Literature & The Arts - Marie-Louise Labelle. Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian Collections. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation. 100 Laurier St., Gatineau, Quebec J8X 4H2. xi + 185 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Paper
In: African Studies Review, Jg. 49 (2006-04-01), S. 167-168
Online
unknown
Zugriff:
LITERATURE & THE ARTS Marie-Louise Labelle. Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian Collections. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation. 100 Laurier St., Gatineau, Quebec J8X 4H2. xi + 185 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Paper. The publication of Marie-Louise Labelle's book coincides with a major exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (April 2005-February 2006) entitled "Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Adornment," curated by the author. The book is not an exhibition catalog, although many of the 185 artworks in the exhibition are illustrated in color and appear along with many field photographs. Rather, it is a study in depth of the historical-social-cultural matrix in which the artistry of beadworking developed and is pursued today in eastern and southern Africa. (If one wishes to see the exhibition without traveling to Gatineau, an excellent "Exhibition Preview" by Labelle appears in African Arts 38, no. 1 [2005].) Studies in African art have largely focused upon sculpture in wood, bronze, ivory, and terra cotta. The "crafts" of weaving, dyeing, and beadworking have only recently been considered in terms of the criteria of technical skill and artistic imagination. With respect to artistry in beads, while there have been an increasing number of essays in the last two decades appearing in various journals, there have been few lengthy studies on the order of Labelle's work. Only Henry Drewal and John Mason's Beads, Body and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe (1998) comes to mind; I know of no comparable study of eastern and southern African or central African beadwork. Labelle's book has several strengths. It is based upon fieldwork among the Maasai and Samburu of Kenya in the 1980s and an inventory of seven thousand objects of eastern and southern Africa in Canadian collections. In addition, the author is acutely aware of the important point that aesthetic values are produced within historical and social contexts and constantly shift over time. Thus she begins her study with a review of the origins of beadwork in an examination of the principal materials used before the arrival of glass beads in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While glass beads, brought by Arab merchants from the shores of the Indian Ocean, reached even remote regions of eastern and southern Africa, these beads were rare. People made beads from seeds, wood, teeth, bone, cowries, ostrich eggs, clay, and metal. Some materials were "alive," scented, noisy when strung together, and "talkative"; that is, they provided immediate visual identification of family, social, political, and ritual status, even the wearer's personal history. Hence beads were not essentially adornment in the sense of finery-ephemeral beauty-but rather expressions of status and self-respect. European beads came initially from Venice and Murano and subsequently from Bohemia, brought in ever greater quantities by Portuguese, Dutch, and English traders. …
Titel: |
Literature & The Arts - Marie-Louise Labelle. Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian Collections. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation. 100 Laurier St., Gatineau, Quebec J8X 4H2. xi + 185 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Paper
|
---|---|
Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Pemberton, John |
Link: | |
Zeitschrift: | African Studies Review, Jg. 49 (2006-04-01), S. 167-168 |
Veröffentlichung: | Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2006 |
Medientyp: | unknown |
ISSN: | 1555-2462 (print) ; 0002-0206 (print) |
DOI: | 10.1353/arw.2006.0086 |
Schlagwort: |
|
Sonstiges: |
|