The hefty volumes that accompany recent exhibits include essays which, besides challenging the enduring myths, complement the visual experience by ethnographically based interpretations of the works. Such commentary is traditionally "anthropological," although the contributors now often include specialists in history, literature, philosophy and other disciplines. Modern-art historians working in Africa usually engage in extended fieldwork in the anthropological manner; the disciplinary boundary is no longer clear. Translation in art resembles any other, but may be aided by the fact that the art works are there to "speak" for themselves.

Translations are always approximate, but good ones are best regarded as works of art in their own right. Even within one language, meanings vary in time and space. George Steiner begins his book on language and translation with critical interpretations of passages from Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Rossetti, showing how much interpretation is needed before the modern reader can come close to the resonances the texts may have had for their original audiences. He goes on to list the lexical aids available to the student of English literature, including for example the Admiralty's Dictionary of Naval Equivalents, which helps us to understand The Wreck of the Deutschland (no such sophisticated tools are available to most ethnographers). But, says Steiner, “these are externals. The complete penetrative grasp of a text, the complete discovery and recreative apprehension of its life-forms . . . is an act whose realization can be precisely felt but is nearly impossible to paraphrase or systematize" (Steiner 1975: 25). And, we should add, impossible to replicate, despite Steiner's confident use of the word "complete." The task of literary interpretation, as Steiner describes it, is closely similar to that of the ethnographer, although the latter's product will inevitably fall still further short of "completeness"; the comparison is explicit in Fernandez' approach to the Gabonese cult of Bwiti as an imaginative constellation of images comparable to Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan (Fernandez 1982: 9–11).

Like other art, art in Africa is an experience of certain objects, not just the objects themselves. The answer to the question "What does this mean?" must begin with statements that – though the objects, like artworks elsewhere, are respected and visually powerful – the experience of the objects, in rituals and sumptuary displays, is likely to be very different from that of the museum or gallery. On the other hand, all countries in the world today incorporate a "modern" institutional sector whose buildings, practices and symbols resemble those of the corresponding institutions elsewhere, and probably includes museums and possibly art schools. This institutional plurality (in the United States or Canada, for example, the divide between Native America and the dominant sector), is traditionally the subject matter of anthropology. It creates translation problems of another order than those of the distance between Shakespeare's England and George Steiner's, or between Norwegian and Italian. Anthropologists, to their own considerable embarrassment, have not yet established a satisfactory vocabulary to designate such "otherness."

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