Coda

Embracing Unstable Ground

How do we know what we think we know? The question has fueled my research on power associations and their arts, but I can trace it back to prior concerns about included and excluded voices within a discipline as well as earlier efforts to understand what an identifier applied to the arts actually means. The question also implies that the production and dissemination of knowledge are not neutral activities.

Mozambique-born sociologist Elísio Macamo addressed the nature and ethics of knowledge production and dissemination in his keynote lecture at the 2017 European Conference on African Studies in Basel, Switzerland.¹ He explained, “We [scholars of Africa] study Africa because we want to know how to study Africa. That’s scholarship.” Macamo continued, “Scholarship is not defined solidly by the conclusions we can draw about our studied objects. It is also and perhaps more fundamentally defined by the ability to reflect on the best way to organize our ways of knowing” (2017; see also 2018, 8; emphasis in the published version of the lecture). Study of Africa reveals flaws or faults in conceptual apparatuses, especially ones developed in European and North American centers where imaginings of enlightenment and universality have dominated. Macamo’s concerns struck me when I first heard them, given my own commitments to finding and examining hidden assumptions—to seeing the unseen—in my research and writing.

Through my study of power associations and their arts, I investigate how Africanist art historians and other thinkers have historically organized ways of knowing. I urge reconsideration of common but problematic analytic frames, propose alternate approaches, and shift attention to perspectives that scholars or other observers have overlooked, ignored, or flattened. One goal is to offer possibilities for richer, more nuanced understandings that capture complexities of past and present lived experiences. Another objective is to embrace the idea that no position is all knowing. Rather, any perspective, including a viewpoint coming from within the three-corner region, constitutes a single element within a larger whole and is contingent on the circumstances shaping it.

Instead of analyzing power associations as institutions that express the essence of a particular cultural or ethnic group, I have examined them as organizations that have transcended cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious borders for more than a century. Rather than view the organizations and their activities as reflections of “tradition,” even invented tradition, I have recognized their past and present importance in local, national, transnational, and international spheres, even when extant documentation makes impossible the reconstruction of detailed histories. I have considered local specificity while also acknowledging the remarkable consistency across space and time of certain features of power associations and their arts. In addition, I have directed attention to power association audiences, including women who interact with performers at a live event but who are prohibited from actually viewing the event that other people can see. My focus on the organizations’ audiences has allowed me to identify and assess women’s critical contributions to institutions long considered the near exclusive domain of men. By no means do I think that scholarly methods are the only way to investigate a topic. With this idea in mind, I close the book with an analysis of Souleymane Cissé’s award-winning film, Yeelen (1987). The film approaches the power association Komo and its arts from yet another vantage point, that of a Malian filmmaker who studied film in what was then the Soviet Union and who produced the film for release in France. Through my study of the film, I foreground the partial yet still generative nature of any particular point of view.

According to Macamo, the “[intellectual] ground upon which we stand is unstable, and shifting,” dependent on the statements and analyses of scholars and other observers who preceded us, including individuals whose actions we may now regard as controversial or otherwise objectionable. Macamo adds, “[The shaky intellectual ground on which we stand] is what enables us . . . to find our bearings in the world. The fact that we are conscious of the lack of ground beneath us enables us to resist the temptation to think that our ideas and findings necessarily represent objective reality” (2017; see also 2018, 5–6). The work of scholars of Africa, he says, “implies an ethical commitment towards knowledge itself, because knowledge is responsibility” (2017; see also 2018, 8). Macamo identifies the extent of this responsibility, concluding that we study Africa not only because we want to know how to study Africa, but because we want to know how to study the world. The relevance of scholarship on Africa, from the questions we ask to our methods of study, extends beyond the continent and its diasporas and to the whole world.

In my conversations with power association leaders in western Burkina Faso, they demonstrated keen attention to the responsibilities that come with pursuits of knowledge. I noticed their frequent emphases on consulting with individuals whom the specialists deemed competent, conscientious, well-informed, and trustworthy as well as their repeated references to the acquisition of rare materials and knowledge from distant or otherwise difficult-to-access places. Each assemblage, installation, performance, or building that a power association leader or other specialist constructs or maintains results not from a single genius who has a flash of inspiration and achieves greatness on his own, but rather from a person who has over time consulted with other respected specialists with whom he has gathered information and materials, tested the resources, and refined them. The process is ongoing and ever changing, and it results in smaller and larger works inseparable from an ever-expanding ensemble. As I reflect on my own process, I recognize that I have forged networks of knowledgeable people in western Burkina Faso and beyond to garner information about power associations and their arts. I have sought to locate and evaluate disparate sources of information available in different formats. I have experienced moments of revelation as well as moments of concealment. And I have published thoughts that exist in relation to other people and texts, including my own. Thus, in some ways, my own means for generating and circulating knowledge have reminded me of processes familiar to power association leaders. The specialists, like Macamo, provide us with productive possibilities for probing the ways in which we try to know and share knowledge.

The words Macamo delivered in Basel excited me when I first heard them, and they continue to inspire me. The guiding principles for scholarship that Macamo set forth in June 2017 ring true with my own commitments, and Macamo’s ideas have pushed me to articulate more clearly how and why I do what I do. I also resist the idea that any book, including any book I write, stands as a singularly authoritative, definitive, or all-encompassing volume on a subject. Even as I pen words to conclude this text, I can see that if I were to begin a study of power associations in December of 2020 rather than conclude it at that time, I might write a very different book. I would develop a set of questions informed by my past and present in that moment, and I would draw on other contexts, ways of thinking, and sources of information, including specific power association leaders and other community members, available to me then in an attempt to answer the questions. My process, inseparable from specific people and contexts, would lead me to certain themes and framings.

I offer Seeing the Unseen—like Senufo Unbound or the in-progress Mapping Senufo, my other two monographic projects—as a single node in a network of reflections by a broad range of thinkers, each of whom was informed by distinct perspectives, frameworks, and evidence specific to particular times, places, and circumstances. Each subsequent investigation builds in some way on earlier analyses and foregrounds a particular set of voices. Ideally, each new investigation will uncover historical complexities, examine persistent assumptions, or refine common understandings. It may even seem to offer stable ground once it is released into the world. Yet as Macamo urges us to see, each time we think we find ourselves on new, stable ground, that ground should become unstable, hopefully leading to fresh reflection and analysis. As Cissé shows in Yeelen, one end may open up to still-to-be-imagined futures.