Bamako's Woodcarvers as Pariahs of Cultural Heritage: Between Marginalization and State Representation

Abstract

In this article, I propose to view the acts of production behind tourist art as indicators of adaptation strategies paramount to innovation and cultural reprocessing. From this perspective, I examine the principle of materiality associated with UNESCO selection criteria, including a spatial-temporal conception that rejects the contemporaneity between objects and their acts of production. The Malian state's foundation excludes tourist art carvers on the basis of their economic survival strategies and marks of identity. In an opposite perspective, the principle of corporality includes a perspective on cultural heritage in which the human body is viewed as a receptacle of the capital of social relations of work, conveying a aesthetic in which iconographic innovation is the outcome of economic precariousness and hierarchical relations.