It is immediately obvious that this is an unusual publication. Few dictionaries require fieldwork of a reviewer but this is so vast that Mohammed must go to the mountain and read it in the publisher's office. To concentrate on one continent, as I shall here, is perhaps to undermine much of the point of the work, since its main justification lies in its sheer universal coverage. There is great profit to be gained from browsing from the Golden Stool of Asante to an entry on the evolution of the chair as artefact.
The African element comprises a huge general section, followed by regional surveys and then tribal and national entries scattered throughout the remaining 31 volumes of text as the alphabet requires. There are inevitable oddities. In Africa, this arrangement gives an awkward weighting with Bamenda, Bamileke and Bangwa followed hotfoot by Cameroon. Igala gets a tribal section all to itself while Benin is dismembered and spread among funerary art, metalwork, portraiture et al.
The foremost impression that emerges is one of enormous concentration. A dictionary of this kind is not the place to look for revolutionary originality and mostly the editors have rounded up the usual suspects, having them repeat what they have already said at much greater length elsewhere. We get Jean Borgatti on portraiture, Philip Ravenhill on Baule, Danielle Gallois Duquette on Bijogo, Marla Berns on ceramics, Eugenia Herbert on metallurgy, so that much of it reads like a reworking of the past ten years of African Arts, with a heavy preponderance of solid American scholarship. There is a wealth of general information here about the scope, interpretation, function and technology of art, together with plenty of case studies exploring everything from gender to gesture with some sophistication. It has clearly been an interesting exercise to demand brief factuality of some writers on African art who spend their lives splitting hairs in a leisurely subjunctive mode. The enormous pressure here has produced some diamonds where there has been a definite gain in the crystallising process. From others - predictably - we get dust. Particularly useful are short sections like that on middle Niger cultures by the Roderick and Susan McIntosh, clearing away a decade's worth of scholarly rubble and asking that most terrifying of questions to an academic, "so what?" For many, there is a tendency to write in examination questions. "The Asante have no traditional masquerades, partly owing to the dominance of the institution of chieftancy, which discouraged the introduction of masking cults that might rival their power". Discuss. Yet other contributors find the demand of authorial omniscience too much and give voice to sheer frustration, tending to write about how little is actually known. "Despite much effort by many scholars, the study of Bamana art is in its infancy."
The format reifies the assumption that western art is done by individual artists, African art by faceless tribes. Contributors are understandably itchy about this and a standard introductory ploy in the tribal entries is to deny that the relevant tribe even exists while giving the geographical and historical information about it that the guidelines obviously required.
While the index and cross-references work well, there is a curious lack of editorial consistency so that different contributors use the end-of-section bibliographies in radically divergent ways. Most irritating is their arrangement in date as opposed to alphabetical order since dates and references may or may not be given in the text at all, according to the writer's arbitrary pleasure. The introduction, with art-historical optimism, claims that this allows them to work as a 'historiography' of a subject. It certainly makes them very much harder to use for any sensible purpose.
Nigel Barley is assistant keeper, Museum of Mankind, London.
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