{"product_id":"red-fez","title":"Red Fez","description":"This remarkable and controversial book explores the ways in which colonial Europeans have been represented in African ritual art and drama. Through a profound re-examination of Western concepts of otherness and mimesis, the anthropologist and art historian Fritz Kramer shows that African images of Europeans -in sculpture, masquerades and, above all, spirit possession - are the reverse and also the counterpart of European images of the Other as savage, whether noble or ignoble. For Africans, Europeans belonged to the realm of nature, to a state of innocence.\u0026lt;br\u0026gt;\u0026lt;br\u0026gt;Rejecting the modernist view of African art as abstract, Kramer insists on its mimetic qualities. These rituals are representations of some-thing experienced, although the experiences have been transformed into spirits. In ways which may echo nineteenth-century European realism, they reveal the power of the visible, of the telling, obsessive detail: a feather, a shirt, or the eponymous red fez which runs like a leitmotiv through spirit possession cults of the early colonial period. Just as one danced an ancestor or an animal, so one could dance a motor-car or an aeroplane, possessed by the spirit of the thing.\u0026lt;br\u0026gt;\u0026lt;br\u0026gt;\u0026lt;i\u0026gt;The Red Fez \u0026lt;\/i\u0026gt;is certainly a book of wonders but, more importantly, it is a study of wonderment. Fritz Kramer takes his readers through a hall of mirrors, in which can be found startling likenesses of ourselves and our culture. By different paths, Kramer leads us through another world back to our own, presenting a challenge to anthropology and indeed to social science as a whole.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57507827482997,"sku":"9781786637253","price":20.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781786637253.jpg?v=1787042968","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/red-fez","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}