A Beautiful Gan Bronze Amulet – Ancestor – Burkina Faso

20th century. Cm. 7,8 high (3.07″); Gr. 33,5 (1.18 oz.). Extra fine work. Lost-wax casting.

The Gan are based in the south-west region of Burkina Faso. For the Gan, every form of power is legitimized by its relation to a traditional and official state system of cults dedicated to a pantheon of supernatural entities, associated in particular with the spirits of the dead. The cult objects and symbols identifying these entities turn out to play a determining role in the procedures for relating the present to the past, to the point of constituting formidable “objects of memory”.

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