African Art in Transit

ISBN-13: 9780521457521 / Angielski / Miękka / 1994 / 240 str.

Christopher B. Steiner

Opis

Based on extensive research in West Africa, Christopher Steiner's book presents a richly detailed description of the economic networks that transfer art objects from their site of use and production in Africa to their point of consumption in art galleries and shops throughout Europe and America. In the course of this fascinating transcultural journey, African art acquires different meanings. It means one thing to the rural villagers who create and still use it in ritual and performance, another to the Muslim traders who barter and resell it, and something else to the buyers and collectors in the West who purchase it for investment and display it in their homes.

Recenzje

"'African Art in Transit' is an important contribution to African studies as a whole, and the anthropology of African art and economics in particular. A detailed and lucid ethnographic account of the way in which middlemen construct value in the art markets in Abijan, Cote d'Ivoire, it is, for the field to date, the most theoretically informed study of authenticity as a construct, and as it is used in the market to create value. For African art, it is a landmark study for the ways in which it brings social and economic theory to bear on the creation of surplus value through bargaining processes, that is, through the competitive 'meditation of knowledge' in the art market." Jonathan Zilberg, The International Journal of African Historical Studies

Spis treści

Introduction: the anthropology of African art in a transnational market; 1. Commodity outlets and the classification of goods; 2. The division of labor and the management of capital; 3. An economy of words: bargaining and the social production of value; 4. The political economy of ethnicity in a plural market; 5. The quest for authenticity and the invention of African art; 6. Cultural brokerage and the mediation of knowledge; Conclusion: African art and the discourses of value.