Tikar (trade attribution label)
A market and catalogue term applied loosely to lost-wax brass and other Grassfields material from Cameroon, conflating dynastic origin myth with an art-attribution category.
In academic usage, 'Tikar' designates a dynastic origin claimed by several centralised chiefdoms of the Cameroon Grassfields, particularly those of the Ndob plain, whose ruling lineages trace descent to a founding Tikar migration from the Adamawa plateau. Tamara Northern's The Art of Cameroon (1984) established this genealogical rather than ethnic reading: the Tikar identity is one of noble ancestry, not a uniform culture with a bounded material tradition. There is no documented single Tikar art-producing community in the ethnographic record.
In art market and auction usage, however, 'Tikar' functions as a regional catchall for lost-wax brass pipes, figural castings and ceremonial objects produced across numerous Grassfields chiefdoms — Bamum, Babanki Tungo, Bamessing, Nso and others — whose workshop traditions differ in iconography, technique and court context. The label gained currency in the mid-twentieth-century trade as a prestige signifier implying ancient courtly manufacture, and persists despite scholarly critique. Collectors and curators working with objects catalogued as 'Tikar' are advised to treat the attribution as meaning 'Cameroon Grassfields, chiefdom unspecified' and to seek more precise attribution against documented comparative collections wherever the object's formal character and provenance permit.