Authorless authority: A proposal on agency and ritual artefacts

In this article, the author proposes a re-examination of the first example of agency given by Alfred Gell in his famous Art and Agency (1998), namely the Zinganga ’nkisi (nail fetish) of Western Africa. This article essentially argues two points. First, the relation between the artefact and the person it incarnates is not, as Gell has defined it, bi-univocal (one-to-one), but can be better described as one-to-many. In the author’s view, the ritual artefact does not work as a mirror reflection, but as a crystal. Secondly, the kind of ‘distributed I’ that the artefact enacts is not composed of a single identity distributed in several material occurrences, as Gell has described it in Art and Agency. In the author’s view, another concept of plurality, defined as a set of different identities condensed in a single object, describes more appropriately the kind of agency that characterizes the ’nkisi.