| "Bieri Remains: Fang Reliquary Art and the Process of Extinction" is a post-history of this canonical art tradition from northern Gabon, southern Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. My dissertation chronicles significant moments in the life course of these wooden heads and full figures carved to guard over barrels of ancestral skulls from the vantage of viewer response. Biographical details of individual objects help to reconstruct how these works function in different contexts. The behaviors that the bieri reliquaries have encouraged in African and European audiences over time range from veneration to contempt and include such acts as obsessive collection and willful defacement.;To autopsy the corpus of bieri sculpture I dissect the cultural identity of these objects at the art tradition's inception, prime, death and afterlife, from the late eighteenth century to the present. Clues to viewer-object interactions are found in diverse materials, including the surface of sculptures, the pages of travelers' accounts, Gabonese penal codes, local church architecture, Christian-traditional Bwiti ceremony, postage stamps and museum galleries. Urban myth and rumor serve as critical sources throughout.;My dissertation interrogates the widely held assumption that African arts are dying out by examining this specific tradition at the local level and within international routes of circulation to identify the particularities of history that have contributed to its decline. I contend that the dissolution of the art form was due to a number of social, cultural, and economic forces, including the zeal of certain American Presbyterian and French Catholic missionaries, pressures of the colonial system of taxation, the labor needs of timber camps, the rise of a Christian-traditional syncretic religion, rampant art collection, and illicit trade networks. Finally, I consider the possible return of a number of Fang bieri still attached to human remains while recognizing the role of nostalgia in current debates over repatriation. |
