Mbari: Art and Life among the Owerri Igbo

Herbert M. Cole's Mbari, Art and Life among the Owerri Igbo, published by Indiana University Press in 1982, is a scholarly art historical and ethnographic study of the Mbari tradition of building and ritually abandoning elaborate sculptural houses among the Owerri Igbo of Nigeria. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Cole's own direct fieldwork documenting Mbari construction and the beliefs surrounding it. Its limit is age relative to the further decades of Igbo art scholarship that have followed, and the position of an outside art historian describing a living religious practice, so a claim about how the tradition has since changed or is currently practiced needs more recent fieldwork alongside this study.