We are pleased to offer our readers an unpublished article by Roger Caillois, a posthumous text which takes its place alongside his other studies on the myth and the imaginary. The octopus, the praying mantis and the fulgora in the real world led Roger Caillois to reflections similar to those which he exposes here relative to the narwhal and the imaginary unicorn. The importance of the unicorn in the author's work comes from the relationship established by the narwhal's tusk between two squares on Roger Caillois’ chess board: myth and dissymmetry. (Editor's note).

Social consciousness is the most comprehensive historically differentiated and dynamic relatively independent spiritual system. It performs its function both with regard to social being and to the life and consciousness of the individual members of society. As a many-sided, heterogeneous and complex system social consciousness should be analyzed from various points of view. Varied approaches and methods are employed in its study, heterogeneous criteria, close-ups and cross sections are used in investigating its content.

Behind every Utopia there is always a territory, but a territory that “is not here”, a territory removed from immediate reality in space or in time. In time, when the Utopia invokes the past of an Age of Gold or a Paradise Lost “illo tempore,” but also when there is a gamble with the hope of a better world to be organized in the future. These are “ideal times” or “longed-for times,” past or future of which philosophers, writers or political men speak.

In 1976 an interdisciplinary study on risks and risk evaluations was inaugurated in Sweden and was sponsored by the Committee for Future-oriented Research. One of the basic assumptions of the Swedish risk project was that modern society has created “new, increasingly complicated and large-scale technical systems.” It also assumed that “large systems are economically efficient, but vulnerable and therefore create risks.” A third assumption was that “the ever rising standard of living is purchased at the cost of certain additional risks.” The perspective of the project was thus markedly historically oriented.

Today, esthetic thought takes pride in the fact that it no longer scorns familiar objects nor any form of everyday culture. Refusing to limit its domain to Fine Arts, it analyzes the products of artisans and industry, urban environment, costumes and customs, tattooing and graffiti. It thus confirms a tendency of contemporary creativity that rejects the separated status of art and defies the regulations of good taste.

Our present models and theories of African history and prehistory are profoundly influenced by the physical anthropologists’ perceptions of human reality in present-day Africa. Professor P. V. Tobias has suggested that the present-day people of Africa, excluding the recent arrivals from Europe and Asia, descended from a common proto-Negriform stock which gave birth first to the so-called “Khoisan” (I am using here the terminology of my source, not the historically justified Khoe and San, meaning the Hottentots and the Bushmen) and later to the Negro genetic type. Of greater importance to archaeologists, who deal mainly with the so-called pre-history, is the fact that, genetically speaking, the difference between the “Khoisan” and the Negroids is smaller than the difference between these two African racial types and all other non-African types. This realisation tends to have one consequence: the pre-historic and even historic developments are generally perceived as explainable from within Africa, without any need for external clues or explanations. Archaeological finds are thus taken for evidence of a basically internal evolution and the finds of foreign glass beads, though very frequent and spread all over Africa, are seen as belonging to the same category as Persian, Chinese, or Arab ceramics and are explained as indication of a coastal trade.

In the introduction to his book, African Art, Pierre Meauze refers to carving as a dialogue between man and matter. He does not specify what he means by this statement but if it is his intention to let African sculpture speak for itself he is to be credited for his accomplishment, for the book contains beautiful pictures of some of the most well known pieces of African sculpture. However, as the following inquiry seeks to indicate, it is not possible to fully understand the sense in which carving is a dialogue between man and matter without an initiation into the world of African art. It is therefore the aim of the following inquiry to reveal the sense in which Meauze's statement accurately reflects African sculpture in particular and African art in general. It is necessary, at the outset, to point out that an initiation into the world of African art is not simply an intellectual process. As is the case with other African initiations, it is a process that involves the entire being of man.