Commerce and Authenticity

Is what’s produced for commerce with outsiders inauthentic? That’s one way to describe the fundamental intuition that makes Westerners look for African art produced by Africans for religious ritual and traditional dance – and to draw back from what’s made for trade.

There is, undoubtedly, work done for trade that has little intrinsic meaning and value. We buy it all the time, in fast food and fast merchandise. But the basic idea that commerce and meaning are opposed is obviously false: artists have to eat, and many of them profoundly desire commerce in the sense that they want to speak to their fellow men and women. 

This basic opposition is certainly false some of the time in Africa. You can see this in the account by Brenda Schmahmann in “Stitched-up Women, Pinned-down Men: Gender Politics in Weya and Mapula Needlework, Zimbabwe and South Africa.” (This article is chapter 5 in Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster, eds., African Art and Agency in the Workshop (2013) – which those of you who’ve seen my recent posts will know I’ve been reading along in.) Schmahmann describes the history and the products of two projects in which African women, with the assistance of outside professionals, used sewing skills to produce things of beauty and to earn income.

I’ll focus most on the embroidered cloth created by South African women near Pretoria, in a project called the Mapula Embroidery Project. Initiated, it seems, by the Pretoria Council of Churches, and catalyzed by a member of the UNISA (University of South Africa) art and fine art department and colleagues of hers, this project was seeded in the black community of Winterveld and took root there. It took root only with difficulty: local group leaders’ deaths and disappointed hopes undercut it but it survived. You can see some examples of the Mapula work – which strikes me as beautiful and stylistically innocent at the same time – here. (And for examples of the Zimbabwean Weya project’s appliqués, see this link.)

But the work turns out to be deeply political. As Brenda Schmahmann explains, the women embroiderers respond to the tremendous sexual oppression of their lives by creating images of a just world. The Weya appliqué makers are sometimes blunter, but they too tended to the portrayal of the world they wished for. (The Weya project as such ended when funding ran out, though Schmhmann reports that "works in a Weya style continue to be made" (131).) 

Thus an artist named Thandi Sondlo creates a piece called “Nelson Mandela and Graca Machel,” in which Machel says to Mandela, “I like your shirt” and Mandela responds, “And me too I like your dress” – while a child sits between them and below them is an image of “Mr Mbeki [South Africa’s second president] developing the world.” Schmahmann says, “In her representation of Mandela and Machel, Sondlo remedies the lack of reciprocal affirmation that usually characterizes relationships between men and women in her community.” (Text accompanying plate 5 in the book.) It's noteworthy also that Sondlo did not invent the dialogue she presents; rather, she borrowed it and transmuted it from a South African joke in which the first speaker was not Graça Machel but rather Archbishop Desmond Tutu (141). This work is clever as well as moving.

These pieces, understood against the backdrop of the makers’ lives, become both sweet and sad. As to the supposed opposition between commerce and authenticity: the idea seems almost absurd as one thinks about these works, whose authenticity, whose expression of pain and hope, is so immediate and overpowering. 

A mimetic apprenticeship

Here is Silvia Forni’s description of an apprenticeship as a potter in Nsei, Cameroon (in her “Masters, Trend-makers, and Producers: The Village of Nsei, Cameroon, as a Multisited Pottery Workshop,” chapter 3 in Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster, eds., African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Indiana University Press 2013):

Initially, the master and apprentice work on the same kind of object, the young man carefully observing the master’s movements while trying to reproduce his gestures and postures. The training involves very little verbal exchange: if the apprentice does not follow the correct procedure, the master will stop working on his piece and will step in to demonstrate the correct way to complete the task. (Kindle location 2134 of 9227)

She goes on to emphasize:

the essentially mimetic character of apprenticeship, a relationship meant to “turn the neophyte’s initial mimicry of his master into unselfconscious movements that are masterful in their own right” (quoting an article by Nicolas Argenti, “People of the Chisel: Apprenticeship, Youth and Elites in Oku (Cameroon),” 29 American Ethnologist  493, 502 (2002)). (Kindle location 2143 of 9227)

One might imagine that this sort of training would lead to a professionalism that consisted solely of imitation. Perhaps it often does. But Forni also says that an “ability to cater to different markets and innovate, although not the norm, seems to characterize the attitude of many of the potters who influence trends in contemporary Nsei pottery.” (Kindle location 2163 of 9227)

Now all this is really quite startling. My impression is that a lot of current educational theory emphasizes the necessity for reflection by the learner, and the value of the teacher enabling or guiding the learner to engage in that kind of thought about what he or she is learning. Those propositions seem to be important elements of understanding adult learning. To be sure, it’s not entirely clear from Forni’s article how old the apprentices here are; at one point she refers to “young men” entering apprenticeship, at another she refers to “boys.” But even if the Nsei apprentices are all young enough not to qualify as adults, the seeming absence of opportunities for reflection appears quite unlike what contemporary American education even for younger students aspires to.

It may be that Nsei potters are reflecting while they practice imitating their masters’ physical movements, but that’s hardly clear. It is clear that the masters are not focused on eliciting any such reflection. To put the matter bluntly: this kind of education doesn’t appear to be reflective. If it is reflective, then any process of education is reflective, because people think about what they are doing, So they do  – but if that truth is enough to ensure the presence of reflection, then educational practice needn’t be shaped to add any further support to what is an inevitable process anyway.

The point of reflection is generally thought to be to give the learner a deeper understanding of what is being learned, so that he or she can go beyond merely reproducing past lessons to address new problems with the benefit of professional skill. But on Forni’s account, it seems that many graduates of this unreflective apprenticeship process achieve creativity nonetheless.

None of this disproves any tenet of American education. It may be that more Nsei potters would develop into creative professionals in a different educational system, even if some develop that way in the nonreflective system they in fact learn in. It may also be that potting, a physical art, requires a more physical, mimetic form of education than some other professions – law, for instance. But I think, nevertheless, that Nsei apprenticeship at least raises some question about how sure we should be about the educational tenets we currently embrace.  

Cannibalism and the teacher-student relationship

Nicolas Argenti, an anthropologist who apprenticed as a Cameroonian woodcarver, recently discussed a ritual by which such apprenticeships traditionally concluded. He does so in “Follow the Wood: Carving and Political Cosmology in Oku, Cameroon,” which is chapter two of African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster eds.; Indiana University Press 2013). I would give a page reference but I’m reading the book on a Kindle; in Kindle terms, the discussion I’m referring to, and quoting from, occurs around “location 1781 of 9227.”

This ritual is no longer practiced, but evidently it’s still remembered. At the end of the apprentice’s training, the apprentice brings the master “a ritual offering of food and wine.” The master consumes the offering – all of which seems quite amicable, except that the name of the ritual is “eating the apprentice”!

That’s quite a name. Shall we say, putting the matter delicately, that it points to the possible ambivalences of the teacher-student relationship? Perhaps the meal marks the point at which the apprentice’s youthful individuality has been completely consumed by the master. Having been eaten up, the apprentice offers another meal in recognition of his consumption.

Or perhaps the point is almost the opposite – the apprentice has consumed the master’s knowledge and must now, inevitably, replace the master. Argenti says that “the threat posed to his master by the newly accomplished apprentice was neutralized by this ritual act of cannibalism.” A somewhat different reading would be that, by way of apology, and to avoid the master’s natural resentment of this prospect of replacement, the apprentice offers up a meal.

I’d rather think of the event’s overtones, however, as more amused than angry. The master has devoted years to teaching the apprentice, one hopes with the view, as a figure in Middlemarch puts it, that “the earth belongs to the young.” The master is not sad that the apprentice has achieved mastery. On the contrary, the master should be proud of the success of his (or her) teaching. The master also understands that the alternative – a real alternative, as the elders among the Baga or other groups whose ritual traditions are collapsing in the space of a generation or two have actually experienced – is that there will be no more masters, and their knowledge will simply vanish. So the master is not resentful.

Still the master may well be rueful, and less thrilled by the passage of time than is the apprentice now coming into possession of the world. The “eating of the apprentice” then is not sublimated revenge but an ironic, autumnal reflection on one way that we make the best of the fact that we don’t live forever – namely, by passing on what we know to the young. 

Law school clinics and American law

The April 30, 2013 issue of Law Week (Vol. 81, No. 41: the Supreme Court opinions issue) reports three interesting decisions, but these decisions are also interesting for another reason, visible in the lists of counsel at the end of each case. It turns out that clinical programs were on the briefs for all three cases.

The Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic helped represent Adrian Moncrieffe in his successful challenge to the argument that his conviction for possession of 1.3 grams of marijuana with the intent to distribute (not necessarily to sell) was an aggravated felony barring him from eligibility for certain discretionary relief from deportation. Moncrieffe v. Holder (No. 11-702, decided April 23, 2013)

The Institute for Public Representation, a program of Georgetown University Law Center, helped represent the plaintiffs/petitioners in McBurney v. Young (No. 12-17, decided April 29, 2013), an unsuccessful effort to establish that Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act, which offers access to information only to Virginians, was unconstitutional under either the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the US Constitution’s Article IV, § 2, cl. 1, or under the Constitution’s “dormant commerce clause.”

The George Mason University School of Law Supreme Court Clinic helped represent the State of Louisiana in Boyer v. Louisiana (No. 11-9953, decided April 29, 2013), in which the Supreme Court dismissed the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted. Boyer contended that the prolonged delays in his trial were attributable to the state’s failure to fund the public defender system, and that his right to a speedy trial had been violated, but the Court, over a dissent by Justice Sotomayor (joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan) did not rule on the constitutional question.

It may be that no member of the clinical community will agree with the arguments advanced by all three of these clinical programs in these cases. That’s fine, and just as academic freedom gives protection to clinics undertaking controversial cases so it gives protection to debate over what cases clinics ought to take. But what strikes me about this issue of Law Week is the unmistakable illustration of the fact that clinics are now a force shaping American law, in many local courts and offices and also in the highest court in the land. 

Why US courts won't be hearing cases involving torture so much anymore

In Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (No. 10-1491, April 17, 2013), the Supreme Court unanimously decided that US federal courts could not hear a case contending that Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport and Trading Company had violated the law of nations by helping Nigerian troops ferociously suppress opposition to the companies' oil extraction activities in the Ogoniland region of Nigeria.

That's an important decision, and a debatable one, but as I said all 9 justices of the Supreme Court agreed on it. What they didn't agree about was the rationale.

The dispute among the justices can be summed up bluntly: they disagreed about whether US courts could hear a case about torture, if the torture took place outside the US. (If some justices did feel torture outside the US could be the basis for a suit - as they did - why was the court unanimous about rejecting this case? The answer is that the lawsuit wasn't brought against the alleged government wrongdoers, but only against private entities accused of aiding them. Bad as aiding another government's "atrocities" is, no one on the Court saw it as a sufficient basis for federal court action.)

What was the basis of the justices' disagreement? Much of what they say is focused on a rather dry legal question: does the "presumption against extraterritoriality" apply to interpretation of the Alien Tort Statute? That statute, 28 U.S.C. 1350, on the books since 1789, reads as if it allows anyone to sue anyone, in US court, for violations of international law. But the presumption against extraterritoriality says that ordinarily Congress' statutes should be assumed to be aimed at regulating events in the US, not abroad. If that presumption applies to the Alien Tort Statute, then the law's seemingly broad language would be read much more narrowly.

The strongest argument against applying this presumption to this statute is that everyone agrees that one thing the statute was meant to allow is suits against pirates, and pirates undoubtedly acted primarily outside the US - so Congress must have wanted to act extraterritorially at least to some extent.

But what about torturers? Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, says that "pirates may well be a category unto themselves," whose legal status has no lessons for the treatment of other wrongdoers today. Justice Breyer and three other liberal justices maintain, in contrast, that torturers are today's pirates, "'common enemies of all mankind,'" and equally within the statute's reach.

But the most startling point the majority makes has very little to do with the pirate analogy. Instead, it is the observation that accepting this lawsuit "would imply that other nations, also applying the law of nations, could hale our citizens into their courts for alleged violations of the law of nations occurring in the United States, or anywhere in the world."

This observation is quite correct. Justice Breyer argues that a number of limiting doctrines that he would apply "should obviate the majority's concern," but I don't think he is right. if the United States has a special interest in not becoming a sanctuary for torturers, as he argues, then so would other countries. And it is one of the undeniable  legacies of the past decade of war that there are quite a number of Americans, including former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, who were involved with conduct, notably water boarding, that many people in the world regard as torture.  

Whether that reality justifies reading the Alien Tort Statute narrowly can be debated. The majority argues for such a narrow interpretation so as to leave to today's lawmakers the question of whether to now write an expansive statute whose existence might encourage other nations to claim similar authority over Americans. We might think, instead, that those who adopted this statute in 1789 already made the decision about how to position the US with respect to international law, and that they did not anticipate, and so did not seek to guard against, the possibility that we would someday find ourselves on the wrong side of international law.

But what is clear is that we have arrived very much on the wrong side of the law, in the view of many people around the world. And our fear of Americans' being haled into court around the world now seems to contribute to our own courts stepping back from contributing some measure of justice in suits against other enemies of all mankind. That result strikes me as yet another of the sad results of our losing our bearings in the war on terror.

The Baga, past and future

The story Frederick Lamp tells in his fascinating book Art of the Baga begins as a portrayal of timeless beliefs, but then deepens into a story of the decline and fall of those beliefs, and of their possible rebirth in new form. Here are a few snapshots from that story: 

The Baga believe, or rather believed, that they could create their own "spiritual power" (158). The amazing masks of D'mba, expressing the profound impact of mature women in society, are apparently a conscious invention. They aren't "spirits" but they are powerful. Everybody creates gods, but almost no one acknowledges having done so; the Baga seem to come closer than most.

Yet this intense spiritual world must now be gone. Even when Lamp wrote, in the 1980s, almost everyone who actually recalled the innermost secrets was very old. Those elders would not pass on what they knew, because the rituals in which their knowledge was to be shared were no longer practiced. So this knowledge was simply disappearing, unless, as Lamp hopes, the elders still have some method of transmission as secret as the knowledge itself. (253)

How did this elaborate world of belief come to an end? Lamp tells us that the Baga ritual culture was finally destroyed not by French colonialists – though they undermined its role – but by a wave of Islamization, accompanied by violence. This was not the Islamist fundamentalism that is so prominent today, but something much more local, in the mid-1950s. (224) What gave it such force? Perhaps, as is often the case with religious outpourings, politicians' calculation played an important part. But Lamp thinks that something else was going on too. He suggests that the ritual world of the Baga was so all-consuming, and so tilted in favor of Baga elders, that Baga young men were ready to throw over the old customs in favor of freedom. So the amazing and rich culture that we are tempted to mourn was an oppression to those young Baga who helped end it. (238-39)

And yet, in the 80s, Baga young people were trying to reclaim their cultural heritage – in part with the aid of a visiting art historian, Lamp himself, who became in his words "a patron of the arts, as the ceremonial organization or the council of elders would have been in the past." (256) It's reasonable to guess that these efforts have included a rebirth of the actual making of classic Baga masks. A Baga mask made today may not be a ritual object, but it may still deserve to be called "authentic," because it reflects a popular movement at cultural reclamation. And its purchase, say by a Westerner, may not be a further blow to an endangered culture, but a support for that culture’s resurgence. And perhaps it is not out of character for a people that once believed it could create a spiritual power to now believe it can reclaim its lost culture. In this sense, both the new masks and the entire effort at self-re-invention are expressions of the rich Baga tradition. 

Review my sister's book!

Last month, Christopher Buckley reviewed my sister Lucy Ellmann’s new novel Mimi in the New York Times Sunday Book Review for March 17, 2013. He didn’t seem to like it much. I won’t link to it, but you can look it up.

It’s not so easy to refute a book review. Of course every reviewer is entitled to his – or her – opinion. (Usually “his”: most reviewers at the Book Review, and a number of other journals, are men, as shown in a recent statistical analysis by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.) Nevertheless I wrote a letter to the Book Review in response. They haven’t printed it – perhaps they don’t like letters from authors’ brothers – but I will, here:

            To the Editor:

Christopher Buckley’s review of Lucy Ellmann’s new novel Mimi is so over the top in its hostility to the book that one searches for an explanation. Can he really be that upset about italics? Or could he possibly see the book’s Manifesto as an actual call for men to solve the world’s problems by giving all their money to women? Buckley asks a couple of times if perhaps he is missing the point, and wonders if the book should be read as a Swiftian modest proposal. In my opinion, that notion misses the point twice. The book is neither a tract nor a satire, but rather a romance, and its Manifesto is not advocacy but the imagined expression of a man who has at long last and after much suffering found love in a woman’s arms. The books Buckley imagines and dislikes aren’t the one Lucy Ellmann wrote.

Sincerely,

Stephen Ellmann

PS: I am the author’s brother – but since Buckley finds time in his review to sniff about the “numerous Ellmanns” my sister includes in her acknowledgments, I feel I too have been touched by his review and have acquired a right of reply.

So what to do? Well, Lucy’s book features a Manifesto, and I wish to speak in similar vein:  

Literary critics of America, you have nothing to lose but your chains. Don’t be daunted by one man’s opinion. Read Lucy’s book and review it!