Art and Fetish in the Anthropology Museum

Abstract

Between the 1920s and early 1980s an increasing number of African art exhibitions opened to the public in Western Europe and North America. In these exhibitions African religious objects such as masks and wooden figurines were reframed as modernist art. Focusing on the illustrative case of the National Ethnology Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, this article shows that these African art exhibitions offered a powerful alternative to the colonial, religious concept of the fetish. Early scholars of comparative religion claimed that the primitive fetish worshippers were unable to grasp the idea of transcendence. By elevating African religious objects (the so-called fetishes) to the transcendental realm of modernist art, curators of African art helped dispel the colonial concept of the fetish, and change mindsets and worldviews. In their struggle against the notion of the fetish, these curators also engaged with the concepts of art, culture and religion. Mounted on pedestals and bathed by light, the African religious objects became modernist cult objects: cultural artifacts elevated to a higher plane of religious and aesthetic spirituality.

Keywords:

• fetish
• art
• artifact
• cult object
• modernism
• anthropology museums
• African art

Acknowledgements

I thank the NEM staff, particularly Paulo Costa, Cristina Henriques, Alexandra Oliveira, and Carmen Rosa, for their help and support. My thanks go as well to Joaquim Pais de Brito, Branca Moires, Rogério Marques de Abreu, Brent Plate, and Birgit Meyer. The ideas behind this article were first presented in “Religious Objects in Secular Museums,” a panel organized by Brent Plate for the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, 2013.

Notes

1 The NEM researchers curated the following four African art exhibitions: Modernism and Black-African Art (1976), African Sculpture (1977), African Sculpture (1985), and African Sculpture in Portugal (1985). In this essay, I briefly consider a fifth exhibition, Peoples and Cultures (1972).

2 Key references on the concept of the fetish in religion and/or art include De Brosses (1760); Keane (2007); MacGaffey (1994); Masuzawa (2000); Mitchell (2005); Picton (2014); Pietz (1985, 1987, 1988); Sansi (2007); Shelton (1995); Silva (2011, 2013).

3 For the relation between materiality and transcendence, see Keane (2007), Meyer (2012), and Pietz (1985, 1987).

4 For a discussion of the art-culture system, see Clifford (1988b), Fernandes Dias (2001), and Price (1989).

5 All quotes in the Portuguese language were translated into English by the author.

6 A brief comparison is warranted between Modernism and Black-African Art, held at the NEM in 1976, and “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1984. While both exhibitions rested on the juxtaposition of traditional African art and Euro-American modernist art, they were received in dramatically different ways. While Modernism was received with acclaim, Primitivism unleashed a torrent of pointed critiques, being often described as the end of an era. For an introduction to Primitivism from the perspective of its curators, see Rubin (1984). For a discussion of this controversial show from the critical perspective emerging in the mid-1980s, see, for example, Clifford (1988a) and Foster ([1985] 1998).

7 For a discussion and critical appraisal of the notion of authenticity in African art, see, for example, Willet (1976) and Phillips and Steiner (1999).

8 Shelly Errington (1994) provides a detailed analysis of the “deep schemata” that help explain the selection of some objects over others as “authentic primitive art.” Examples of such schemata are art over craft, art over utility, iconicity over decorative abstraction, and religiosity over usefulness. See also Silva 2003.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sónia Silva

Sónia Silva is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Skidmore College. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia, as well as museum work in Europe and the USA, Silva’s research deals with materiality, material religion, the notion of the fetish, ritual and religion, divination, witchcraft, violence, and museums. Silva is the author of Along an African Border: Angolan Refugees and Their Divination Baskets (Penn Press 2011).

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