76 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 3

Book Reviews

The Making of Bamana Sculpture: Creativity andGender, SARAH C. BRETT-SMITH. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1995. RES Monographson Anthropology and Aesthetics, xx + 352 pp. 60b/w illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, in-dex. $95.00 (cloth)

PETER MARK

Wesleyan University

Sarah Brett-Smith's book, The Making of BamanaSculpture, undertakes nothing less than to change ourconception of the nature of power and creativity inBamana religion, ritual, and artistic creation. In theprocess, she uncovers and details the seminal role thatwomen play in that universe. Her central thesis, that"in the Mande world, the female sex is both sacredand terrifying," is carefully developed and docu-mented, as she describes the intellectual world ofMande sculptors—powerful elders, blacksmithswhose carvings embody the power of the Komosociety.

This book's strength lies in its painstaking ethno-graphic description of the work of several elder black-smiths, abetted by analysis of ritual, of linguisticterminology, and, as a leitmotif, of the interweavingof the spiritual world and thfc sexual lives of herinformants.

Brett-Smith writes beautiful prose; while her inter-pretations at times make for difficult reading, herstyle is always clear. Her arguments are logicallydeveloped and her evidence—backed by verbatimtranscriptions of interviews—is right there for theworld to see and critique. She is nothing if not coura-geous.

The universe which Brett-Smith describes is aworld characterized by relentless and ruthless com-petition, a world obsessed by sex, suffused with blood,and faced with the omnipresent threat of death ormurder. The sculptor's world is a dangerous place;

carvers of powerful ritual objects are continuallythreatened by poisoning (p. 64); in order successfullyto continue their work they must be willing to sacrificeboth their sex lives and the lives of other humanbeings (p. 67). They inhabit a "labyrinth of hiddenenvy" (p. 73), and their family usually suffers from"madness and disability" (p. 74). In brief:

the successful sculptor lives in a perpetual internalconflict from which death is the only escape . . . hemust kill to create and he cannot refuse to createwithout being killed, (p. 83)

The author presents this not as metaphor nor asideology but as objectifiable reality.

This nightmare vision is an idiosyncratic view ofBamana society. Brett-Smith's earlier work, informedby a similar perspective, has been understandablycontroversial. The image she depicts contrasts vividlywith that presented by most other Mande scholars(and their numbers are legion). I am not a Mandescholar, and so I can only judge the accuracy of hervision by comparing her work to that of other scholarsand by drawing analogies to another culture, on thefringes of the Mande world, where I have carried outfield work. Is Bamana society so dreadful as sheimplies? I have my doubts. Do sex and childbirthprovide, as she suggests, the template for under-standing Bamana society? It seems to me that it isstretching things to write:

Men who meet in secret associations for the purposeof agreeing on group rituals and "laws" are imitatingthe primordial secret agreement generated by sexbetween a man and a woman. They are taking theforms and structure of the first "jo," the sexual act,and extending it to the community at large, (p. 213)

Impressed as I was by her many insights and ofteninnovative approach, I find that her vision of a worldobsessed with sex and blood smacks of reductionism;that vision leaves me skeptical. But then again, "achacun son Bambara."1

BOOK REVIEWS 77

More troublesome to me was the author's methodof obtaining some of the information which becamethe backbone of her study. Aware that elderly ritualexperts would not entrust privileged information to awoman, the author made use of an intermediary, aman named Adama Mara. Mr. Mara taped his inter-views, "convincing [the elders] that the tape record-ings were really an aside in his own search for ritualknowledge." (p. 2) The informants, Brett-Smith nev-ertheless argues, "were fully aware that I planned towrite a book from our joint work." Just how fully didthese elders comprehend what it meant, to have abook written based on transcribed recordings? Theauthor herself argues that these same elders, living invillages remote from the modern world (p. 20), rep-resent an intellectual universe that "was still fully inplace as of 1880." It seems to me that she cannot haveit both ways. Either her informants inhabit a kind ofethnographic present characterized by pre-colonial"traditional" thought and ritual, in which case theycould not have been fully aware of what it means tohave one's words transcribed and published, or theylive in a world transformed in some ways by books,by their knowledge of Europeans who fly in airplanes(p. 175), and by the influence of a colonial andpost-colonial society and economy. In the latter case,the author's use of an ethnographic present is mis-leading and inaccurate.

I say this, aware that the particular strength of thebook lies in the richness of the material about anintellectual system that is the purview of an elite. Hadshe not resorted to this system, Brett-Smith mightnever have gained access to important material.Clearly, Brett-Smith faced a difficult choice. Suchchoices are, however, common in ethnographic andhistorical fieldwork. I would have preferred to err onthe side of discretion.

An ahistorical approachI believe that this book's most salient shortcoming

is the lack of historical perspective. By her own ad-mission, Brett-Smith is "somewhat vague in definingthe time period in which the practices and ideasdescribed . . . apply" (p. 19). Basically, she adopts an"ethnographic present," founded on the assumptionthat "the farther out from an urban center one travels,the farther back in time one moves" (p. 20). Theahistorical approach is a serious shortcoming. The useof an "ethnographic present" by anthropologists or arthistorians is a dated and dubious method. In thisstudy, the precolonial period is reduced to an undif-

ferentiated and timeless era, characterized by "condi-tions of constant political and physical insecurity" (p.93). Most significantly, the author ignores a substan-tial body of historical scholarship focusing on thehistory of the Bamana and the related question of"Bamana" ethnicity, work which is of immediate rele-vance to her thesis.

Where Brett-Smith presents the Bamana as an eth-nic group with more or less fixed membership and aunified and identifiable religion, Jean Bazin and Jean-Loup Amselle have long argued that ethnic categoriesand culture have been and continue to be subject tocontinuous historical change. Bazin, in a major articlepublished in 1985, suggested that "Bamana" is a rela-tive term, one which is contextually determined andused by local Muslims to designate non-Muslim peas-ants (Bazin 1985: 99) He further claims that "theBamana" are a heterogeneous and fluid group: "Onecan become Bamana because one decides to drinkbeer [i.e., to ignore the Muslim prohibition on alco-hol]" (Bazin 1985: 100, 102). Bazin goes so far as tosay that Bamana religion consists of practices of dis-parate and heterogeneous origin, brought togetherunder the rubric bamanaya primarily by virtue of theiropposition to Islamic ritual. Now, Bazin may bewrong. But his work cannot be ignored. If true, itsimplications for Brett-Smith's study are immense. Sheneeds to address his thesis, if only to refute it.

Amselle's Logiqu.es metisses, published in 1990, fur-ther develops the thesis that Bamana identity is fluidand relative. His claim that "to be Bamana is not animmutable state but rather an acquired status" thechange in "ethnic" identity being intimately linkedwith religious conversion away from Islam, also chal-lenges Brett-Smith's model of an almost unchanging"traditional" Bamana religion (Amselle 1990: 82,84).While Brett-Smith cites Amselle in her bibliography,(Bazin's article is not cited) she makes no mention—or at least I could find none—of his central ideas,which challenge the conceptual framework of herstudy.

If Bazin and Amselle are even partly correct, thenthe model of "traditional" Bamana religion breaksdown. Even if they exaggerate, it seems to me unlikelythat Bamana ritual specialists, living in a region whereIslam has been a critically important cultural factorfor six or seven centuries, could have remained iso-lated from the beliefs and rituals of the Muslim relig-ion. Some of Brett-Smith's own data suggestinteraction between the smiths and Islam. The black-smiths undertake their most important ritual carvings

78 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 3

on Friday. They refer to their female spirits (source ofspiritual power, sexual problems, and artistic inspira-tion) as djinn (jina). Before undertaking a commis-sion, one elderly carver even offers a prayer in Arabic(p. 98). Yet the author maintains a "traditional vs.Islamic" paradigm, never once investigating the pos-sibility of Islamic influence on the thought, much lessthe ritual or the sculpture of the blacksmiths.

The Making of Bamana Sculpture would also havebenefitted, had the historical dimension been ex-panded to consider the work done on women's oraltraditions by Mamadou Diawara (1990). (SomeBamana are apparently of Soninke origin; certainly,the cultural similarities between Soninke and Bamanamight have suggested an important additional avenueof inquiry, one the author could have carried outwithout an intermediary, into the history of women'spower.) And finally, recent work by Robert Launay(1995)2—some of which was not available to Brett-Smith while she was writing, but all of which demon-strates the advantages of following a dynamic modelof social groupings—suggests that not only ethnicity,but also the casted groups of nyamakalaw representfluid and contextually defined groupings, rather thanthe fixed categories that appear in The Making ofBamana Sculpture. This book would have been moreuseful to other scholars had it incorporated an histori-cal dimension rather than taking a synchronic ap-proach to its subject.

In sum, I found The Making of Bamana Sculptureto be a book with breathtaking though controversialinsights and important information about the processby which Bamana blacksmiths prepare for and thenundertake important carving commissions. At thesame time, however, the book has serious methodo-logical and conceptual shortcomings which signifi-cantly diminish its contribution to West Africanstudies. <•

Notes

1. The tide of Jean Bazin's seminal essay on the relativityof "Bamana" ethnicity (1985).

2. A similarly nuanced view of caste and ethnic groupamong Mande peoples as "not frozen tableaux but ongo-ing processes" is enunciated by Adria La Violette (1995).

References

Amselle, Jean-Loup1990 Logiques mdtisses. Paris: Bibliotheque scientifique

Payot.

Bazin, Jean1985 "A chacun son Bambara." In Au coeur de Vethnie:

Ethnie, tribalisme et itat enAfrique. Jean-Loup Amselle and E.NFBokolo, eds. Paris: De'couverte.

Diawara, Mamadou1990 La graine de la parole. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.

Launay, Robert1995 The Dieli of Korhogo, Identity and Identification." In

Status and Identity in West Africa. David Conrad and BarbaraFrank, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

La Violette, Adria1995 "Women Craft Specialists in Jenne." In Status and

Identity in West Africa. David Conrad and Barbara Frank, eds.Pp. 170-81. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

• • •

Eagle Transforming: The Art of Robert Davidson.ROBERT DAVIDSON, with photographs by ULLI

STELTZER. Seattle: University of WashingtonPress; and Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & Mcln-tyre, 1995. x + 164 pp. 103 duotone illustrations,chronology, notes. $39.95 (cloth).

CHARLOTTE TOWNSEND-GAULT

Bowen Island, British Columbia

Book jackets speak volumes. Eagle Transforming iswrapped in a rich bronze—the glowing patina withwhich Robert Davidson endows freshly cut westernred cedar. Its richness also emphasises that, for theHaida, "art" was, and is, synonymous with wealth.The book, Davidson's own story about his life as acarver, has, as one of its subtexts, the enriching ofHaida culture. The bronze cover frames a charac-teristic black and white Ulli Steltzer photograph hov-ering over Davidson's hands at work. Picking up onthe swirling grain, rippling adze marks and highrelief, it is as considered and detached as the art itselfand the groomed text that, with a hundred others, itcomplements. Steltzer has been photographingDavidson at work for twenty years, supporting, inter-preting, helping to make him. There is nothing casual,experimental or tentative about text or pictures.Handsome as it is, this is anything but a coffee tablebook, lovely and finally unimportant. There are nowasted words, no superfluous images; one under-stands that the work is too urgent, the drive toostrong.

Another subtext is the relationship between worklike Davidson's, as he reanimates "tradition," and the