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…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most communication technologies documented in this book are built around masks, costumes, and public performance. The Woyo, living along the Atlantic coast where the Democratic Republic of the Congo meets Cabinda in Angola, developed…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Many masks in this book exist to be seen, their entire function bound up in public display, in the crowd’s reaction, in being looked at. The Bemba of Zambia and the southeastern Democratic Republic…
Most masking traditions in this book reserve their most demanding, most elaborate objects for senior, initiated men, the people with the most standing to carry them. The Bijago, off the coast of Guinea-Bissau on an archipelago of some thirty islands, built the opposite hierarchy: their heaviest masks are worn by the age group not yet…
Isolation shapes art in ways that are easy to underestimate until you meet a tradition it happened to. The Mumuye, living in the rocky hills and savannas of northeastern Nigeria along the bend of the Benue River, remained in near total isolation until as recently as 1959, and their statuary was not even discovered by…
Most masks in this book appear repeatedly, at funerals, at harvests, at initiations that recur every generation. The Temne of Sierra Leone built one that does the opposite: a mask representing the guardian spirit of a ruling dynasty, seen in public only once, during the enthronement of a new chief, after which it disappears and…