Suchergebnisse

Recensione di Rosario Forlenza, Bjørn Thomassen, Italian modernities: Competing narratives of nationhood, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. XII, 296.

Exhibition review of Mito e natura. Dalla Grecia a Pompei, Palazzo Reale, Milano, 31 luglio 2015 - 10 gennaio 2016.

Starting from the case of ancient Malian terracotta in this article I propose an epistemological reflection on the relationship between hidden practices of circulation of unprovenanced objects and official discourses and policies driven by museums. In particular I develop a critique of the Kantian association of Truth, Beauty and Goodness involved in cultural heritage policies and art circulation. Through this perspective I refer to Luhmann's theory on trust and power as well as to Handler's theory on authenticity in order to show how the erasing of the social life of the Malian terracotta (overlapping legal/illegal, individual trajectories of the art traders, investment strategies, acquisition policies) by museums finally produces social inequality because of the lack of information through the production of trust toward their public. In this sense I endorse a consequentiality principle linking beauty and properness through which the value of a given final art product is directly proportional to the degree of opacity of its multiple production stages: the more the local context of the grey market remains vague, the more the world-wide homogenization of deontological and aesthetical official criteria is effective and firm.

This article focuses on the hierarchical relationships governing the local illicit trading networks in terracotta antiquities in the region of Baniko, in Mali. The level of authority and social control at the heart of the network lessens with each link in the chain, as a result of the monopoly and the fragmentation of knowledge. The article demonstrates that the social organisation of the network corresponds to a hierarchical habitus that ensures that the status quo of the dominant actors (urban antique dealers, rural antique dealers and intermediaries) is maintained through the economic dependence of the rural diggers, the monopoly of information and control of the network. Analysis of the first links in the network shows that action by rural intermediaries in the chain with respect to the weak links in the chain (the rural diggers) reproduces 'micropolitics of power' that are modelled on the same strategies of compartmentalisation of the local links, as used by the dominant actors on the rural intermediaries.