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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center and Regents of the University of California are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Arts. AUTHORSHIP IN YORUBA ARTIn her article "Known Artists but Anonymous Works: Fieldwork and Art History" (Spring 1999), Susan Vogel notes that the late William Fagg was one of the first, along with Olbrechts, to identify, on stylistic and documentary grounds, the hand of an individual master and to assemble an oeuvre for that artist. Inspired by Bill and his writings, I took the opportunity to do field research with him in southwest Nigeria among the Yoruba during the summers of 1979 and 1981. We attempted to find and interview traditional carvers of ere ibeji and compile a photographic index by town. This work was meant even-tually to be published in a book on Yoruba style, a dream of Bill's.I have continued to conduct research on the Yoruba, so it is with great interest that I read the Vogel essay. After years of gathering information and photos on individual carvers (and more recently, bead workers), I have to agree that "...any information that has so consistently eluded researchers should be taken to indicate areas of little or no cultural relevance to the people under study" (Vogel, p. 40). In my case it turns out, two decades later, that my field data is not highly valued by most members of the very culture from which I gathered it. The Western model of the individual artist does not necessarily render authenticity to Yoruba carvings. The ideas of commodity and ownership are perhaps more relevant, both in Africa and the West.The notion of authorship can no longer be strictly defined by the identification of a sculptor. The African owner and the Western collector

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