The Red Fez: On Art and Possession in Africa

di Fritz Kramer (Autore)

Malcolm R Green (Traduttore)

Verso Books, 1993

This remarkable and controversial book explores the ways in which colonial Europeans have been represented in African ritual art and drama. Through a profound re-examination of Western concepts of otherness and mimesis, the anthropologist and art historian Fritz Kramer shows that African images of Europeans -in sculpture, masquerades and, above all, spirit possession - are the reverse and also the counterpart of European images of the Other as savage, whether noble or ignoble. For Africans, Europeans belonged to the realm of nature, to a state of innocence. Rejecting the modernist view of African art as abstract, Kramer insists on its mimetic qualities. These rituals are representations of some-thing experienced, although the experiences have been transformed into spirits. In ways which may echo nineteenth-century European realism, they reveal the power of the visible, of the telling, obsessive detail: a feather, a shirt, or the eponymous red fez which runs like a leitmotiv through spirit possession cults of the early colonial period. Just as one danced an ancestor or an animal, so one could dance a motor-car or an aeroplane, possessed by the spirit of the thing. The Red Fez is certainly a book of wonders but, more importantly, it is a study of wonderment. Fritz Kramer takes his readers through a hall of mirrors, in which can be found startling likenesses of ourselves and our culture. By different paths, Kramer leads us through another world back to our own, presenting a challenge to anthropology and indeed to social science as a whole.

• Autore: Fritz Kramer
• Traduttore: Malcolm R Green
• Editore: Verso Books
• Anno: 1993
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 304 p.
• Dimensioni: 233 x 156 mm
• Peso: 476 gr.
• EAN: 9781786637253

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