Talk:African aesthetic

message: I've removed the tags due to lack of discussion on the talk page. I don't see any uncited or biased parts, perhaps the person who wishes to add the tags could point them out? - FrancisTyers 19:15, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps you could make some specific complaints? - FrancisTyers 20:39, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Apparently, just more edit warring.  I'd already removed the tags once, noting a lack of discussion of unsourced information.  The tags should stay gone unless and until Zoe offers something substantive.  deeceevoice 03:07, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Tags

message: I've been threatened with blocking if I edit this page, so you win, I'll keep away from it, even though it is an egregious violation of Wikipedia policy.  User:Zoe|(talk) 23:23, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Please.  "I've been threatened with blocking if I edit this page" is not accurate.  I said that if you kept edit warring over tags while not discussing them, then I would block you when you cross 3RR.  It's right here; you can read it.  I have invited and entreated you to edit the page amid discussion.  I repeat: Zoe, please help make this page better.  Please do it by making a specific, actionable suggestion, then another, then another.  Throwing tags on a page that other editors don't see the need for, and then refusing to say what the need is, just gesturing contemptuously towards the backlog, is immature and unproductive behavior.  Why not be helpful?  I'm confident you could improve the article considerably if you wanted to; show us. -GTBacchus(talk) 23:54, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

text: You two should go out on a date.  Like peas in a pod. -GTBacchus(talk) 16:38, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Please "resist" making uncivil remarks and personal attacks, deeceevoice.  GTBacchus, remember to have a neutral policy with editors.   You've threatened Zoe with a block, don't forget to speak to Deeceevoice (who is on probation for, among other reasons, being extraordinarily uncivil to Zoe "What? U want me 2 hold your little, white hand and sing Kumbaya"? What the hell kinda comment is that?  etc).  Justforasecond 01:17, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: You win

message: The Sublime Dance of Mende Politics: An African Aesthetic of Charismatic Power by William P. Murphy American Ethnologist
November 1998, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 563-582 
In this ethnography of politics, the theory of the sublime is used to clarify the aesthetics of power among the Mende of Sierra Leone. A key formal dimension of this aesthetics is the dialectic of extraordinary visible effects caused by powerful hidden means, which is analyzed through the cultural analogy of dance and politics. This dialectic is also shown to link the aesthetics of the sublime with the politics of charisma as expressing similar logics of expressive power. Aesthetics is treated as an ethnographic heuristic for understanding political power and agency. The Mende political sublime raises broader questions for social theory about the relationship between aesthetics and agency as modeled by the opposition in aesthetic theory between beauty and the sublime. It also addresses the implications of this aesthetic opposition for the typology of agency found in the period ization of premodern, modern, and postmodern social conditions, [the sublime versus beauty, aesthetics of power, charisma, West African political culture, premodern versus postmodern agency]
 Africa By Mary Roberts
Summary
Linking concepts:
* Words for beauty and goodness often intersect, as Susan Vogel has noted among the Baule peoples of Côte d'Ivoire and others have discerned among the Lega and Songye of the Congo and the Igbo, Edo, and Ibibio of Nigeria, among others.
*External perfection and internal moral excellence are linked
* Physical perfection and ideal social order, also linked.
* For many African cultures, how an object looks is related to the way it works, according to strict aesthetic specifications, for protection, healing, communication, mediation, or empowerment.
Terms(All these terms imply a power-knowledge relationship):
* For Bantu-speaking peoples of central, eastern, and southern Africa, a power called  nkisi is manifest in sculpture and other expression
* For Mande-speaking peoples of western Africa, secret and instrumental knowledge is called  nyama.  
* For African Muslim mystics, baraka is a blessing energy emanating from saintly tombs, written and spoken verses, and visual forms. 
Occult knowledge(These can be highly esoteric and understood only by the initiated):
* As is true for many other African philosophies, Yoruba aesthetics also privilege knowledge that is allusive, indirect, and enigmatic, through:  Patterns in textiles, designs on ceramics, houses, and sculpture, graphic inscriptions on walls, masks, and the body, and verbal arts such as proverbs, epics, and songs.
* Geometric patterns on Bamana  bogolanfini textiles from Mali encode women's herbal medicinal recipes. 
* In other cases, patterns connote resistance, as did the surreptitious painting of African National Congress colors on homes by southern African women during apartheid.
Another characteristic of many African aesthetic systems is that objects, narratives, songs, and performances are interpreted by audiences in many different ways through intentional semantic variability. 
* Among Luba peoples of the southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, thrones and staffs embody beauty and royal authority but are also mnemonic devices stimulating the making of history. 
* The process of making art is often more valuable than the final products, and such dynamism is the essence of aesthetic experience. 
* Objects may have ephemeral usage before being destroyed or progressing to the next phases in layered histories.
* An anti-aesthetic is also common, as in certain satirical masquerades among the Mende of Sierra Leone and the beauty-beast performances of the Igbo and Ibibio of Nigeria.
Recent study of African aesthetics includes two critically important thrusts:  
* popular urban arts 
* diasporic art forms of the black Atlantic, and an Indian Ocean world linking eastern Africa with South Asia
As Karin Barber notes, African popular arts fall between the cracks of "traditional" and "elite" or "modern" art. The hybridized forms of Africa's dynamic popular urban arts reflect not only constant absorption of ideas from the outside but also long-standing adaptive processes through which Africans have always been innovative players in world forums.
futurebird 17:26, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources