A Carved Tusk and its Undertones
A late 19th century carved ivory tusk from western central Africa is kept erect in a glass box, affixed to a perfectly white wall in an art and anthropology museum in Hanover, New Hampshire, 6500 miles from the place of its creation. However, this isn’t as weird as it sounds. The ivory tusk was not necessarily created to serve an intrinsic function, but rather to be sold into a foreign market, according to the blurb that is posted beside the tusk. The position of the object as a commodity is incredibly important to analyzing it. Franz Boas spoke of historical particularism, the idea that you cannot separate a culture from every single piece of its history. A piece of art cannot be separated by its artist, and since the person belongs to a historically particular culture, the art is therefore historically particular as well. Questions of authenticity arise: can an art piece be truly authentic if created for foreign exchange. What if foreign exchange is an important piece of the culture, as it had been in west central Africa for hundreds of years prior to the creation of this piece? The Australian film Cannibal Tours examines these questions by presenting tourists and their naïve wishes for ‘authentic’ art not purely created for their consumption, ignoring historical particularism, an idea that should be applied when analyzing the Hood Museum’s carved tusk and its meaning. We cannot be so naïve when looking at the tusk.
The first thing one notices about the tusk is how intricate it is. Its creation would have taken significant training and knowledge of delicate techniques to accomplish such small and detailed carvings. The tusk is white, but not purely white, more of a beige-ish cream than a white, easily comparable due to the stark white wall behind it. A helix runs throughout the tusk, appearing to look like ribbon. Male and female looking figures coexist on the various levels that the helix creates, doing numerous tasks like playing an instrument or carrying a bag, all with the same facial expression. There is also the occasional rope or stick that connects the helix-created levels. Also connecting the various people is the physical contact they share, frequent in the piece but not between every pair of figures. At the very top of the tusk, a baby sits on all fours, perched atop their mother’s head. The blurb explains how the woman being close to the top tells us that the tusk came from a matrilineal society, but I am nervous to impose a hierarchical understanding on the piece, even if the helix does create stratified levels. Were I able to talk to the artist, I would ask them if we are to truly understand the piece as a hierarchy, or a more egalitarian depiction of life. I would also ask them why they drew the facial expressions that they did, uniform but also interpretable as really any emotion. To the point of historical particularism, I would also ask the artist how much, if at all, they factored in the foreign markets into their depictions of culture.
To carve a piece like this, the artist would not only need the learned dexterity, but also the cultural knowledge of western central Africa. The piece represents an expansive view of the everyday tasks accomplished by the people in the culture that the author seeks to depict. The author would therefore need to know these everyday tasks as well as the hierarchies that seem to be implied by the helix-created levels, if the helix does imply hierarchy.
The piece no doubt depicts a culture, but is it an accurate depiction of the culture? The piece was made for a foreign market; does this fact eliminate all authenticity and correctness from the tusk’s depiction of local culture? Is the piece a reflection of what a potential buyer would like to see, instead of a depiction of what is? To the first question, the answer is that ‘authenticity’ is a word rooted in fantasy. The only way to get an object not created for its buyer is to steal or to buy something that wasn’t ever intended to be sold when it was created, making the acquiring of something truly authentic potentially immoral as well as extremely difficult. To the question of whether the tusk depicts the culture accurately, it is simply something we cannot know because we cannot separate the moment in time from the art created at that time. Even if the object wasn’t created for a foreign market, it would still have been created in west central Africa in the late 19th century, a place thoroughly meddled in and affected by foreign action. It is therefore unrealistic, selfish, and naïve to anger one’s self with the piece’s supposed lack of authenticity, as the tourists in Cannibal Tours do frequently while negotiating for lower prices among art sellers in Papua New Guinea. I bring this up because, as a lover of pre-colonial African history, I myself felt disappointed as I walked around the “traditional” African art room and couldn’t find a single piece dated to before Africa’s colonial period. However, this disappointment over lack of access cannot be extended to a belittling of African art that was created during the colonial period. Art from different times is interesting and different fundamentally because of its different contexts. While a piece of art from the 19th century may depict a different culture than one from the 13th, they are both true, real depictions, each a product of their unique contexts.
Summarily, the tusk is a product of an entire, multidimensional context. The artist’s economic wishes played a role when carving a depiction of their culture for a foreign audience. In addition, the culture that is depicted is not stagnant itself, as historical particularism dictates. The exact culture that the artist experienced is not the same as the culture of the same people in the same place 100 years prior, when the slave trade thrived, and it certainly isn’t the same as the culture of the same people in the same place 100 years after, in independent Angola. Cannibal Tours exposes how ugly the idea that culture is not historically particular can be, showing tourists’ complaining that a place they have changed the entire economy of doesn’t have art that is ‘authentic’ enough for their liking. We must debunk this complaint and instead note that the depictions we are offered, like this depiction of late 19th century west central Africa on an ivory tusk, are influenced by the culture’s history, and a direct product of it.
Bibliography
Cannibal Tours. Directed by Dennis O'Rourke.
Carved Tusk. Late 19th Century. Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH.