Evhe—Ouatchi: Un'estetica del Disordine/Une esthetique du disordre

Evhe--Ouatchi: Un'estetica del Disordine/Une esthetique du disordre edited by the agency of Giovanna Parodi da Passano Milan: Centro Studi Archeologia Africana, 2004 163 pp 158 ill. Price 30

An exhibition of power realitys connected to the several vodu homages of southeastern Togo was organized jointly through the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano and by the agency of the Centro Studi Archeologia Africana di Milano from February 26-June 6 2004 Its catalogue includes a neatly organized series of essays introduced by dint of Marc Auge, the noted author of Le Dieu Objet (1988)

Editor Giovanna Parodi da Passano's leading essay raises sum of two units main points. Firstly, she directions an historically and anthropologically well-informed discussion of the two the concept and the bourn feticcio (fetish). Her position step quicklys against the grain of Anglo-American scholarship, which has, level in recent years, argued against the use of the mete in publications that, in their sheer whirl and number, seem to demonstrate that the problem simply refuses to move away; for it entails fundamental and thorny issues of a theoretical as well as methodological nature (eg Shelton 1995) Against reductionist runs Parodi da Passano picks up a line of cogitation permeating "Continental" anthropology since at least Jean Pouillon's Fetiches sans fetichisme of 1975 She argues that the conception of "the fetish," once expurgated of its colonial overtones in a "de-fetishized" approach to certain African cultural expressions, is still extremityed in that it designates a specific constellation of conceptual, cognitive, symbolical, and psychological simple bodys made visible in the kind of material tillage expressed by vodu and similar religious packages (on this matter, diocese Poppi 2006).

The next to the first element of interest in the essay consists of an attempt to describe the specific aesthetics of vodu particulars in terms of the effort to master the invisible forces active within a variety of fields of experience by the agency of mustering them within concrete objects--the manufactured, visible, and tangible material substance of vodu. In this faculty of perception "the aesthetic" as such is primary and constitutive and not simply "symbolical" and "representational." It is the hard material form alone that is capable of overcoming the protean, phenomenologically unstable, and cognitively slippery experience of the vodu "Giving a body" circumvents and locates, focuses and "plants" the vodu otherwise left to wander perilously, an angry, disembodied spirit in search of victims where and when worshippers are lacking. Here the comparison with Suzanne Blier's African Vodun (1995) is almost de rigueur. While this cannot be pursu further for reasons of space, it ought to be pointed without that the two analyses tale each other in that the pair privilege an understanding of vodu external realitys from a strongly psychological point of view: Blier's being more intimate and person-center while that of Parodi da Passano is directed to a more "objective aesthetic."

The essay through Alessandra Brivio expands on a certain number of of the general themes introduced in the opening essay. The greatest in quantity engaging part consists of a detailed analysis of the notion of the person--as experienced in the cultural area in question--in relationship to the array of entities, forces, and fields of power--all variously in and without of focus--that constitute the phenomenon of vodu Here the ethnography is detailed and to the point, as it derive pleasure froms the freshness (as well as, occasionally, the hesitations) of a work in progres (the author is still conducting field research). The central thesis is that amongst the Evhe the notion of the somebody is that of a composite being within which an ever-changing constellation of forces straddling the two visible and invisible phenomenologies of experience finds a field of action whose shape--past, near and future--is negotiable and at no time to be taken for granted. Brivio's detailed account of similar forces, fields, and negotiations is convincing in its complexity and nonsystemic approach to what are, in the experience of the not absent reviewer too, almost intractable ethnographic vexed questions Perhaps some will find her interpretation of the data les compelling, for it advances close, in its somewhat reiterated formulations, to the description of all-too-postmodern personalities. The discovery of multiplicity versus the (pretended) unity of Modernist Western Man does not ne now to be exported back to the place where the notion of the heteronymous Primitive African Man was one time formulated in order to reinstate an improbable--and universalistic--'equivalence" between Euro-America and Africa.

A comparative approach is pursu through Albert de Surgy, the specialist of Evhe religion, in the third essay of the catalogue. The riddle that he addresses, in a nutshell, is whether, in the light of the multisided composition of the one among "les Africains" (a generalization that fortunately disappears as the essay sails into ethnographic azure waters), they ought therefore to be considered les "individualistic" than their European (and--I gues on the other hand one never knows these days--American) counterparts. De Surgy is definite in this respect: "Most certainly an African cast ups that supernatural forces dominate him. He have feelings that he is primordially acted by means of them and that he is not immediately responsible for his actions" (p 107 my translation). However, de Surgy plants the doubt of the comparative equivalence, meant to revolve the tables over and redres the imbalance: "Nevertheless, is the subdue of a modern society not himself dominated and directed, if he does not guard himself, by dint of obscure psychic forces?" (ibid.). His answer is, of course, in the positive. Ultimately, de Surgy argues for a "transcendence absolue du sujet" (p 112) in Africa, owed to the very possibility of a variety of choices in negotiating one's life trajectory with conflicting super natural powers. This would compare favorably with "Modern Man's" subjection to impersonal bureaucracies, sombrous political manipulations, and all the determinations preventing him from being an "absolutely transcendent subject" unlike his luckier counterpart who can--at least, as it were--manipulate the fetishes. individual cannot help thinking that we are here in the nearness of yet another version of the elderly story that has haunted the darkest nights of the Western intellect since Michel de Montaigne had thinkings on cannibals. Or, more modestly of poor comparative methodology answering hastily formulated problems