The historical life of objects: African art history and the problem of discursive obsolescence.

This essay evaluates how the field of African art history deals with the problem of cultural and discursive changes deriving from its canonization of specific objects of African art by interrogating the Mbari architecture of the Owerri-Igbo, a ritual complex of distinctive practices that is largely extinct, and whose archival inscription and contemporary interpretations are thus open to debate. It interrogates the increasing gap between the continued representation of distinctive ethnic forms of material production through historically dated art objects and the emergence of contemporary forms of art in those contexts that bear little formal resemblance or meaning to canonical cultural artifacts. The problem engendered by this conjunction of temporality and historical specificity can be defined as the problem of discursive obsolescence: If iconic objects assume different forms and meanings in different historical periods, how do these changes affect scholarly interpretation of the objects and of the archives that narrate their historically specific meanings?

Inscriptions of the Material World (1)

In 1904, the British colonial officer A.A. Whitehouse published pictures of a ritual complex documented among the Owerri Igbo, who identified them as "Mbari" houses (Fig. 1; Whitehouse 1904a and b). According to Herbert Cole, who has studied this phenomenon extensively, Mbari ritual complexes comprised colorfully orchestrated tableaux of gods, spirits, men, and animals in an elaborate architectural setting and are found in most of the communities within a radius of about 25 miles (40.23km) of the modern town of Owerri (Cole 1975; see also Cole 1969a, 1969b, 1969c, 1988; Cole and Aniakor 1984). The construction of an Mbari house required huge communal investments in time and resources, and its completion was celebrated with a formal opening festival where the finished building and its contents were subjected to communal evaluation and criticism.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Cole's research on Mbari is the most thorough art historical analysis of the subject extant. It established Mbari as a gestural mode of cultural practice and also comprises the bulk of the existing archive of research on this art form. The analysis that follows raises questions about how to engage this kind of archive, especially if contemporary analysis yields alternative interpretations of its canonical inscription. It questions the validity of "canons" of African art in general since such canons often fossilize cultural practice and prevent the emergence of alternative forms. Canons arise precisely because of the structure of knowledge production in art history, in which museum collections are valued higher than the cultural processes that bring them into being. In the case of Mbari, the canon comprises the representation of these complex structures documented in the archival record, whose interpretation raises interesting questions in retrospect. Mbari is not unique in this regard: Similar questions can be raised about other canonical African art forms and the archives that narrate such objects.

Cole's initial research on Mbari was conducted in the mid-1960s and truncated by the Nigerian/Biafran civil war that left large swatches of Igbo country devastated. The war engendered a decline in Mbari construction, and Cole subsequently documented this process of transformation in further research on the subject carried out in 1982 and 1983. In 1983, he documented a structure identified as an "Mbari" constructed by S.A.O. Chukueggu, not in Igbo country but in Jos in northern Nigeria. (2) To all intents and purposes therefore, Mbari can be defined as an "extinct" tradition. (3) Built of perishable materials (mostly comprising anthill clay), few Mbari artifacts have survived and fewer still are represented in Western collections of African art. Unlike many other objects of African art, the documented images of Mbari ritual complexes are the primary evidence of their former existence among the Owerri Igbo. These images thus provide a "virtual" existence for archival documentation of Mbari complexes that represents (by standing in for) the absent object. This representation demonstrates that inscription of African art objects sometimes replaces actual objects of study in art history. It also raises questions about how this history and its discourses are engendered in the first place.

The intersection of actual and virtual histories of African art/ritual objects like Mbari constitutes a crisis for African art history. This crisis is evident in the growing dichotomy between art exhibitions (and scholarly investigation) attempting to represent distinctive ethnic forms of material production through historically dated art objects and the emergence of contemporary forms of art in those contexts that bear little formal resemblance to canonical cultural artifacts. (4) Past forms often do not provide any useful guide for future interpretations of specific cultural practice. The previous form of an object can thus be a poor guide to its contemporary manifestation, especially when one considers that the canonical form may itself be the subject of problematic interpretation. In other words, the temporal identity of any object reflects its documented form at a specific historical period and conjoins but also diverges from the history of the object, which narrates its inscription within a specific discourse (in this case, African art history). The above are of course different from the historical life of objects (the history of the object's life in relation to indigenous cultural histories) in which is described its form and role within indigenous knowledge systems, that intangible heritage whose practice gives social life to the objects, a knowledge quite complex but mostly orally sustained and transmitted (Svensson 2004). The conjunction of temporality and historical specificity (which I have defined as the problem of discursive obsolescence) destabilizes existing interpretations of African art objects and forms of cultural practice. It challenges the canonical forms inscribed for these objects and their interpretation in various archives. It also questions the importance of these archives to our contemporary understanding of the specific objects so identified.

"Time changes the questions that artworks put before us, different objects call to different subjects at different moments, and new political angles make new objects come into view" (Holly 2005:77). Cultural production and its meanings had very limited life spans in African cultures, but analysis of their transformation into canonical objects of art has not always considered this fact. Although many studies evaluate the process and meaning of change in African art, they mostly do this from the perspective of etic change, which documents the insertion of these objects into the frameworks of Western discourses and inscriptions. (5) These studies, however, need to pay more attention to how African cultures built the idea of historical specificity into their cultural practices, and how these are framed by knowledge systems that prescribe the form, transformation, and obsolescence of these objects. In light of recent theory and other advances in art history, the existing research on much African art in general needs to be reevaluated, and future studies need to reconsider their dependence on the canonical forms inscribed for specific objects.

This essay thus revisits the question of what exactly Mbari is and posits that the documented forms and interpretation of Mbari architecture (and that of the larger canonical archive of African art in general) raises significant questions that challenge our understanding of indigenous forms of expression in African arts. The kind of reevaluation suggested here applies insights from analysis of other aspects of Igbo cultures to the interpretation of this ritual complex. Such specificity is necessary to prevent analysis from degenerating into frivolous revisionism. In that regard, this essay does not attempt a detailed critique of Cole's work on Mbari; instead it uses the archive generated by this work to make a larger point about scholarship in African art history in general.

Cole's work remains the most significant research on Mbari, but it is important to point out that no trained anthropologist had ever researched the subject. (6) Given the prevalence of anthropological research on African cultures for most of the twentieth century, art history would obviously benefit from engaging with this research, especially in light of anthropology's reflexive investigation of its own methodologies in the previous two decades. Such engagement provides an interdisciplinary approach to the study of African art in general. The demise of Mbari among the Owerri Igbo also means that there are few ways to engage this practice except through focus on the archival record, supplemented by interviews with older members of Owerri society who safeguard the knowledge system of the original rituals that gave rise to the Mbari phenomenon. This is however not an insurmountable problem: Cole's research on the Mbari ritual and architectural complex is broad and quite innovative. In addition to his documentation and analysis of the construction process (Cole 1982), he investigated the history of Mbari and analyzed various theories of its origins (Cole 1975). In later years, he reviewed the survival of similar architectural practices in postwar Igboland/Nigeria as evidence of change in Mbari (Cole 1988) and repudiated his own inscription of an "ethnographic present" in his earlier research on the subject. Nevertheless, certain aspects of Mbari presented a persistent problem for Cole--the use of imported European plates in the construction process, for instance, and questions of Mbari's origins, deriving from the solitary nature of this practice among the Owerri-Igbo, while related architectural and sculptural practices abound among western Igbo and Edo peoples. This raises the possibility of alternative interpretations of the origins and meaning of Mbari (a non-Igbo origin of the ritual complex necessitates a broad reinterpretation of its meaning) but it also raises other issues: What is the meaning of this archive and the knowledge contained therein for our continued attempt to understand the arts and cultures of the Owerri-Igbo, especially since the cultural practice itself is no longer extant? What impact does emerging knowledge of the historical life of these objects (and the indigenous knowledge systems they supported) have for our understanding of African arts and cultural history in general? Also, if African cultures designed their art objects with very specific life spans (a life history of creation, use, and dissolution within a narrow temporal frame, of which Mbari is a stellar example), is it proper to continue to narrate those objects as significant aspects of cultural practice outside of this original temporal framework?

Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Historical Life of Objects

European colonial officers and ethnographers noted the existence of Mbari among the Owerri-Igbo area early in the twentieth century. Commentators such as A.A. Whitehouse (1904b), Percy A. Talbot (1927), G.I. Jones (1937), and G.T. Basden (1966) agreed that Mbari possessed identifiable forms, a supporting symbolic structure, and ritual organization that attest to its antiquity in the Owerri culture area. The authors also noted that the earliest examples of Mbari appeared to be rather modest structures, while the contemporary examples that they photographed showed large numbers of figures (representing various deities and contexts) in an expansive tableaux (Fig. 2). As with most indigenous forms of expression in Igbo culture, Mbari rituals and architecture were affected by European colonial incursion into Igbo country. Whitehouse's 1904 pictures documented the representation of European figures within an Mbari tableau, "for one of the modeled groups shows a European being carried in a litter, followed by two uniformed soldiers" (Cole 1975:107). The British colonial government that these soldiers represented indulged in unbridled iconoclasm in Igbo country by destroying shrines and votive images that it disapproved of. The resulting loss of specific objects and the knowledge systems that supported their invention and use presents a great obstacle to the work of historical reconstruction. Early documentation of contemporary forms of cultural practice at specific historical periods often became inscribed as the canonical forms of those objects (the research on Mbari, for instance, uses Whitehouse's 1904 pictures as a sort of historical benchmark). This practice renders existing knowledge of African art problematic, precisely because the forms attributed to them in the discourse and interpreted as their canonical forms are often documents of specific historical perception locked into the inscriptional mode of Western production of knowledge.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The inscription of Igbo and other African cultures in art history focuses too much on objects without a corresponding focus on indigenous knowledge systems about beliefs and behaviors related to their cultural history. However,</p> <pre> the multiple heritage which seems to have the greatest bearing on objects/artifacts are knowledge systems

and life ways related to the specific objects but are not part

thereof. Objects do not speak for culture, or are instrumental reflections thereof unless an extensive body of knowledge/intangible heritage is attached to them (Svensson 2004). </pre> <p>What is described here as knowledge systems differs from the idea of "context," which situates the subject of analysis in social space. (7) "Knowledge system" specifically refers to the cognitive structures within each culture that give form to the objects in question. For example, the knowledge system behind various objects associated with the Igbo Ozo ritual tradition does not reside in why and how the Ozo ritual is carried out (which is what most existing research documents), but in what the Ozo ritual is. The history and indigenous meaning of these objects reside in the material and conceptual identity of the Ozo ritual, whose interpretation at various generational (thus historical) periods give rise to specific objects through which Ozo is represented. Although there is a cluster of specific types of objects associated with the Ozo ritual, their physical form often reflects changes in material culture. The knowledge system of Ozo rituals is resilient, and at each new investiture, its form and protocols are debated until they produce a consensus of ideas about contemporary reality (Fig. 3; for analysis of Onitsha-Igbo Ozo traditions, see Henderson 1972).

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

During the colonial period, Igbo societies preserved continuity by periodic adjustments to their systems of symbolic signification, retaining specific indigenous knowledge systems while altering the physical and symbolic forms by which this knowledge was represented. In fact, Cole's research indicated that Mbari had a canonical structure of ritual but its forms were endlessly evolving. This suggests that Mbari embodied change as an integral aspect of its conceptual and formal structures. This process of change reached a peak in the 1920s-30s, a period identified as the golden age of Mbari, which saw changes in the size and design of Mbari houses (Cole 1982:3). The coming of the British colonial economy or "ego oyibo" (literally "white man's money") made possible increased individual and communal wealth that allowed more lavish structures to be erected to the glory of local deities. (8) It also made new images available to Mbari artists, whose willing adoption of these images reflected the expanded horizons of individual towns but also redefined the relationship between the secular and sacred. (9) By the time of Cole's fieldwork in 1966 and aided by the onslaught of colonial Christianization, the meaning of most concepts and forms associated with Mbari had become esoteric knowledge, highly guarded and thus an instrument of power, or else they had passed beyond memory into myth. (10) The construction of cement "Mbari" in Owerri (started in 1976-77 but uncompleted) and Jos (1985) by S.A.O. Chukueggu of Mbaise brought Mbari art to an ironic finale. (11) In these structures, the Christian deity--Chukwu/Chineke--displaces Ala as the central figure and thus "owner" of Mbari. (12) This act of apostasy inverts the meaning of Mbari, and in turn provides an alternative explanation of the origins of this ritual tradition.

The arrival of the Christian sky deity was not the first instance of apostasy encountered by Ala (the earth), the principal Igbo deity associated with Mbari. (13) The Mbari ritual and its architectural complex documents an earlier struggle in Igbo religion that accompanied the arrival of the deus otiosus Amadioha (the sky god) to the Owerri region. The strange origins and nature of this alien god is retained in cultural memories of its rise to power as a series of oracular entities, all of whom advocated the supremacy of the sky (Igwe) over the earth (Ala). The use of special termite clay, aja mpu (clumps of earth from anthills), as the primary material for constructing Mbari is a heavily encoded symbolic statement. It represents Ala, the central deity of Igbo religion (whose shrine is often located in the vicinity of, and incorporates, anthills), struggling to absorb and sublimate the rising importance of Amadioha as a major deity in the Owerri region (14) (see Ogbechie 1993; space limitations preclude a full examination of the liturgical struggle between these deities). The record of this liturgical struggle is inscribed in the ritual process and spatial configurations of Mbari and can be deduced from the floor plans of most Mbari houses. Documented examples deploy the esoteric language of Igbo numerology in the positioning of key figures in the shrine. The simplest plans locate various deities along a cruciform axis while more complicated floor plans replicate in ideographic inscription the pairing of Ala and Amadioha in the completed structures (for illustrations, see Cole 1975:125; on the esoteric nature of Igbo numerology and its uses in Igbo divination, see Umeh 1999).

The Mbari ritual complex thus documented changing conventions in Owerri-Igbo religious and political culture in a historical form that was meant to evolve. The complex tableaux encapsulated a local history of cultural change occasioned by the elevation of the deus otiosus Amadioha to a position of prominence and the struggle to subsume this heresy by literally absorbing it into the sacred body of Ala, the earth. (15) This initial struggle was complicated by the appearance of the white colonial officer, whose strategies of domination through brutal force were equated with Amadioha, who was henceforth reconfigured as a colonial officer. (The veneration of Amadioha in the Owerri region predates the colonial era, but the arrival of the Europeans got tacked onto his iconography.) It is significant that in most of the Mbari documented from Whitehouse in 1904 to Cole in 1967, Ala was represented as a "traditional" Igbo matron while her "consort" Amadioha was often dressed in military-derived fashion, initially representing the power of the colonial order, but later that of the new Nigerian police officers and soldiers. In fact, Ala is rarely depicted through figurative imagery among most Igbo peoples, and is instead represented by clumps of anthill earth in simple shrines (unlike other deities, Ala's pervasiveness was evident and did not need embellishing). This suggests that the complex architectural structures later identified as Mbari were not originally built to worship Ala, but to domesticate the challenge to her supremacy in Igbo cosmology posed by emergent sky deities like Amadioha of Ozuzu, Igwe-ka-Ala of Umunneora, and later Chukwu of the Christians, whose adherents preached the supremacy of the sky-gods over the earth. (For analysis of the impact of these sky deities on Igbo religion, see Nwoga 1984.) This vital symbolism is completely opaque to most observers, which explains why commentators have sought the meaning of Mbari in the physical expression of this ritual complex, its documented forms and expansive tableaux of paintings, and cultural narratives. The true meaning of Mbari, like its origins, apparently lies elsewhere. (16)

Ethnography and Cultural Expressions of power

Mbari is a great example of art as process. The entire edifice was constructed out of clay and anthill earth, was never repaired after its unveiling, and eventually melted back into the earth after several rains. The fact that Mbari were intentionally allowed to fall into disrepair once completed and dedicated makes it impossible to evaluate the historical development of this tradition based on analysis of extant forms. Each Mbari documents a cultural history of conflict resolution particular to its specific location and period of construction. It is important to specify this original impetus of the Mbari ritual, a creative process in which the production of the ritual edifice comprised its substantive period of active historical existence and value. The historical life of Mbari is located within this process only, in the ritual that brings the edifice and its cohorts of images into being. Once this edifice is completed and dedicated, it is already post-historical. In a fundamental sense then, Mbari has no canonical form. Its forms endlessly evolved and were subject to constant reinterpretation. There is a particular instance within Mbari's cycle of creation, exposition, and destruction when its forms undergo a pointed change. Cole remarks on the conceptual and verbal transformation that accompanies the process of embedding plates in the architectural edifice, after which the entire edifice and its process becomes identified as "Mbari" (Cole 1975:112, 1982:87-8). Beyond this instance, Mbari unfolds mainly as a fluid process whose meanings lie in the performative context of ritual rather than the constructed edifice. Ideally, Mbari does not produce objects; it produces narratives. This fact problematizes any interpretation of Mbari that pursues a "history" of this cultural practice through analysis of its extant edifices.

The reconfiguration of Mbari as an "object/subject" of art illustrates the frequent inversions of meaning that accompanied the emergence of Western discourses about African art and culture. Although African art forms have been generally assumed to be without history, there is a growing acknowledgement that this assumption is untenable. Nevertheless, the kinds of objects that were used to define art forms like Mbari (its figurative forms and expansive tableaux of paintings and narratives) are usually assumed to be without history, since the colonial inscription of this particular art practice did not acknowledge for it an internal (local) history embodied in specific indigenous knowledge systems. In fact, the colonial inscription of this practice is itself used as a benchmark of its emergence into history. Cole defined the problem as follows:</p> <pre> The fact that African art historians have painfully little historical data to draw upon is no secret. Extant objects rarely predate 1900, when much African art began the qualitative decline under Western influence so evident today. Oral traditions going back before 1900 are common in few art-producing

areas. Archaeological research has so far yielded important but sporadic information on the arts (Cole 1975:104). </pre> <p>The question that arises in this specific instance is why there should be extant objects predating 1900 in a cultural practice devoted to the idea of impermanence? In many African societies, objects were often willfully destroyed in order that new and inventive forms could take their place. If the goal of Mbari was to provide a cultural experience in which impermanent forms are deployed in the service of complex narratives, of what use are the objects that remain when this primary process is completed? What meanings do these remnant objects embody in general? We can then question what Whitehouse's 1904 pictures document and why they have become a benchmark for the historical evaluation of Mbari. These pictures documented remnant traces of the Mbari ritual while neglecting to document the knowledge systems necessary to decode it. This reflects a general failure of its chosen methodology. Although ethnography, and subsequently anthropology, has always been interested in the dynamics of social relationships between people and objects, in many instances the study of how social relationships produce objects predominates in anthropological research. This is primarily because objects provide an anchor upon which to hang questions about technologies of production, use value, symbolic meaning, and indigenous exegesis. In this form of questioning, social relations are sometimes objectified and the functionalist approach it encouraged has yielded very problematic interpretations of African art and culture over the years. (17)

Clifford Geertz defines the favored mode of anthropological documentation as ethnography.</p> <pre> The ethnographer "inscribes" social

discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be consulted (Geertz 1973:19, emphasis in text). </pre> <p>The ethnography of Mbari (including all research on the subject previous to Cole's art historical analysis) illustrates the limitation of this practice, since it attempted to fix or stabilize through inscription a cultural process devoted to change. The idea of a "canonical" form for any Igbo art object runs against the fact that Igbo art (like other types of indigenous African art) encompasses extremes of naturalistic and abstract representation. Well-known objects such as the Ikenga are represented in forms that may be strikingly naturalistic (the figurative Ikenga with its ram's horns, machete, and human-head trophy) or purely abstract cylindrical objects identified only by its twin horns. Ikenga's "form" thus includes naturalistic and abstract forms, and also signifies a category of object that is invoked through onu-ile, affective speech, rather than represented (Figs. 4-5). Ikenga, like Mbari, is not actually a "form"; it is a "gesture" whose structure and efficacy lies in its relationship to the user's affective speech. (18)

[FIGURE 4-5 OMITTED]

To insist on alternative interpretation of the Mbari complex does not imply that Mbari has intrinsic meanings. The meaning of Mbari is a sum total of the cultural negotiations and exchanges that shaped the emergence and sustenance of this ritual complex. The relevant question is whether this meaning correlates with the meanings inscribed for the object so identified in its ethnographic representation. Geertz suggested that each new culture studied by an anthropologist secures a discourse that might otherwise vanish (Geertz 1973). My contention is that the indigenous knowledge systems of the Igbo (in this case) valued the idea that cultural practices and objects periodically become obsolete, and thus vanish from general use. The goal of those periodic initiations and rites of passage that have been well documented in African cultures is to provide each new generation with the tools they need to engage and make sense of their world in its contemporary existence. In that sense, it is wrong to insist that the tools of the past are adequate to present needs.

Inscribing Meaning

The historical life of objects can be defined as their internal cultural history of invention, standardization, and change. This history is inscribed in each object by the knowledge system that circumscribes that object's capacity for being and it is different from the history engendered by the incorporation of that object into a standard discourse about its relationship to colonial power. Although it may be reflected in the external form of an object, it is wrong to assume that it only flows from that form. Although it is created by and exists within the culture that produces the object, it is wrong to assume that generic cultural narratives about the nature and uses of the object tells us everything significant about its meaning. In fact, what this canonical "history" tells us may be at variance with the narrative that emerges when we take the historical life of the objects into consideration.

The ethnographic and anthropological production of knowledge about African art objects are ultimately a study of meta-narratives, a response to the ethnographer's documentation of the response of a community to his presence. Although contemporary anthropology is very much aware of this fact, in the field of African art history, there is still a tendency to accept ethnographic inscription (which is mostly ahistorical) as a useful guide to the constitution of society and art objects in Africa. A canon has been created and a discourse produced to justify and explain the cultural practices represented by this canon. This canon has had less to do with actual elucidation of the historical life of objects within indigenous knowledge systems; rather it posits the contemporary forms of specific objects documented at specific historical periods as templates for historical practices before and after the times in question. This leads naturally to arbitrary demarcations between "traditional" and "modern" Africa (where "tradition" is ahistorical and "modern" represents change and the emergence of Africa into "history"), which in turn negates the impact of the changing nature of African knowledge systems on the creation of new cultures and artifacts. (19)

The time has come to revisit the archive of African art history in order to reexamine how its objects/subjects of study are located in indigenous and discursive histories. (20) In the specific case of Mbari, the existing archive provides evidence of changes in Igbo cultural practice in the era of Mbari construction in response to colonial occupation. In other words, it is really impossible to document change; one can only document manifestations of form in specific historical moments. Ultimately, the history encapsulated in the documented objects--for example, the "history" encapsulated in Whitehouse's 1904 photographs--neither provides evidence of a canonical form for Mbari nor resolves the issue of its contemporary meaning at the time Whitehouse took the picture. The sustained evaluation of Mbari carried out by Cole contextualizes the process of Igbo cultural transformation and its impact of Mbari practices. This research is significant but as the researcher himself noted, more remains to be done. "The arts no longer actively used must be reassessed and further analyzed" and previous subjects of research need more thorough exploration by scholars with a deeper grasp of local languages, "because of the critical value of language and its nuances to any real understanding ... of aesthetic systems" (Cole 1988:27). The practice of Mbari may have ceased to be useful to the Owerri people, but it would be wrong to imagine that the knowledge system that supported Mbari has thereby vanished. But if in fact that knowledge has vanished, in which case Mbari becomes a true "extinct" tradition, this should nevertheless not be a cause for alarm. The goal of cultural practice in the indigenous knowledge system is to provide each generation of Owerri people with the tools they need to make sense of their place in the world. The disappearance of Mbari only proves that it no longer provides an adequate explanation of contemporary realities.

Cultural conventions dictate the possibilities within which the new can emerge. In the case of rather sudden exposure to foreign ideas--like what occurred to the Mbari ritual complex with the advent of European colonization in Igbo country--societies domesticate newness by incorporating it into existing creative and social practices. In all instances, the new is often taboo before its formal and conceptual qualities become familiar to the society; the truly new (thus completely alien) also comes with great social anxiety. Nevertheless, indigenous art forms such as Mbari asserted that change was inevitable and offered hope that change could be domesticated by providing a context in which the divergent parameters of contending knowledge systems could be negotiated.

For African art history, in which the canonized physical cultural object carries a weight far above that of its value in indigenous societies, the idea of an art history that questions the roles and interpretation of canonized objects also causes great anxiety. However,</p> <pre>

art history is not a fixed body of objects but an ever-shifting system of knowledge embodied in different ways at different times. Some forms stay the same and change their meanings; others become obsolete so that new forms can be invented, a dynamic seriously impeded by the creation of inviolable canons of objects and values (Cotter 2005). </pre> <p>Museums and art history conventionally fixed the African past and disturbed this process of organic change. In place of the organic response to change suggested by indigenous interpretation of various African art objects, this fixed past presents the solutions of previous generations as a valid template for engaging contemporary existence. In this process, it marginalizes contemporary cultural developments.

Consider then, in this regard, Chukueggu's cement construct (Fig. 6), which Cole included (among other cement structures) in his review of post-civil war Mbari even as he stated that the use of "cement and concrete" is inimical to the spirit of Mbari (Cole 1988:57-8). Chukueggu's "Mbari" is nothing of the sort; rather, it is a contemporary art ensemble that appropriates the form of Mbari, in much the same manner that Picasso appropriated African mask forms to reconfigure his art. This sculpture's appropriation of Mbari is an individual act of creativity that does not incorporate the rituals identified by that term. Chukueggu merely completes a process of substantive re-presentation that began with Whitehouse's 1904 pictures of Mbari. In fact, his sculpture extends Ala and Amadioha's struggle for dominance in the Igbo pantheon into the contemporary era and renders both deities subservient to the Christian sky-god. As Cole noted, Chukueggu's substitution of Chukwu for Ala and the stasis of his cement sculptures negate the fluid meanings of the original art form and its capacity for social transformation. By so doing, the artist severs the sacred bond between the physical world of the living and the numinous dimensions of the great spirits, leaving Ala and her cohort of deities marooned on the concrete doldrums of a contemporary sea of change. If Whitehouse's pictures marked the emergence of Mbari into the discourse of "history," Chukueggu's cement construct negates that historical process. It provides a stark indication that we have indeed reached the life-end of these objects.

Conclusion

Ultimately this essay raises questions about the nature of canonical objects of African art history and how interpretations derived from indigenous knowledge systems may alter existing understanding of these objects. How does this desire to examine "indigenous knowledge systems" escape from the Eurocentric gaze, with its hegemonic discourses? The writing of history, which inevitably takes a narrative form, necessarily involves the tacit adoption of a philosophy that justifies the particular narrative form adopted (Macey 2000:249). The inscription of indigenous cultures in African art history is marked by this metahistory (both of the field and the art); one can therefore endlessly critique this inscription and the discourse that its archives support. Nevertheless, archives are often all we have. The cultural record shows that Owerri people no longer build Mbari, so it is impossible to engage this phenomenon through primary research (especially if we agree that the meaning of Mbari lies in the rituals observed during the construction process rather than the trace objects that result from this activity; in that regard, reconstruction of Mbari houses sans ritual would not constitute a "revival" of Mbari). We can engage this archive in order to subject it to new knowledge. However, we need to apply a greatly expanded understanding of indigenous knowledge systems to their interpretation.

[This article was accepted for publication in October 2005.]

This paper was first presented at the Emerging Scholarship in African Art Symposium, Columbia University, April 22, 2005. I ant grateful to Simon Ottenberg for his valuable criticism of its premise, and Susan Vogel for her incisive critique of its analysis.

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(1.) This phrase is taken from the theme of Northwestern University's Program of African Studies Roundtable for the 1993-94 Session.

(2.) The structure forms part of the Museum of Traditional Nigerian Architecture (MOTNA), which commissioned it. Chukwueggu's Jos building and his earlier cement Mbari ha Owerri both centralized the figure of Chukwu but also include Ala, who is represented in subservient roles.

(3.) The concept of "extinct art" is first elaborated in Vogel 1991. Vogel notes that extinct art is art of the past that is often no longer made, is mostly housed in museums, imagination, and memory, and is deployed mainly in discourses of national and cultural identity.

(4.) This tendency is clearest in exhibitions of African art in which the objects displayed are not clearly identified as historical objects, thus giving audiences the impression that they represent contemporary forms of cultural practice. Research in African art history has grappled with this problem of ahistorical representation in the past decade. Recent scholarship mostly grapples this problem and provides excellent interrogation of contemporary practices.

(5.) This essay acknowledges the erudite work done in the field of African art and cultural history by distinguished scholars such as Henry Drewal, Margaret Drewal, Simon Ottenberg, Rowland Abiodun, Herbert M. Cole, Sydney L. Kasfir, Suzanne Preston Blier, Zoe Strother, Babtunde Lawal, and others too numerous to mention. Our contention here is that this archive of research needs to be subjected to rigorous critical and methodological inquiry to elicit a sense of the metahistory of the field.

(6.) Simon Ottenberg (personal communication, July 25, 2006) distinguished between the ethnographic writing on Mbari by colonial officers like A.A. Whitehouse, P.A. Talbot, and G.I. Jones; art historical studies by Herbert M. Cole; and the analysis of trained anthropologists like himself, tie suggests that African art history has not taken recent advances in anthropology discourses into question in their critique of these earlier authors, who are erroneously defined as anthropologists. This lack, he concludes, makes the "history" in African art history very weak.

(7.) The paradigm of "context" remains entrenched in African art history despite strenuous objection to its use. See Drewal 1988 (the special issue of Art Journal devoted to the subject); for a critique of the use of "context" in African art history, see Davis 1989.

(8.) The Igbo distinction between indigenous concepts of wealth and the currency of the British colonial economy is part of a broad distinction in Igbo culture between traditional values and colonial prescriptions.

(9.) The most sustained research on changes ha Igbo culture occasioned by colonization was carried out by Simon Ottenberg among the Afikpo Igbo, and has been ongoing since 1956. See in particular Ottenberg 1958.

(10.) Myth, as used here, more specifically refers to mythopoesis (the poetic art of myth creation), which documents change, evolution, and creation of new mythic images in indigenous societies. Mythopoesis suggests the active construction of "mythical narratives" rather than the passive reduction of once-credible beliefs to vague memories or superstition.

(11.) See Cole 1988 for a list of places where cement "Mbari" were built in Igboland and beyond. Cole argues that although actual construction of Mbari ceased sometime around 1980, the spirit of Mbari survives and can be glimpsed in several innovative forms of contemporary cultural practice. Ottenberg suggests that the decline of Mbari resulted from the transformation of Igbo peasant culture as a result of its incorporation into the capitalist world system. See Ottenberg 1984:5-17.

(12.) Chinua Achebe, in the essay "Chi in Igbo Cosmology" (Achebe 1975) suggests that the designation of this deity as "Chineke" or "Chi-na-Eke" derives from colonial Christian misinterpretation of Igbo religious concepts, because the word incorporates two separate--and antagonistic--deifies, Chi and Eke.

(13.) The usual identification of this deity as "the earth goddess" is erroneous. Ala is the Earth itself and represents the elemental force of creation. Ala combines male and female attributes and can be both creator and destroyer. Mbari rituals appeal to the nurturer aspect of Ala, thus feminizing this elemental force, a process tempered by its liberal use of red cloth, representing Ala's ability to impose retribution on offenders.

(14.) The religious narrative documented by Cole among the Owerri that narrated the supremacy of Chukwu (or Chineke) reveals the completed process of religious and cultural indoctrination involved in the liturgical struggle between Ala and this deus otiosus. Cole (1982:57) in fact documents Owerri people saying that "Ala is evil, she is dark. She kills people and eats them," ha complete inversion of the usual understanding of this deity in Igbo land.

(15.) The interaction between religion and formal structures in African art is crucial but often cryptic. This is where anthropological research might prove invaluable to African art history, except that the latter field is often unwilling to engage anthropology's considerable body of research on African religion.

(16.) The solitary nature of Mbari practices among the Owerri Igbo and the prevalence of similar forms west of the Niger strongly suggest that Mbari was an imported tradition. Cole (1975:116-19) Investigated possible links between Mbari and similar architectural complexes among the Western Igbo and Edo peoples, but he was criticized for not pursuing further investigation of this fact (McNaughton 1976). Ogbechie 1993 traces the possible routes by which the Mbari architectural complex arrived in the Owerr-Igbo region from the Edo Kingdom of Benin.

(17.) Social anthropology, characterized by the study of social relationships, specifically refers to the mode of anthropological research favored by British social anthropology between the 1950s and 1970s. Recent anthropological research has moved beyond this paradigm. See Clifford 1988 for analysis of changing methodologies of anthropology of non-Western peoples; see Mudimbe 1988 for analysis of the inscription of Africa in Western discourses.

(18.) The affective speech is given to each Ikenga owner by his dibia (diviner) during the ritual to consecrate his Ikenga. It is very personal and attuned to each man's life force (chi). Analysis of Ikenga should therefore proceed from the perspective of this transferal rather that from the physical form of the object. For analysis of the role of dibia In Igbo culture, see Umeh, 1999. For classic ethnographic studies of Ikenga, see Aniakor 1974:1-14; see also Cole and Aniakor 1984:24-34.

(19.) I am questioning the validity of artistic "canons" in general since they often fossilize research and prevent the emergence of alternative explanations. Canons arise precisely because of the structure of knowledge production in art history in which museumized objects are valued higher than the cultural processes that bring them into being. Mbari, like other practices invoking gesture, are problematic in this respect because they resist commodification and objectification.

(20.) On this subject, see Okoye 1996:22-5.