ART on view THE SENUFO LABEL Ideas and expressions of a discrete Senufo cultural or ethnic identity emerged by the end of the nineteenth century within the specific political and historical contexts 74 of the three-corner region, an area defined by the present-day borders of Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali. One, but not the only, explanation for the word Senufo suggests the term distinguished Senufo farmers from people who engaged in other activities (see Veirman 2002: 110). Other markers separated people who had converted to Islam from those who had not, so, for example, Bamana may have described individuals who had not converted to Islam. Understood as indicators of occupational and religious difference, the terms Senufo and Bamana are not mutually exclusive. For instance, a farmer in this region who may never have converted to Islam could be identified as a Senufo farmer and a Bamana nonbeliever of Islam. The same person who converted to Islam could then identify or be identified as Jula. With conversion as well as migration or changes in occupation, an individual’s status could change within a lifetime (see also Launay 1982; Amselle 1998: 43–57). Even as he promoted the concept of a bounded Senufo identity in the early twentieth century, French colonial administrator Maurice Delafosse (1904: 192– 93) recognized that he applied the term Senufo to people who did not necessarily use the label to identify themselves. Indeed, from the nineteenth century to the present day, configurations of Senufo identity and definitions of the Senufo corpus have not always overlapped with the distinct interests and investments of individual artists, patrons, and audiences of rural communities recognized as Senufo (fig. 1). When applied to the arts, the Senufo label facilitates classification of objects for sale or study even when little written documentation exists about specific works housed in private collections or museums. Connoisseurs and scholars confronted with objects from the African continent in the early twentieth century sought to delineate discrete styles in order to assess art with the same rigor as their colleagues who specialized in European arts. Their turn to cultural or ethnic group labels joined careful formal analysis with studies in anthropology, including scholarship at the time considered to be cutting edge. Still, packed into culturalor ethnic group–based labels but not always revealed are a range of colonial and anthropological modes of thinking as well as divergent formal and financial interests of artists, dealers, and connoisseurs in Africa,
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