Visual Culture in Translation : The Reception of the Benin Bronzes on the Verge of Modernity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The British and German public never had a positive image of the Benin Kingdom in West Africa and its supposedly ‘fetish worshipping’ citizens. But after the ‘massacre’ of a British expedition in January 1897 and the following punitive expedition in February 1897 the Beni were seen as blood thirsty ‘savages.’ The discovery of the so-called ‘Benin Bronzes’ in the aftermath of the Punitive Expedition therefore puzzled ethnographic museums, scientific publications and the public press in Europe.\nThis thesis will examine the reception history of the bronzes in Britain and Germany between 1897 and 1901 when they came into the collections of the British Museum in London and the Völkerkundemuseum in Berlin. It only took these few years to change the reputation of the ‘Benin Bronzes’ from war booty, to scientific objects and finally to works of ‘primitive’ art, changing not just the view on the bronzes but also their makers.\nUsing translation studies as a means to examine how ethnographers and art historians represented the ‘Other’ by describing their visual culture, the current study will assess the importance of the ethnographers’ writings on the development of the notion of ‘primitive art’ and the extent of their international collaboration. To do so, the research includes various secondary and primary sources and numerous archival materials from the two museums in question.\nMoreover, the present study will examine this material in light of the Foreignization and Domestication of the ‘Other,’ to analyse the change in attitude towards the bronzes. This analysis might not just be applied to the reception of the Benin Bronzes but to the reception of all non-European visual culture and, thus, has implications on today’s understanding of World Art.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".