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Edna G. Bay. Asen, Ancestors and Vodun: Tracing Change in African Art. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xiv + 186 pp. Photographs. Maps. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00. Cloth.
Edna Bay's voice is important among the dedicated chorus of scholars of the Dahomey kingdom. Now part of the territory comprising modern-day Benin on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, Dahomey served as one of the major West African trading and export partners for Europeans before and during the colonial era. Bay draws from the colonial archives and her own deep scholarly engagement with Dahomey over the past thirty years to trace the changing historical role of a single object type - the iron Asen staff - from its first appearance in the colonial texts, where it was sometimes correctly identified as a tool to venerate and communicate with ancestral spirits, but more typically portrayed simply as a "fetish" or religious "idol." She then moves on to discuss the changing uses and appearances of Asen ever since, up to their slow and, according to Bay, natural decline in Benin cultural production today.
As used in ceremonies...