Carving, raffia weaving, and appliqueing are the main art forms of the northern Anang of Calabar Province, Nigeria. A great variety of carved and woven objects is produced by numerous Anang artisans, many of whom exhibit a high order of talent, especially when creating artifacts for traditional (rather than tourist) usage. Unfortunately, the appliqueing of funeral cloths for ritualistic purposes is a rapidly disappearing art, while the painting of funeral murals to serve the same end, which preceded and for a time was practiced concurrently with appliqueing, has disappeared altogether.

Both-carvers and weavers serve the nineteen Anang voluntary associations, of which seven are religious groups, five are social, five are orchestral, and two are dramatic. Four of the associations employ wooden masks, four raffia masks and costumes, and two wooden puppets, and all utilize an assortment of minor carved and woven articles produced by professional artisans. This paper will be concerned with the use of wooden masks, puppets, and figurines by one of the drama associations——in plays which are presented to amuse audiences by ridiculing the motives and actions of well-known individuals and groups. All of the Anang associations have social control functions as regards their membership or the larger community, or both, but, through its system of rules governing the behavior of members and through its plays acted by humans and puppets, exerts the broadest measure of social control of any association-over individuals, kinship and political groups, other associations, and even the missions and, at one time, the colonial government.

Some Africanists work on Africa as a continent, but there are probably more who prefer to focus attention on the area to the south of the desert. The terms “Africa South of the Sahara,” and the shorter but less popular “Sub-Saharan Africa” have been invented to meet this need.

There are so many differences in historical development, climates, economic policy, education, agriculture, politics, and other aspects between the Union of South Africa and the rest of Africa, however, that one often wishes to exclude the Union or Southern Africa, as well as Northern Africa, from a research project or a discussion. “Tropical Africa” is a convenient label which is in widespread use among those dealing with such things as climate and agricultural production, as well as among some historians, and no doubt its use will continue. But it has not been accepted by the general public, perhaps because it suggests that one wishes to deal with tropical products, the zone between the two tropic lines, or tropical conditions of some kind rather than to merely exclude Northern and Southern Africa from consideration.

It is a time-worn cliché that music is an important constituent element of African culture closely associated and integrated with the daily living of the African—a cliché that would not merit repetition here were it not for the fact that this statement has rarely been applied to political activities in African societies. Ethnographers and ethnomusicologists have reported the music and the music making of various tribes in relation to religion, the “rites de passage,” agriculture, work, and social life, but the use of music as an agent of political expression has received scant attention.

In a pioneer study of African music von Hornbostel wrote: “In the life of so-called primitive man, and especially of the African Negroes, music and dance have quite different and incomparably greater significance than with us. … Music is neither reproduction (of a ‘piece of music’ as an existing object) nor production (of a new object), it is the life of a living spirit working within those who dance and sing” (Hornbostel 1928: 32). The spirit animating all Africans today is one of independence from colonialism, freedom, and nationalism. In a paper pregnant with ideas and suggestions for new approaches in the study of African music, William Bascom has written: “It is my belief that we would better understand change in political beliefs if we knew more about the way in which music, the dance, or any other forms of traditional behavior develop, and of how they are modified by the outside influences with which they are brought in contact.” (Bascom 1959: 7) It is the purpose of this paper to examine and assess the function and role of African music in contemporary political movements with special attention to the repertory of songs.

I am delighted with the manner in which these three papers have dealt with the social and political relevance of sculpture, folklore, and music. This is no startlingly new discovery. It has been recognized before by those interested in the arts, but it has been largely ignored by those who specialize in social and political studies. The contributors to this panel are to be congratulated for their documentation of this function of the arts, and our chairman deserves special recognition for this attempt to bring it to the attention of those who so often overlook it.

The panelists have stressed the lessons to be learned by the social scientists, but I wonder if there is not one for the humanists as well. The fact that artists are often rebels against thestatus quo is a truism in our society, but the significance of the arts as a medium of social and political action, and of change, is often ignored although similar examples can be found in Africa today as well as in the history of other societies.

Where does this leave our conventional definitions of art as aesthetic expression, as creativity, as “art for art's sake,” as concern with form for its own sake, or as elaboration beyond the point of utility? All these, I fear, underevaluate the socio-political utility of art which these papers have demonstrated in their different fields.

African studies in the USSR are at present concentrated in Moscow and Leningrad. The two centers have individual characteristics and, in the case of Africa, fairly defined fields of academic interests. Some introductory remarks on the disciplines concerned and on the general organization of higher studies in the Soviet Union will be relevant, before examining African studies in detail.

Regional studies have developed strongly inside the Soviet Union, first because the living material for such studies is within the confines of the state; secondly because a society which is consciously remolding its future to a specific pattern needs such basic knowledge, and thirdly because of a tradition in and love of the study of popular cultures going well back into the 19th century. Such studies cut across academic disciplines; field work is predominantly undertaken by “complex expeditions” which, to the core of ethnographers, add archaeologists, linguists, folk-lorists, art historians, and sociologists. Ethnography in the Russian sense is mainly concerned with material culture; folklore deals entirely with recording oral tradition and poetry. In a paper read at the VIth International Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnographers in Paris in June, 1960, Professor Tolstov, President of the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences, explained the Institute's academic conceptions as follows:-