Beauty and the "I" of the Beholder: Identity, Aesthetics, and Social Change among the Ashanti

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Abstract
Though frequently belittled, African tourist arts are often as conceptually sophisticated as traditional works. Messages expressed in secular modern forms complement the demands of a changing society just as effectively as traditional art once reinforced complex meanings inherent in political and religious rituals. Ethnographic evidence from the Ashanti--where artists today violate traditional norms of harmony with deliberate grotesquerie catering to Western tastes--shows such art to be highly functional. Turner's notion that sacra are channelled through distortion, and Peacock's concept of the "rite of modernization" are used to establish that the Ashanti artist today is a cultural broker whose work, by a process of inversion, reinforces traditional cultural values.

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