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 treat individual masks as interchangeable instances of a single type. The Vuvi of central Gabon organized theirs differently: each bwiti association mask apparently carried its own specific…
Ijele, Agbogho Mmuo, Gelede, Egungun, Ekpo. A working guide to Nigerian masks, who made them and what each masquerade was built to do.
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 draw a sharp line between the performer and the thing performed. Few state it as directly as the Mano of Liberia and southernmost Guinea, whose masks represent…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several masking traditions in this book represent a single ancestor or a single spiritual authority. The Ngbaka, spread across the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo and into the Central African Republic, carved theirs…
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 treat spirits as distant or purely supernatural. The Ijo of Nigeria’s Niger Delta describe theirs in almost domestic terms: water spirits, human in their strengths and weaknesses,…
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…