'There is no such thing as a spirit in the stone!' - Misrepresentations of Zimbabwean Stone Sculpture (PDF)

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract:
The purpose of this thesis is to elaborate an approach to modern Zimbabwean stone sculpture - not from the perspective of aesthetics, but through a critical anthropological analysis of identity and representation. I do not set out from a category, for example ¿Zimbabwean sculptors¿, but from the following problem: precisely those sculptors - i.e., a group of people, which I understand as a collective that shares common cultural traits but which is not for that reason necessarily homogeneous - are represented through a discourse that evokes their socio-cultural being in a way that does not correspond with the real context of their social practices. Hence the point of departure is a problematic disadjustment between the representations that are constructed through this discourse and the reality that it (mis)represents; in other words, the central problem approached here is how - and to a certain extent why - a specific social reality comes to be distorted. I have not rendered cult to any methodological monotheism in this undertaking; rather, I have ended up combining discourse analysis, open-ended interviews and ethnographic descriptions.
The present study is predominantly based on bibliographic material; it draws on sources obtained from the libraries of the World Art Studies Centre, at the University of East Anglia, U.K., the SOAS, London, and the National Gallery in Harare, Zimbabwe. However, this chiefly bibliographical aspect of research is also supported by three months of fieldwork in Zimbabwe, which I undertook from January to April of 1997.
Many aspects of this thesis, especially the more critical ones, are inspired by certain aspects in the thought of P. Bourdieu and of J. Fabian, although the analyses presented here do not pretend to go beyond an incipient stage of reflection on an issue that is common to both of them and which I will here denominate a critical constructivism. Fabian¿s Time and the Other reveals how Anthropology has often presented its practices according to ¿positivist canons of ¿empirical observation¿¿, that is, as if it were engaged in a straightforward task of collecting and ordering a neutrally ¿given¿ empirical material, whereas the central object that defined its endeavour, instead of being in any such way ¿given¿, was in fact one that it strove from the very beginning to define or to construct, and in ideologically and politically relevant ways. According to Fabian, this object was ¿the [...]