John Arnold: belief

Transcript context

…These would be Congo pieces? Or what in African sculpture is attracting you? Exactly. There was a lot of it that was developed for pagan rituals, and it was either celebrating birth or death or the transition to adulthood, weddings. It’s this isolated culture that still comes up with these objects that are beautiful and had no idea what other people around the world were doing at the time. Westerners came there and quickly saw these and were fascinated by these objects and started bringing them back to Europe, and Europeans fell in love with them. There started to be even an export market that developed over time, where Africans were developing pieces specifically for Europeans. Then, as African cultures went from pagan religions to Christianity, they started discarding many of those objects. There’s the flip side of it, which is best represented by the Benin bronzes, where a British expedition in 1897 comes in and conquers the royal palace in Benin and steals all those objects and brings them back to Europe. I think there’s still this struggle in the West of how to deal with these. You give them back, you’re not sure they’ll be treated well, right?…

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