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Comment: African Arts and Social Control
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2016
Extract
I am delighted with the manner in which these three papers have dealt with the social and political relevance of sculpture, folklore, and music. This is no startlingly new discovery. It has been recognized before by those interested in the arts, but it has been largely ignored by those who specialize in social and political studies. The contributors to this panel are to be congratulated for their documentation of this function of the arts, and our chairman deserves special recognition for this attempt to bring it to the attention of those who so often overlook it.
The panelists have stressed the lessons to be learned by the social scientists, but I wonder if there is not one for the humanists as well. The fact that artists are often rebels against the status quo is a truism in our society, but the significance of the arts as a medium of social and political action, and of change, is often ignored although similar examples can be found in Africa today as well as in the history of other societies.
Where does this leave our conventional definitions of art as aesthetic expression, as creativity, as “art for art's sake,” as concern with form for its own sake, or as elaboration beyond the point of utility? All these, I fear, underevaluate the socio-political utility of art which these papers have demonstrated in their different fields.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1962
References
Footnotes
1. Political scientists should also be interested in a recent study by Mary H. Lystad in which folktales were used as a means of exploring political attitudes. She notes that in Ghana “Traditional institutions are deliberately being changed, and the attempt is being made to alter old values and attitudes. Ghana's political leaders have persistently criticized and attacked the traditional institutions and values of hereditary chieftainship, ethnic and regional solidarity, and magico-religious sanctions for custom. In their place, they are trying to substitute achieved status, territorial and national solidarity, industrialization, urbanization, and rationality.”
In assessing the reaction of Ghanaian school children to these conflicting sets of values, she asked all 94 students in one grade (Form II) at Achimota to write their favorite story and tell why they liked it, and later to compose a new story about a boy and girl in their own town. A content analysis was made of both types of stories, which revealed a preference for the traditional values, though boys were less traditionally inclined than girls, as were urban children compared to rural children. Mrs. Lystad concludes: “The attitudes expressed by these children in their stories suggest that social values are not changing very rapidly or very markedly in Ghana in spite of the attempts to secularize, urbanize, industrialize, and rationalize the country.” ( Lystad, Mary H., “Traditional Values of Ghanaian Children,” American Anthropologist, 62, 1960, 454–464.CrossRefGoogle Scholar)