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Several recent Israeli films such as Beaufort, Waltz tiffany note Bashir, and Lebanon have won major film festival awards, but the history of Israeli cinema remains barely known in this country. Raphael Nadjari's documentary is a penetrating personal take on Israel's film history rather than a conventional historical compilation. The film provides no narrative. It is built around clips from a wide range of films and features talking-head interviews with directors, critics, and scholars who are analytic and articulate. Their discussion eschews a definitive analysis for a variety of interpretations of a cinema that is constantly changing. The first part spans the years 1933 to 1978, starting with Zionist films that resembled Stalinist Socialist Realism in their polemical commitment to creating a "new man" and national unity out of the ashes of the Diaspora. By the 1960s the films shifted from Zionist agitprop to broad escapist "bourekas"-comedies that depicted the struggles of ethnic groups-and eliteoriented films dubbed the "New Sensitivity" that were beholden to European tiffany pendant cinema. The documentary's second part covers the years 1978 to 2005 and examines the wave of films dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, and others offering a more personal approach to cinema, including films dealing with ignored groups like the ultra- Orthodox, women, gays, and Georgian immigrants. Many of these films criticize Israeli society without being didactic. They also pose the question, in a nation where social and political reality is inescapable, what the function of cinema as a national narrative is. Nadjari's film spills over with suggestive ideas that tiffany pendants a window into a cinema that needs to be further studied and seen.

Hans-Joachim Kolosss two-part article in African Arts on tiffany key (njom, pi. ajom) among the Ejagham (Koloss 1984, 1985), alas published without its accompanying photographs, has long presented the most updated information about esoteric knowledge in the Cross River culture region. In Traditional Institutions in Kembong (Cameroon), a historically grounded ethnography on Central Ejagham people (a.k.a. Keaka), Koloss conveys how an acephalous society's broader cultural institutions and artistic practices facilitate a peoples negotiation with god (obasi) for a harmonious existence amidst ancestors, spirits, ghosts, and witches. The text, which is meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated, provides a step-by-step introduction to the complexity of Ejagham thought and fills in gaps in the art historical scholarship on the Upper Cross River region; thus it is an invaluable resource for readers with a general interest in African art and for scholars with specialized knowledge of the field.

Although the study is not framed as such, it functions as a sequel to Kolosss 2000 monograph World View and Society in Oku (Cameroon). The current volume is considerably informed by Kolosss keen awareness that the egalitarian society in the forests of Cameroon's South West Province constitutes an "entirely different world in cultural respect" from the stratified Oku kingdom in the Cameroon Grasslands (p. 17). In fact, it is Koloss's insight into the two societies' dissimilar attitudes tiffany necklace seemingly comparable cultural institutions that fostered his attention to minute details of performance practice and utmost respect for his informants' explications. Throughout the text, Koloss wraps up general accounts of various rites' ideal miseen-scene with documentation of specific performances the author observed over a period of twenty-five years, between 1.980 and. 2005. This description is sensitive to the fact that the society is undergoing dramatic changes.

The monograph is presented in seven chapters, each supplied with endnotes that in and of themselves constitute a valuable synthesis of the scholarship on Cross River cultures. A preface, written by Hon. Rev. Dr. Ayukachale Peter Egbe and late Chief of Kembong Alfred Ayuk Ako, regrettably casts the book in light of salvage anthropology, an attitude that occasionally also surfaces in Koloss's writing, for example, when he states that one can no longer "expect to observe completely authentic' ways of life" (p. 20).

Chapter 1 discloses background information about the research project and situates the reader in the geographic tiffany necklaces and its history. Koloss moves skillfully from familiar themes, e.g. the transatlantic slave trade, German and British colonialism, the arrival of Christianity, and the modern state's administrative centers, to more nuanced local recollections about Kembong's clan history and fortuitous positioning at crossroads that led to Calabar and Limbe at the coast and Bamenda, the gateway to the Cameroon Grasslands, in the east. The significance of these routes permits the author to touch upon the diffusion of the cultural institutions that lay at the heart of the study. Mgbe, Angbu, Obasinjom, Mgbokandem, and Nchebe.

Kuba political organization, with its complex system of tiffany bracelets, is among the most elaborate in all of Africa. The development of Kuba visual arts was directly tied to the increasing complexity of the political structure during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to the economic success of many Kuba as partisans vied for advancement within the system. With the large number of titles there developed a corresponding series of prerogatives, insignia, emblems, and objects that differentiated an individual's rank and corresponding status within the hierarchy. The desire to display one's achieved status and monetary success was nurtured by the highly competitive economic environment and the ingenuity and creativity of Kuba artists who made decorated objects that were acquired with relish.

Economic growth was spurred on by the increase in food production among the Kuba and by the expansion of internal and regional trade (Vansina 1978:175-85). The increase in regional trade, which included the decorative arts, directly impacted the range of objects that were produced and traded to neighbouring peoples. This in turn influenced artists in bordering regions to produce Kuba-style objects, as not only Kuba objects but Kuba style was exported.

Trade became even more lucrative for tiffany cufflinks elites with the unprecedented rise in the demand for African ivory beginning in the early nineteenth century. The Kuba were strategically situated geographically to benefit from the increased demand and spiralling prices for ivory. The Kuba hunted elephants on their own lands, but more importantly served as middlemen, acquiring ivory in quantity from hunters and traders north of the Sankuru River to sell at markets established in the southern Kuba region (Vansina 1978:192-95; Binkley 1993:278-79). While the Kuba nyim and other eagle- feathered chiefs (kum apoong) were its principal beneficiaries, as the ivory trade increased, the income of the rural populations distant from the elite centers may have also risen, resulting in an increase in the acquisition of decorative arts in these chiefdoms as well (Vansina 1978:195).

As individuals obtained titles or advanced within the hierarchy, they marked their success by acquiring objects and symbols that publicly acknowledged achievement within the political sphere (Vansina 1978:16, 184-86, 195-96). Artists from throughout the region produced extraordinarily beautiful objects that were readily acquired by a demanding tiffany earrings seeking new and innovative forms. By the late nineteenth century Western explorers, missionaries, and ethnographers were astonished by the proliferation of Kuba titled positions linked to the display of an immense variety of insignia, prestige regalia, and decorated objects. They unanimously extolled the distinctive style and virtuosity of Kuba decorative traditions, considering them among the greatest achievements on the African continent.

On a splendid hilltop, overlooking the town and lake of silver rings, sits the Museum of Ethnography, a dynamic laboratory/showcase committed to creative exploration of ethnology. Energized by its director, Marc-Olivier Gonseth, and his young team of collaborators, the museum continues its "expographic" program with the temporary exhibition "Retour dAngola" (see Gonseth, Hainard, and Kaehr 2002). This time the museum turns attention to itself by taking a critical look at its own history of collection, study, and display through the activities of Théodore Delachaux, one of the museums significant early figures. Gonseth and his collegues go beyond mere showcasing and biographical display. Their objective is to provide transparency of past ethnographic paths and practices and to expose the paradoxes and concerns of museology as well as contemporary heritage debates (Gonseth, Laville, and Mayor 2007:5).

Théodore Delachaux (1879-1949) was curator of MEN from 1921-45 and recognized for having amassed a collection of 3,500 artefacts during the second Swiss mission to southwestern Angola (MSSA). An astonishing array of pieces from the Ovimbundu, Chokwe, Nyaneka-Nkhumbi, tiffany accessories, Kwamatwi , Kwanyama, and others was acquired during a mere six month period from 1932-33, which attest to the rich and complex cultural mosaic of the region. By bringing Delachaux to the forefront, revealing his multiple talents and curiosities in a most personalized fashion, the visitor is drawn strikingly face to face with individual and communal attitudes of the time and to past and present collecting approaches.

Delachaux was in fact, a "Jack of all trades." His initial passion was natural history and he published his first work on plankton at the tender age often. Much later, while already engaged in muséographie work, he discovered the sweet water worm Troglochaetus beranecki, an ancient species that existed before the formation of the Alps and fura (ibid., p. 11). But apart from his scientific achievements, he was unquestionably a talented artist, as can be seen from his drawings, paintings, photographs, and even stained-glass windows. From the early age of nine and throughout his lifetime he also tiffany bracelet, in particular small-scale European toy models of figures and animals, revealing his interest as a folklorist (ibid., p. 15). All of these preoccupations shaped the nature of Delachaux's voyage to Angola and are intimately represented in the exhibition.

Aside from the wonders of Photoshopping, what is going on silver key rings? Nothing short of a colonization of the Senegalese visual economy by Chinese interests, in my estimation. Indeed, the oddly altered images of Ahmad ai-Tijani and Amadu Bamba (to be addressed again below) are manifestations of far greater changes than may meet the eye.

The phrase "visual economy" has been explicated by Deborah Poole (1997) in her important study of a late-nineteenth-century Andean image world. Like other economies, those concerning visual culture are characterized by three features: "an organization of production encompassing both the individuals and the technologies that producé images"; "the circulation of goods or, in this case, images and image-objects"; and "the cultural and discursive systems through which graphic images are appraised,, interpreted, and assigned historical, scientific, and aesthetic worth.... How images accrue value" is of special significance to these latter reckonings (ibid., 9-10). I would add that all economies, including visual ones, are fluid as to relationships that they imply, create, and strengthen, for actors, ideas, and means come and go constantly, making it impossible to define the boundaries of any given economy. In this, Arjun Appadurais (1996) sense of "-silver necklaces" is useful, insofar as it suggests dynamic transactions developed and understood through cultural frames that produce "fuzzy sets" rather than rigidities of political delimitation.

The other term of my title is 'colonization," suggesting that the Senegalese visual economy has been co-opted by foreign interests. The prefix "re-" implies that something like this has happened before, although not necessarily in the same ways or for the same reasons that it is happening now.

A vibrant visual economy was created by and among Senegalese Muslims in the late nineteenth century as French colonial forces asserted hegemonic control of most of the Sahel. Greater Senegambia was convulsed by Islamic resistance, and the French took an increasingly militaristic approach to enlarging their sphere of interest (Robinson 1991:153-54 and passim). Transition from political economies influenced by transatlantic, regional, and domestic slave trades to domination by colonial capitalism was fraught with difficulty (see Barry 1998, Baum 1999), and the French felt obliged to play a wary game, promoting certain Muslim authorities while suppressing any movement they deemed subversive to their colonial aspirations (Robinson 1988). Although silver pendants from further violence, Senegalese Muslim leaders were anything but passive in building social structures counter to colonial models; and in so doing, they "turned increasingly to the production of devotional literature which served to reinforce their authority in an arena independent of the colonial state" (Stewart 1997:54). Significantly, the "literature" in question was both written and visual

Halfway through her continental victory tour, silver bracelets Wata arrived with great fanfare at the Museum of African Art in "Washington DC, a city newly obsessed with the power of glamour (and the glamour of power). Pulitzer laureate Holland Cotters fevered review in The New York Times (April 3, 2009) both gauged and magnified her extravagant allure:

[The exhibition] is as rousing as a drum roll, as piquant as a samba, as sexy as Cesaría Evora's voice. It is about glitter and tears, bawdy jokes and baskets of flowers, miracles and mysteries, money in hand and affairs of the heart. It's about standing at the edge of the sea at dawn and watching a world reborn, in that world no one walks; everyone dances and swims, everyone, that is, who has taken the plunge into Marni Wata's realm.

Cotter's ballyhoo got it just right Henry Drewal's show is cluttered, emotional, incredible: a perfect correlative to the curator's passion for his cargo cult goddess. Drewal is not just in love with Marni Wata; he IS Marni Wata. Not schizophrenic, really, just obsessed in the way great artists (and great curators) can be obsessed about the silver cufflinks of their affection. I am sure that Flaubert was not kidding when he proclaimed "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Nor was Henry kidding when he put on mermaid drag and sashayed (or whatever it is that mermaids do) in the Halloween Parade on Christopher Street.1 Nor could he have been plainer about his feelings when he confided to his journal (pp. 13-15), "[These] are personal and playful episodes in the subjection of the author by the object of his affection. In short, Marni Wata seduced me."

As Drewal narrates in his Preface, he has pursued this transnational mermaid from West Africa to such fabled Black Atlantic entrepots as Bahia do Salvador, Hamburg, Germany- and that sexy capital of mid- Atlantic allure, Coney Island. He has interviewed her priests and priestesses, placed gifts on her dressing tables, and named two sailboats in her honor. His obsession began in Nigeria in the middle '60s, where (caveat lector) Henry and I both served as Peace Corps Volunteers.3 Inspired by Sir silver earrings Uwaifo's highlife lyrics, "Eeh, if you see Mami Wata, never you run away. . ." Henry took that lyrical advice literally. If Mami provokes the question "How can you do justice to a goddess whose realm is the entire Black Atlantic?" Henry's answer is "Give her everything!" And so he does.

In her introductory essay to the first "Ephemeral Arts" issue cheap pendants African Arts (vol. 42, no. 3), Allyson Purpura (2009) explored the ideas, motivations and outcomes - intentional and unintentional - that inform ephemeral arts with power, poignancy and meaning. Her insights equally apply to the essays compiled for this second issue on the topic. As with the first group, the essays in this volume present selected examples of Africa's visual arts that are ephemeral by virtue of their use of fragile, fugitive materials and/or their intentions of a finite "life." They also draw on the conceptual power of the ephemeral to push the boundaries of thought about the social lives of objects and people whose histories, practices, and identities are produced through them. Applying to both "traditional" and contemporary art practices, the concept allows us to break down such categorical distinctions' and offers opportunities to consider the material, conceptual, ethical, and practical challenges posed by works of art that are impermanent by design.

As a backdrop to the in-cheap rings case studies presented in this and the previous volume, this essay provides a brief overview - illustrative, rather than comprehensive - of selected categories of tradition-based African arts whose uses and meanings are closely tied to the ephemeral. While a strict definition of "ephemeral" suggests an intentionally brief lifespan, I propose to take a slightly broader view of the concept as a way to consider impermanence in particular forms and materials in Africa's tradition-based arts. Many of the objects selected to illustrate my points are from the collection of the National Museum of African Art, whose mission, like most other museums, includes the preservation of objects that, in their ordinary contexts of use, would have had finite a lifespan. The preservation, conservation, and stabilization work of museums reflects a "cultural response, one shaped within a Western regime of value that, from the late eighteenth century onwards, extolled permanence as a virtue and cheap tiffany a right of sovereignty" (Purpura 2009:12). In writing this essay, I acknowledge and draw attention to Material Differences, edited by Frank Herremann (2003), which discusses the rich variety of materials employed in the making of African works of art and includes an insightful section on ephemeral arts.

In major museums worldwide, Fang statuary has come to represent the zenith of African cheap key rings. Until the early 1900s, accomplished Fang artists carved wooden heads and full figures to guard over their ancestors' remains. Attached to baskets housing ancestral skull caps, long bones, and other memento mori, their express purpose was one of preservation. Yet these striking objects have all but died out in Gabon, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea. While their lives as "art" in American and European collections have been documented and even dramatized, the effects of their passing - indeed, their ephemerality - in Africa has yet to be explored. This paper considers a particularly urban phenomenon in Libreville, Gabon, in which the absence of Fang reliquaries has engendered contemporary mythologies tied to political, social, and economic power. The types of stories told about these works resonate in fictional plays and children's books written by colonial officers and missionaries in earlier decades.

At a key point in Gabonese history, Fang reliquaries became ephemeral.1 Though gone from sight, their absence remained palpable and found its way into urban legends and myths. In stories about owning the sculptures and human remains, these objects performed a different kind of "preservation," in that they provided urban dwellers with a discourse with which to engage their present. These narratives of loss are striking and speak to the power of longing and fear that continue to cheap money clips the figures - or memories of them.

This trope of absence is key to understanding these works in Africa today. Once confiscated, sold, destroyed, or discarded, the sculptures entered into the popular imaginary. As Roland Barthes explains (1957:127), "(I)n general myth prefers to work with poor, incomplete images, where the meaning is already relieved of its fat, and ready for a signification, such as caricatures, pastiches, symbols, etc." Among Fang and non-Fang individuals alike, urban myths emerged that referenced these works, their troubled histories, and their ongoing influence in matters of politics, money, and power. Once "stripped of their fat," the reliquary guardians living abroad could be redeployed as gods and protagonists both sinister and triumphant.

As an ethnic group sharing language and culture, the Fang have a contested history tied to their migration from what is today Chad and the Central African Republic, towards the southern regions of Cameroon, to continental Equatorial Guinea and northern Gabon, where they now reside. Fang movement from the northeast is thought to have begun in the mid-eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century.2 It was during this migratory phase of Fang cultural identity when the bien reliquary art form is thought to have developed as a way of venerating the cheap necklaces through portable cemeteries. Typically measuring less than three feet tall, the sculpture and the relics could travel with their itinerant owners. Interactions between the Fang and the Mbuti ("Pygmies") at this time might have influenced the size and anatomical representation of the dead in the form of bieri heads and figures attached to barrels of tree bark.3

Along coastal Bénin, the Vodun religious system cheap cufflinks its associated aesthetics are driven by fluctuation, transformation, and open-endedness.' The continuity of Vodun is dependent upon its ability to remain relevant and effective in the lives of its practitioners. If it is not effective, it closes down; it ceases to be; it finishes. In this paper, I argue that this protean, agentive aesthetic system that thrives on such flux and possibility is best described in terms of the ephemeral, the incomplete, the "unfinished."

My intent here is to introduce the idea of the "unfinished" as a way of conceptualizing Vodun aesthetics, and by extension, other African and African diaspora aesthetics. Drawing on both theory and case studies from coastal Bénin and the Caribbean, I explore how Vodun aesthetics are best understood through action, interaction, and potentiality. I suggest that like Vodun, the framework we use for understanding its aesthetics must also remain flexible, rather than definitive. This means making sense of Vodun arts by accepting the idea of "unfinishedness" cheap earrings an ongoing, indeed permanent state of anticipation. I begin by exploring the inherent paradox between the ephemeral and the unfinished.

In Vodun thought, the seemingly contradictory ideas of the ephemeral (impermanent, fleeting, short-lived) and the unfinished (ongoing, enduring, never-ending) merge in a dialectic that maintains the requisite tension between the two. For example, in a problem -solving situation, a diviner might prescribe items for a client to offer to a particular Vodun spirit residing in a shrine. After an offering is made that results in the resolution of a problem, the power solicited for and inherent in this "work" is no longer necessary (ephemeral). At the same time, this very power is preserved, maintained, and ready to be tapped if a need arises (unfinished). For the annual yam celebration in a Vodun compound near Cotonou, Bénin, the guardian spirit Legba was offered yams, palm oil, chicken blood, and other oblations over a fresh bed of azan, or ritual palm fronds (Fig. 1). The particular offerings were active when this photo was taken in the mid 1990s. cheap jewelry than a decade later, none of these offerings remain and many more have been added and have since disintegrated. The accumulative power, however, endures; it is present, and can be called upon if the need arises. That is, the tension maintained through this ephemeral/unfinished dialectic is the determining factor in Vodun efficacy-when Vodun transcends and fuses such opposites, it works.

Calle de los Negroes was not a black neighborhood but was named for the levels of vice and tiffany committed there. It lay within the Chinese quarter, native brotherhood associations known as tongs thrived. These had their roots in triads, underground societies that operated in China for more than years to protect local populations brigands and marauders. As Chimigrated to California during the Gold Rush, triads established in cities such as San Franand Los Angeles. Most of the Chicame to California under contract. triads would pay their traveling costs and contract their fees for services; the laborers would eventually pay back the triads and either remain in the state or return to China. Tongs, criminal gangs modeled on the triad system, engaged in three other lucrative businesses - gambling, prostitution and opium smuggling. Such illegal or semi-legal activities led to trouble as rival organizations vied for territorial domination and warred over gambling debts, women and economic spheres of influence.

The trouble in October 1871 started when two Los Angeles-based tongs, the Nin Yung and Hong Chow, argued over which had the conjugal rights to a certain female. Fistfights and gunfire broke out in Calle de los Negroes between members of the rival tongs. The Los Angeles Daily News reported that the rivals had accumulated 600 six-shooters and that a number of Chinese had arrived from San Francisco "for the express purpose of taking (an] active part in the fight." On October 24, the same day as the massacre, Judge Wilson Gray presided overa preliminary hearing involving two tong members who had tried to kill each other. Both men posted bail, but neither side was willing to let American justice run its course. cheap bangles that afternoon, gunfire again erupted in Calle de los Negroes. Tongs also fired shots at white and Mexican neighbors who tried to interfere or were simply onlookers.

Policeman Jesus Bilderrain responded to the gunfire and found Ah Coy, a member of the Nin Yung tong, bleeding from a bullet wound to the neck that would prove fatal. Without differentiating between Nin Yung and Hong Chow tongs, Bilderrain instructed a bystander named Adolph Celis to help him catch any fleeing Chinese. The officer then fol - lowed two armed tong members into a house and took a bullet in the shoulder for his trouble. Unknown to Bilderrain, given the chaotic scene, his assailant was a member of the Nin Yungs, not the Hong Chows. The wounded policeman emerged from the house and blew his whisde, hoping to summon another officer. Rancher Thompson responded first. Big mistake. Minutes later he was dead.

Soon after Thompson's murder, lawmen (policemen and sheriff's deputies) and civilians (both Mexican and white) surrounded the narrow cheap bracelets. The city marshal ordered that fleeing Chinese be shot. Working-class Los Angelenos resented the Chinese for accepting low pay and taking away jobs. And over the preceding two decades, a culture of vigilantism had sprung up in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. By 6 p.m., scarcely 90 minutes after the wounding of Bilderrain and killing of Thompson, a mob was either hanging or shooting any Chinese trying to escape the alley.