New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several masking traditions documented in this book tie their objects to ancestors, initiation, or entertainment. The Mambila, farmers and stockbreeders straddling the Cameroon–Nigeria border, built theirs around something more specific: an association called suaga,…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masking traditions documented in this book ask a dancer to carry weight, but the Kurumba of northern Burkina Faso built theirs around a headdress that, by the book’s own account, seems physically impossible…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Nearly every people documented in this book’s Liberian section organizes at least part of village authority through the Poro society, the region’s dominant men’s institution. The Grebo, a little-known ethnic group of eastern Liberia’s…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several masking traditions documented in this book use a mask’s design to project fear, authority, or ancestral weight. The Bassa of Liberia’s central coastal region built a tradition around the opposite register entirely: a…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Many masking traditions documented in this book have drifted, over time, from a role rooted in real fear or real danger toward one closer to entertainment. Few make that drift as explicit as the…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several masking traditions documented in this book give masked performers real social authority, the power to enforce a rule, collect a debt, or settle a dispute. The Eket, an Ibibio subgroup of farmers numbering…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masks documented in this book can, in principle, dance alone: a single performer, a single carved face, a single ritual moment. The Marka of Mali and Burkina Faso built their masking tradition around…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → A number of masking traditions documented in this book use color to mark rank, age, or spiritual category. The Lumbo of southern and southwestern Gabon went further, building an entire moral division into a…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Nearly every masking tradition documented in this book answers to ancestors, nature spirits, or the authority of a chief. The Ligbi, an Islamized trading and artisan people who moved from western Ghana into northern…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → A number of the peoples documented in this book built their masking traditions around a king, a court, or at minimum a centralized chief whose authority the masks helped enforce. The Ngbandi, roughly 120,000…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masks documented in this book serve either war or peace, aggression or reconciliation, rarely both at once. The Bete of Côte d’Ivoire, roughly 600,000 people living between the Akan groups to the east…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Some of the masking traditions documented in this book come with rich, well-recorded ritual explanations, a specific society, a specific ceremony, a specific meaning attached to each carved feature. The Lele, occupying the western…