"Social Control" and the Elephants We Scholars Make

Mande people have a deft way of describing insubstantial or unaccomplished people.They liken such individuals to elephants so light they can be carried on one's shoulders.Since the study of other cultures allows us to compound our insights and experience with theirs, I want to alter the Mande perception a bit and use it to reflect upon certain of our scholarly activities.When we think and write about African art we build elephants of our ideas that subsequently roam the heady terrain of academe, to gain weight or dissipate on the fare of the day.Our elephants are distortions, creations inflated from the materials we find, but that is neither good nor bad by definition.Much depends upon the company they keep and on the way they assert themselves in their herds.That scholars distort as they distill is no surprise to any of us, and it need not lead to problems.It can generate valuable insights, inspiration for new angles of research, and nuances of understanding that we all pursue in our efforts to know art better.And so we deconstruct, unpack, pull apart, and peer most closely at the segments of the whole that interest us.Ideally we extract those little

Control (management) · Geography · Social control · Social science · Sociology · African cultural and philosophical studies · Anthropology · Artificial Intelligence · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories