Thoughts on the Arts of Small-Scale Societies
Becoming and Being an Artist in the Benue River Valley
Tsojon Shadon: An Independent Artist/Craftsman
Family and Corporate Workshops
Thoughts on the Arts of Small-Scale Societies
Nominally, this paper is about the social and economic basis of traditional art and craft production in the Benue River valley of northeastern Nigeria.1 More fundamentally, I will try to clarify what I think are some of the sources of the aesthetic potency which I believe most sensitive observers perceive in traditional African arts and crafts, and in traditional arts and crafts generally. Ultimately, I aim to demystify this aesthetic potency through an exploration of the social and economic implications of increasing standardization of product and alienation of producer as the transactional frame shifts from face-to-face relationships, part-time specialization and "custom" work to full-time specialization, division of labor, middlemen, and market.
These ideas are based on my limited field data regarding who makes works of art and craft in the Benue River valley of northeastern Nigeria: individuals working on their own, family workshops, and corporate workshops.2 My perspective derives from an emerging conviction that the aesthetic potency that I find in so much of traditional African art and craft is generally not typical of manufactures for elite members of highly stratified societies, African or otherwise. Such works are highly seductive, in terms of the value of the materials used and the virtuosity of technique they exhibit. They are supposed to be. They are also self-aggrandizing appropriations of human and material resources whose purpose is the ideological reinforcement of ruling-class interests. They are, in other words, a highly sophisticated form of propaganda.3 Further, the best of traditional African art and craft--particularly objects produced by part-time specialists working in small-scale societies-can be regarded as embodying qualities of richness, contingency, and complexity of meaning which have recently come to be characterized as "post-modern.-4
In 1981, I published a short paper entitled "Metropolitan Myopia and the Myth of Antiquity in Nigerian Art Studies.''5 Among other things, this paper attempted to assess the effects and implications of centralization and specialization on art and other aspects of culture. It is relatively easy to understand why the English and Europeans should place a high value upon kingdoms and dynasties and other manifestations of hierarchical principles in social and political structures. Such middleman and destined for an anonymous customer in a distant market.
Fang appear closely to resemble principles are pervasive in their own histories and fundamental to their cultural consciousness. Americans, in contrast, by virtue of their democratic heritage, have traditionally been less comfortable with institutionalized stratification and, in my judgment, it is less becoming for Americans to be seduced by the pomp and circumstance, the tidiness and spectacular artistic accomplishments, of kingdoms and empires and other totalitarian states. Of course centralized societies should be studied, but it is incumbent upon the student to recognize that the comparatively high degree of order and stability they tend to exhibit is usually based on repression and enforced conformity, and that full-time specialization in art or architecture, medicine or warfare, religion or politics, or any other activity, is usually accompanied by the emergence of a network of dependency relationships and by increasing alienation of individuals from each other and from the community to which they belong.
I intend this statement as an appreciation of small-scale societies, where, except for age- and sex-based divisions of labor, practically everybody knows how to do practically everything. These patterns prevail in most of northeastern Nigeria. Such limited specialization as exists is usually part-time and based mostly or entirely on face-to-face interaction between the artist/craftsperson and his or her audience, the client and/or critic. Not to belabor the obvious, I am arguing that things which I make for myself, or my neighbor, are likely to get care and attention beyond that invested in work for a middleman and destined for an anonymous customer in a distant market.
Critical judgment and aesthetic sensibility are distributed rather than concentrated, both among the population and across a wider range of phenomena than is customary in the West. Finally, the process of art-making, the maker, and sometimes even the end product--may be assigned a relatively low priority. The interface is of primary importance. The artist becomes the vehicle, the agent, the proximate cause--not the ultimate cause--of the work of art and the aesthetic experience.
I believe, in short, that this transactional frame, this shared social and cultural universe, this dynamic interplay between the artist and his/her community, must be regarded as the source of the aesthetic potency I find in traditional African art and craft. Moreover, I am quite comfortable in opposing this conclusion to the prevailing European and Euro-American myth of the totally focused artistic genius pursuing his uniquely idiosyncratic vision in splendid isolation as the sole source and single vector of great art.
Support for this analysis, and for the conclusion to which it has led, is found in the publications of two anthropologists who studied the arts of small scale societies comparable to those of northeastern Nigeria: James Fernandez on the Fang of Gabon and Paul Bohannan on the Tiv of the lower Benue River valley.6
Athough far from the Benue, the circumstances and attitudes that Fernandez (1975:203) reports for the Fang appear closely to resemble those of similarly organized Benue Valley populations: "One might almost ask if art lies as much in the act of creation as it does in the relationship between creation and criticism-the artist and his critics." He further asserts that, to the Fang, artists are simply not very important: "Artistic expression clearly takes place within a social and natural order to which it makes inevitable reference." He goes on to conceptualize this relationship in terms of the exposition and imposition of order. As it happens among the Fang, it is the plastic arts that merely expose while it is the oratorical arts (in social and political life) and ritual-myth arts (in the religious life) which impose order (1975:197).
Elsewhere, Men should define themselves principally as family heads, living representatives of the perpetuating lineage, debaters, warriors, hunters, trappers, and agriculturalists. Their skills with wood or reed, vine leaf, or metal are the necessary supplemental skills, and not the essentials, of Fang personality (1975:200).
And finally, among the Fang, at least, those who simply expose aesthetically pleasing harmonies for the delectation of their compatriots, while esteemed, are not highly respected and are of low rank. On the other hand, those who impose harmony upon their compatriots, thereby enhancing the quality of Fang life, are greatly to be respected and are of high rank. For they have done the most difficult of all things. They have acted to make universal harmonies manifest in social life which is in its nature, as far as the Fang are concerned, ever disturbed and endlessly gravitating to a state "nasty, brutish and mean" (1975:196).
Bohannan similarly defines aesthetics as the relationship between criticism and art objects. The relationship between artist and object centers on the problem of "creativity." He concludes that studying the artist is at best a partial way of understanding art.
It elicits the artist's motivation, it elucidates his personal aesthetics, and it clarifies technical problems. It may even help to solve some of the many difficult ... problems about "creativity." But it cannot explain the reason that some art is accepted and other is not, nor why some is considered better than others (1961:86).
Tiv, Bohannan says, are interested in the art--not in the artist ... The viewpoint of Westerners, interested primarily in creativity, is completely different from that of the Tiv in this respect. Tiv, indeed, use the word "create" (gba) for working in wood--its only other use is for God's creation of the World. But the primary field of Tiv interest is not on the verbal notion of gba or creation, but rather on the objects which are the result of it. Tiv are more interested in the ideas conveyed by a piece of art than they are in its manufacture, just as in their religion they are far more interested in the Creation than in the Creator (1961:87).
He goes on to recount several incidents in support of the notion that Tiv, in many instances at least, care who creates a given object as little as they care about the creative process. Art is, among them, an epiphenomenon to play, religion, prestige and most other aspects of life. Indeed, much of it is a sort of "commu-nity" art, a true folk art in which the artist is as unimportant as the composer of folk music (1961:89).
Then follows a series of anecdotes about the collaborative character of much of Tiv carving, wherein the height of critical approbation seems to be embodied in the phrase: "It didn't turn out too badly." Following a failed attempt to make sculpture, Bohannan sets himself to carving stools and chairs but the moment I rested, some bystander would take up the adze and get the work a little farther forward. I, in Western tradition, had a feeling of complete frustration because my "creativity" and my ability were being challenged. For a few days I tried to insist that I wanted to do the work myself, but soon had to give it up because everyone thought it silly and because no one could remember my foible. Eventually several of our chairs and stools "didn't turn out too badly." I had a hand in all of them, but they are not my handiwork--the whole compound and half the countryside had worked on them (1961:91).
While some chair specialists, whose works "always came out well," were recognized, they were clearly exceptional. Much more typical, according to Bohannan, are the attitudes embodied in his first experience with designs being sewn into cloth for resist-dyeing.
The first time I saw a man sewing raffia almost at random onto a cloth he was preparing for resist dyeing, paying attention to a political discussion rather than to any pattern and obviously having no plan, I was upset. I finally interrupted the business at hand to ask him why he did not pay attention to what he was doing. He told me, and though I understood his words I did not grasp their full meaning until later, that one does not look at a pattern until it is finished: then one looks to see if it has come out well. If this one does not come out well, he said, "I will sell it to the Ibo; if it does, I shall keep it. And if it comes out extraordinarily well, I shall give it to my mother-in-law (1961:91-2).
Bohannan goes on to summarize:
In Tivland, almost every man is a critic. Because there are no specialists in taste and only a few in the manufacture of art, every man is free to know what he likes and to make it if he can. It seems to me that as many Tiv are aware of why they like something as are aware of the implications of any other aspects of their culture. In all spheres, this is a faculty which varies greatly from person to person. There are as many reasoned art critics in Tiv society as there are reasoned theologians or political theorists, from whom we study Tiv ideas about their religion and politics (1961:94).
Extrapolating from Fernandez' and Bohannan's findings, I suspect that there probably were among the peoples of the Benue valley very few of what Westerners would calll artistic geniuses or "professional" critics-few Leonardos or Picassos, Vasaris or Berensons. But there probably were many connoisseurs, in the sense of people who applied developed critical standards and aesthetic judgments across the whole spectrum of life experiences.7
Becoming and Being an Artist in the Benue River Valley
The foregoing analysis is intended as a theoretical framework for the limited and essentially impressionistic survey of artists and craftspeople that follows. I will emphasize recruitment, training, conditions of work, and status, clustering according to the three categories of art or craft production mentioned earlier: the independent producer, the family workshop, and the corporate workshop. The survey begins with biographical sketches of artists and craftspeople belonging to a number of ethnic groups working essentially on their own in various media, as background for a more detailed discussion of one carver's life and work. Next, a brasscasting workshop involving an extended family is considered, and finally a corporate workshop engaged in the decoration of textiles for regional and supraregional distribution (figure 1).8
The vast majority of male artists and craftsmen--carvers, brasscasters, weavers--learned from male relatives, typically their fathers, grandfathers, or eider brothers, although a few claim to have learned on their own. Female weavers, potters, and calabash decorators learned from their mothers or sisters.9 For the most part, instruction took place in late childhood and early adolescence and was not systematic, consisting rather of observation and guided "helping out." Most practitioners also engaged in agriculture, pursuing their specialization during the dry season when farm work lessened. Most were "in it for the money," but a few were concerned with preserving tradition, continuing a family heritage, or personal fame. Most deferred to their teachers in terms of skill, but a few claimed to be superior to them. Carvers, weavers, and traditional (female) calabash decorators worked almost entirely on commission; potters, brasscasters, modern (male) calabash decorators, and blacksmiths "for the market." Except for blacksmiths, artists and craftsmen did not enjoy any special distinction in the societies they serve.
Lenke, a Mumuye carver of Zinna, learned carving at about age ten from his eider brother, Mai Shera, who learned from their father Zuganu (figure 2). After about one year he started carving on his own. In 1970 he had been carving for about 30 years, for the money it brought him. He worked for many local groups, traveling around to execute commissions. He estimated that he had carved 500 horned masks of the type called vabo, 150 yoke-masks (sukuru), but only one figure; it wasn't appreciated, so he didn't make any more. He is also a weaver, but apparently doesn't farm.10
Habukuku was a resident of Wukari (figure 3). He is Abakwariga, or pagan Hausa, and is a carver, brasscaster, and blacksmith. He carves during the dry season, but his year-round involvement with blacksmithing is his main source of income. He doesn't farm, paying people to do it for him.
Atahiru Umoru is also Abakwariga and also lives in Wukari (figure 4). His skill as a weaver is widely renowned, having won him a major prize at the Wukari agricultural show. He was weaver to the Aku, or King of the Jukun of Wukari, and was presented to me as "head" of the weavers, but he only works for about two months per year, after farm work is finished.
All, a brasscaster of Tula, learned the craft from his father. About 40 years of age in 1970, he had been working on his own (on commission) since about 14. He regards himself as primarily a farmer.
Both the father and grandfather of Danda, a Wurkun carver of Dogo Yell, were carvers. Danda learned to carve by watching his father produce hoe handles. Whereas most artists and craftsmen defer to their teachers in terms of skill, Danda insisted that he was a better carver than either his father or grandfather. Neither of them was carving images, but he decided he wanted to. Nobody believed he was capable, so he went to bush, cut a big log, and carved about a dozen images. This proved he could do the work, but children began using the images he had made as toys. This made his parents unhappy, so he took the images and threw them away. He had not received any subsquent commissions, however, because diviners hadn't sent any of their clients to him.
Tsojon Shadon: An Independent Artist/Craftsman
Late in 1965 I spent several weeks working with Tsojon Shadon, an Abakwariga artist living in Rafin Kada, near Wukari. I documented his production of the carved wooden Jukun male mask type called aku wa'unu, and its basketry cap mask female counterpart, aku wa'uwa (figures 5, 6). I also recorded the main elements of his biography.
Tsojon Shadon came from a family of weavers on his father's side, but all the weavers in the family had died before he was old enough to learn. As a child of about ten years, he became interested in carving by watching Adin Yajon, his mother's brother, carve two masks. This was during a period of two years and three months when mother and child were staying with Adin Yajon at a place called Ndoto, near Riti on the road between Wukari and Akwana. One of the masks was almost finished when Tsojon Shadon arrived at Ndoto, but he saw the whole process for the second.
Then Adin Yajon died, and Tsojon Shadon's mother's other brother named Abi, from Kente, brought mother and child back to her husband at Rafin Kada and stayed with them there. At about age 13, Tsojon Shadon set about learning to make the aku wa'uwa basketry crest from Abi, also by watching and "helping out." Abi died soon after that, and Tsojon Shadon started working on his own, as a way of making money.
In about 1960, Tsojon Shadon's father's brother had bought a carved wooden food bowl at Takum, which Tsojon Shadon decided to copy for his own use. People who saw it asked him to make copies for them, and he sold many at Wukari. In addition, "people whose masks had spoiled" came and asked him to make replacements. He estimates that he has made 20 wooden aku wa'unu masks, and more than 30 basketry aku wa'uwa masks (figure 7).
Among his basketry crests were a few examples with technical refinements iR delineating the eyes and mouth, "special versions" for the Aku to take to Kaduna for the Regional Arts Festival. They actually represented a return to the technique used by his maternal grandfather, which Tsojon Shadon himself had been taught. Although "more beautiful," they were also more difficult to make. Tsojon Shadon had no plans to deviate from the simpler, more streamPined version that he had developed for ordinary commissions, unless specifically requested and at a higher price.
Tsojon Shadon never learned, or cared, to copy the carved wooden version of the aku wa'uwa mask which his father's family used to commemorate his grandmother Atsi Kisha, an Okpoto woman (figure 8).11 Until she asked for commemoration in this form, people knew only basketry.
Tsojon Shadon had a big farm and made masks and food bowls during the dry season. Of his art-making activities, aku wa'uwa brought him the largest income, followed by aku wa' unu and then food bowls. His son assisted him and was already proficient on his own. Tsojon Shadon and the various kibitzers present during his work agreed that carvers aren't especially respected by the community-only blacksmiths are greeted in the Aku's sacred enclosure or by masks during performance. On the other hand, when a man is sick or otherwise in trouble and needs a mask to bring about an improvement in his circumstances, the carver is essential.
Family and Corporate Workshops
Most brasscasters I encountered in northeastern Nigeria were individuals working on their own, almost entirely on commission. In 1970, however, I had an opportunity briefly to study a family brasscasting workshop at the Bura hamlet of Kingin, near Biu (figure 9)12 There, under the direction of Adamu, practically everyone participated in some phase of the production of donkey bells, bride-price bracelets in various configurations, archers' rings and other utilitarian configurations. They also farm. The traders who formerly came in large numbers from as far away as Shelien and Mubi to buy brasswork rarely come anymore. Nowadays, members of the family travel to periodic markets throughout the region to dispose of their production and to buy up out-offashion or broken brass artifacts for recycling.
A major, and apparently old, traditional industry in Wukari is the production of doma; large, essentially standardized cloths decorated using the tritik resist-dyeing technique (figure 10). Rolls of hand-spun, loosely woven, cotton ribbons made in Mutum Biu are brought down the Benue to Ibi and thence overland to Wukari. There they are cut into strips, which are sewn edge to edge to make up sheets approximately three by eight meters in size (figure 11 ). Geometric patterns and schematized representational designs are drawn freehand on these sheets with a knife-shaped wooden spatula and a dark, syrupy liquid. The lines are overcast with strips of raffia, the cloth is dyed with indigo, and the stitches are cut out (figures 12, 13).
As recently as 1970, traders were still buying large numbers of these cloths for export into the Cameroon grasslands for use as adornments of royal courts.13 It was my impression that many members of the Abakwariga section of Wukari, involving several extended families, participated in the industry. Domaproduction seemed to be a full-time specialization for most of the workers, with comparatively few engaging in farming or other economic activities.
In sum, the vast majority of traditional art and craft production that I encountered in northeastern Nigeria- weaving, carving, brasscasting, blacksmithing, calabash decorating-was in the hands of individuals. They were part-time specialists, usually assisted by one or more children or other immediate (junior) family members, and worked mostly on commission, or with limited stockpiling, for their immediate community. Both production and distribution were in the hands of the producer. In many ways, the emphasis was as much on the social as on the economic dimensions of the transaction.14 In industries such as brasscasting, which might involve some combination of relatively complex technology, widespread demand for standardized products, the requirement of unusual raw materials, and economics of scale, the transactional frame increasingly shifted from artist/client to artist/corporate workshop/middleman/ market/customer, and the relationship at each stage was predominantly, if not exclusively, economic. In two instances--one involving brasscasting, the other carving --these conditions stimulated the emergence of a relatively extensive, articulated, family-based workshoP?5 Finally, the production of luxury textiles (doma) for a distant elite clientele brought about even greater articulation and division of labor, characterized by increasingly monotonous, standardized, repetitive work.
The art historian Dennis Williams wrote of the art of imperial Benin: "It would be no surprise to learn, could this ever be established, that a common production, even a mass production, was known and practiced in traditional times.''16 Given comparable political, social, and economic conditions, traditional art and craft production in northeastern Nigeria probably also tended toward such preindustrial mass production with its attendant political, social, economic-and artistic--consequences.
1. Field research during 1964-66 and 1969-71 was supported by a (Ford Foundation) Foreign Area Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hayes African Area Studies Center Faculty Research Grant; my thanks are due to both programs, to the Committee on Reseach, Academic Senate, University of California (Los Angeles Division) for help in meeting expenses connected with processing my reseach materials, and to the Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, for producing the photographs used here as illustrations. Within Nigeria, the staff of the Jos Museum provided invaluable shelter and support. I must also thank the many Nigerians whose generous hospitality I enjoyed and from whose knowledge I benefited--particularly the artists whose biographies are the main focus of this study. My colleague Cecelia Klein and several of my students in the Art Department, UCLA, provided useful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
2. Craft is oriented toward functional excellence. Although the hands--and particular sensibilities--of individual craftsmen can often be identified, craftwork tends toward a conventional, culturally determined uniformity of product. Art, on the other hand, tends to subordinate function to expression, attaining a more complex, idiosyncratic mix of consistency and variation within types. Rarely is an object entirely one or the other. Craft can be arty, and art crafty; pots or baskets can be works of art, paintings or sculptures craft. There are, however, fundamental differences between art and craft, but one must be familiar with entire classes of objects in order to recognize them.
3. On the other hand, given the high esteem in which such elite artifacts are generally held, this conviction might be dismissed as simply a matter of "taste." Albeit in a slightly different sense of the term, Ezra Pound (quoted in Gerard Haggerty, "Teraoka Erotica: Erotic Works by Masami Teraoka 1968-1984," Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, January 27-March 3, 1985) responded to a critic's concerns about whether his-Pound's--work was "tasteful": "Damn your taste! I should like if possible to sharpen your perceptions. Your taste will then take care of itself."
4. This line of analysis was suggested by Judith Bettleheim's comments on the papers presented to the panel on the "Ethos of Performance in African Art" at the 1984 meeting in Los Angeles of the College Art Association. Her discussion focused on some of the premises of antiidealist, postmodern criticism, emphasizing the performer rather than the character or the "things to be done" within the performance.
Critical criteria based on modernist presumptions of clarity, precision, aesthetic coherence, and stylistic continuity simply ask inappropriate questions. Messier is better... Fruitful chaos becomes aesthetically correct and the... work of art is viewed as a document of a particular reality, a part of history, not a timeless masterpiece. Formal structure and aesthetic components are variable. Aesthetic criteria are changing and immediate.
5. John Povey and Arnold Rubin (eds.), Observations and Interpretations: 2000 Years of Nigerian Art, Occasional Paper No. 23, African Studies Center, UCLA, 1981, p. 8.
6. Quotations are from James Fernandez, "The Exposition and Imposition of Order: Aesthetic Expression in Fang Culture,'' in Warren d'Azevedo (ed.), The Traditional Artist in African Societies, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1975, pp. 194-220 and Paul Bohannan, "Artist and Critic in an African Society," in Marian W. Smith (ed.), The Artist in Tribal Society: Proceedings of a Symposium held at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, pp. 85-95.
7. See also James Fernandez, "Principles of Opposition and Vitality in Fang Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25, 1966, pp. 53-64.
8. I recently published a short article on a family-based workshop, emphasizing mask-carving procedure: "Akuma: Carving the Masks at Takum," African Arts 18(2), February 1985, pp. 60-62, 103. For present purposes, technical aspects of particular arts and crafts are not elaborated, and many influential cultural and historical variables are not taken into account. Nevertheless, these data reflect patterns that appear to be widespread in Africa and may be practically universal for small-scale societies elsewhere.
9. Maria C. Berns and Barbara Rubin Hudson, The Essential Gourd: Art and History in Northeastem Nigeria, Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles, 1986, pp. 47, 94-95, 125.
10. Recalling Bohannan's experience of Tiv methods of work: in the early stages of carving the mask shown in figure 2, most men who visited the worksite took a few whacks at the sculpture.
11. Tsojon Shadon's Atsi Kisha mask was one of only three carved aku wa'uwa I saw south of the Benue, so I suspect there was no demand. His great-greatgrandfather had also come from Okpoto, by which I understood him to mean the Alago area around Lafia, north of the Benue. The term Okpoto is, however, more generally applied to aboriginal peoples of the larger Idoma/Tgala area of the Niger-Benue confiuence.
12. See also "Bronzes of Northeastern Nigeria" in Marie-Therese Brincard (ed.), The Art of Metal in Africa, African American Institute, New York, 1983, pp. 43-44; "Bronzes of the Middle Benue," West African Journal of Archaeology 3, January 1973, pp. 221-31.
13. While the research reported here was being carried out, the workshop was involved in filling a £ 200 order for export to Cameroon. See Edith M. Chilver, "Nineteenth Century Trade in the Bamenda Grassfields, Southern Cameroons," Afrika und Ubersee 45(3), 1961, pp. 233-58, passim; also e.g.R. Lecoq, Les Bamileke, Presence Africaine, Paris, 1953, figs. 18, 109, 110; Robert and Pat Ritzenthaier, Cameroons Village: An Ethnography of the Bafut, Milwaukee Public Museum Publications in Anthropology #8, 1962, figs. 62, 64. Regarding the Abakwanga as craftsmen and long-distance traders, see my "Bronzes of the Middle Benue," West African Journal of Archaeology 3, January 1973, pp. 221-31, and "Bronzes of Northeastern Nigeria," in Marie-Therese Brincard (ed.), The Art of Metal in Africa, African-American Institute, New York, 1982, pp. 44-46.
14. Cf. the alternative destinations of Bohannan's Tiv cloth decorator's work, above, p. 10. The technique he was using, incidentally, was apparently the same as that used for the production of doma. 15. See note 8.
16. Dennis Williams, Icon and Image: A Study of Sacred and Secular Forms of African Classical Art, New York University Press, 1974, p. 147.