Fang Reliquary Art : Its Quantities and Qualities - article ; n°60 ; vol.15, pg 723-746

James W.Fernandez, Renate Renatel.Fernandez

Description

Cahiers d'études africaines - Année 1975 - Volume 15 - Numéro 60 - Pages 723-746
24 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: CAHIERS_D-ETUDES_AFRICAINES
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1975
• Nombre de lectures: 59
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Monsieur James W. Fernandez
Madame Renate L. Fernandez
Fang Reliquary Art : Its Quantities and Qualities
In: Cahiers d'études africaines. Vol. 15 N°60. 1975. pp. 723-746.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Fernandez James W., Fernandez Renate L. Fang Reliquary Art : Its Quantities and Qualities. In: Cahiers d'études africaines.
Vol. 15 N°60. 1975. pp. 723-746.
doi : 10.3406/cea.1975.3371
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cea_0008-0055_1975_num_15_60_3371CHRONIQUE BIBLIOGRAPHIQUE
JAMES FERNANDEZ
and
RENATE
Fang Reliquary Art Its Quantities and Qualities*
The Fang of western Equatorial Africa Gabon Rio Muni and southern Came
roun were one of the most publicized African peoples in the mid and late nineteenth
century Their noble savagery was widely featured and their anthropophagy
expounded in the extant journals of popular exploration Globus Tour du Monde
Petermanns Mitteilungen Their irresistible advance out of the interior plateau
down to the coast inspired fear in coastal peoples and impressed European traders
and colonizers By the mid-twentieth century these Fang reliquary figures
have come to achieve their due place in the catalogues and art books of African
art Fang is one of the best known of African art styles style of such powerful
yet limited range as to be readily recognizable It catches our attention Indeed
these figures among their other purposes were intended to inspire caution in
those uninitiated into the ancestor cult the steady gaze of the eyes1 often accen
tuated by metallic discs is arresting The locking of the arms across the chest2
or their symmetrical extension toward the belly the squareness of presentation
the crouch of the legs all suggest unambiguous power in alert repose Hieratic
meditation is term often used to describe the posture of these figures but they
impose themselves more forcefully than that
Fang Statuary in Its Quantities One Style Center or Two
We have not until recently had careful morphological study of the distri
bution of styles in Fang bieri carvings Now Louis Perrois has advanced such
study Statuaire Fan Gabon and an ethnological summary of 272 of these carvings
We would like to review in some detail this thick and generally useful book for
the hypothesis of style dynamics it puts forth is questionable and in some ways it
misrepresents the ethnographic facts in its enthusiasm for morpho-analysis The
ethnographic facts after all are what is basic in explaining the diversity in Fang
styles As always the attachment of numbers to complex aesthetic phenomena
or their entrapment through some scheme of categorization however refined
can beguile us into supposing that we grasp what is still well beyond our reach
Our Gabon work was funded by the Foreign Area program of the Ford
Foundation 1958-1961 We thank Don Jorge Sabater Pi for providing details on
the carvers of Rio Muni
The Perrois study in the section on Décomposition des éléments morpho
logiques shows that 104 out of the 272 carvings employ metal discs for the eyes
One hundred fourteen out of 172 full length Pahouin carvings appear with
their arms flexed across the chest
Cahiers tudes africaines V-4 pp 723-746 JAMES FERNANDEZ AND RENATE FERNANDEZ 724
Numbers must be attached and categories must be constructed but we should not
lay supine before them Nor should we fool ourselves that the morphological
approach has much to do with the creation and appreciation of the artifacts
themselves Perrois hypothesizes two great centers of the Fang style We shall
argue for one style center with persistence of archaic forms on the periphery
as well as variations in the diffusion of style into the periphery
To begin with the figures in Perrois study in the great majority come from
European and American collections Very few of them have accurate attributions
Moreover the active carving of these figures is virtually defunct Thus Perrois
who is Director of Research in the Arts and Traditions Museum in Libreville was
obliged to tour the Gabon countryside seeking to elicit from old men he showed
them eighteen representative photos judgments as to which of the sub-styles
were characteristic of their area and their sub-tribe Ngumba Ntumu Okak
Nzaman-Betsi or Mvai
Given the high degree of mobility of the Fang up until the Second World War
this is chancy method of linking style to sub-tribe For example village families
ndebot which have settled say along the Okano River in the south among the
Betsi may have moved down from Ntumu country in the Woleu Ntem basin
generation or two previously The judgments of old men along the Okano may
have been based on stylistic preferences learned form their forebears who were
then living in the Ntumu country Perrois gives no evidence of informing himself
in every case of the migratory antecedents of his informants He does give
general account of sub-tribal migrations but tends to identify them with those of
one clan In cases where the style of figure seems anomalous for its area he
does check into genealogical antecedents to explain by recent migration the
anomaly We will return to this difficulty below
The point is that Perrois tends to reify the sub-tribe among Fang It is
designation that has weak institutional support in tradition and was until recent
years of more reality and utility to Europeans as category than to Fang The
grouping concepts that have had dominant reality for Fang are the house group
ndebot) the village group mvokabot) the string of villages abiale boi or etungabot
and the dispersed clan ayong Recurrently in their history Fang have sought
to knit clans together alar-ayong Fernandez 1970:428-440) though the fission
of clans into new clans has been the greater reality The same clans or commonly
derived clans are found in several sub-tribal areas and not only clan Bokwe as
listed by Perrois
Holding these matters in abeyance for the moment let us consider sample
of carvings upon which Perrois has drawn the universe from which they came
and then the major conclusions he has derived from them It is reasonable to
suppose that his 272 pieces are representative sample that comprises at the least
20 percent of the total extant collection of Fang ancestor pieces Unfortunately
he made little effort to consult Spanish collections both public and private which
would have given him perhaps another 200 figures for analysis pieces moreover
with better attributions by and large and deriving from an area of particularly
intense Fang aesthetic production the borderland of Gabon Rio Muni and the
Cameroun Our own estimate -based on research in in the late 1950S is
that on the average there appeared one carver of quality for every 30-40 villages
or one carver for every three to four thousand population No traditional schools
of carving have been identified and only late under colonial pressure have carving
schools appeared at all Fang carvers as Perrois remarks were never profession
alized Carving was always specialty of man who except when he became
old had regular subsistence activities to attend to Our own view is that the
output of these specialists was low On an average they cannot have produced
much more than dozen figures in their lifetimes Fernandez 1973:199 Even
under pressure to commercialize the Fang sculptors of the 1940S and 1950S worked
slowly ibid. We may generously estimate taking Fang population as 200000 CHRONIQUE BIBLIOGRAPHIQUE 725
and numerically stable despite migration for the last two centuries and taking
generation as 25 years that at the maximum grand total of 4000 quality carvings
could have been produced by Fang from 1750 to 1950 we have no indication that
any extant figure is older than two centuries About quarter of these have
found their way into western collections perhaps thousand The great majority
of carvings succumbed to the equatorial environment termites carpenter mites
humidity and decay) to cultural accidents hut conflagration loss in migration)
and social movements the periodic anti-witchcraft and fetish movements of which
the last the Mademoiselle or Ndende movement in northern Gabon of 1955-1958
destroyed hundreds Fernandez and Bekaie 1962 Lest we ourselves be conquered
by numbers we put these figures forth as an educated guess perhaps but guess
all the same
When one says quality carvings and quality carvers one should be clear that
these were not the only kind produced by the Fang They recognized quality in
carving and carvers3 but the egalitarian nature of Fang culture was such that
men might feel passing competence in almost all of its aspects The range of
styles and the relative crudity of large proportion of figures obtained in the
field collections of Tessmann Grebert and ourselves4 show the degree to which the
majority of the figures were carved by inexperienced men men who no doubt
in the heat of village separation and in the removal of their share of skulls from
the old reliquary carved their own figures for the new reliquary The total
universe of Fang carving over the last two hundred years must have been much
larger than the quality universe at least on the order of two to one.1 It should
be clear then that the sample of carvings Perrois