Paper short abstract:

This paper examines a group of Idoma masks and figure sculpture documented by the author 25 years ago in a Nigerian village which have now turned up in Paris, LA and elsewhere. It compares their first and second careers and proposes an explanation of their movement from one to the other.

Paper long abstract:

The ethical issues surrounding the publication and photographing of African art objects, a concern of all fieldworkers since the 1960s, has been borne out by the number of those objects later found in Western collections. In recent years scholarly interest has shifted to the trajectories which lie between these disappearances and reappearances. This paper traces a group of Idoma masks and figure sculpture documented by the author 25 years ago in a Nigerian village which have now turned up in Paris, LA and elsewhere. It compares their first and second careers and proposes an explanation of their movement from one to the other, which includes among other things, their inclusion in the author's SOAS PhD thesis, but also the impoverishment of rural Nigerians by the IMF's Structural Adjustment Programs.