Temne Rounds: The Arts as Spatial and Temporal Indicators in a West African Society

The Temne of Sierra Leone, West Africa, are a people of many cultural cross-currents. Through centuries of foreign incursions, documented historically from the fifteenth century, the Temne have absorbed many cultural elements into their institutions, but it is clear that they also have maintained certain guiding principles throughout their history that identify them as a people. These principles become clear in the ways the Temee conceptualize spatial and temporal categories and in the ways they apply them. In both space and time the elemental construct is the round. Space is defined as a closed entity formed by the circle, whether in architecture, village planning, notions of social or personal territory, or the physical world. Units of time, such as the days, months, generations, or the creation and destruction of man, follow a cyclical pattern in which the completed return is essential to the continuity of life. The maintenance of the perpetual round relies upon the fundamental principle of balance. The Temne think of society as one in which the continual readjustment of unsteady forces is necessary to social harmony and self-confidence. These forces, or principles, are binary, aligned in space in terms of male and female areas, dry and wet areas, right and left, black and white images, the village and the bush, and earthly and spiritual domains. In time, complementary and opposed values are given to the day and night, rainy and dry seasons, life and death, and pre- and post-creation. In space, the dividing line between areas is "the line of life," the East-West axis. In time, it is a concept of beginning and end, clearly marked in the way units are described and in the way people organize their activities. The common discourse of the Temne and the ways in which daily activities are structured reveal that the system of dual categories is a fundamental determinant in the way they conceive of space and time. In the ritual arts this system takes its most dramatic and crystallized form. This study considers the concepts of space and time inherent in the arts of architecture, sculpture and painting, dance, music, theater, oral narrative, and language. The primary method used was that of morphology, the art historical analysis of the quality and juxtaposition of form.