Aesthetics of Acquisition: Notes on the Transactional Life of Persons and Things in Gabon

Abstract

Abstract Based on a historical study of older and newer visual regimes in Gabon, Equatorial Africa, this paper examines spectacles as world-manufacturing processes that produce and circulate assets. Visual and aesthetic strategies have often been analyzed as technologies of the self that transform and manifest people's identities. I show here that they also work as a means to create resources and put them into motion. The notion of “aesthetics of acquisition” helps to capture the dynamic energy of visual events and reinsert them into the realms of economic production and material exchange. If spectacles allow people to acquire riches, produce new statuses, and circulate resources, I argue, the process through which this occurs cannot be analytically reduced to a mere commodification of the person. Instead, I explain how aesthetics of acquisition enable institutional and social actors to assume temporary commodity status, a moment and a strategy that I call “transactional life.”

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