Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how the roles of Akan arts shifted since the 19th century from their circulation beyond Africa. Focusing on Bowdich's collection and writings, it suggests how recontextualizing Akan culture in museums informed British and African understandings of Akan arts and inspired artists.

Paper long abstract:

British member of the Africa Company Thomas Edward Bowdich's work about Akan culture during his visit in 1817 is exceptional in how his writings complement objects he donated to the British Museum. This paper explores how the roles and meanings of Akan artworks have shifted since the nineteenth century as a result of cross-cultural exchanges and the circulation of objects beyond the African continent. It focuses on Akan objects that Bowdich collected in the Ashanti Region (present-day Ghana) in 1817 and donated to the British Museum upon his return home. The British Museum holds an important collection of African art, with strengths including Akan arts from Ghana. Notably, Bowdich collected what is now the earliest remaining adinkra cloth, one of the best-known textiles of Africa. This specific adinkra cloth is extraordinary in its historical importance today as a record of interactions between Akan artists and British travelers in West Africa and the introduction of this textile practice by the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the paper considers the influence of Bowdich's work and collection on contemporary art production, such as artist Godfried Donkor's recent work that reimagines illustrations in Bowdich's text, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, which describes his travels to Akan society. The paper suggests how the recontextualization of Akan objects in museum collections that British explorers and colonial administrators acquired during the colonial period has shaped the canon of African art, informing British and African understandings of Akan arts and becoming sources of artistic inspiration for contemporary artists.

Paper short abstract:

Challenging scholarly conventions that distinguish between Western (or colonial) and vernacular understandings, the paper demonstrates how local forms of power, value and status imbued in art objects coalesced around global exchanges.

Paper long abstract:

By the late nineteenth century, African caravan traders linked to Atlantic commerce had transformed polities across eastern Angola. Locally manufactured objects of status and authority formed part of this trade, helping to constitute and change networks of government and religion. From the 1880s trade in art with Europeans further influenced networks of power. This paper uses the art trade as a window into economic, political, and religious change. How did prophets, titleholders, and warlords negotiate and consolidate positions through the trade in artefacts? Exchanges of items of status between Lunda notables and Portuguese explorer, Henrique de Carvalho, along with Carvalho's recording of Lunda oral traditions, consolidated the precarious legitimacy Lunda paramount, Mwaant Yav. Soon after, however, Chokwe titleholders, traders par excellence, offered artefacts to this bourgeoning market, including icons and carved thrones that represented Lunda oral traditions. They also began to trade objects that catered to an evolving European taste for the "fetish" and the "mask." Exchanges with colonial officials and ethnographic explorers, including Fonseca Cardoso, Emil Torday, and Frederick Starr, imbued select artefacts with new forms of authority. Art exchanges thus reveal relationships between Chokwe and Lunda notables, as well as their attempts to mobilize support with emerging colonial networks. Challenging long-established scholarly conventions that distinguish between Western (or colonial) and vernacular understandings, the paper demonstrates how vernacular forms of power, value and status - and even meanings - of objects coalesced around global exchanges rather than being discrete from them.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to investigate the different modalities of acquisition of artefacts from the Italian colonies (Eritrea, Somalia, Libya and Ethiopia) from 1880 to 1943, taking into account anthropological artefacts, zoological and botanical specimens, commodities science collections.

Paper long abstract:

My PhD project intends to highlight the importance that the colonial collections, took on in creating the Italian Empire and shaping the colonial and race consciousness of the conquerors. Not only anthropological artefacts, but also zoological and botanical specimens, and commodities science collections, contributed in creating a "colonial mindset" for the Italian people, displaying the richness of the colonies.

In fact, both Liberal and Fascist Italy invested a great amount of resources in collecting and exhibiting artefacts and specimens from the colonies, displayed in museums (around 60 all over the country still exhibit colonial collections nowadays) and temporary exhibitions and fairs. Exhibiting was intended as a way to get to know, and in this way truly posses, those far away lands.

Collections were usually catalogued and displayed by their conditions of acquisition: for example the collections of weapons, like the Ethiopian bows and arrows, collected by various soldiers during the first and the second Abyssinian campaign, were hosted (and still are) in the War Museum of Rovereto, a small city close to Trento and the border with Austria, in a museum celebrating the First World War. The "colonial adventure" was, in fact, presented as the perfect coronation of the military making of the country, in a process started with the wars of Risorgimento and continued during WWI.

Religious and spiritual objects, on the contrary, were usually collected by missionaries and displayed in museum such as the Ethiopian Museum Guglielmo Massaia of Frascati, named so after the cardinal very active in promoting the Italian (and catholic) expansion in Africa.

Paper short abstract:

Field-based documentation offers possibilities for recovering detailed information about local agency in the production and use of the arts. But such documentation also often entails significant limitations in the recovery of local agency, requiring scholars to grapple with the nature of evidence.

Paper long abstract:

When Leo Frobenius and other members of the 1907-9 Deutsche Inner-Afrikanische Forschungs-Expedition traveled through areas of present-day Mali, they gathered information about objects they encountered and collected. They also created detailed drawings of the works. Many of the objects did not survive the twentieth century, so the drawings provide the only remaining record of the objects' existence and form. The team's notes provide additional insights into the works and into the team's collection methods. In this presentation, I will examine the team's documentation of arts of power associations, organizations in western West Africa that promote the exchange of potent knowledge across vast interpersonal networks. I will investigate where certain kinds of objects were reportedly made, who reportedly created them, and why people seem to have made them. I will consider how early-colonial-era, field-based documentation of African arts offers possibilities for recovering detailed information about local agency in the production and use of works. But I will also demonstrate how such documentation often entails significant limitations in the recovery of local agency. It requires scholars to grapple with the nature of their evidence. In my presentation, I will draw on recent research I conducted in the archives of the Frobenius-Institut as well as my own fieldwork in West Africa and focused study of similar objects in museum collections.

Paper short abstract:

By linking the objects from the early 20th century Rev. Moon African collection to photographic and manuscript archives questions about how the objects were acquired, and in what circumstances, are addressed to improve understanding of historical cross-cultural interactions and connections.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on the early 20th century collection made by Reverend James Moon, working in central Africa for the Regions Beyond Missionary Union (1907-1910 and 1913-1916). This is one of many historic Africa collections in the National Museums Scotland made by Scottish missionaries who lived and worked in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The collection was included in a one-year collections project in 2016, which addressed questions about the field practices of Scottish missionaries in Africa and their position in institutional and informal networks that connected field and museum. The aim was to piece together, where possible, how objects were acquired, from whom, why, and in what circumstances, to improve understanding of historical cross-cultural interactions and connections.

Many of the objects in the Moon collection were items worn as indicators of age grade, status, wealth and ethnic identity. Artefacts include brass and copper personal adornment, raffia woven skirts and belts with attachments of animal skin pouches, bones, horns, shells, beads and amulets. Collected during a period of change from locally sourced and traded materials to imported European clothing, these objects are important material evidence of local patronage and demand.

Connecting these objects with personal correspondence, missionary archival material and a fascinating collection of related contemporary photography this paper aims to better understand the significance of such collections in networks of trade and power, and the construction and maintenance of cultural identity.

Paper short abstract:

In 1971, Oliveira and Pereira, both curators at the Ethnology Museum of Portugal, assembled a collection in Angola. By valuing art over artifact, they inserted their collection in a network of colonial institutions and ideas, and complicated the relation between objects, colonialism, and museums.

Paper long abstract:

In 1971, at the peak of Portuguese colonialism, Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira and Benjamin Pereira, both curators at the Ethnology Museum of Portugal, traveled to the Portuguese colony of Angola. Their goal was to acquire a small but rich collection of Angolan objects from different provinces, and to visit the Angolan museums that held similar objects in their collections and displays. In my paper, I show that these anthropology curators valued "art" over "artifact." By reframing the identity of those objects as art and artifact at the point of their acquisition in Angola, Veiga de Oliveira and Benjamin Pereira both inserted those objects in a network of colonial institutions and ideas and complicated the relation between objects, colonialism, and anthropology museums.