Masks in context: representation, emergence, motility and self

The archaeology of masks in 2021

We are all now aware of masks and their affects. In the last 18 months, they have proliferated and in doing so replicated most of the major tropes of material culture studies. In Europe and the US they have shifted from exotic objects to, variously, symbols of collective responsibility or state control; they guard the purity of the body and mark distinctions between the domos and the agrios. They are vehicles for expressing identity, though rather less so than other items of clothing; sombre black or surgical masks remain the most common. Perhaps, this sameness of the masks we wear marks out the erasure of identity we feel in donning them. Despite covering only part of the face, it is difficult to recognise people we don’t know well, or read facial expressions. And in popular Western culture, the link of masks with death has re-emerged. Fears around mask-wearing and the pandemic have coalesced in the figure of the plague doctor, a black figure with a beaked mask, in the seventeenth century the height of scientific disease control (Mussap 2019), subsequently a venetian carnival mask, currently stalking our children’s nightmares. On the global scale, some cultures with established traditions of public mask wearing have also been challenged by the recent rise of the standardised clinical mask, and the tangible influences of globalised crises and unilateral intervention that this represents (Bablis 2020). Others, specifically those which combine traditions of ceremonial masking, with social veiling and recent histories of respiratory epidemics, have found the broader uptake of surgical masks less unsettling (Leone 2020).

This volume, at once timely and untimely, explores practices of masking across contents and millennia. Unlike the surgical masks we wear, the masks discussed in this volume produce new faces: one or more of humans, animals, ancestors, gods and spirits. The images of masks in this volume seem to collapse distances in space and time, bringing the past and present face to face with a viscerality seldom matched by other forms of material culture. The powerful affects they produce hinge upon a shared concern for the face across cultures and the consequences of attempts to materially fix its form. From the researcher’s perspective, this hints at a desire to materialise the suite of familiar relations associated with the face, in a way, which facilitates further manipulation through donning, doffing, display and concealment. As such, masks play an unequivocally powerful role within the archaeological imagination, and beyond. The broader academic interest in masks from the perspectives of fine art, anthropology, performance and theatre studies attests to this, but beyond the academy, Clementi’s (2019) discussion of the role that gold and silver gilded funerary masks have played in Greek/Macedonian nationalist discourse demonstrates the political realisation of this power.

Encounters with masks from archaeological contexts have captured the attention of researchers for over a century, and form a smaller component of the longstanding interest in the cross-cultural occurrence of masks within the discipline of anthropology. Yet the materiality of ‘archaeological’ masks also limits the character and frequency of encounters with archaeologists. The oft-noted preference for organic materials in mask making practices and the associated poor rates of survival for organics within archaeological contexts result in their relative scarcity within the archaeological record (Meller 2010). Despite this relative dearth of material, the past decade has seen a flurry of significant contributions to the analysis of masks from archaeological contexts. Two conferences convened by Harald Meller at the State Museum in Halle (Saale) in 2009 and 2010 took a diachronic approach to masks and masking practices within the archaeological record of prehistoric Europe, and the published proceedings of these conferences are a benchmark for archaeological research within this field (Meller and Maraszek 2010, 2011). The papers within these volumes often draw from the anthropological and ethnographic literature on masks, and as such begin to collapse the temporal distances between mask wearers in the deep past and recent present.

In 2015, Angelika Berlejeung and Judith Filitz hosted a three-day symposium on the masks of the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant region, focussing on the third to first millennia BC. These incorporated a range of disciplinary approaches, coalescing around the Classics and Biblical Studies (Filitz and Berlejeung 2018). Within her contribution to this volume, Filitz outlines a relational approach to the study of masks, which includes a consideration of the mask (a material object), the mask wearer (a human), the mask figure (an ancestor, deity, or demon) and mask event (being created in the fusion of mask wearer, mask and mask figure). Using these relational categories, Filitz argues that masks can define and relate the Other to the Self, and create liminal spaces between distinct cosmological worlds. They also possess the capacity to create more-than-human beings, simultaneously conceal and reveal the visible and invisible, and fundamentally distinguish between life and death. Whilst the essentialist principles of this argument struggle to account for how and why masks work differently in different ontological contexts, facets of Filitz’s argument are explored to varying degrees by the papers within the 2018 volume, and resurface here within this Special Issue. The papers presented here take up many of the themes established within these volumes, but also extend the archaeological discussion of masks in a series of novel and exciting directions. Within this introduction, we wish to highlight a number of these themes and explore them in more detail, in order to articulate the content of this volume within the broader families of mask and material culture studies.

Power and representation

Many of the authors take a non-representational approach to masks – seeking to explore what they do rather than what they depict. Averett’s discussion of zoomorphic masks from ancient Cyprus explores the transformation of both body and perspective that mask wearing facilitates. Elliott et al.’s consideration of masking practices within the hunter-gatherer cemeteries of the Eastern Baltic builds an argument for types of relations that the material specificity of masks created. Eeckhout explicitly eschews representation as an appropriate concept to employ within the interpretation of Andean archaeology, based on Viverios de Castro’s (1998) analysis of Amerindian ontologies. Mossolova focuses her discussion upon the role that masks play within the broader processes of decolonial healing within the present-day population of Quinhagak, Alaska. Clearly, an attention to masks as process, and the ontologies these reveal, is a key theme within this volume.

Recent critiques of non-representational archaeology, often deploying Peircian semiotics, have argued such approaches neglect symbolic meaning (see Swenson and Cipolla 2020 and other contributions to World Archaeology 52(3)). Preucel (2020, 403), for example, states ‘ontological archaeologists are advocating a shift away from symbolic ways of knowing towards intuitive and experiential knowledge’. Preucel equates his delineation of ways of knowing as variously experiential, intuitive and symbolic with Peircian concepts of firstness, secondness and thirdness. His critique that ontological archaeologists focus on the intuitive and experiential is a surprising one, and, is in fact, quite the reverse of the aims of these approaches, as indeed the contributions to this volume demonstrate. This may be a consequence of the rendering of the world in Peircian terms – if the symbolic is seen to be avoided, then only the intuitive and experiential remains. Ontological approaches do not shy away from meanings that we, as analysts, might find surprising; in fact, this is one of the approach’s rationale, to startle us out of our complacency and make us understand its political consequences. The ontological turn focuses on profound issues, yet does not reduce these to traditional renderings of symbolism or cultural ways of knowing a real world that is out there. Instead, it takes seriously things that are, to the analyst, not at all intuitive. Holbraad (2007), for example, discusses the powerful powder of Aché diviners in Cuba. The powder is not a simple symbol of power; rather it is power. This necessitates reframing worlds where a thing is simultaneously a concept. These are articulations that would be glossed in Peircian terms as symbols, known through thirdness; but these are not ways of knowing, they are constitutive of worlds.

Let us return to the specificity of masks and their role as representational objects. Masks are privileged objects through which to examine issues of representation, for their power resides in their ability to presence other things. Masks are objects that have a notable recent history as visual culture whereby their aesthetic properties and visual symbolism have been foregrounded. As African and Oceanic masks were appropriated into western European contexts, stripped of their origins, they functioned as pure aesthetics, inspiring nineteenth and twentieth century European art movements. A white mask, made by the Fang people of northern Gabon and later owned by Derrain, was instrumental in inspiring the avant-garde Fauve artists, including Matisse. The mask was viewed as embodying a spirit inherent within African sculpture crushed in western art by neo-classical formalism (Cohen 2017). These sentiments, undoubtedly influenced by racist prejudices towards African groups, ignore most of the key features of the mask as made by Fang craftspeople: the white colour, symbolic of the dead, and its probably function as means of harnessing the power of white colonisers. In contrast to these earlier western accounts of ethnographic masks as pure aesthetic feeling, in later structuralist analyses, the symbolic meaning of masks became key. Levi-Strauss’ Way of the Mask, focuses, for example, on particular features of the masks of North West Coast groups. These features are interpreted through their relation to their paired opposites (e.g. open eyes/closed eyes, fur/feathers) and their manifestation in myth.

How then do our non-representational studies approach these visual elements of their subjects? It is clear that for the authors of this volume what masks look like is a fundamental aspect of what they do. Eekhout notes, for example, that the false heads of Pachacamac mummies are often painted red. The term Ychsma refers to the colour red, a deity, the place and the act of painting one’s face red for ritual purposes. This redness, and the idealised facial features, participate in rendering the mummy into an ancestor and a vehicle of communication to the spirit world. This redness is not an abstract symbol of the type that populated the post-processualism of the early 1980s. Redness references other things but is part of the process of making ancestors.

If masks simply referred to something else they would not provoke the visceral response they do. Masks are powerful precisely because they are more than representational (see Harris 2021). But why do masks have such powerful affects? Masks correspond in many ways to Kristeva’s (1982) definition of the abject; something that threatens to ‘unmask’ our separation and purification (in Latourian terms) of culture and nature, subject and object and (in psychoanalytic terms) self and other. While these are particularly western framings of these issues; many non-western masks also assemble elements that are normally kept apart, or whose combination is fraught with danger. Masks are particularly powerful because of their relationship with the human body, and for their ability to exceed it or capture its elements. It is this potential, which unites in the category of masks things with very different forms that work in quite different ways.

Two examples of very different masks will suffice: death masks, in recent, western contexts, are understood as facsimiles of the faces of the dead. This practice, which seems to have emerged initially as an aid to the production of funerary effigies and commemorative statues (Pointon 2014), increasingly became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a way to commemorate great men. These death masks are not actually masks in the popular sense of the word, intended to be worn, rather they are casts of the face of the deceased. These casts were produced from a mould, which is itself a plaster cast of the face of the dead. It is the cast that by virtue of the fact it is briefly ‘worn’ by the deceased that might be more accurately described as a mask. However, as Pointon notes (2014, 173), ‘both the mould and the imprint or cast, is each referred to as a death mask, an elision indicative of the desire to maintain the connection between face and mask.’ In Piercian terms then, the mould and the cast might be considered both icon (as an image) and index (as a physical trace).

But are they just this? In his famous essay on photographic ontologies, Bazin (1960) has likened photographs to death masks: the photograph produces an image or impression of a subject through the action of light, just as the death mask produces an image through the impression of a face on plaster. While this metaphor has provided fruitful avenues to explore the nature of photography (Sontag 1977), it does not perhaps do justice to the nature of death masks. As Pointon’s statement hints, it is their physical proximity to the human body, in extremis, and their capture of its form (rather than a simple reference to it) that gives these objects their power. The human face acts as a mould for the plaster mask, which itself is a mould for the death mask. As Simondon (1964) describes, moulds are not simply a way of imposing a form, rather, the face of the dead person works with the craftsperson in both actualising the energy of the plaster, and stabilising its boundaries for expansion. This imparting of form and actualisation of matter is perhaps the last act of a person as an intact body. It is worth noting that some of this weighting in the relationship between craftsperson, matter and subject was also given in the nineteenth century: a lawsuit focused on unauthorised copies of the death mask of Napoleon found that the man who had taken a cast of the face of the emperor was a mechanic, rather than a craftsperson; ‘in reproducing them he has no more than plagiarised Nature and Death’ (Pointon 2014).

A second example, showing the workings of a different sort of mask work can be found in Averett’s discussion in this volume: she describes masks made from cattle bucrania found in sanctuaries across Bronze Age Cyprus. In Piercian terms, these masks can be described as both an icon (they look like cattle) and an index (they reference the entire animal from which they are made). However, they are not just these: Averett traces the processes by which they were made and used through their participation in masking rituals. These were masks made in sanctuaries from animals killed in ritual sacrifice that were consumed by both people and deities. These masks carried with them not simply a sense of the animal from which they were made and resembled, but in their relation with deities forged through sacrifice of the animals from which the mask was made; incorporation too then of the divine. The assembling of these potent affects with the human body resulted, Arevett argues, in a more fundamental transformation of human, animal and divine elements. This mask gains its power through relationships: these relationships are material in the case of the cattle bucrania; the divine element becomes present through the incorporation of the deity through sacrifice.

These two types of mask, the nineteenth century wax death masks and the Bronze Age bucrania, have power that derives in part from their resemblance to other things. But this is by no means the whole story: the affects of the death masks emanate from the active relationship of matter, subject, death and craftsperson. The bucrania’s power might initially be considered as possessing an iconic-indexical-symbolic relationship with cattle; what seems more important is their role in processes that capture, or assemble, cattle, human bodies and the divine. It is only through tracing these, often mundane, technological processes that we can see how these relationships emerge. What masks look like and what they reference is undoubtedly important: however, whether something is an icon, an index, a symbol or something more than representational is less important than how and when they might become this. The bucrania become an index of divine power through their role in sacrifice, yet this, like the indexical relationship with cattle, is something that emerges through following processes, rather than emerging, intuitively at its starting point. For some cultures, symbols are important; for others, a symbolic analysis risks imposing our own concerns; for some, the nature of a thing emerges differently in different circumstances: We are reminded of Gregory Bateson’s metalogue: ‘Why a Swan’, a fictionalised discussion of Swan Lake between father and daughter. The key issue is how we know whether, or when, something is a human, a dancer, a swan or a sacrament (‘in the Catholic sense’), or all of these (Bateson 1972, 37). As archaeologists, we need to trace the processes through which masks emerge as one or many of these things.

Connecting and dividing

As discussed above, masks are sites of convergence for diverse sets of often opposed things: materials, bodies, identities, meaning, action, relationships, spaces, and ideas. A classic example of this comes from Hepp et al.’s (2019) study of masks during the Formative Period of Mesoamerica, and their role in bringing together animals, weather events, long-distance inter-community relations, animate objects, ancestors, social hierarchies, ritual specialists and deities to form powerful hybrid beings. Elliott et al.’s account of death masking practices in the hunter-gatherer cemeteries Eastern Baltic features similar characteristics, where masks bring together understandings of life, death, structured cosmology, and a selected array of material affects. When acting in this way, masks perform the role of mediators; binding agents, forming a material interface between otherwise conceptually distinct entities. Within such contexts, masks can act as (somewhat unstable) permeable membranes, regulating the differential flow of affects across themselves through their materials. Within these ontological contexts, we are reminded of the role of masks within late twentieth century Yup’ik ceremonial dances – forming lenses between worlds and allowing the wearer to see into and be seen from divergent cosmological planes (Fienup-Riordan 1987).

Yet as they facilitate this coming-together, masks can also divide and define – drawing a distinction between what lies in front and what lies behind. They form distinctive spaces in and of themselves, to which other assemblages may relate in a range of ways.

This inherent mutability – and the capacity to harness meaning from as diverse a set of trajectories as emotion, expression, identity, sensory perspectives, materials, and (non)human bodies, as well as the social context within which they are encountered, affords masks a huge amount of semiotic fluidity. Simply put, masks have the capacity to take on an unusually eclectic set of meanings. In Holbraad’s terms of motility, we might think of masks as facilitating the meeting of previously unrelated strands of meaning, and as such having the potential to be situated at the crux of truth production (Holbraad 2012, 203). The link between masks and truth-making is also a feature of Filitz’s (2018) linguistic study of the etymology of the word ‘mask’ within European languages. She notes that in both English and German, the respective words for mask are associated with concepts of dishonesty or insincerity, and are synonymous with ‘falsehood, pretence, jugglery, duplicity, and hypocrisy and deception’ (Filitz 2018, 3). This line of thought can be traced back to the use of masks within Classical Greek theatre (though see Wiles (2007) who highlights their original transformative potential in ritual practice) and characterises the role masks play within (post)modern, ‘Western/European’ ontologies (Pizzorno 2010). As such, masks have the capacity to form a dividing membrane between truth and deception – mediating both in the moment of bisection. This ability both to divide and to mediate things that are usually apart brings into focus the two sides of the mask and its effects. Attention has been always on the outward surface, the view of the mask that has been presented to the audience, unsurprisingly given their history of use in theatre.

Transformations

A further facet of the etymology of masks, highlighted by Filitz, is the archaic German word for mask: Larvae. This shares a common, Latin root with the English word larva, and is linked to the Roman Lares – a family of domestic spirits, which came to prominence at moments of biographical transformation and transition. This would appear to speak to a connection in certain contexts between masks, metamorphoses and transformations (Filitz 2018, 11). The connection between masks and corporeal transformation is born out within ethnographic accounts of the Nuxalt, Tlingit and Tsimshian mask-wearing ceremonies from nineteenth century British Columbia, where mask wearing transformed the wearer into physical manifestations of supernatural characters or spirit guides (Neil 1986; Seip 1999), the transformation of humans into spirits during ‘masquerade’ ceremonies within a range of central and west African societies (Cole 1985), or the use of masks by Amazonian Yakuna payé during human/jaguar transformations (Carvajal 1942). In this volume, Ugwuani and colleagues describe how Ibo masking practices transform the wearer into an ancestor or deity, and Arvett argues for a fundamental bodily transformation contingent on masking rituals in ancient Cyprus. It is important here to draw an ontological distinction between the ability of masks to conceal or disguise a body (as they so commonly do within contemporary, ‘Western/European’ ontologies) and the ability of masks to transform a body (Conneller 2004). In the case of the former, we can observe the creation of a new and false identity, layered over the old, true identity of the wearer, premised on the immutability of the body. Within this framework, masks create their own power by producing difference, constituting the material membrane between truth and falsehood. The various meaning trajectories held within the material of the mask itself dictate the character of this emergent falsehood. Within this ontological framework then, masks are both powerful and creative, and whilst what they create is an essential falsehood, this falsehood in turn helps to define a truth. When the mask slips, the falsehood collapses and the truth is revealed.

In the case of the latter, however, masks function as a catalyst (Neil 1986, 460); the active ingredients within a diverse assemblage of materials, which triggers the physical manifestation of a body that was not previously there. Masks, when serving as agents of transformation, therefore create something that is both novel and truthful. This quality of mask to produce things that are new and true across multiple ontologies is the keystone in their social power and is picked up upon by several of the authors within this volume.

Of particular note in this regard is Mossolova’s paper, which extends the argument for masks as catalysts for transformation, and repositions this in relation to broader socio-political concerns. In arguing for the role that the co-authored excavation and curation of masks play in decolonial healing, Mossolova places masks at the heart of a political transformation. The transformative efficacy of masks at the level of State politics has been echoed elsewhere. Hoechtl (2013) and Clementi (2019) give examples of the ways in which the curation of prehistoric masks from archaeological contexts has been choreographed specifically to transform concepts of national identity, in line with the political agendas of the Mexican, Greek and Israeli governments, respectively. This draws our attention to the capacity of masks to affect transformations on assemblages, which are not primarily focussed on the body.

The distinction between ontologies within which masks disguise and ontologies within which masks metamorphose is also crucial in understanding the role that masks play in the articulation of the self and the other. Much has previously been made of the capacity of masks to bisect and conjoin these two concepts within both the anthropological and archaeological literature (Crumrine 1983; Emigh 1996; Filitz and Berlejeung 2018; Gell 1975; Honigmann 1977; Synnott 1990). In essence, these discussions focus on the ability of masks to temporarily change a wearer’s identity, and consequently what this illuminates of the underlying structure of identity. Pollock’s (1995)model of indexical semiotics within mask wearing serves as a rare example of an explicit discussion of this relationship. For Pollock, masks present a paradox in that they are simultaneously indexical and iconic. Following Gell’s (1975) proposition that masks create identity by altering the appearance of the elements of the body deemed to be most closely linked to identity, Pollock argues that the variety of mask forms observed across cultures is a reflection of the varied ways in which identity is indexically encoded within human bodies. Within many western societies, ‘I see’ is shorthand for ‘I understand’, suggesting the eyes as an important locus for identity. However, amongst the Kwakiutl, the mouth is the orifice through which souls enter and leave a body, and thus are the means by which identity is expressed. As a consequence, stylistic elaboration within European and Kwakiutl masks focuses on the eyes and mouth, respectively, as the means to change the identity of the wearer.

Pollock’s theory of mask semiotics, however, falls short of utility from both an archaeological and an anthropological perspective on a number of grounds. Firstly, the suggestion that masks represent a paradox of Pierican semiotics in being simultaneously indexical and iconic is a misrepresentation of Pierce’s work. The famous trichotomy of icon/symbol/index has long been considered an abstraction. Pierce himself argues that, to a greater or lesser extent, most objects play all of three parts within signification (Peirce 1932). Certainly, the existence of ‘pure’ icons, indexes or symbols has long been questioned (Legg 2008). As such, the capacity of masks to be both iconic and indexical, is not paradoxical, and its observation does not aid our understanding of how they function to affect identity in so much as it does any object.

Secondly, the ontological assumptions upon which these discussions rest require some examination. Pollock’s dismissal of approaches to masks, which give credence to the indigenous explanations of their actions is indicative of a broader attitude towards indigenous ontologies prevalent within anthropological research prior to the seminal work of Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004). As outlined above, the subsequent ‘ontological turn’ has led to anthropologists taking these expositions more seriously. As such, the ethnographically reported role of Kwakiutl masks as active, autonomous agents within the transformation of the wearer (Walens 1983), and the corporeal transformation of human bodies that Kwakiutl masks effect (Neil 1986) need to be understood within the contexts of the realities they themselves create, rather than in subservient relation to the specific identity-laden and historically specific realities that European masks create.

Alternative approaches to transformation might then take a slightly different approach to identity within non-Western ontologies. Here, the work of Viverios de Castro (2004) on perspectivist ontologies, which stress the role of outer bodily surfaces in determining the position of a being within its ontology, and the ways in which it can interact with other beings. The implications of this concept for Formative Period Mesoamerica masks have been highlighted by Hepp et al.: ‘These masks facilitate a transformation by providing the face of the wearer with a new outer surface’ (2019, 269). Further to this, we can consider Walens’ work (1983) on Kwakiutl masks. Within the context of the Kwakiutl ontology, beings consist of an inner soul and outer container – both of which are mutable. The human body is in itself considered to be one such mutable container. Walens notes that masks are also containers, on an ontological par with the human body, and often feature extended paraphernalia and attachments that extend to cover the body of the wearer (although he notes that these were rarely collected in the nineteenth century and thus seldom feature within Museum collections). As such, masks are, in Walen’s words ‘soul catchers’, capable of subsuming souls to create new beings. The causal power of masks within the Kwakiutl ontology is notably distinct to that of the Western observer; ‘the masks can be said to act through people as much as people can be said to act through masks’ (Walens 1983, 71). This causality is noted by Honigmann (1977) to be featured within other ontologies, including that of the early twentieth century Hopi, and mid twentieth century Trinidad, and sections of early twentieth century rural German society.

During transformation, the Kwakiutl wearer becomes the masks’ soul, the mask the body of the intended spirit, and together they form a new being – a point reinforced by the revealing of the wearer’s human face to the audience at various points within the wearing ceremony. The audience is not ‘deceived’ by the mask – its relationship to the wearer is openly presented as part of the performance to demonstrate the mechanics of the transformation taking place. The sequence of layering within Kwakiutl mask wearing is crucial in controlling this transformation and often mind-bendingly intricate in its fluidity. Walens cites an example of a technologically exquisite mask from Kingcome Inlet, now housed within the Portland Art Museum, which initially depicts the face of a hawk spirit, but opens to reveal a human face within, surrounded by the faces of other spirits. This is not a depiction of the face of the wearer, but another set of spirits, which the newly manifested being then subsequently transforms into. Walens views this as a mask possessing both an outer and inner self; and this is crucially distinct from the opposition of self and other that mask wearing is conventionally thought to explore.

This attention to layering is glimpsed within Elliott et al.’scontribution to this volume, through the case study of Zvejnieki Burial 316/317. Here, an individual buried whilst wearing a mask is also noted to have been bound and wrapped prior to inhumation. The creation of this ‘membrane’ within a mortuary space does not appear to be a prerequisite for all mask wearers within this Eastern Baltic burial tradition, but hints at similar levels of complexity in expression that mask wearing was afforded within Typical Comb Ware ontologies. The ethnographic record of masking clearly indicates the potential for masks and coverings to play an active role in the realisation of specific ontological articulations.

Performance: masks in motion

Filitz’s concept of the ‘mask event’ (2018) is a useful springboard for exploring the role of performance in our understanding of masks from archaeological contexts. Historically rooted within sociology, anthropology and folklore studies, academic considerations of performance have developed through a coalescence of Marxist notions of mundane praxis, temporally restricted public displays of culture, and the performative aspects of the oratory arts (Limón and Young 1986). At the transdisciplinary level, working across these different social contexts, performance can be defined as ‘showing doing’ (Schechner 2020a); the repetition of a previously learnt behaviour that draws the attention of other things. Performances are inherently relational in that they are created through actions, interactions and relationships; they fundamentally exist between things. Within the spaces that performances create, these remade relationships and interactions form a distinct reality of their own (Schieffelin 2013). Difference and interaction between performed realities and preexisting realities has the capacity to effect changes in both, and herein lies the social, political, and ontologically transformative power of performance.

The ability of masks to demarcate different types of space, outlined above, creates the potential for differences in perspective in relation to both mask and performance spaces. The fluid positionality of mask makers, wearers, and audiences, alongside that of the researchers and objects themselves, provide a suite of sophisticated tools for creating actions and relationships, and as such for performance making. These subtleties of shifting perspective in relation to Igbo masks and performance are highlighted by the explicit discussion of positionality and its impact on the meaning provided by Ugwuanyi et al.in this volume. Taking a critical approach to their own biographies, Ugwuanyi et al. highlight the role that their Christian faith and western education played in shaping their formative understandings of masks and mask wearing within Igbo society. However, their perspective on masks changed dramatically on discovering the long-standing anthropological interest in Igbo masks, and the role of non-local researchers in the documentation and analysis of these practices. As such, their emergence as self-critical, western-educated, men, observing masking from within Igbo society itself, is discussed explicitly as a key factor in the understanding of masks that their paper presents. Their role as ‘spectators’ within mask wearing ceremonies is foregrounded, albeit supplemented by a richer depth of knowledge concerning the mythology and ceremony surrounding masks – usually reserved for initiates. This is markedly different to the understandings of masks generated by audience members deemed ‘outsiders’, or external observers.

The anthropology of performance historically has been dominated by the seminal works of Victor and Edie Turner in the mid to late twentieth century, and a growing appreciation of the conceptual fluidity between notions of performance and ritual within anthropological research. More specifically, mask-orientated anthropologies of performance are equally long-established, if perhaps not as extensively applied, and have been broadly characterised by the structural functionalist approach (Schieffelin 2013); a tradition firmly upheld by the contribution of Ugwuanyi et al. (2021) to this volume. Marking a historically significant break from this tradition, however, is the work of Turner (1970), in regard to liminality. Turner postulates that performances both mark and create ‘liminal time’; social contexts centred around cyclical periods of change, within which ‘showing doing’ offers an opportunity to scrutinize and invert social relations at a historicised point of broader, tangible flux. Emigh’s (1996) wide-reaching work on masked performances uses case studies from across Asia to demonstrate that, whilst the structure of performances are historically prescribed and essentially dictated by the expectations of the audience, performers excerpt considerable agency, autonomy and plasticity within this structure. This allows performers to dramatically alter the relationships, interactions and realities that the performance creates. Depending on the actions of the performers, the power of performances to affect pre-existing relationships can be either enhanced or inhibited. Performers, however, also have the ability to go ‘off script’, to shift the direction of actions from its expected course and show unexpected kinds of doing in order to form new kinds of relationships and realities (Schechner 2020b).

This capacity for change through performance can be seen in the developing role of masks within Lucha Libre (Hoechtl 2013), and the dynamic masking practices of the Dogon in Mali (Doquet 1997). In the latter, the emergence of masks depicting colonial administrators and tourists, and their adoption within masking ceremonies, attests to the ways in which individual actors consciously shape mask performances to address and challenge relationships within their emergent worlds (Richards 2003). Homann’s (2018)example of the innovative role that individual mask makers play in the Bobo masquerade ceremonies is another clear example of this process in action. Her work documents the decision of the acclaimed mask maker André Sanou in the late 1990s to break from the convention of making kimi masks (which materialise the presence of fluid-formed spirits) and start producing masks which represent the facial features of recently deceased members of the community. Homann documents the mixed Bobo responses to this, which ranged from scepticism and contempt through to joyful acceptance. The subsequent appearance of André Sanou’s masks in regional masquerade dances prompted a profound debate within the Bobo community over what a mask is, and what a mask can be. Her analysis of this change in mask making practices highlights the role of innovative individual actors in shaping the meaning of masks, and the power of performance in the renegotiation of this meaning. Crucially, whilst the initial production and commercialisation of depiction masks sparked a debate over the morality of the mask maker’s decision, it was the dancing of the new masks that prompted the much wider consideration of what constitutes a Bobo mask. Performance, then, sets masks in motion. It allows masks to reify and reinforce pre-existing relations and realities, but also creates the potential for the renegotiation of these relationships. If performance is in itself emergent (Lord 2000), then it appears to offer yet another avenue by which masks might emerge. Performance offers masks an opportunity to change.

Conclusion

In this discussion, we have examined how masks become powerful and meaningful objects. In recent western contexts, masks have been interpreted through tropes of disguise and concealment, emerging through a history of use in theatre or carnival. Yet, as the collection of papers assembled in this volume demonstrates, masks exist in different forms and have a varied set of affects through time and across space. While the visual and aesthetic dimensions of these affects have long been noted, it is their ability to coalesce a diverse range of different concepts that often appears to give them their power. The richness of this diversity, encompassing human bodies, identities, materials and represented form, render the potential meanings of masks limitless. As Pernet (1992) argues, the search for universalist definitions of what masks are and what masks do is fundamentally futile. Masks can act as membranes, portals, or even barriers, between different states of being. However, in juxtaposing unusual configurations of concepts in material form, masks present an almost unique context to study the intersection of these concepts. The precise character of their affects, and the powers they exert, are largely dependent upon the ontologies within which they operate, and which their study can reveal to us.

The contributors to this volume have traced the emergence of their selected masks; through visual references, performance, technological or ritual practice. In doing so, each paper sheds its own light upon the ontologies through which these masks emerge, and hint at the role that masks themselves play in mediating these ontologies over time. Rather than revealing some essential truth about human bodies or material culture, the careful tracing of mask making and masking practices that characterises the contributions to this volume provide a glimpse of ontologies that would be otherwise difficult to access. It is through an attentive, archaeological approach to these objects that the varied and specific understandings of human bodies, identities, death, material culture and practices of reference and representation can be revealed.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the research on which this paper is based. We would also like to thank Amy Bogaard for her helpful (and speedy) comments on the text.