Gagliardi Susan Elizabeth, Seeing the Unseen. Arts of Power Associations on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier”
Gagliardi Susan Elizabeth. — Seeing the Unseen. Arts of Power Associations on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier”. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2022, 342 p., bibl., ill., index.
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1Art historian Susan Gagliardi conducted fieldwork among Senufo in southwestern Burkina Faso in 2006-2007. The Senufo are famous for their elaborate sculptural tradition associated with poro associations. It may come as a surprise, then, that her work focused, not on poro, but on two different “power associations,” komo and kono (Susan Gagliardi explains why she prefers the term “power association” to labels such as “secret society” and “initiation society” more commonly employed in the literature). Komo and kono are usually associated with Bamana Mande-speakers in Mali. As it happens, the term “bamana” is used in parts of Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso to refer to Senufo, rather than to Mande, speakers. It is no accident that Susan Gaglardi puts the word “frontier” in quotation marks in the subtitle of the book. In spite of linguistic differences, she suggests that the frontier between Senufo and Mande is permeable and ought not to be reified, as artificial in many respects as the frontier between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire, the homeland of both Senufo and Mande.
2The boundaries that Susan Gagliardi calls into question are not simply national, ethnic, and linguistic. As an art historian, she is centrally concerned with the question, “What is an object?” After all, the very power objects created and deployed by the power associations she studies are also prominently featured as objects of art in museums. As such, they appear to be finished products, whose form and substance are stable. On the contrary, Susan Gagliardi suggests that they need to be understood as assemblages in process. She uses the example of the boli, a common bamana power object. A boli frequently takes the form of the headless legs and torso of a large animal, a cow or a hippopotamus. As early as the early 20th century, the missionary ethnographer Father Joseph Henry dissected several of them to attempt to determine their composition, an amalgam of animal and vegetable material, often with the addition of sacrificial blood. Such attempts (Henry’s was hardly the last) to determine the composition of the object mask the fact that it is perpetually in process. Those with the authority to deploy these objects are also continually adding, but also removing, specific materials. Such materials are not generically animal or vegetable but, on the contrary, highly specific (and often secret), and intrinsically related to the purpose to which the object is being employed. The highly specific context in which an object is being created and used determines the perpetually contingent nature of the assemblage. Even the most accurate analysis of an object’s composition would fail to capture its function and purpose. Susan Gagliardi is hardly suggesting that such objects not be displayed in museums, but such a display is inevitably, in important respects, a misrepresentation.
3Boli are hardly the only kind of assemblage in power associations. Masks are similar creations, hardly reducible to wooden sculptures but also incorporating animal matter (feathers, tusks, horns, sacrificial blood) as well as additions of various plant substances. Their contingency also involves their very identification. She cites instances of particular masks that have been alternatively classified as komo or kono on the basis of formal criteria that are ultimately of little or no interest to the leaders of the associations in question. Art historians have long interrogated ways in which we look at and understand African art, but Susan Gagliardi’s critique, based on her own fieldwork with power associations, is especially radical.
4Susan Gagliardi’s fieldwork, it should be stressed, was particularly difficult (and I would add impressive) because power associations are a domain intrinsically shrouded in secrecy. As she relates, she confronted this ethical dilemma openly and frankly. She insisted to her interlocutors that she had no intention of uncovering, much less revealing, their secrets. As a woman, her situation was particularly problematic. Indeed, one of the most engrossing chapters of the book is where she explores explicitly female understandings of power associations. Women are prohibited from seeing certain masks, and during some performances in the village, women are confined to their houses, their windows shut. Susan Gagliardi chose to experience such events as a woman, rather than to attempt to assert White privilege to assume masculine prerogatives. Instead, she argues that women constitute an integral, even necessary, audience for power association masquerades. Deprived of vision, women are nevertheless totally privy to the sounds of the performance, and quite ready to comment among themselves about what is occurring. Her account of women’s eye(-less) view is definitely a highlight of the book.
5All in all, as an attempt to bridge frontiers and challenge boundaries of all kinds, including those of the objects dear to art historians, this is a challenging and engaging work that bridges art history and anthropology—yet another boundary she chooses to cross.
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Référence papier
Robert Launay, « Gagliardi Susan Elizabeth, Seeing the Unseen. Arts of Power Associations on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier” », Cahiers d’études africaines, 258 | 2025, 584-585.
Référence électronique
Robert Launay, « Gagliardi Susan Elizabeth, Seeing the Unseen. Arts of Power Associations on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier” », Cahiers d’études africaines [En ligne], 258 | 2025, mis en ligne le 11 juin 2025, consulté le 18 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/50719 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/145ys
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