture, leading them on projects examining American tattoo, Pasadena's Tournament of Roses, and the decoration of cemeteries on Memorial Day (Fig. 11). Having heard of some of Rubin's methods for making students think in terms of parallels between the purposes of African art making and that in their own cultures, I began to use some of them in my own classes.20Rubin was an early editor of African Arts, planned exhibitions for the Museum of Cultural History and, with Sieber, co-curated an exhibition of the Tishman Collection for the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (Sieber and Rubin 1968) and founded the Arts Council of the African Studies Association and served as its president.21 After Rubin's death, UCLA did not replace him until 2000, when both Zoë Strother and Steven Nelson were hired.22UCLA's offerings in the humanities went beyond art history. The Department of Dance had been founded in 1962. The Ethnic Arts program was established in 1972, bringing talent from anthropology, art history, dance, folklore and mythology, music, and theater. The program emphasized the development of interdisciplinary, intercultural perspectives on the arts. The Ethnic Arts program was eventually renamed World Arts and Cultures; in 1995 it merged with the Dance Department, and in 2001 faculty and staff from the Interdepartmental Program in Folklore were added. Those addressing the arts of Africa included Polly Roberts (art history), Allan Roberts (anthropology), Don Cosentino (folklore), and Chris Waterman (ethnomusicology).Established in 1961 by Philip D. Curtin and Jan Vansina, the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin served as a leading center for research, teaching, and outreach. Known for its strength in African languages and literatures, Wisconsin gradually developed as a powerhouse for the study of the visual arts as well. Vansina, both historian and anthropologist and an authority on Central Africa, was a major figure in incorporating historical methodology in the study of the arts. Like McCall at Boston, Vansina challenged the ethnographic present, demanding attention to history and chronology. His Art History in Africa provided a systematic method whereby an historical understanding of art is achieved, placing it in a framework that explains how artistic change has taken place over time (Vansina 1964). Henry Drewal joined the Department of Art History in 1991 as Evjue-Bascom Professor of Art History and Afro-American Studies.23Michigan State University claims its commitment to Africa began over fifty-five years ago, partnering with the future Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe in founding the University of Nigeria-Nsukka. Through this endeavor, Joanne Eicher developed her research on Nigerian dress and textiles and returned to teach at MSU. She had matriculated MSU as an undergrad and remained for graduate studies in sociology and anthropology. From the late 1960s until 1977, Eicher taught in the Department of Human and Environmental Design, where she developed a cadre of grad students, advising or co-advising twenty-three graduate projects.24 Eicher advanced the study of textiles, dress, and apparel with great enthusiasm and recruited avid parti