A Gan Aluminium Ritual Knife – Burkina Faso

Aluminium. Cm. 33,0 high (12.99″). Grams 229,1 (8.08 oz).

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 – spectacular figurations – 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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