Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun

"Illustrated with field photographs, Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun tells the remarkable history of the rise and decline of the sculptural tradition of ancestral asen in southern Benin. Asen, canonical metal art objects that are created to honor the spirits of ancestors and vodun deities, are meeting points in which visible and spiritual worlds interact. Richly decorated with a variety of human, animal, and plant motifs that illustrate proverbs and other highly inventive oral arts, ancestral asen reflect the relationship between the living and the dead through visual and verbal references to the deceased." "Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the former Kingdom of Dahomey, Edna G. Bay traces more than 150 years of transformations in the manufacture and symbolic meanings of asen against the backdrop of a slave-raiding monarchy, domination by French colonialism, and postcolonial political and social change. Bay expertly reads evidence of the area's turbulent history through analysis of asen motifs as she describes the diverse influences affecting the asen production process - from the point of their probable invention to their current decline in use. Paradoxically, asen represent a sacred African art form, yet are created using European materials and technologies and are embellished with figures drawn from tourist production."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.