Power Objects: On the Transient Nature of Classifications, with Examples from the Kwilu Region in Congo-Brazzaville

Abstract

| african arts SUMMER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 2 Classifications, typologies, labels, and other organizational tools help us wade through complex cultural contexts and specificities. They may be a point of departure that suggests clarity, providing a veil of reassurance. Yet, if not subject to renewal in terms of temporal and spatial considerations, they can become static mechanisms that constrain and obscure the wealth of changing and seemingly anomalous factors that are essential features of dynamic cultural realities. As Gonseth et al. have stated, “the world cannot be defined solely in terms of classifications ... it has to be looked at through, between, over, and above the expressions of our codes” (2013: 19). In the domain of art, the naming and labeling game (attribution, provenance, identification of object types) is a major concern, with very different issues preoccupying scholars and those in the private sector. Where the monetary value of art works remains the fundamental driver, perennial “stylistic” criteria of authenticity related to ethnic labels are repeatedly evoked and maintained to preserve easily recognizable market indicators. In scholarly circles, Renée Bravmann definitely “opened the frontiers” in 1973 by showing “avenues of mobility” beyond the “frozen cultures” of William Fagg’s 1960s “one tribe, one style” ethnic paradigm (Bravmann 1973: 9, 10; Fagg 1965: 11), yet the “single stories” approach, to which Gagliardi and Biro (2019:1) have recently referred, in which an object is attributed to “a whole group of people or a geographical area,” is still currently used. Maxime de Formanoir (2019) has shown how the so-called Kota label, for example, applied in a 2017 major Paris exhibition to no fewer than 102 “reliquary figures”—aesthetically aligned simply on the basis of morphology and style—has obscuring their exact regional provenance and context of production and use. My concern here goes beyond the preoccupation with style and ethnicity, two vast topics of debate (see Gagliardi et al. 2020: 16–21) which remain prime Western art historical and art market concerns, that are at times a little too intertwined. What interests me has to do with the reading of interethnic visual forms, their local performative and ritual use, interpretation and labeling. To exemplify this I will deal with a cultural feature of the Congo-Gabonese Atlantic coastal region, but essentially from the Congolese sector of Kwilu province of Congo-Brazzaville, where I undertook research in the 1990s. As I have not conducted research north of the Congolese border, this research note unpacks an unbiased and hopefully useful southern view of local specificities that characterize a part of a more extensive, variegated landscape of practices and beliefs. My study of the literature and field research conducted in Congo-Brazzaville has led me to realize the extent to which intertwined, changing realities may be confusing to those unfamiliar with the terrain (Hersak 2001). In the absence of historical evidence and collection data about specific objects, as well as the anonymity (whether chosen or imposed) of carvers and users, selective readings appear as the only avenues of possible interpretation simply because they are easier to deal with. I have referred previously to the homogenization and simplistic interpretation of the vast Kongo-speaking complex, a sociocultural entity that stretches from southern Gabon to northern Angola (Hersak 2001). This “single stories” misrepresentation may be due in part to the difficulty of dealing with an overwhelming amount of documentation that exists on the region, dating from the sixteenth century onwards, but also to the sparsity of more recent field investigations. In reading synchronic and diachronic cultural features of a region, identification of object types has been subject to constraining academic taxonomies. For example, having dispensed with the admittedly vague term “fetish” (at least in English), which had been applied since the contact period in the early literature research note