Demythologizing “African Art”:

Revisionary Hermeneutics and Baule Aesthetics

By: Seth Davis

Davidson College - Fall 2001  

© Seth Davis, 2002, All Rights Reserved

Abstract

   To see African Art through African eyes we must move beyond the museum display case's isolation of form.  While some anthropologists and art critics have stepped outside the museum so as to understand the emic perspective on African art, there remains the need for a systematized hermeneutics respondent and relevant to the realities of African art in the contexts of its production and reception.  Interpretive anthropology's specific concern with hermeneutics leads us to examine African art as part of the larger cognitive and lived realities of African cultures.  By focusing on a case study of the Otherworld spouse statues produced by the Baule of Cote d'Ivoire, we can suggest a new system for understanding African art by focusing on life-value, form, and function.  We see that the Baule statues are part of their larger cosmology  that links the Blolo (Otherworld) with our own.  Moreover, Baule aesthetics suggest that the Baule worldview does not strictly separate life and art, thereby challenging Western divisions of the two.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Stepping Out of the Museum

The coffee-table volume has become a Western reliquary of both Western and non-Western art.[i]  Flipping through the high-gloss, folio-sized pages of such a volume, one has the sense that “ art” is a category describing that which transcends space-time and culture: it can be experienced through the medium of photography without reference to the contexts of its production, the intentions of its author, or its function.  Such is a Western aesthetic.  In this essay, I hope to move beyond the books and museums to come to a sense of an African aesthetic.[ii]  An “African aesthetic” is not an intellectualized version of the coffee table book, but a hermeneutic able to deal with the various contexts, histories, and realities in which “ African art” is produced and received.  While it is not within the scope of this paper to address every possible cultural expression that could be called “African art,”  I will provide a model for addressing these expressions through a case study of Baule blolo bian figurines.  To apply Western terms, Baule “pragmatics” and “aesthetics” are inseparable when it comes to Baule “art.”  A Baule aesthetic is one that values form, function, and, above all else, what I call life-value.  Our understanding of the blolo bian figurines in context allows us to see that, for the Baule, there is no sharp ontological distinction between life and art.  Thus, in understanding Baule aesthetics, we are understanding, in a way, Baule experience.  

This suggestion, to my mind, is inseparable from a deconstruction of Western divisions of life and art (life is lived on the streets while art is displayed in the museum).  Many studies of  “art” assume the term to refers to an easily recognizable and fixed category of objects.  We find, for example, Laurie Scheider Adams beginning her discussion of Western art by asking “Why Do We Study Art?”  (1997: 14), as opposed to the appropriate first question, “what is art?”  Therefore, our exploration of Baule and Western aesthetics will be, to frame it differently, an exploration of what “art” is to both groups.

Analyses of African art have tended to emphasize formal aspects, with a focus on “aesthetic appreciation”  (Arnoldi and Hardin 1996 : 4).  This emphasis has been due to a combination of the influence of the Boasian focus on formal investigation into “art” objects, as well as the importance form takes in Western studies of Western art  (Arnoldi and Hardin 1996: 4-5).  It seems to me that we might also cite the role of museums in presenting African art to the West, in so far as museum presentation can decontextualize art objects, since all that is readily presentable is the form of the object itself.  Moreover, Carol Thompson has pointed out that museum exhibitions are as much pictures of what is on display as they are pictures of the curators and creators of the exhibition (2000: 37).  For Thompson, this realization reveals the sometimes questionable  “racial politics” (2000: 39) of curators.  It also causes us to realize that museum exhibitions reinforce existing Western aesthetics of form, even when the objects on display are African.  

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Methodology and Theory

            Though it is perhaps less common to discuss methodology in a paper based on library research than one based on fieldwork, it is important to point out that, in the case of Baule art, the topic calls for new perspectives and further inquiry.  The work of Susan Miller Vogel and Philip Ravenhill dominate the field, as most work tends to derive a great deal from both.  In order to approach critically the topic of Baule art, and the work of Vogel and Ravenhill, I have highlighted strengths and weaknesses of both their arguments, and demonstrated where the two differ.  In addition, I have worked to include alternative perspectives and critiques where available.  I have also pointed out possibilities for further fieldwork on Baule art.  

            My theoretical approach is, as is clear from the title of this essay, informed by the interpretive school of cultural anthropology.  Interpretive anthropology both provides an area of concern for my work (a hermeneutics applicable to Baule art) and a method for investigating that concern (close-reading of Baule Otherworld spouse statues in the context of the cognitive systems and lived realities of the Baule).  In particular, Geertz’s central conclusion about the Balinese cockfight -- that it is “a Balinese reading of Balinese experience”  (2000 [1973]: 513) – has influenced my exploration of the relationship between a Baule aesthetic and the larger systems of Baule cosmology and experience.  However, my application of Geertz's notions is tempered by the fact that Baule Otherworld spouse statues are not displayed in public areas.  Thus, Geertz's idea that culture is a “shared code of meaning that is acted out publicly”  (Geertz 2000 [1973]: note 6, 503) does not directly apply to the objects themselves.  It seems that while the Baule Otherworld spouse statues are not part of the public sphere, the cosmology in which they exist is a publicly created one, as individuals do talk about their Otherworld spouses with others.  While the Baule Otherworld spouse statues are not directly parallel to the publicly displayed Balinese cockfight, they do exist as part of a publicly created system of meaning.     

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Overview of the Baule People

        Turning from Western museums to Cote d’Ivoire, we see that while the country has over sixty ethnic groups, the Baule are the largest (Chappell 1989: 679).  They are an Akan peoples (Baule Information 2001: Online) who began to migrate into present day Cote d’Ivoire in the seventeenth century.  Driven by economic pressures, the Baule “diaspora was a complex process of migrating families splintering and jostling for farmland, adherents, and access to gold fields or trade routes”  (Chappell 1989: 678).  In this chaotic climate, Baule entrepreneurs were able to become wealthy on gold rushes and multidimensional trade alliances.  Baule oral tradition tells that the Baule nation in Cote d’ Ivoire was formed when the followers of Queen Poku fled an Asante succession strife (Baule Information 2001: Online).  Despite this origin story, Baule migratory society seems to have been without a centrally powerful ruler, at least in reality, and its cohesion was based on trade and negotiation, rather than centralized threat of force. [iii]  Contact with other ethnic groups due to trade changed Baule culture during and after migration, as Baule matrilineage was replaced by a system of kinship whose center was the “aulo bo, or integrative family compound”  (Chappell 1989: 678).  When the French began making inroads in West Africa, they faced a people who had entrenched themselves, both economically and politically, in the area.

            Not surprisingly, French encroachment was met with Baule resistance.  Baule warriors killed the first French traders in the area in 1891, and continued to resist French force with force in kind until the first decades of the twentieth century.  Even as late as 1908, the Colonial Governor called the French colony a “’precarious’”  (qtd. in Chappell 1989: 680) one.  Once defeated, the Baule were subjected to the French administration, which reconfigured Baule rulership, economy, and, in some cases, relocated Baule peoples (Chappell 1989: 682).  The cultural effects of these reconfigurations included changes in gender relations.  Gender equality between Baule men and women was upset by French industrialization of cloth production.  Men have power in the new postcolonial, industrialized economy, and, “insofar as men control more cash” (Etienne 1997 [1980]: 530), women’s importance in Baule socioeconomics has decreased.  Gender relations are important to consider when looking at the  blolo bian figurines, as we shall see in a moment.          

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Blolo bian in Context

Blolo is the Baule Otherworld, that place “neither above nor below the earth, nor [where] … the dead are buried, though after their sojourn in this world they return there” (Vogel 1997: 72).  The Otherworld exists parallel to our world, and the two are like mirrors facing one another.  Blolo is the place where newborns come from and where the dead return (Ravenhill 1996: 2-5).  Every living person has an Otherworld family (Vogel 1997: 67), including an Otherworld mother (Ravenhill 1996: 2).[iv]  Thus, when a child dies not long after birth, the Baule say that its Otherworld mother asked it to return (Ravenhill 1996: 2).  However, most important to Baule of all of the Otherworld inhabitants are their blolo bian (for men) and  blolo bla (for women) (Vogel 1997: 67).[v]  This importance is due in no small part to the power that these figures can enact in our world (Vogel 1997: 67).  This point is an important one.  The Otherworld and our world are reflections of one another, and so, in that sense, my metaphor of the parallel mirrors applies.  However, we can also speak of points of contact between the Otherworld and our world, as influence can be exerted from one world onto the other, and vice versa.        

Based upon the ability of blolo bian and blolo bla to exert influence from the Otherworld to ours, we can agree when Vogel tells us that “marriage has important implications for [Baule] art”  (71).  Specifically, the Baule have a class of sculptures relating to marriage, including the blolo bian figurines, but not limited to them.  For example, there are sculptures made to promote marriage, as well as sculptures made to protect their owner from the malicious intent of a realworld spouse.  In terms of the blolo bian, Vogel sees a relationship between the lived realities of marriage among the Baule and the creation of these statues of Otherworld spouses.  Otherworld spouse figurines, she argues, resolve some of the tensions in Baule life regarding marriage and children.  She points specifically to tensions created by divorce, as well as worry over the lives of one's children, especially infants.  Vogel argues that the blolo bian figurines can aid in one's search for a living partner and can be a figure to ask for help during childbirth (Vogel 1997: 71-2).[vi]  In addition, the creation of a figurine can be a way to mitigate against the jealousy and competitive feelings that the Otherworld spouse may have for one's living spouse (Ravenhill 1996: 2-4).  Therefore, blolo bian figurines can aid one's marriage (or prospects for marriage) in the living world as well as one's Otherworld marriage.       

However, as Vogel argues in another section of her book, Otherworld spouses are ambiguous figures, causing both good and harm to their “realworld” spouses.[vii]  Otherworld spouses can make their living spouses ill or predispose them to accidents.  For example, the Otherworld husband of Kouassai Nzue Jeanne, a Baule woman, has chosen at times to make her ulcers worse.  If they are appeased, however, both Otherworld husbands and wives will bring success in emotional and economic matters, such as love and farming (Vogel 1997: 248).  The way to appease an Otherworld spouse is to make a statue of him or her, and make offerings to it.

Not every Baule has a blolo bian figurine.  The process of creating a blolo bian figurine begins when a person is faced with a problem, usually of a sexual nature, that a diviner determines is related to one’s spiritual spouse.[viii]  Usually these problems come in young adulthood, and need not correspond to when someone marries.  Once the diviner has determined that it is the spiritual spouse that is creating the problem, it then must be asked if the problem can be solved by the carving of a blolo bian statue.  If the answer is yes, then the diviner helps the person find out the appearance of the Otherworld spouse to ensure that the subsequent carving will accurately represent this spouse.  Information about the appearance of the Otherworld spouse can also come from dreams.  Once the person knows the Otherworld spouse's appearance, then they go to a carver, and have a figurine carved out of wood.  After the carving is done, the figurine is consecrated and placed in the home with a confirmation sike ceremony.  Once installed, the figurine is kept in private, put in the corner of the bedroom, and sometimes covered with  a white cloth.  The person will clean this statue frequently, as well as making offerings to the Otherworld spouse as embodied in the statue (Ravenhill 1996: 2-7; Vogel 1997: 247-261).  In addition, the person will make sure to make skin to statue contact as part of the cleaning ceremony (Bacquart 1998: 48).  Thus, a close bond is forged, both in space and action, between the person and the Otherworld spouse, through the “realworld” representation of blolo bian.

        It is vital to note that the Otherworld spouse’s influence on our world is increased by the creation of a statue (Vogel 1997: 248).  For example, if their wives have a  blolo bla statue, living husbands will make offerings to it at the time of childbirth, in hopes the birth will run smoothly (Vogel 1997: 258).  Blolo bian figurines intensify the points of contact between the two worlds.  For Koffi Nianmien, a Baule carver, his blolo bla figurine helps him cope with the death of his realworld wife by creating contact with his Otherworld wife (Ravenhill 1996: 36-9).  The creation of a blolo bian figurine enables close emotional contact with the Otherworld spouse, for both Baule women and men.  The blolo bian figurines allow for back and forth influence, as the living spouse can make offers to influence decisions of the Otherworld spouse, while the Otherworld spouse’s ability to change the living spouse’s life is increased by the creation of a figurine.    

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Form, Function, and Life-Value

        Marx’s delineation between use-value and exchange-value is helpful in beginning to see how the blolo bian figurines support a view of Baule aesthetics as combining form, function, and life-value.  In Capital, Marx defines use-value as “the utility of a thing” (2000 [1905]: 269), while exchange-value is the “ proportion in which values in use of one sort [are] exchanged for those of another sort” (2000 [1905]: 269).  Christopher B. Steiner has argued that use-value is particularly emphasized in regards to traditional African art among African peoples.  Among Western buyers, however, the cultural capital and exchange-value of a given piece are increased when its original, African use-value is denied (Steiner 1994: 159-61).[ix]  We will look more closely at Baule art in a global economy in a moment, but, for now, it is helpful to begin with this delineation between use-value and exchange-value.

        It would be invalid, I think, to say that traditional Baule art does not have an exchange-value for the Baule people.  New fieldwork is needed regarding the Baule systems of exchange in which pieces such as the blolo bian move.  We know that there are artistic specialists among the Baule: the carvers of the blolo bian statues.  But neither Ravenhill nor Vogel discusses how these carvers are compensated for the blolo bian statues.  We do know that the pre-colonial Baule had exchange-values, because they traded cloth, among other items (Etienne 1997 [1980]: 524).  However, pre-colonial Baule, and pre-colonial West Africans in general, focused not so much on a piece’s exchange-value as on its use-value (Etienne 1997 [1980]: 524; Steiner 1994: 100-1).  Perhaps one of the reasons that neither Ravenhill nor Vogel focus on the economics of production and consumption of blolo bian figurines is because the Baule focus more on the figurines' spiritual and emotional significance.  However, I think further analysis of the blolo bian's place in Baule economics is needed. 

        We can clearly see from the above discussion of blolo bian figurines in context that their use-value outweighs their exchange-value.  These figurines represent a given person’s spiritual spouse, and a tie to the Otherworld.  They allow one to interact with the Otherworld in intensely personal and constructive ways, helping one to mitigate against the vagaries of life by asking for assistance from one’s spiritual spouse.  

 A number of anthropologists and art critics, including Vogel, Ravenhill, and Steiner, writing outside the box of Western art criticism, have argued that use-value outweighs exchange-value in terms of traditional African Art.  For example, Vogel points out that “art” objects (and we can consider the blolo bian  as a support for her position) among the Baule are not displayed, but are kept private, and are important for “what they do”  (1997: 291-2).  Though I commend her for striving to see African art through African eyes, I think that the ideas of “what they do” or, in Marxist terms, the “use-value,” do not adequately reflect the importance of a piece such as the blolo bian. 

Vogel points us in the direction of a new term when she writes that, for the Baule, they focus on “the spiritual presence associated with the object” (1997: 17).  Such a focus is different from the Marxist notion of use-value.  In explaining use-value, Marx gives examples of “watches, yards of linen … tons of iron” (2000 [1905]: 269).  While these objects are part of larger cultural complexes, they are not infused, generally, with the same spiritual, emotional, and cosmological significance as the blolo bian figurines.  The blolo bian figurines represent a connection with a whole cosmology and way of living, day to day, through the exigencies and joys, sureties and explorations, of life.  We cannot reduce that complex of emotion, dream, and living to “use-value.”   Thus, I suggest a new term, one that has its imperfections, but more faithfully touches upon the importance of blolo bian to daily living and to spiritual existence among the Baule: life-value.  

One problem with "life-value" is that it may cause us to overlook the importance of form and function in Baule art.  By “function,” I mean the specific ways in which an object is used: the blolo bian  figurines being placed in the home and given offerings.  For the Baule, form and function cannot be abstracted from one another.  The marriage of the two allows us to see that what an object does is inextricable from what it  represents (an emphasis on either function or form blinds us to either what it does, or what is represents, respectively).  It is my contention that form plus function creates the blolo bian figurines' life-value.

Vogel contends that the Baule are “only marginally concerned with the physical form of the [art] object” (1997: 17).  However, given what she and Ravenhill say about the blolo bian, this contention cannot be the case.  We know that the carvers create the form of the statue based on two principles: (1) fidelity to the appearance of the Otherworld spouse, and, (2) application of the Baule sense of being sese (“just so”) (Ravenhill 1996: 7).  “Being just so” refers to Baule notions of human attractiveness, which are based on the idea that each feature should be “neither too pronounced nor too diminutive” (Ravenhill 1996: 7).  If the figure is “just so,” it will please the Otherworld spouse, while a misformed figure can be rejected (Ravenhill 1996: 7).  Thus, the carver creates a statue that must reflect the appearance of the Otherworld spouse, but do so in such a way that the statue exemplifies the ideal of sese. 

We can see, then, that the form of the statue is inextricably linked to its function. When the diviner tells a person that he or she must please his or her Otherworld spouse by creating a statue, the form of this statue is central to this appeasement.  The statue’s form must reflect the appearance of the Otherworld spouse, and, in so doing, provides a point of contact between our world and the Otherworld.  Vogel’s characterization of the relative unimportance of form in Baule art, at least in regards to the blolo bian figures, seems to be incorrect.  Moreover, the blolo bian  figurine does not simply function as an appeasement to the Otherworld spouse.  It  is part of a larger cultural complex, and serves to exemplify Baule ideals of sese.  These figurines are part of Baule cosmology, representative of the connections between our world and the Otherworld.  Their form and function make them part of this cosmology, as their form depicts an inhabitant of the Otherworld while their function is to connect us to this world.  Form and function go into determining life-value, which is a combination of both what the blolo bian figurine does, and what it represents.  Moreover, we can see here the confluence of Baule aesthetics and pragmatics – the ideal of sese, for example, being centrally important to the function of the blolo bian.  Thus, ideals of beauty and ideals of action are inseparable.  We will return to this matter of “aesthetic” and “art,” as terms, in a moment.  

Though a number of analysts have looked at Baule art, and African art, with the attempt to understand the emic perspective on the matter, there remains no clear system for thinking about this issue (Ryle 1995: 18).  I would like to propose that my understanding of the relationship between life-value, form, and function can be a stepping-stone for a systematic consideration of what it would mean to see African art through African eyes.  I have argued in this essay that we must avoid homogenizing perspectives on African art.  We can, however, search for a vocabulary for examining individual cases of African art.  In looking at Baule art, it is appropriate to speak of a piece's life-value.  We must be careful to recognize that one Baule may have a figurine to alleviate sterility, while another may have one to ensure safe childbirth.  Thus, we can identify culturally patterned, but individually manifested (and, in some cases, modified), life-values embedded in the relationships between the Baule and their blolo bian figurines.  The question then becomes whether this notion of life-value helps us to understand art from other African cultures.

There is evidence that my formulation, based in a case study of the Baule, may be applicable to other African artistic traditions.  Among the Yoruba of the Eastern Guinea Coast, ere ibeji figurines are created when a twin dies.  These figurines connect the living family to the deceased twin, and, like the blolo bian, allow the living special access to the "life force" (Perani and Smith 1998: 147) and powers of the deceased.  Ritual demands that the living stay in frequent contact with the ere ibeji, "washing and handling" (Perani and Smith 1998: 147) the figurines, a practice, as described above, also extant among the Baule.  I am not arguing that the life-value of the ere ibeji for the Yoruba is the same as the blolo bian for the Baule.  It would be unfairly homogenizing to say that artistic works have the same life-value for every African or African ethnic group.  However, the idea that art objects have life-value, in at least some African contexts, seems to be a constructive perspective.  Among the Yoruba, the ere ibeji allow a family to retain a connection to a dead member or members.  For the Baule, the blolo bian figurines create a connection between this world and the Otherworld.  I suggest that my theoretical formulation is a constructive basis for analysis of both Yoruba art and Baule art, respectively.  

There are other examples of African ethnic groups who take the life-value of a piece to be of paramount importance.  Among the Lega of Zaire, "objects play an important role in Bwami [the system of rule] because they are used [to illustrate] … moral perfection" (Sieber and Walker 1987: 97).  For example, the kukulukamwenne kusmasengo figures represent elders and express the importance of shouldering one's responsibilities (Sieber and Walker 1987: 97).  I have offered three instances in which the notion of life-value can help us understand the art of three different African ethnic groups.  Whether this theoretical formulation applies to all art that can be called African is another matter.  In this sense,  I do not consider my work to be a final answer.  It is a proposal for a system of thinking, and can be tested against ethnographic data. 

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Globalization and Aesthetics

We cannot fairly discuss Baule art without a consideration of globalization's effects on art and the art trade in Cote d’Ivoire.  The first matter is to debunk the myth that globalization has radically altered Baule blolo figurines.  Colon  figures, depicting peoples (sometimes white) in colonial dress, began to be made during colonial times, and are sold widely on national and international markets.  Some blolo  figurines are now made wearing contemporary Western dress.  Therefore, yes, colonization and globalization have affected Baule carving, as carvers create for market consumption, and as some Baule persons now see their Otherworld spouses in Western dress (Ravenhill 1996: 69-80).  Although there have been changes, ”the function of an object always depends on the narrative attached to it”  (Schipper 2000: 116), and the Baule continue to relate to the blolo bian figurines in their relationships with their Otherworld spouses.[x]  

As mentioned, exchange-value has never been a completely alien concept to Baule society.[xi]   Thus, it is inadequate (and, in a sense, inaccurate) to speak of the changes wrought by colonialism and globalization on Baule art as the simple “commodification” of Baule objects.  Commodification is “ the process in which something enters freely or is coerced into a relationship of exchange” (Ganahl 2001: 23).  While Baule art has been wrenched into non-Baule systems of exchange (Steiner 1994: 1-15), we can locate its recontextualization not so much in its commodification (for art objects were exchanged before colonialism), but in its fetishization, which I define as the making of something into an object of desire through removal of it from its original cultural moment.[xii]

We must understand this fetishization because it obscures the lived realities of African Art.[xiii]  John Ryle writes that the world of African art in the West is “a world that is largely assimilated to the culture of collecting and classifying – the art fetishism to which we subscribe in the West” (1995: 19).  Steiner calls the operating principle of this culture of collection and classification  “commodity fetishism,” which he defines as the “calculated alienation of production from consumption and the overestimation of transcendent worth in the pseudo-sacral space of the international art market”  (1994: 163).  An example of this principle at work would be the Museum for African Art’s 1998 exhibition entitled African Faces, African Figures: The Arman Collection, in which objects from all over Central and West Africa were placed together not by original context, but by a principle of “’universal’ aesthetic pleasures embodied in them” (Hilden 2000: 22).[xiv]  This space of “universal aesthetic pleasure” is the “pseudo-sacral space” of which Steiner speaks.

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Conclusion: Baule Art/Baule Life

We must remove ourselves from the Western mindset of art display if we hope to understand African art.  The blolo bian figurines are not simply admired by the Baule for their form.  We have seen that the form of the figurine is important for its function as a means by which the realworld spouse can interact with his or her Otherworld spouse.  Both form and function create the life-value of the blolo bian  figurine, as it exists as part of the larger Baule cosmology that connects our world with the Otherworld.  The concept of life-value includes, but is broader than, the Marxist notion of use-value.  Life-value helps us understand that the blolo bian figurine is important for its use, its emotional and spiritual significance, and for its representation of the Baule belief in the Otherworld.  This belief in the Otherworld and the Otherworld spouse has persisted despite colonialism and globalization, and though some blolo bian figurines are now dressed in Western clothing, the Baule continue to interact with these figurines as part of their larger understanding of life, marriage, meaning, this world, and the Otherworld.

Thus, a Baule "aesthetic" of form, function, and life-value challenges Western notions of the relationship between art and life.  We (Westerners) are  inheritors of a modernist tradition of seeing art and life as separate realms (Koppen 2001: 375-8).  While certain analysts have begun to break this barrier down, I think the following visual metaphor, from Deborah Wyrick’s review of Vogel’ s Baule: African Art/Western Eyes exhibition, helps us to see how the separation of art and life works in Western aesthetics:

the [Baule] objects themselves, enclosed in well-lit vitrines and surrounded by the open spaces necessary for crowd management, seem larger-than-life; the people in the films [of Baule ritual], often shrunk to a few inches high, appear as tangential footnotes to what's really important – the art object in its serene, even reverential isolation.  (1999: Online)

            Vogel tell us that the Baule do not have a noun for “art,” but, rather, that the Baule use adjectives and adverbs “to express their experience of … [“art”] objects precisely: as modifiers of personal lives; as modifiers of moral and physical struggles; and as modifiers of the drabness of daily existence[xv]” (1997: 292).  Thus, it does not seem fair to say simply that there is no Baule sense of “art” or “aesthetics.”  Perhaps we head in the right direction to take it one step further, and say, that while we can speak of Baule notions of beauty (sese), there is no Baule aesthetic independent  from Baule notions of what it means to live.  We may remember that the Baule believe that their Otherworld spouses gain a greater influence over the world through the making of a blolo bian  figurine, while they themselves gain a greater influence in the Otherworld.  Here the action of creating “art” (a representation of an emotional and cognitive frame) is inseparable from life (the living out of thoughts and emotions through actions).  In speaking about her Otherworld husband, a young Baule woman states:

My blolo bian is very beautiful.  He wears trousers a la mode and a jacket with short sleeves; he has beautiful hair, patent leather shoes, and a watch.  I remember it was my grandmother who advised me to get my hereafter husband to come down to earth. (qtd. in Schipper 2000: 150)

Is she describing the figure (of her Otherworld spouse) or the figurine (of her Otherworld spouse)?  Both, for he is present on earth in her life, just as clearly as the wooden figurine she keeps.