Two Lives For One Form, Ritual At Home And Art Abroad

Willis records the Akuaba doll form itself becoming one of the most widely reproduced pieces of Akan art in museum and popular collections outside Ghana, a global circulation and recognition he notes considerably exceeds that of the Adinkra cloth symbol derived from it, so that many viewers encounter the doll's silhouette as fine art or craft before ever learning of its role within the Adinkra corpus specifically. He distinguishes the doll's original ritual and devotional function, carried by a specific woman for a specific fertility or protective purpose, from its modern reproduction as decorative art and tourist craft, treating the two as genuinely different, coexisting lives of the same visual form rather than one having simply replaced the other.

Willis records this split between ritual origin and modern art-market reproduction as one of the more pronounced examples in the whole Adinkra corpus of a single traditional form acquiring an entirely new, much larger audience abroad while its original devotional use continues, largely unaffected, within its originating communities in Ghana. Willis records this split circulation, ritual object at home and art object abroad, as a pattern he also notes, in smaller degree, for Nyame Dua's household shrine.