Introduction

REFERRING TO A bovine-shaped object with a distinctive dark, crusty surface, the contemporary Brooklyn-based artist Nayland Blake says, “So much of its meaning as a sculpture is bound up, not in what you can see on the outside, but what it contains within.” Indeed, dark lines, seemingly left from material that once dripped, and cracks in the crusty, indeterminate matter covering the sculpture’s surface hint at layers of barely visible or unseen materials added to the object over time (fig. intro.1).¹ The work is held in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), which identifies the sculpture as a boli (sg.; boliw, pl.), a West African Mande-language term for an accumulative work or assemblage created from the layering of organic and inorganic materials. West African power associations, the organizations that produce and maintain boliw, have, for more than a century, sponsored compelling arts that have captured the attention of local, national, and international audiences.

The idea of power in the term power association refers to the capacity to effect change, exemplifying the concept as art historian Arnold Rubin delineated it in 1974 with respect to accumulative arts produced broadly across the African continent. Positing that accumulative arts in African contexts reflect individuals’ careful decisions about how to manage diverse resources and concentrate potent energies, Rubin (1974, 8) focuses on boliw to illustrate the point.² Members of power associations are specialists who create accumulative sculptures with complex internal structures and indeterminate surface matter as they attempt to manage resources in this world and the otherworld in order to effect change. In this sense, the composite works are power objects. As power association members expand their knowledge and use of potent materials and energies to solve problems among individuals and communities, they invest in and maintain dynamic arts.

Circumstances for viewing power association assemblages and installations in locales where the works are made shift from intimate settings to public spaces, from small rooms to outdoor courtyards, and from day to night. Power association members relocate or perform with assemblages and installations during some events, and they store objects in their workrooms or other buildings. They also augment and edit accumulative objects when working on their own, collaborating with their colleagues, or performing for smaller or larger audiences. One assemblage created and maintained by Burkinabe power association leader Karfa Coulibaly has constantly changed since I first encountered it in 2004. Coulibaly has worked alone and with colleagues to create and recreate the accumulative work. He has added materials to and subtracted materials from it. As he has adjusted its location and staging, the assemblage’s audiences and contexts have likewise shifted. Coulibaly affords beholders only partial views, piquing interest while never completely revealing all the materials or methods used to construct or maintain the work. In a single instance of its display as well as over time, the work’s visual appearance fluctuates. Process, rather than completion, is integral to its and other power association arts’ conception and design.

The organizations’ assemblages and installations as well as their architecture and performances reflect the acumen and aims of power association leaders, specialists who wield knowledge of potent matter and intangible energies to solve problems facing individuals and communities. Seeking to create arts that advertise their knowledge and skill without disclosing everything they know, power association leaders manipulate visibility and foster intentional ambiguity. They deliberately manage tension between seeing and not seeing, between specificity and indeterminacy, and between the secret and its revelation, engendering what Michael Taussig describes in another context as a “striptease of hidden presence” (1999, 34).³ This striptease heightens beholders’ awareness of exceptional power and profound knowledge wielded by specialists. Thus, specialists and their audiences mediate mutual recognition of each other’s potential agency through the arts.

My extensive field, archival, and object-centered research shows concealment and revelation of an object’s elements or of a performance to be constantly oscillating features rather than static boundary markers. My findings reconfigure premises for discussions of secrecy in arts of Africa that have focused on how arts mark boundaries between people privy to secrets and people without access to them (e.g., Nooter [Roberts] 1993; Guyer 2018, 32). The decision to maintain a secret or divulge information often depends on the particular contexts and people involved (cf. Bellman 1984; Piot 1993). Attention paid to such details leads me also to consider responses of audiences, the people who know what not to know (cf. Taussig 1999). Scholars of European and Euro-American painting and sculpture from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have investigated interplay among makers, audiences, and the arts (e.g., Potts 2000; Gamboni 2002). But scholars of so-called historical or classical arts of Africa have often posited group responses to objects or performances, rarely investigating how particular makers, audiences, and arts intersect within specific contexts.⁴ The singular assemblages, installations, architecture, and performances at the core of my analysis bear witness to historical dynamism and specificity in the making, reception, and circulation of arts that transcend cultural or ethnic group boundaries, even though power association arts have long been framed as products of discrete groups.

“The singular has often been sacrificed to the general in the human sciences,” anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano (2003, 6) observes, and “more often than not, this has resulted in a distorting simplification of the human condition.” Shifting my focus away from previously limiting analytical categories allows me to consider how each construction or performance reflects particular individuals and contexts involved in the making of a work. This approach aligns theory with practice in an analysis of field, archival, and museum-based data. And even if we cannot ever recover information about the exact individuals and circumstances surrounding the creation and use of a work, we can recognize that it exists and makes sense in relation to particular people and circumstances. We can also focus on other important qualities of power association arts, such as the tension between visibility and invisibility that is central to their conception and use. No longer constrained by the notion that power associations and their arts express a particular cultural or ethnic essence, I examine strategies of seeing and not seeing at play in the organizations’ arts. I thus highlight complex aesthetic and intellectual bases for making and viewing power association arts, opening new possibilities for the study of historical or classical arts of Africa grounded in the specificity of individual works, their making, and their reception.

FIGURE intro.2. “Kono house in Sangaradugu,” 1908. Ink drawing on paper by Reinhard Hugershoff; 30 × 14.5 cm. Frobenius-Institut an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, EBA-B 00226. © Frobenius-Institut.

Frames for Analysis

Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, power associations have served as great patrons for the arts in western West Africa. Today the organizations include Komo, Kono, Nama, Nya, and Wara, as well as hunters’ associations often called dozo tonw (pl.; dozo ton, sg.). Operating across thousands of miles from Guinea to Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire to Senegal, local power association chapters have numbered in the hundreds in recent decades. They have transcended cultural, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and geopolitical boundaries for more than a century (cf. Diamitani 1999; Gagliardi 2010). They have sponsored and continue to invest in elaborate assemblages, installations, architecture, and performances, including masquerades (figs. intro.2–intro.3). And for more than one hundred years, power association assemblages as well as the ambiguous nature of their meaning and composition have captured the attention of European and American observers.

FIGURE intro.3. Buffalo masquerader of the Kangala hunters’ association performing in front of a Wara power association house. Kangala, Burkina Faso, April 30, 2007. Detail of fieldwork image: 2007–7355. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

When French Catholic missionary Joseph Henry disassembled at least several boliw in 1910, he apparently found plant matter and animal parts in them.⁵ He also reported that he had heard about other boliw containing human remains and had even seen one such assemblage (Henry 1910, 140). The ethics of the missionary’s actions and complexities of his claims aside, Henry’s efforts to discern the material composition of boliw attest that the objects resist complete apprehension for audiences not privy to processes of their making. On September 6, 1931, and again on the following day, French travelers Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, and Éric Lutten seized several objects, including a bovine-shaped boli, from Kono power association houses in Kemeni and “Dyabougou” (possibly Diébougou), two towns in present-day Mali (fig. intro.4). The trio were part of the 1931–1933 Mission Dakar-Djibouti, an ethnographic expedition sponsored by the French government and led by Griaule.⁶ According to Leiris, the men were fascinated by the boli’s animal-like form as well as the coagulated blood they speculated was incorporated into it (Leiris [1934] 1981, 105; [1934] 2017, 154–156).

Even if Leiris encountered the bovine-shaped boli in situ before snatching it, his description of the object, its materials, or its functions may reveal more about his and his counterparts’ assumptions than about the concerns of the object’s makers. Indeed, Leiris reports that the travelers fled Dyabougou and stopped in a third, unnamed town, where they removed additional objects from a Kono house before continuing to San, where the group ate lunch (Leiris [1934] 1981, 105; [1934] 2017, 156). When Leiris participated in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti and published his account of the voyage, he worked within an intellectual climate that regarded African populations as isolated and their cultural productions as “pure” and “primitive” (Colleyn 2009b, 22–23). Leiris’s reductive framing denies change over time and specificity of place; what we do not learn from Leiris are the names of the people who oversaw the Kono chapters in Kemeni, Dyabougou, and the unnamed town near San, the histories of each chapter, the circumstances surrounding the construction and use of each of the objects the French travelers stole, nor the particular materials used to create any one work.

If we knew who oversaw the chapters, the histories of each chapter, the circumstances surrounding the construction and use of each object, and the particular materials used to create any one work, and if we could connect the people, chapters, and objects to other people, chapters, and objects, then we would be able to trace specific networks and histories. We would better understand how power associations, like other institutions across the African continent, have historically operated and continue to operate within local, national, transnational, and international spheres. But foreign observers have not regularly published information about such dimensions of the organizations. We would also better assess how the materials, form, and significance of any single power association assemblage, installation, building, or performance depend on and reflect specific individuals, processes, and contexts involved in the work’s creation, maintenance, and use. We would be able to write detailed histories that capture some of the complexities of people’s lived experiences and art production in the region.

FIGURE intro.4. Unrecorded makers. Power object identified by the musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac as composite object (boli) linked to Kono from Mali, Ségou region, village of Dyabougou, Bamana culture. Before 1931. Earth mixed with beeswax, coagulated blood, and wood; 44 × 59 × 24 cm, 20,255 g. Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, Mission Dakar-Djibouti (71.1931.74.1091.1). Photo: Patrick Gries. © musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Theory has outpaced changes in practice in the study and presentation of the so-called historical or classical arts of Africa, including power association arts. Since the early twentieth century, authors tended to describe the organizations and their arts as products of Bamana or Mande groups, the latter often used to name a family of languages common across West Africa, one that encompasses the smaller Bamana-language, or Bamanakan, group.⁷ The approach corresponds with a widespread method for categorizing and analyzing African phenomena in terms of discrete cultural or ethnic groups, each with its own language. It also implies the possibility of recovering some “pure,” precolonial version of the phenomena attributed to a particular group. Yet scholars have repeatedly recognized the role of colonial governments in the delineation of discrete cultural or ethnic groups. They have shown how the framing of analysis in terms of such categories provided a foundation for academic study of Africa in Europe and North America, and they have demonstrated that the approach obscures historical complexities.⁸

While a number of twentieth-century publications characterize power associations as Bamana or Mande institutions, observers throughout the twentieth century referred to power associations in communities that they identified with other groups. Yet certain features of the organizations emerge again and again across accounts. Repetition of such information raises the possibility that, in some ways, the organizations and their arts have varied little across space and through time, even as they have transcended cultural and ethnic group delineations. It also may suggest that later observers repeated findings of their predecessors without investigating the reliability or validity of information or without citing their predecessors (cf. Vansina 1984, 54; Kasfir 1986, 12; Howell and Prevenier 2001, 63–64). Earlier accounts are often impossible to cross-check, yet details in the accounts may endure as solid fact.⁹ Overlaps in different accounts from various observers further tend to obscure insight into important factors, such as how certain chapters developed, the specific contexts in which they operated, or the particular circumstances surrounding the making or use of their arts.

One consistent finding among observers, including myself, is that power association leaders are specialists who have developed and continue to develop expert knowledge of tangible materials and intangible energies in order to control criminal behavior, address daily concerns, and help individuals achieve particular goals. The specialists wield their knowledge to help themselves, their families, and their clients. For example, a power association leader may help a man who wants to win over the woman whom he has been courting, the father of a baby girl who has been inexplicably sick for weeks, and even the foreign researcher who wants her work to proceed well. Power association leaders address challenges comparable to problems that other experts, such as medical doctors, psychologists, wellness experts, relationship experts, guidance counselors, and conflict mediators, help solve. And because capacities to help or heal can also be used to cause harm, power association leaders restrict access to their expert knowledge.

Rural communities in West Africa have historically supported and sustained power associations, but the organizations’ relevance has extended and continues to extend beyond local contexts to national, transnational, and international realms. Ethnomusicologist Heather Maxwell draws attention to Malian singer Nahawa Doumbia, who, by the end of the twentieth century, referred to her family’s Komo chapter as the source for her vocal prowess (cf. Elbadawi 2000). Doumbia’s repertoire draws on distinguished music from her home region and includes Komo songs. According to Maxwell, Doumbia—like musicians in other areas of the world—has used music to reflect on everyday realities. The former president of Mali, Moussa Traoré, who governed the country from 1968 to 1991, reportedly asked Doumbia whether her song about a fallen authority referred directly to him (Maxwell 2002, 203–214).

It is not unheard of for politicians to leverage power association arts to bolster their status. Sometime before 2005, Burkinabe politician and international diplomat Mélégué Traoré invited the president of Gabon’s national assembly to attend an annual Kono celebration. International leaders’ presence at power association events reinforces local leaders’ stature and prestige. And Captain Amadou Sanogo, the man who wrested power from former Malian president Amadou Toumani Touré on March 22, 2012, seems to have started to wear a dark brown hunter’s shirt underneath his uniform the day after he assumed power (Whitehouse 2012a, 2012b). The shirt would have aligned Sanogo with hunters known as dozow (pl.; dozo, sg.) (fig. intro.5). For decades, hunters within and beyond Mali have forged transnational networks to promote their activities as security agents, military operatives, law enforcers, and political actors rather than as hunters of game.¹⁰ Just detectable under Sanogo’s uniform, the shirt, like other power association arts, would have clearly but discreetly associated its owner with powerful experts as well as announced that person’s abilities to effect change without disclosing exact details of his knowledge and skill.¹¹

FIGURE intro.5. Master hunters Siaka Dembélé and Kadiene N’golo Dembélé. Wolokonto, Burkina Faso, April 16, 2007. Detail of fieldwork image: 2007–7006. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

Observers have often described hunters’ organizations, other power associations, and their arts as “traditional.” Even if we acknowledge the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm 1983), the characterization of the organizations and their arts as “traditional” camouflages individualized and localized concerns that resulted in the establishment of particular chapters or the creation of certain assemblages, installations, or performances. The idea that the organizations and their arts are “traditional” also implies that power associations and their arts belong to self-contained rural communities. Many authors writing in English and French apply the term village to such a rural West African community. Some authors have often contrasted the ordered, harmonious space of the village with the dangerous, unordered space of the wilderness (e.g., Anderson and Kreamer 1989).¹² Griaule and ethnographers who worked with him after he completed the Mission Dakar-Djibouti operated within a similar frame. They also tended to view power associations as a system of organizations that worked in cooperation with each other within each Bamana village.¹³

My research demonstrates the possibility of fragmentation rather than harmony among power association chapters within a single community (see Gagliardi 2014, 238–240). Power association leaders and other specialists collaborate and also compete with each other, even when they live and work within the same town. Cooperating and rival experts who manage worldly and otherworldly energies meet at markets, in courtyards, and during performances. They exchange ideas, share stories, and size up their counterparts and potential competitors. Arts that experts develop from rare and often difficult- or dangerous-to-obtain materials allow power association leaders and other specialists to advertise their knowledge and skill within a competitive environment. Specialists also maintain strict secrecy measures to protect themselves from challengers. At times, rivalries spark fierce contests (see also McNaughton 1979a, 8–9, 11, 12–13).

Medieval European cities saw similar dynamics of competition and violence. Drawing attention to locations in present-day Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, historian Valentin Groebner (2004, 37–65) refers to efforts to distinguish medieval European cities enclosed by walls from the violent spaces thought to exist beyond the city walls. He argues that despite the city walls, the goal of a unified and peaceful medieval European city was in fact often not achieved. Competing groups within the city vied for authority, especially when no single judicial body existed to manage all the violence and tension. What one group in a medieval European city deemed aggressive action, another may have considered a defensive action (2004, 40–43). Municipal bodies and other organizations often operated covertly and did not reveal all their actions to the larger public within the city (2004, 44–47). Competing factions within and beyond a city visually distinguished themselves from each other through a variety of signs, passwords, and gestures to mark their allegiances and recognize members (2004, 52–62). Through his historical studies, Groebner demonstrates that visual culture promoted by rivalrous groups offered clues to coexisting and oftentimes competing interpersonal, religious, and political relations within and among medieval European communities.

The competition within medieval cities led me to see how power associations and their arts disrupt the idea of harmonious villages existing in opposition to the wilderness beyond village borders (see also Gagliardi 2014, 239). Power association members have reportedly used signs to differentiate themselves from nonmembers (e.g., Travélé 1929, 128, 131). The organizations and their arts also reflect competition for power and authority that exists both within and among towns, albeit in modes to fit local and changing contexts. Specialists who compete with each other may encourage divisions rather than foster harmony within a town.

The notion of a bounded African or West African village invites further scrutiny. As geographer Leif Brottem asserts, “villages are not really villages,” meaning European and American conceptions of West African villages do not match lived experiences of people inhabiting the places. Based on his research in Mali, Brottem explains, “What we know as villages are actually constellations of settlements sometimes numbering in the dozens and frequently dispersed across large territories. In fact, the term village itself is largely a colonial creation referring to a single settlement that was designated at the lowest level of public administration. That administrative system, which fixed villages on the map, belied the shifting patterns of settlement that preceded it” (2018b; see also Brottem 2018a). In order to dispel the idea of the harmonious village in opposition to the wilderness, to signal dynamism rather than stasis in rural areas of West Africa, and to disrupt popular images of African villages prevalent in European and North American imaginations, I have repeatedly avoided the term village in my own writing about West African arts. I do the same in this book.¹⁴

My insistence on avoiding the term has ignited many discussions with a range of scholars, including curators, museum educators, translators, and writers. Many of the scholars who have talked with me about my decision have extensive research experience on the African continent, where English- and French-language speakers often refer to villages. The English- and French-language term village may convey different meanings in various contexts. Writing as someone based in North America, I remain attentive to Brottem’s recognition that use of the term village to characterize a particular location often reflects colonial assumptions about places as well as their mapability as bounded locales.

Oral histories suggest that rural settlements across West Africa have long operated in relation to, in cooperation with, and in competition with other settlements rather than as self-contained places (cf. Amselle [1990] 1998). People who live, work, or visit family in rural West African settlements contribute to and experience dynamic exchange in places they may call villages when speaking in English or French. They may use a colonial term that has become commonplace for English or French speakers. However, through their own experiences and their use of local languages, they may recognize specific histories, movement, and exchange that the term village obscures in European and North American imaginations. Indeed, the idea of a bounded African village remains strong in European and North American conceptions of the continent. My resolve not to use the word village, like my attention to other word choices, stems from a larger commitment to rethink how we translate concepts and write about arts of Africa linked to rural communities. One possibility would be to retain local terms, but even in that case I would need to translate the words throughout the text for readers not familiar with local languages. Rather than providing caveats about frames, terms, or concepts I use and the problematic assumptions undergirding them—but then proceeding to use the same frames, terms, or concepts—I am committed to trying to disrupt language that fuels common assumptions.

The term village also does not appear to have a stable meaning. One contention is that the number of people who live in a place determine whether it is a village. But population size is not a consistent criterion in recognizing a place as a village. Take Utqiagvik, Alaska—also known as Barrow, Alaska. In 2014, it reported a population of 4,429 residents and defined itself “as the largest city in the North Slope Borough.”¹⁵ If a population of 4,000 people suffices to constitute a city, then Sokouraba, the locale in Burkina Faso where my research has been based, would qualify as a city (fig. intro.6). After Burkinabe officials traveled through Sokouraba for the 2006 census, a civil servant told my research associate, Dahaba Ouattara, that the unofficial count for Sokouraba’s population was 4,200.¹⁶ Other factors that may indicate a place is a village include its spatial organization, administrative structure, or economic activities. Yet each factor encompasses a range of possibilities, and no single factor pertains to all places identified as villages.¹⁷

Viewing power associations as “traditional,” village-based institutions tied to a particular cultural or ethnic group, as observers did throughout the twentieth century, impedes understanding of power associations and also stymies analysis of the organizations’ arts.¹⁸ Village- and ethnicity-based approaches assume homogeneity and disregard heterogeneity within a place and from place to place. The linguistic diversity within Sokouraba offers just one example of variety rather than sameness within a single town. In the early 2000s, families based in the southwestern part of Sokouraba often identified the Senufo language Sìcìté as their first language, whereas families in the northeastern section of the town tended to refer to the Mande language Dzùùngoo as their first language.¹⁹ People who claimed different first languages still interacted with each other and married into families that did not share a first language.

Village- and ethnicity-based approaches to study of power associations and other phenomena also imply consistency from person to person. Yet individual power association leaders and their clients, like individual scholars, operate within specific contexts. In this book, I shift frames for analysis to focus on individual examples. I examine singular objects and performances. And I assess how certain power association leaders and other specialists, including national and international politicians, have used assemblages, installations, and performances in order to engage local, national, and international audiences, advertise expertise, and attract clients from near and distant places without fully disclosing restricted knowledge.

FIGURE intro.6. Map of select locations in present-day Burkina Faso and Mali referenced in the book. Image: Mark Addison Smith, 2021.

Power association leaders and other specialists recognize the power of visual access. They control when and where certain people can see their arts, and they prohibit viewing for others, including many women. Artists and patrons in other times and places have also restricted visual access to the arts, heightening the allure of powerful images. In his study of the reception of sacred images in late medieval and early Renaissance Florence, Richard Trexler (1972, 17) cites a 1435 law that highlights the importance of limiting how often an image of the Impruneta Virgin was brought out into the streets of Florence in order for the Virgin’s image to maintain its impressive power. Like fifteenth-century Florentine lawmakers, power association leaders in the present, as in the past, augment their authority as they deliberately exploit tension between what audiences can and cannot see in the dynamic arts they sponsor. When we attend to the frameworks we use to apprehend power associations and their arts or any other topic, we avail ourselves to the possibility of seeing more detail and nuance.

Beyond the One Tribe–One Style–One Scholar Paradigm

Joseph Henry’s statements about the boliw he tore apart appear in his 1910 book entitled L’âme d’un peuple africain. Les Bambara, leur vie psychique, éthique, sociale, religieuse (The Soul of an African People: The Bambara, Their Psychic, Ethical, Religious, and Social Life). As the title suggests, Henry considered boliw and the organizations that sponsored them as Bambara or Bamana, the two terms used interchangeably and the latter term now prevalent in English. Consistent with early twentieth-century French colonial understandings of identity markers, Henry (1910, 4) recognizes Bambara as the name for what he calls a race in French and part of what he regards as the larger Mande race.²⁰ Remarkable for its extensive discussion of power associations and their activities, Henry’s text provided a foundation for subsequent evaluation of the organizations as institutions that are distinctly Bamana. The framing of power associations as Bamana has endured, although some writers have preferred to characterize the organizations as Mande.

My approach to the study of power associations offers a different model, one that does not rely on the framing of the organizations and their arts in terms of a particular cultural or ethnic group. Rather, based on historical evidence and field-based data, I appreciate that the organizations promote the exchange of potent knowledge across boundaries and thus are not specific to any single cultural or ethnic group. Freed from the analytic constraints that come with studying the organizations as expressions of a particular cultural or ethnic group, I investigate how the organizations have historically operated and how different aesthetic concerns have, in different places and in different moments, informed the organizations’ arts. This approach, which I began to develop in 2004, when I first traveled to Burkina Faso to establish a site for my work, allows me to shed outdated frames and to advance knowledge. It also finds an echo in Susan Vogel’s 2005 call for scholars “to get down to the hard work of using current thinking to organize [historical documents, objects, and photographs] in new ways to produce new knowledge [in their studies of the historical arts of Africa]” (2005, 16).

According to Vogel, by 2005, scholars of African arts had largely turned their attention away from historical arts of Africa, even though—or perhaps because—a corpus of historical arts served as the field’s foundation (cf. Lamp 1999; Visonà 2010, 7–14). She identifies several factors contributing to the turn. She describes a growing preference among scholars beginning in the 1990s not to conduct fieldwork in rural places in Africa. She notes scholars’ lack of attention to aesthetic quality of historical arts, however and by whomever quality is defined. And she explains that scholars’ concerns about the implicit or explicit politics involved in pursuing studies of African arts have impacted what they have decided to study. Vogel reckons that by 2005, scholars also widely acknowledged the inadequacy of terms long used to describe arts of Africa due to colonial assumptions embedded in the words. Eager to avoid topics tainted by colonial prejudices, scholars may have sought other topics. Yet Vogel still sees possibilities for continuing the study of historical arts of Africa, and she alerts readers to vast troves of information ready for scholars to mine. She urges us to scour such sources. She writes, “So far, this [historical] material has been used for much more facile clucking over outdated theories and colonialist attitudes than for substantive contributions to knowledge. The most intriguing aspect for study in old sources is not the obvious—that they are old and reflect the ideas of their time—but that the information can be read between the lines and in the margins of the photos or through the lens to ask questions that were never asked before” (Vogel 2005, 16–17). Thus, nuanced readings of historical documents open up possibilities for advancing knowledge about historical or classical arts of Africa. The present study, which draws on but differs from my dissertation research, contributes to my larger project to show what such endeavors can look like.²¹

Vogel’s assessment recalls Achille Mbembe’s 2001 reflections on the state of scholarship on Africa. The two authors point at a gap between familiar critiques of colonial frameworks and actual transformation of practice. Mbembe writes, “It must not be forgotten that, almost universally, the simplistic and narrow prejudice persists that African social formations belong to a specific category, that of simple societies or of traditional societies. That such a prejudice has been emptied of all substance by recent criticism seems to make absolutely no difference; the corpse obstinately persists in getting up again every time it is buried and, year in year out, everyday language and much ostensibly scholarly writing remain largely in thrall to this presupposition” (2001, 3). As Vogel and Mbembe suggest, Africanist art historians and other scholars had, by the end of the twentieth century, recognized fallacy in certain paradigms, including reliance on cultural or ethnic group names to identify and explain the arts. But the frameworks have proved tenacious, hindering advancements in knowledge (see also Gagliardi and Biro 2019; cf. Petridis 2020).

When art enthusiasts in areas of Europe and North America acquired objects from regions of Africa in the early twentieth century, they sought to associate objects with specific cultural or ethnic groups based on anthropological theories and taxonomies of the time.²² Art historians adopted and adapted the same model for studying African arts when the field of African art history emerged in Europe and North America in the mid-twentieth century. In a 1984 article that has resonated with many scholars, Sidney Kasfir critiqued this method, which she described as the “one tribe–one style” model, and proposed scholars adopt an “historical process model” for the study of African arts. Kasfir writes, “As a [field of study] derived equally from history and anthropology, African art history has managed to combine the worst failings of both” (1984, 165). She urges Africanist art historians to develop diachronic models (1984, 167) and to consider alternate explanations for the distribution of object types (1984, 170). Even before Kasfir published her landmark article, scholars of African arts considered how geographic distribution of form and of cultural or ethnic groups did not always coincide. They also recognized the importance of considering historical flows and processes (e.g., Vandenhoute 1948; Sieber and Rubin 1968; Bravmann 1973; see also Olbrechts 1943; Vansina 1984, 1, 33–40; Picton 1986, 554–555).

The “one tribe–one style” model persists in the face of abundant evidence of its limitations, reflecting the convenience the model affords for thinking and writing about objects for which scholars and other writers have little specific information. The “one tribe–one style” model also continues to appeal to collectors, dealers, and other art enthusiasts in Europe and North America who, like other people in Europe and Euro-America, have imagined the African continent was once neatly divided into bounded cultural or ethnic groups (e.g., Kloman 2018; see also Lewis and Foy 1972).²³ And rather than overhaul methods for studying and presenting historical arts of Africa, curators and other scholars of African arts have at times preferred to address complexity through reattributions or the creation of long lists to attach multiple cultural or ethnic group names to a single object (cf. Colleyn 2009a, 14). But in the reattributions and long lists manifest the persistent corpse that Mbembe laments.

As scholars of African arts sought to define and expand the field’s scope in the latter half of the twentieth century, they often endeavored to study previously unstudied styles. The impulse to provide a breadth of coverage led to the “one tribe–one style–one scholar” model for the production of knowledge about African arts. The desire for coverage and the field’s turn in the 1990s to other areas of inquiry have often resulted in curators’ and other scholars’ reliance on a single person’s observations of arts in a certain place and in a certain moment to explain an array of objects and performances identified with the same style but perhaps produced in different locales or in different times. A corollary of the “one tribe–one style–one scholar” model is the idea that someone cannot study a corpus of historical African arts that has already been studied. Once a scholar writes a “definitive” volume for a style or region, the tendency is to consider the area covered and to encourage other scholars to pursue research in other areas.

When I told a former mentor in the early 2000s that I was planning to commence research on power associations and their arts in communities of Senufo-language speakers, the person commented that scholars had already studied Senufo arts. I understood my former mentor was suggesting I pursue a different topic because the area had already been well covered.²⁴ I knew then that people including Albert Maesen, Dolores Richter, Anita Glaze, and Till Förster had conducted significant research on Senufo arts in northern Côte d’Ivoire since the 1930s.²⁵ But their studies did not focus on Komo, Kono, or other power associations. I also knew that art historians and other thinkers had long considered Komo, Kono, and other power associations as Bamana or Mande institutions distinct from Senufo organizations. Scholars including Patrick McNaughton, Jean-Paul Colleyn, and Sarah Brett-Smith had by then written about power associations and their arts in central and southern Mali.²⁶ Even while the authors have acknowledged the region’s heterogeneity, they have characterized power associations as Bamana or Mande institutions or labeled power association arts as distinctly Bamana (e.g., Colleyn 2009a, 15). And as I prepared to begin my research, I knew Burkinabe scholar Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani had recently demonstrated that Senufo-speaking communities in western Burkina Faso support Komo and the organization’s arts (Diamitani 1999; see also Diamitani 2008, 2011). Yet the “one tribe–one style” paradigm even lingered in Diamitani’s attempts to explain how Senufo Komo arts differ from Bamana Komo arts, as if the arts must differ on the basis of cultural or ethnic group classifications (see Diamitani 1999, vii).

Scholarship on any topic tends to thrive when many, rather than just a handful, of researchers investigate the topic from different angles. Compared to scholarship on so-called historical or classical arts from other parts of the continent, scholarship on arts identified as Yoruba has flourished precisely because many different people have pursued study of this complex corpus.²⁷ Researchers have approached studies of Yoruba arts from distinct vantage points, and they have explored different, even if overlapping, questions. Beyond the continent of Africa, knowledge of arts linked to particular places and moments has likewise benefited from a plurality of scholars and perspectives. Understandings about arts of the Italian Renaissance are robust not because one person has studied the corpus, but because generations of scholars have dedicated themselves to it. Ultimately undeterred by my former mentor’s comment, I pursued study of power associations and their arts in order to build on the foundational studies of my predecessors. I sought to understand how and why power associations transcend cultural and ethnic group classifications as well as linguistic, religious, and geopolitical boundaries (Gagliardi 2010). I also anticipated that avoiding the trap of the “one tribe–one style” model would lead me to other, more penetrating questions.

In developing conceptual frameworks for this book, I have also been keenly committed to foregrounding insights of scholars and other writers who offer important critical analyses but whose work may not usually be considered the go-to sources for certain topics. I have deliberately sought alternate perspectives and approaches, given that old ones have often reinforced the very knowledge structures I seek to call into question. I remain acutely aware of the fact that choosing which sources to cite is not a neutral act. As Sara Ahmed (2017, 151) explains, “Citational practices . . . are a way of keeping things familiar for those who want to conserve the familiar” (see also Ahmed 2017, 15–16, 148–158; Mott and Cockayne 2017; Ewell 2020).²⁸ My aim is to consider what we learn when we defamiliarize the familiar and consider other viewpoints. And if we question the notion that a single scholar can be the sole authority on a topic, as I do, then we must embrace multiple perspectives even as we consider foundational texts.

While I examine power associations beyond their link to any particular cultural or ethnic group name, the terms Senufo and Mande in this book’s subtitle point at my engagement with and contributions to previous scholarship on and other documentation of arts identified as Senufo and as Bamana or Mande. People currently use the terms to organize knowledge or to articulate identities. Ignoring the existence of historically constructed categories in the present obscures, rather than recovers, historical dynamism (see also Palmié 2013, 1–7; cf. Reid and Miller 2018). My point is that we need to be clear about how and in what contexts we use the terms, drawing attention to the complex histories behind them rather than glossing over the histories to imply that the terms capture information about a bounded, precolonial cultural or ethnic group that never existed as such beyond people’s imaginations (cf. Gagliardi 2014). This concern for complex histories differs from the approach of twentieth-century observers who repeatedly identified Komo, Kono, and other power associations as Bamana or Mande institutions with the goal of recovering precolonial characteristics of an isolated group they assumed had once existed. Instead of aiming to recover a view of some “pure” culture untainted by colonialism, I have sought evidence from the past and present in order to understand ever-changing, interconnected histories.

In order to recognize the political import of power associations and their arts in the present as in the past, I consider how local chapters and the arts they sponsor have shaped and have been shaped by ever-changing webs of relations created by specific people in specific places and moments. Bruno Latour’s observation that individuals and groups interrelate through “an on-going process made up of uncertain, fragile, controversial, and ever-shifting ties” (2005, 28) applies to people with different affiliations in and beyond an area defined by the present-day borders of Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali as well as to people involved with power associations within and beyond the same area (see also Brenner 2000, 163–164). Consideration of such ongoing processes proves critical for understanding how power associations and their arts transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries as well as how and why certain people create and maintain the arts. Power association leaders are specialists who acquire expert knowledge and cultivate relationships across diverse interpersonal networks in order to maintain and promote their activities. They are not limited by cultural or ethnic group.

The blending or flexing of previously set boundaries may serve research when used advisedly. Throughout this book, I use Glaze’s phrase three-corner region (Glaze 1993), at times anachronistically, as shorthand for the area spanning the present-day borders of Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali. The phrase refers to a region marked by the intersection of colonial and national boundaries that colonial and postcolonial governments constructed in the twentieth century. The boundaries do not align with precolonial understandings of the region. However, my use of the phrase three-corner region reflects my desire to indicate location without reinforcing the idea of a bounded area defined by a single cultural or ethnic group (fig. intro.7).

Makers and audiences of power association arts in and beyond the three-corner region are hardly cogs in a predetermined cultural sphere. When they have engaged in any activity, including the creation, sponsorship, or promotion of power association arts, they have responded to distinct individuals and singular circumstances. The organizations’ assemblages, installations, architecture, and performances continue to reflect individual responses to everyday decisions, mistakes, ambitions, tragedies, and gains. My concentration on specific people, places, contexts, and arts results in an “ethnography [or rather, ethnographies] of the particular,” which, according to Lila Abu-Lughod (1991), constitutes a method that allows scholars to avoid generalizations and othering, features of art-historical studies and other analyses that attempt to outline or assess characteristics of a singular cultural or ethnic group or arts ascribed to it.

Addressing the ever-changing webs of relations and other particulars requires changes in how scholars of African arts frame questions and present information. But as Vogel suggests, scholars may have found it easier to “cluck over” outdated frameworks rather than overhaul them. An additional risk is that the stagnation of knowledge that comes with repetition of old critiques rather than development of new approaches could eventually lead to an abandonment of knowledge.²⁹ The choices we make today about whether we reassess our knowledge of so-called historical or classical arts of Africa, including power association arts, in keeping with current theories and leave some knowledge in the past by not bringing it up to date may foreclose future possibilities of engaging with a foundational yet also problematic corpus of African arts in nuanced ways.

FIGURE intro.7. Map of the three-corner region. Image: Mark Addison Smith, 2021.

My efforts to bring our knowledge up to date benefit from a variety of approaches. Fieldwork undergirds my analysis of power association arts. I began my research by locating myself in a Senufo-speaking neighborhood in a town in western Burkina Faso and interviewing power association leaders who identified their first languages as Senufo ones. But even during a preliminary two-week visit to the area, my network expanded to encompass people whose first languages were neither Senufo languages nor part of the larger Gur family under which Senufo languages are classified.³⁰ Historical documents further bolster my understandings and make clear that power associations and their arts defy ready identification with a singular cultural or ethnic group or even a specific geographic area.

A photograph of a daytime power association performance suggests the extent to which the organizations and their arts have long crossed cultural and geopolitical borders (fig. intro.8). The Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, France, dates the image to 1950 and attributes it to Père Germain Nadal.³¹ One of the first French Catholic missionaries to arrive in the French West African city of Bobo-Dioulasso in the late 1920s as a member of the Société des Pères Blancs, Nadal, like other Catholic missionaries and foreign travelers to the area, documented events that he witnessed.³² ANOM identifies the image attributed to Nadal as “Danse du Kono chez les Sénoufo,” or “Dance of Kono among the Senufo.” ANOM’s record also locates the photograph to Bobo-Dioulasso, an administrative center in the colony then known as Haute Volta and today the second largest city in Burkina Faso.³³

The same image of masqueraders appears in publications dated to 1997 and 2004.³⁴ The caption for the image in the 1997 publication states: “Group of Komo masqueraders, who accompanied all important events in Bamana life: birth, circumcision, and funeral.”³⁵ The caption beneath the image in the later publication reads: “A Group of Kòmò Dancers, Kòmò Association, Guinea.”³⁶ Between the ANOM record and the 2004 publication, attribution of the performance and the masks slips from Senufo to Bamana, the name often applied to a group considered distinct from the Senufo group and to a different style of art. The information also slips from Kono, one power association, to Komo, another power association. The terms Senufo and Bamana as well as the terms Kono and Komo appear to cloud meaning rather than explain the performance in the image. And identification of the performers’ location shifts from Bobo-Dioulasso, a city in present-day Burkina Faso, to an unspecified location in Guinea, a nation-state to the west of Burkina Faso. Both the city of Bobo-Dioulasso and the present-day country of Guinea fall beyond the borders of present-day Mali, where studies of Komo and Kono have been concentrated. Captions accompanying the photograph compel us to reconsider how twentieth-century writers classified power associations and their arts as well as to investigate the organizations and their arts in different places.

FIGURE intro.8. “Danse du Kono chez les Sénoufo,” Bobo-Dioulasso, Haute Volta, 1950. Photo: Attributed to Père Germain Nadal. Fonds Agence économique de la France d’outre-mer, Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix en Provence, France, FR CAOM 30Fi5/14. Image courtesy of the Archives Générales des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Italy, and the Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix en Provence.

Decentering the Center

A tacit fourth plank of the “one tribe–one style–one scholar” approach to the study of historical or classical arts of Africa has been the notion that a scholar should base her work around a cultural center in order to understand the whole. In Art and Death in a Senufo Village, a complex analysis of Senufo arts praised at the time of its publication, Glaze intimates the idea was at play in the study she began in northern Côte d’Ivoire in the late 1960s.³⁷ A close look at her own language also illustrates her efforts to reckon with broad approaches to the study of Senufo arts as well as parse more varied data she gathered in Côte d’Ivoire.³⁸

Glaze aims to offer general assessments applicable to the larger area recognized as Senufo. She explains, “If . . . data from the Fodonon and the Kufulo region can be taken as representative of the Senufo area as a whole, then certain broad conclusions may be drawn regarding the ethnic context of Senufo art” (1981, 194). She indicates the “Central Senufo language group” encompasses the “Kufulo” group. But her understanding of the “Fodonon” area as not squarely located in the center complicates facile recognition of a center as the ideal site for studying core practices of a cultural or ethnic group. She reasons that subgroup styles correlate with language distinctions.³⁹ Yet Glaze still attempts to connect practices in the “Fodonon” area to the center.

Citing French colonial administrator Gilbert Bochet, Glaze asserts, “Bochet has termed the Fodonon an ‘archaic’ Senufo group (1959, 63), implying that they represented an early development of Senufo culture as represented by the Central Senufo groups dominant in the Korhogo region” (Glaze 1981, 4). Glaze disagrees with Bochet, arguing that the Fodonon subgroup “should be assigned to the Southern Senufo language group” and not part of the central group (1981, 3). But she also characterizes the Fodonon subgroup as “relatively sheltered and conservative,” thus implying the group was mostly untouched and therefore worthy of study. And she submits that the subgroup occupied a “key position as a transitional zone between the Central Senufo and Southern Senufo groups” (1981, 4).

According to Glaze, her data from an area she deems central allow her to make broad claims about “the ethnic context of Senufo art,” while her data from the “relatively sheltered” subgroup located to the south of the central group demonstrate the importance of recognizing how art styles and typologies reflect boundaries of larger and smaller language groupings (Glaze 1981, 194). Importantly, Glaze (1981, 14–18) also identifies additional factors that impact style, including an object maker’s occupation, the maker’s particular networks of personal relations, and a patron’s or user’s additions of other elements to a work. She embraces the idea of a cultural center as well as fragmentation of a large group into different smaller subgroups and particularities related to other aspects of people’s lives.

One rationale for focusing on cultural centers is that they serve as sites of innovation. A corollary is that arts produced in peripheral zones derive from innovative arts of cultural centers. In a classic study of Italian arts, Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg ([1979] 1981) critique the idea that arts created in areas considered peripheral depend on artistic production in areas recognized as the centers. An emphasis on places acknowledged as cultural centers may limit research of art and architecture in other ways (e.g., Maranci 2006; Mitter 2008). With respect to the arts of Africa, the idea that studying arts produced in a cultural center would allow one to understand the whole reinforces the notion that the African continent once consisted of discrete cultural or ethnic groups, each one defined by its own geography, language, religion, social organization, and art and most accessible through an untouched or at least more protected core. Yet the notion that bounded cultural or ethnic groups with origins in a timeless past ever existed attracted greater scholarly scrutiny by the end of the twentieth century.⁴⁰

With respect to Senufo and Bamana identities, I have previously examined how prior to French colonization, the term Senufo likely marked linguistic or occupational difference while Bamana identified religious difference. The terms Senufo and Bamana were not necessarily mutually exclusive, and a single person could identify as Senufo and as Bamana. The French colonial government glossed over such nuance to define discrete cultural or ethnic groups. Twentieth-century European and North American art dealers and collectors applied such terms to objects from Africa that arrived in Europe and North America with little other information in their efforts to classify and explain the works (see also Biro 2018; Monroe 2019). By the middle of the twentieth century, art connoisseurs recognized a Bamana style of art and a separate Senufo one (Gagliardi 2014).

Colleyn, who has conducted extensive research in present-day Mali and studied power associations, has joined scholars Jean Bazin (1985) and Jean-Loup Amselle ([1990] 1998) in questioning whether the term Bamana and other ethnonyms reflect ethnic identities that people in the three-corner region recognized as such prior to French colonization. Colleyn explains that people in present-day Mali learned “in the schools of the Tubab (the Whites) ‘what’ they were expected to be” (2009a, 10) with respect to a particular cultural or ethnic identity, one often based on linguistic difference. Colleyn adds that “[French colonial] administrator-ethnologists believed that they knew better than the ‘natives’” (2009a, 10) what the identities of people in the three-corner region were. Colleyn also notes that “these ethnonyms have since [the colonial period] become fully established without referring to any real substance, but reflecting rather the point of view of those classifying them, both in the course of daily life and in the opinion of specialists, missionaries, administrators, and ethnologists” (2009a, 10). He further comments, “One really wonders how certain ethnologists and art historians can continue to regard these African societies as uniform, small-scale, watertight units resistant to change” (2009a, 11).

Glaze’s attempt to discern ever-narrower and presumably more precise distinctions in her study of art may at first seem to offer more detailed understandings of arts produced within a diverse and dynamic area. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, scholars increasingly realized that the delineation of subgroup styles in tandem with linguistic boundaries merely extends the logic of cultural or ethnic group styles to subgroup classifications, perpetuating the notion that at any scale, formal differences in the arts coincide with linguistic differences. Nearly a decade after Glaze published her book, Amselle argued that such classificatory methods contribute to a larger “optical illusion” that obscures complex histories and power relations. He asserts that “focus on smaller details and more defined cultures . . . makes the new classification just as controversial [as the broader classifications], although it appears to rest on a greater degree of scientific objectivity” (Amselle [1990] 1998, 30). Amselle’s insights invite us to consider how ever-changing histories, rather than bounded cultural or ethnic identities, have shaped and continue to shape artistic production. He also prompts us to remember that centers are not fixed places guaranteed to remain centers in perpetuity. Rather, centers rise and decline through historical processes, and they exist in relation to other places around them. Elsewhere I have demonstrated that the city of Korhogo, in northern Côte d’Ivoire, emerged as the Senufo center in the early twentieth century as the French colonial government sought to push nineteenth-century political centers to the peripheries and assert French authority in the three-corner region through an alliance with a savvy political leader in Korhogo (Gagliardi 2014, 61–75). Importantly, a center is a contingent space rather than a fixed location where essence is preserved.

By situating my research in a frontier or border zone, meaning a location considered peripheral to places deemed the centers of Senufo and Mande arts, I am able to illuminate generative interrelations among the region’s great patrons for the arts, examine how such connections foster exchange, and investigate aesthetic concerns of makers and audiences. I have also observed how each power association chapter functions as a node within ever-evolving networks that transcend cultural, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and geopolitical boundaries. A single chapter operates as a center of activity, but it is also peripheral to other chapters. As the prominence of a chapter waxes and wanes over time, its importance as a center or periphery relative to other chapters shifts.

Diamitani’s important doctoral dissertation documenting Komo and its arts in Senufo-speaking communities of western Burkina Faso directed my attention to a possible area of study and later to particular individuals once I situated myself in western Burkina Faso (Diamitani 1999). After reading Diamitani’s dissertation, I contacted him. He suggested that I consult Lamissa Bangali, a Senufo Sìcìté-speaking man from western Burkina Faso who earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. After I talked with Bangali in Ouagadougou in August 2004, he sent me to Sokouraba, his hometown. He also introduced me to Dahaba Ouattara, who has collaborated with me since our first meeting. I first met Ouattara in Bobo-Dioulasso and then traveled with him to Sokouraba for a preliminary visit to the town. We continued from Sokouraba to Sikasso, Mali, where we met Mando Nanta Goïta, then a civil servant in charge of arts and culture. I described my plans to study Komo and Kono to Goïta, who told me that certain Senufo communities in the vicinity of Sikasso also supported Ciwara, another power association long framed as Bamana or Mande.⁴¹ Diamitani’s and Goïta’s observations encouraged me to pursue the more than twenty-two months of fieldwork in western Burkina Faso that served as the basis for my doctoral dissertation and informed my continued study of power associations and their arts.

After I earned my PhD in 2010, I shared a copy of my dissertation with Bangali. I wondered what he would have to say about it, and I met with him after he read my text to discuss the content. He told me that the information and analysis in my dissertation coincide with his own understandings of power associations and the area where I based my research.⁴² His comments encouraged me. Looking beyond a single center in our studies may indeed lead to sharper analyses. The approach requires us to identify and wrestle with long-standing frameworks and attendant assumptions that have often limited perceptions. It may also foster insights that align more closely with lived experiences.

Sources and Methods

Specialists’ control of access to their work and their awareness of their audiences are central themes of this book. The limited circulation of photographs of Komo or Kono performances may mean that generations of Komo and Kono leaders operating in disparate places have successfully regulated visual apprehension of the organizations’ activities. It also prompts investigation into the making of the few photographs that exist, including the photograph attributed to Nadal. Expressions on the few visible faces of performers in the image make it difficult to discern whether the camera-wielding audience member angered them or performers were familiar with the person holding the device. Journals from the Catholic mission in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, where Nadal was based, suggest that Nadal frequently traveled to western Burkina Faso in the late 1940s and early 1950s. An entry dated February 24, 1949, reports that Nadal traveled to the town of Kotoura to participate in an agricultural celebration. An entry dated June 9, 1949, indicates the missionary visited the town of Kangala to attend a different celebration, but the event in Kangala was reportedly postponed.

By 2004, Kotoura and Kangala, each located about ten miles from Sokouraba, had earned reputations for the strong power association chapters the towns supported. Perhaps Nadal attended a power association performance in one of the two towns or in another town in western Burkina Faso.⁴³ Wherever the performers stood when a photographer captured the image now at ANOM, the event depicted in the photograph resembled early twenty-first-century power association masquerades in western Burkina Faso enough to have prompted Komo leader Yaya Bangali to look closely at the picture when I showed it to him. He told me he was trying to determine whether he could identify anyone in it.⁴⁴ Exact details about the photograph or the context of its production remain elusive. Yet the photograph still shows performers engaging with their audience and points at the importance of performance-audience interaction.

Throughout this book, I foreground my own interactions with people in the three-corner region during discrete periods of time and reflect on my methods for studying organizations known for restricting access to them and their arts. My objective is to attend to my evidence and account for how I obtained details informing my analyses. In Interrogating Ethnography, legal scholar Steven Lubet applies standards of evidence prevalent in law to his review of ethnographic studies in order to “[offer] proposals for enhancing evidence-based ethnography” (2018, 7).⁴⁵ Lubet posits that certain practices in the conduct of ethnographic research and writing about it preclude evaluations of a researcher’s evidence. He notes many scholars who conduct ethnographic research spend extended amounts of time in places unfamiliar to reviewers in order to gather information necessary for their work (2018, xii). When they write about their findings, certain scholars anonymize names and places, making it difficult or impossible for reviewers to cross-check information (2018, 133). According to Lubet, some ethnographers favor general claims instead of embracing the specificity of their experiences and information they have gleaned (2018, 136). Lubet encourages people who conduct ethnographic research to pursue a variety of sources in order to vet details. He additionally urges researchers to engage in restudies, make field notes accessible, cite specific interviews, and ground analyses in particular details (2018, 127–137). His recommendations echo aims I sought at the outset of my research and in my first efforts to write about it years before reading his book (cf. Crapanzano 2003, 10–11).⁴⁶

My understandings reflect my interactions with particular people within specific contexts. No position is all-knowing or impartial. McNaughton has also considered tensions between objectivity and partiality in conversations with people about art, and he explains that “the very nature of our being, of our existence in the world, makes information a highly relative thing” (2013, 17–18). He urges us to consider our individuality and interactions in order “to fashion fruitful art historical practices that are attentive to the relationships and dialogues between people” (McNaughton 2013, 17–18; see also Jackson 1989). I strive to attend to such details.

When I first began my research in August 2004, Dahaba Ouattara introduced me to the leading political authority of Sokouraba at the time, the late Nampé Traoré, and other important elders in the town. Traoré also called the town’s elders to a meeting with me. I offered information about myself and described my research plans. They discussed my proposed activities and decided to sanction my return to their town. Ouattara made other introductions for me that have served as starting points for a growing web of relationships with power association leaders, blacksmiths, and other community members across the three-corner region. Ouattara drove the motorcycle we rode to interviews, translated several different languages for me within the complex, multilingual zone, and instructed me in local protocols. We also talked about research findings and strategies.

Ouattara, his brother, André Ouattara, and his brother’s family hosted me in the family’s courtyard in August 2004 and again from October 2005 through July 2007. Inhabitants of Sokouraba and nearby towns have recognized that I am a person independent from the Ouattara brothers, but they have also associated me with the brothers, their courtyards, their neighborhood, and their hometown. Before leaving Sokouraba in July 2007, I financed construction of a two-room house in Dahaba Ouattara’s courtyard for Ouattara as well as a one-room house for me. I returned to the town in January 2012, August 2013, and January 2014.⁴⁷ Ouattara and I continue to work with each other. By 2012, an antenna in Sokouraba provided mobile phone service throughout the town, making possible regular communication by phone, text messages, WhatsApp messages, and Facebook posts and messages. Ouattara has also clarified information and provided me with updates when we have met in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in July 2016, Korhogo, Côte d’Ivoire, in December 2016, and Kumasi, Ghana, in August 2017.

In my person-to-person research, I have endeavored to pursue a multiplicity of perspectives. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, art historian Z. S. Strother argues that the incorporation of a variety of voices and points of view in texts on African arts allows scholars and their audiences “finally to exorcise the figure of the anonymous African artist of legend, the slave to tradition” (Strother 1998, xvi; cf. Clark [1973] 1999, 19). I have also explained to each person I have interviewed that I conduct research for scholarly purposes and with the intention to disseminate analyses through written documents and other presentations. Familiar with their own pursuits of knowledge or the university studies of Bangali, Diamitani, or other people they know, each person has made individual decisions about when to meet with me, what to tell me, and what details—including names—I could record and reproduce in my scholarship. Whereas some scholars have preferred to anonymize names and places, I have used people’s names when they have granted me permission to do so, and I have identified specific locations. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has advocated for the use of people and place names in ethnographic studies. She explains, “I have come to see that the time-honored practice of bestowing anonymity on ‘our’ communities and informants fools few and protects no one—save, perhaps, the anthropologist’s own skin. And I fear that the practice makes rogues of us all—too free with our pens, with the government of our tongues, and with our loose translations and interpretations of village life” (Scheper-Hughes 2000, 128). Scheper-Hughes, like Lubet, urges us to write with specificity and to avoid ambiguity in acknowledgment of our sources.⁴⁸

I found that people responding to my questions better answered queries that focused on a specific performance or situation. Questions about broader events or cultural characteristics often proved more difficult for people to answer. As I pursued my own lines of inquiry, I learned from people who asked about my own experiences and the place I called home. They became researchers searching for information about me (cf. Drewal 1991, 35). The reversal in position helped me identify difficulties people may have had in answering certain kinds of questions, namely queries designed to elicit general statements rather than reflections on particular experiences. During a fall 2006 visit to a courtyard I had visited many times to interview Karfa Coulibaly, Coulibaly’s teenage sons started a series of questions about who pays for weddings and funerals in the distant place they considered my home. I found it difficult to provide a single answer that accurately described who had paid for all my friends’ weddings or all the funerals about which I had ever known. I could not even figure out whom I would include in my all. Did my interviewers want to know about all Americans, about just the people in my hometown of Orange, Massachusetts, or about the people in Los Angeles, California, where I had most recently lived in the States?

Generalized answers about the events’ coordination proved even trickier for me to provide. Each wedding and funeral I thought about as I tried to answer their questions had differed as a result of the specific people involved and particular circumstances surrounding the event. I explained what a standard expectation might be and then said that I knew many instances when what actually happened deviated from that standard. As I listened to what people in western Burkina Faso told me about their own experiences, I noticed that they also distinguished between abstract descriptions of how an event should normally proceed and accounts of what actually happened during any single event. The norm was rarely, if ever, exactly achieved. In fact, my interviews were more productive when we discussed actual events rather than some hypothetical norm. And because I wanted to hear what people had to tell me about their own experiences, rather than fit them within some predetermined frame, I tried to disencumber myself when interviewing from the ideas and information I had read prior to beginning my fieldwork. More specifically, I sought to distinguish between using earlier studies to formulate questions to open the field of inquiry and using them to guide people into expected answers, thereby closing the field.⁴⁹

At times, people I interviewed preferred not to respond to questions I asked, or they told me the information I sought was secret or difficult to explain. I have often interpreted such responses as polite refusals to elaborate. Other people were more interested in sharing accounts for me to record. But each person set different limits. Few people refused to talk with me at all, and other people specifically requested interviews. Instead of setting out to interview many people, each person only a few times, I opted to begin interviewing fewer people more often and to let the interviews lead me to other people and sources. My aim was not to gain a statistically significant sample, but rather a qualitatively significant one. As Strother observes in a research note regarding her own study of power objects in central Africa, one possible and perhaps even common response to questions about highly guarded knowledge is the refusal to answer. After she spent about sixteen months in the area, Strother found she had developed relationships with a few knowledgeable leaders who had become willing to discuss matters with her that, until then, she had not been able to inquire about in detail (Strother 2000, 69–70).

In my own work, I found that repeated visits to an individual, including informal visits to greet the person rather than to conduct formal interviews, allowed me to develop trust. Eventually, I became able to ask more targeted questions and gain greater understanding. Also, rather than creating a standardized set of questions or insisting on pursuing only certain topics during an interview, I allowed each interview to proceed in whatever direction the person or people responding to my questions took it. I regularly abandoned questions I had prepared to ask as a conversational interview led me to unanticipated information and insights. The exchanges were shaped by interpersonal dynamics and local formalities but were less constrained than rigid questionnaires; the preferences and knowledge of the people I interviewed affected the patterns and outcomes of our conversations in real time (see also McNaughton 2013).

The first interviews I conducted in western Burkina Faso were illuminating and bolstered my inquiry. Dahaba Ouattara brought me to meet power association leader Karfa Coulibaly during my initial visit to Sokouraba.⁵⁰ Nearly forty-two years old at the time, Coulibaly had not pursued formal education within state-sponsored institutions, but he had studied extensively with the area’s foremost Kono leader and other specialists. He had acquired a vast knowledge of flora and fauna that he used to help himself, his family, and his clients. Several apprentices sought to learn from Coulibaly and studied with him. Coulibaly also maintained a number of power objects, and he showed me some of them during our first meetings. As we talked, I showed Coulibaly several photographs of assemblages from and performances in the three-corner region. One image especially caught his attention. He told me it featured a masquerader that women are not allowed to see (fig. intro.9). He claimed that he possessed a “more powerful” mask than the one in the picture, but he also said that, because I am a woman, he could not show the mask to me. His comments intrigued me, because I had not associated the mask in the image with Komo or Kono. When Glaze published the photograph from northern Côte d’Ivoire (1981, 20, pl. 8), she identified it as an image of a Kunugbaha masquerade associated with blacksmiths.⁵¹ Her book also focused on arts identified as Senufo and linked to organizations she referred to as Poro. Coulibaly’s comments about the masquerader in Glaze’s photograph left me thinking that I would learn quite a bit if I returned to Sokouraba in the future for an extended stay.

Before I left Sokouraba in 2004, I described my research goals to Coulibaly. He responded with questions about my methods. He sought to know how I planned to respect the secrecy surrounding power associations and the guarded knowledge they promote. He asked me how I would use information I obtained, how I would credit him, and whether he was required to complete paperwork so I could proceed with my study. I answered his questions, assuring him that I had no desire to expose secrets. I described the prospectus and research proposals I planned to write before my anticipated return in late 2005. I asked if I could name him in the documents, and I said I was not aware of any paperwork required from him. At the end of our conversation, he agreed that I could name him in the documents and pursue my research with him at my return.

FIGURE intro.9. The caption accompanying this photograph reads, “Kunugbaha masquerade (blacksmiths’), February 1970” (Glaze 1981, 20, pl. 8). Photo: Anita J. Glaze.

Seated in his courtyard in a rural town in western Burkina Faso, Coulibaly clearly understood that my research would generate a bureaucratic trail. At the time, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, through the Office for Human Research Protections, oversaw Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) across the country in order to safeguard “human subjects,” guarantee their protection, and respect their agency. Because my research involved interviews with living people, the University of California and the United States Government required me to subject my research protocol to the IRB at the University of California, Los Angeles. The IRB mandated that researchers obtain consent, and it maintained strict guidelines about how consent could be obtained. Standard procedure required that investigators receive a signed consent form from each “human subject” prior to collecting data from the person. Under certain exceptional circumstances, researchers were authorized to use an approved script to obtain oral consent. I argued that written consent forms would compromise rather than legitimize my research efforts, given the region’s colonial legacy. When the French government colonized West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it created elaborate bureaucracies. I anticipated that people in the region might be leery of paperwork in the hands of foreigners.⁵² The university board approved the script I created to explain my credentials, the nature of my research, and my plans to use data I collected.

Egregious human rights violations in biomedical research have prompted IRB requirements to secure fully voluntary, informed consent, and written terms and conditions have become commonplace within certain litigious environments, including the United States. But consent-giving procedures may vary, so protocols that seem right in one place might not make much sense or work well in another. People I interviewed often asked me why I asked for consent at the beginning of an interview. They considered the agreement to meet with me for an interview an acknowledgment of consent. The formal request for consent at the beginning of the interview seemed redundant and denied local understandings of agency. And as my first conversations with Karfa Coulibaly in August 2004 suggest, power association leaders and other people in the three-corner region are discerning. They made their own decisions about how to interact with me or other people, what information to supply, and whether they wanted me to acknowledge their names in my work. Indeed, power association leaders are experts in restricting access to information they do not want to share for whatever reason, and they decide on their own terms when to permit or restrict access to information or events. A specialist could give consent in response to the IRB-approved script but then offer seemingly nonsensical responses to questions, require exorbitant offerings, or insist on conferring with more senior people in the community before providing information. Other people in the three-corner region employed similar techniques to avoid divulging details they did not want to provide. As I worked, I remained attentive to different methods for providing consent.

Even when people willingly talked with me about power associations, the organizations’ arts, or any other topic, they often preferred roundabout modes of communication. Had I insisted on pursuing particular lines of inquiry when interviews appeared to veer away from the topics I had intended to discuss, I would have missed information that people wanted to convey to me on their own terms. I had to pursue and reflect on indirect rather than direct connections. When I met Ibrahim Traoré Banakourou in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, he told me he had studied Komo with his late grandfather Lamina (Tientigui) Traoré, a renowned power association leader in Bougoula, Mali, and continued to refine his knowledge. Traoré also shared a riddle with me. He said that after a bird awoke a sleeping man, the man put the bird in a bottle. The bird grew bigger and bigger over a period of fifty years. Traoré then asked me to tell him how I would get the bird out of the bottle without injuring the bird, killing the bird, or breaking the bottle. We turned our attention to other topics before Traoré returned to the riddle. According to Traoré, the riddle refers to the process of knowledge acquisition. He likened the man’s sleep to ignorance and the bird to knowledge one gains over time. In order to free the bird, or rather knowledge, from the bottle, one need only to use the knowledge one has acquired and take care not to cause harm in the process.

Traoré could have told me that power association leaders and other specialists in the three-corner region prefer to communicate through puzzles and metaphors, but he opted to instruct through performance.⁵³ During a subsequent conversation in Paris, France, Traoré explained that when a teacher instructs through riddles without explaining them immediately, the teacher encourages the learner to exercise the brain and cultivate patience.⁵⁴ Specialists I met in the three-corner region have similarly conveyed information to me indirectly and over time.

Research on power associations, their activities, and their arts requires further attentiveness to secrecy that pervades them. In her study of secrecy and its relationship to African arts, the late Mary Nooter [Roberts] explained that “secrets are often central to the making, ownership, use, and interpretation of art” (Nooter [Roberts] 1993, 23). She also agreed with other theorists in asserting that the secret’s existence is often more important than its contents, as a secret distinguishes people who know it from people who do not. But western Burkinabe power association leaders consider the contents of secrets significant. They have told me that a person who knows the specific materials and procedures necessary to build a power object also knows how to render the construction ineffective. Within a competitive environment where specialists seek to outdo rivals or to protect themselves or their clients from competitors who may try to cause harm, specialists restrict access to their knowledge. They also modify what they learn from their colleagues in order to prevent themselves from being vulnerable to attack.⁵⁵

In light of the potential harm knowledge about power associations and their arts can unleash, people in western Burkina Faso have not considered interest in the organizations and their arts benign. My questions raised concerns as people sought to understand the type of information I desired and how I would use it. Jeanne Favret-Saada ([1977] 1980, 16–24) explains that when she conducted research on witchcraft practices in the Bocage in France from 1969 through 1975, she was unable to maintain her status as an objective researcher.⁵⁶ She observes that there was no neutral position from which she could obtain disinterested knowledge. Rather, she recognizes three possible subject positions she could occupy, namely those of the “witch,” the “bewitched,” and the “unwitcher.” My questions about power associations and their arts also meant I was not a neutral observer. Therefore, I remained attentive to potential suspicion that my questions and behavior could arouse, and I refrained from asking questions that might have left people to think I wanted to learn how to construct my own power objects or how to use such tools.

Specialists in western Burkina Faso recognize disparities in how information circulates and who benefits from the circulation of information. My position as a woman who has not received permission in western Burkina Faso to see some of the arts I describe in this book as well as my position as a researcher who avoided gathering information people preferred to keep secret led me to consider whether a person’s initiation into an organization is a requirement to write about it. Indeed, some foreign observers have implied that initiation into a particular organization is a necessary criterion for a researcher’s analysis of it (cf. Guyer 2015, 53–55). When I began my research, I knew that initiation into Komo or Kono was not a goal I could pursue. I also wondered whether every initiation implied access to the most profound knowledge about an organization or if access varied depending on the position of the person seeking it. In his dissertation on Komo in western Burkina Faso, Diamitani (1999, 92–94) describes different types of initiation. He explains that one method of initiation entails an offering to gain access to Komo performances, another method requires an annual offering and participation in an annual procession, and a third method involves the sharing of the most protected knowledge of a chapter among a select few people who are close to the chapter’s leader. Knowledge about Komo varies even among people who can claim they have been initiated into the association.

The practice of distinguishing between people requiring initiation to see a Komo performance and individuals entrusted with more intimate knowledge may be nearly a century old, if not older. In 1929, Moussa Travélé, who served as an interpreter for the French colonial administration, recorded indirect information about Komo. Baba Diara—the elder whose statements about Komo Travélé explains he captured in print—reportedly described a simple initiation for travelers and for “the whites who want at any cost to know about our business” (Travélé 1929, 130). The simple initiation the elder described involved the offering of a chicken and two red kola nuts. By contrast, boys who sought membership in a Komo chapter within their own town reportedly underwent a more extensive initiation that required them to face their fears of Komo, come face-to-face with a Komo masquerader, and learn certain sayings and gestures (Travélé 1929, 129–133; cf. Malé 1999, 47–48).

Initiation into an organization or familiarity with it through one’s family may actually inhibit an observer’s ability to write about it. Diamitani explains difficulties he encountered in conducting research and writing about Komo as someone with family ties to the organization (Diamitani 1999, 4–12, 2011; cf. Malé 1999). Reflecting on research he conducted in a different context, anthropologist Kenneth Little (1951, 8–10) notes that in order to write about institutions that prize secrecy in Sierra Leonean communities he identified as Mende, he never became initiated nor sought protected information. He also explains that he avoided secret information and was careful to protect details people he interviewed preferred to safeguard. In some cases, a researcher’s lack of initiation into an organization and personal distance from it combined with a respect for secrecy may facilitate study.⁵⁷

While I realized that initiation into Komo was an impossible goal for me, I also understood that responses to my research could vary, meaning certain people might be open to my questions and study even if other people were not. Some people in western Burkina Faso sought to talk with me precisely because they wanted me to publish their names and honor their expertise in texts that would circulate beyond the three-corner region. Other people were more reticent.⁵⁸ During an initial meeting with an elder familiar with Komo in Dahaba Ouattara’s neighborhood in August 2004, the elder expressed concern about my research. He reasoned that I wanted to learn about sources of power in western Burkina Faso so that I could broadcast the information on television and help augment the power of people in my home region. He did not want me to make restricted knowledge widely available to large audiences. I explained to him and other people I met that I never wanted to reveal restricted information or extract from people details they did not want to share with me. Whenever I interviewed anyone, I maintained that I only wanted to know what the person wanted me to know and would like me to share. I insisted that I did not want to steal secrets or acquire knowledge that I was not permitted or prepared to learn. When I returned to Sokouraba in 2005, I continued to meet with the elder who had previously expressed apprehension about my research. I respected his desire not to talk with me about power associations and their arts. He was also aware of my interviews with specialists and other people in the three-corner region. The man never changed his mind about talking with me about power associations and their arts. However, I was pleasantly surprised when he supported my research activities in front of the town’s leading political authority in July 2006.

My research benefited from silences I encountered, because what is not said and who chooses not to say something can reveal rather than conceal information. When the elder in Sokouraba who preferred not to talk with me about power associations and their arts referred to the possibility of a television broadcast, he may have recognized the prominence of televisions in the United States and, as he said, preferred not to transfer knowledge to foreign audiences. He may have also had in mind Porgo Rédo’s short documentary featuring a musician who was originally from a town neighboring Sokouraba but, by the early 2000s, lived in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso.⁵⁹ The documentary presents viewers with power association music and dancing. Perhaps the elder may not have wanted to talk about his family’s Komo chapter due to decades of uncertainty about who was going to lead it following the August 1986 death of its prominent leader. Given that the elder had not assumed the position, his own knowledge of Komo may not have been sufficient to lead the chapter. The circumstances of the 1986 death also may have discouraged him and other people from assuming the vacated position. Whatever the case, the elder’s decision not to talk with me about Komo suggested to me early in my research process that silences may not necessarily reflect absences of information. Rather, they may hint at more significant detail.⁶⁰

I detected other silences as I worked. Specialists I interviewed consistently declined to discuss specific vegetal matter they used in their work or procedures for working with it. Their silences led me to conclude that exact identification of plants and methods for manipulating plants constitute some of the most powerful and restricted knowledge linked to specialists’ activities. For this reason, after conservators Robin O’Hern and Ellen Pearlstein consulted me on a project to study two power association helmet masks in the collection of the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, they decided not to identify specific plant matter in the objects they examined, even though technical analysis makes it possible to do so (O’Hern et al. 2016).

When I talked with Karfa Coulibaly in June 2016 about the decision not to investigate specific plant matter incorporated in the two helmet masks at the Fowler Museum, Coulibaly surprised me with his response. Coulibaly noted that if we had identified the specific plant matter, maybe somebody would be able to use that information to help heal more people. While power association leaders regularly draw on their expertise to help heal people, he seemed to suggest that other scientists might be able to use power association leaders’ knowledge of specific plants to develop new treatments. The new treatments might reach more people than power association leaders usually reach. Of course, there are other considerations, including whether Coulibaly or other power association leaders would be properly and sufficiently recognized and compensated for their knowledge necessary to fuel advancement of the kinds of medicines Coulibaly seemed to have had in mind.⁶¹

I had previously asked Coulibaly what he thought about the fact that people in Europe and North America have subjected power association objects in European and American collections to X-radiography and showed him several images. He indicated that the practice did not bother him, explaining that the images do not reveal the secret methods of creation integral to each object’s design.⁶² Other power association leaders I interviewed expressed more concern about X-radiography of power association arts.⁶³ Specialists’ positions could vary, and the perspective of a single specialist could change over time. As a result, no single perspective can account for all perspectives, especially when thinking about the ethics of knowledge acquisition and transmission.

After interviewing people, gathering information, and cross-checking details, I have had to translate what I have learned from various people, each of whom decided what to share, into written text that circulates more freely. Sylvia Ardyn Boone also considers differences in methods for disseminating knowledge in the opening pages of her book, Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (1986). She writes, “All information [and knowledge in Mende communities] is part of the social network and the only sources of information are other people. . . . A printed book cannot decide who is going to read it: its information is free. But a human being can give or withhold information at [their] discretion” (Boone 1986, xv–xvi, emphases belong to Boone). Within the three-corner region, knowledge about Komo, Kono, and other power associations similarly appears to circulate from person to person through interpersonal exchanges that individuals control. American scholars favor printed, peer-reviewed publications with broad reach. I have had to bridge this gap.

Throughout this book, I have endeavored to respect people’s individual decisions about what information to share. People I met often set different limits or offered divergent explanations, and I have aimed to recognize disparate voices and perspectives rather than generalize. And because the production of knowledge cannot be separated from the specific contexts of its production, I have also sought to account for the varied contexts within which certain constellations of people interacting in different places and in different moments have produced knowledge about power associations and their arts. This book assembles knowledge acquired through particular networks of specialists operating within distinct contexts without exposing everything the specialists know in order to demonstrate how, for more than a century, power association leaders have exploited tension between seeing and not seeing in sophisticated ways.

Book Structure

When Nayland Blake talks about the bovine-shaped sculpture in the Met’s collection, the artist focuses on present but unseen materials of the assemblage’s construction. Blake also emphasizes processes involved in the making of the accumulative work, contrasting an attention to the object’s transformations over time with the idea that a “flash of inspiration” gives birth to art. In addition, Blake discerns that the assemblage at the Met is connected to a specific locale and a particular time. The same characteristics of power association arts are critical to makers of the works and their audiences in western West Africa. Yet studies that have assessed power association arts as products of a particular cultural or ethnic group have overshadowed investigations of singular works, transformed through time, or the exact contexts of their making. Here I emphasize specificity in my analysis of the making, reception, and circulation of power associations, their arts, and knowledge about them, all the while recognizing that by their nature, the organizations and their arts resist any efforts to contain them. They also guard against full disclosure.⁶⁴

In the book’s first chapter, “Power Associations,” I address a question about what power associations are in two ways. First, I examine in greater detail the tenacious notion that the organizations are specifically Bamana or Mande institutions. Missionaries, government officials, scholars, and other authors repeatedly framed the organizations as Bamana or Mande throughout the twentieth century. Yet late nineteenth-century French officials, twentieth-century colonial administrators, and other observers documented power associations in other communities. Second, I explain why I use the English phrase power association to refer to what Mande-language users call jo (sg.; jow, pl.). In a manner reminiscent of Rubin’s discussion of power and accumulation, McNaughton (1979a) employs the phrase power associations to designate institutions known as jow in Mande languages. Authors have at different moments in time offered terms including fraternities, confraternities, brotherhoods, religious cults, secret societies, and initiation associations as approximate equivalents for jow, a term with no exact equivalent in English. The terms highlight the organizations’ predominantly male orientation, religious nature, or secrecy bias, or they suggest some sort of formal or graded initiation processes (cf. Guyer 2018). Jow are organizations that specialists form through interpersonal networks they develop to cultivate knowledge in order to effect change. The organizations also support and maintain assemblages similar to the works that Henry reportedly tore open and that Griaule, Leiris, and Lutten stole. Drawing on published texts and previously unpublished archival documents, I trace how local and foreign authors—themselves audiences of power associations and their arts—have intersected with the organizations and their arts in different places and in different moments.

Power association leaders deliberately hinder or enhance spectators’ efforts to identify a work’s potent matter and methods that contributed to its making. This feature of power objects is the subject of “Assemblages,” the book’s second chapter. Specialists sponsor, create, and maintain an array of assemblages intentionally designed to assist them in their activities. The works range in size from small compositions that fit discreetly into a pocket to large constructions that are nearly human-sized. Some boliw take the shapes of masks comprised of helmets performers may wear on their heads and outfits they may wear over their bodies. Animal horns, animal quills, plant matter, and other, often indeterminate, materials abound in power association arts. The works vary in composition: a bird skull, horns, quills, and other matter cover the wooden armature of one helmet mask, whereas a pair of horns and bundles of different shapes and sizes accentuate the elongated maw of the wooden armature of another helmet mask (figs. intro.10–intro.11). Even crusty layers of indeterminate matter applied to the surfaces of power association objects seem to vary from object to object and from layer to layer (O’Hern 2012; see also O’Hern et al. 2016).

FIGURE intro.10. Unrecorded makers. Helmet mask identified by the Baltimore Museum of Art as a Kòmò Society Helmet Mask (Kòmòkun), Manding, Minianka, Guinea, Mali. Before 1983. Wood, animal horns, bird skull, plant fibers, porcupine quills, encrustation, glass; 36.9 × 27.7 × 59.7 cm. Gift of Robert and Mary Cumming, Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA 1983.79). Photo: Mitro Hood.

FIGURE intro.11. Unrecorded makers. Helmet mask identified by the Art Institute of Chicago as Kono Kun, Bamana, Mali. Probably before the late 1960s. Wood, horn, quills, and sacrificial material; 22.9 × 103.5 × 28.6 cm. Through prior gifts of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Baker, Mr. and Mrs. Dave Chapman, Dr. H. Van de Waal; through prior acquisitions of the Robert A. Waller Fund, Art Institute of Chicago (1997.62).

In “Performers and Performances,” the book’s third chapter, I examine power association performances. I assert that performer-audience interaction shapes power association events and bolsters the prestige of certain specialists. Lyrics for a Komo song published in 1927 begin, “Komo came today to entertain people in the village” (Tauxier 1927, 285). The words suggest that Komo organizations have long sponsored performances with their audiences in mind. Indeed, power association performances depend on performance-audience interactions as well as specific contexts surrounding each performance’s making. Other documents hint at power association performers’ awareness of their audiences. In the 1950 photograph attributed to Nadal, we see faces of men wearing masks. Masqueraders looking at the photographer demand mutual interaction. Attention to performer-audience interactions illuminates how power association events respond to and shape specific contexts. This attention also illustrates how the organizations intersect with local, national, and international audiences. The success or failure of particular performances and the standing of individual specialists involved in the events rely on performers’ engagement with other participants and the stories that circulate about the events.

“Unseeing Audiences,” the book’s fourth chapter, extends analysis of power association performances to female audiences. When I was conducting dissertation research in western Burkina Faso, Dahaba Ouattara asked me several times whether my professors understood that I was a woman trying to study organizations that have refused visual access to women for more than a century. I assured him that my mentors were familiar with the restrictions. I explained that I wanted to assess Komo and Kono from other perspectives. I found that although women are not permitted to see Komo and Kono performances, they are always nearby and aware of the events. Considering the unseeing audience led me to reassess the nature of an audience for a live performance. Analyses of theater audiences often use spectator as a synonym for audience, implying that audiences are physically present for a live performance and can see it (e.g., Bennett 1997; Freshwater 2011). Scholars of theater also refer to ghostly audiences (e.g., Goode 2011, 468), absent audiences (e.g., Blackburn 1996; Nair 2009), or invisible audiences (e.g., Black 2012). The unseeing audience comprises people who are physically present at a live performance and who interact with performers but who are prohibited from actually seeing an event that other people can see. In an effort to recover individual experiences of people in unseeing audiences, I present women’s stories of witnessing Komo and Kono arts. Even though their involvement usually excludes sight of the arts, their participation in Komo and Kono events is critical to the organizations’ operations. Power associations depend on the existence and actions of such outsiders and bystanders.

Recognition of women as active—if unseeing—audience members inspires recognition of women’s other contributions to Komo and Kono, organizations that twentieth-century scholars often framed as exclusively male. Characterization of Komo and Kono as male institutions obscures understanding rather than expanding it. It also overlooks how women interact with male Komo and Kono members and contribute to the organizations. Drawing on field data, including my own experience as a woman who has been prohibited from seeing Komo and Kono arts, I readdress the long-standing notion of mostly male observers that all-male membership and male-only audiences define the two power associations. Accounts of the organizations’ founding often identify women as the original owners of Komo and Kono, and the organizations’ leaders recall significant contributions of certain women in their own chapters’ histories. Women engage with and support Komo and Kono activities in other ways—for example, by seeking guidance from a Komo or Kono expert or assisting with preparations for a performance. The restrictions Komo and Kono leaders place on women’s access to the organizations’ arts ultimately underscore rather than preclude the importance of women to the two power associations and their activities.

The book’s fifth and final chapter, “Komo on Screen,” shifts focus from study of actual power association chapters and their arts to a West African artist’s interpretation of them. Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé’s award-winning film Yeelen (1987) charts a rivalry between a father with knowledge of Komo and his son. Because it is generated from within Mali but by a filmmaker without long-standing, firsthand knowledge of the intricate operations of Komo, the film offers another way of knowing about power associations and their arts. Yet when I first watched the film after I began my study, I could not see how the film related to what I had learned about Komo. I watched it several times before the absence of the kinds of objects I have come to recognize as common to Komo or other power associations caught my attention as a subject of investigation.

Themes of the seen and unseen are as central to Yeelen as they are to power association chapters supporting disparate arts in the three-corner region. In Étienne Carton de Grammont’s 1987 documentary on the film’s making, actor Nyamanto Sanògò, who plays the father, says he enjoyed contributing to a document for posterity but knew there was a limit to what could be depicted on screen. He explains, “If these things [i.e., Komo] disappear, children will still be able to discover and learn about them. But among the Bamana, there is a secret that one cannot reveal: it’s the secret of Komo. One can create scenes that resemble Komo, but the secret remains a secret.” By merely evoking the specific knowledge and arts of Komo rather than explicitly showing them, Cissé navigates a tension between seeing and not seeing Komo and between the secret and its disclosure. In the film, a visual and aural art, Cissé also investigates other key features of power associations and their arts, including themes of power, knowledge, competition, and gender. Cissé, an artist, offers worldwide viewers a riddle, evoking specific knowledge and arts of Komo rather than explicitly showing them.

In a sense, Cissé’s film carefully puts on global display a power association that derives its definition from and manages its operations by cultivating audiences who do not see—the women and others the organization’s leaders deliberately exclude. After its release, film critics and scholars tended to want to see the film as a matter-of-fact portrayal of Komo by a Malian filmmaker. But Cissé, who did not study Komo prior to making Yeelen, offers viewers an allegory, one that investigates Komo, its arts, and its power plays as well as the art of film without ever disclosing exact details of their making. My analysis considers how historical and field-based knowledge of power associations in western West Africa intersect with the views of Komo that Cissé presents in his art.

Seeing the Unseen: Arts of Power Associations on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier” examines great patrons for the arts in western West Africa and the works they have supported since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. It also investigates how we know, especially when long-standing analytical categories fail and when contexts of making favor obscurity rather than transparency. And by concluding with a study of a filmmaker’s view of Komo, the book highlights another method for pursuing and disseminating nuanced understandings of phenomena in the world while respecting limits to what broad audiences may be permitted to see or know.