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Vogel pursues another kind of exoticizing impulse in her discussion Yoruba twin dolls. For the Yoruba, twins are minor deities, and there genre of wood carvings to honor deceased twins, whose spirits in traditional animist religion inhabit the sculptures, known as ibeji. As Vogel however, this tradition is in decline, parpaticularly among Muslim and Christian families. The older carvings, which were produced with magnificent care, are being replaced by cheap, simplified carvings of low relief, and sometimes by cheaper Taiwanese plastic dolls with Europe features. (Even more recently, there is no sculpture at all in the twin cult, rather photographs, where a doubled print of the surviving twin often stands in for the deceased sibling.) Both Vogel and, following her, the phi o pher David Novitz, are especially impressed by the alacrity with which Yoruba people have been willing to supplant traditional wooden sculptures with plastic dolls. Vogel conceives these practices as “an imaginative of imported items as replacements for traditional artworks.” Novitz draws a more radical conclusion: the ibeji sculptures, since they are so easily replaced by mass-produced dolls that “most assuredly would not considered art in our culture,” are therefore “appreciated not for their originality, nor for their beauty, nor yet for their proportions; they are appreciated primarily as quasi-religious artifacts that allow the beneficial influence of the deceased twin to persist in the parents’ lives.” The ibeji carvings, Novitz says, “occupy a social space in Yoruba society that is remote from the social space occupied by works of art in our society.”

But leaving the plastic dolls aside for a moment, there are no features this story that warrant claiming that the traditional or more recent ibeji carvings are not art—in our sense or any sense. Recalling the criteria for art discussed in the last chapter, we can say that the older sculptures are (a) skillfully made objects (b) produced in a recognizable, private, rather than public, display gives then an even more special aura. They are also (e) imaginative objects—that is, they stand for the dead and are inhabited by its spirit, but do not literally replace it. Taken together, these features warrant calling ibeji carvings works of art.

The same features also argue against Vogel’s bland accep tance of recent adoption of Taiwanese trinkets as a creative updating of an old tradition. There may be many reasons for the accep tance of plastic dolls ibeji. Certainly the Christianizing of Yoruba life is a major factor. Doubtless there are Yoruba mothers too poor to commission carvings, as mothers who are simply uninterested in ibeji statues as distinctly Yoruba art (thus, incidentally, showing in this case that the enrichment enhancement of Yoruba identity with art makes no difference them). The plastic dolls may even have sheer novelty appeal. But in general, that there are people in any culture who do not care for a local form, or who lose interest in it long enough for it to die out, tells little about whether it is or was an art. Like the replacement of Pueblo pottery by cheap (and more practical) tin pots in the nineteenth-century American Southwest, the invasion of the Yoruba ibeji cult by plastic toys does not constitute a new innovation in an artistic tradition but rather death.

Through much of her discussion, Vogel is attempting to defamiliar-ize Baule and Yoruba art in the minds of her Western readers, requiring them to stop and think about the presuppositions they bring to any of the word “art.” This demand for an “unlearning” of cultural habits is entirely laudable: it extends the Western reader’s understanding appreciation (and, by the way, it is a strategy that could with profit more often applied to Giotto appreciation as well). However, it strategy that can also encourage the false notion that we are ethnocen-trically mistaken in calling Baule or Yoruba sacred creations “art.” That aspect of the strategy is yet