Mask and Masquerades

The main topic for class this week was talking about masks and masquerades. We read an article by Herbert Cole called "Introduction: The Mask, Masking, and Masquerade Arts in Africa. He made some good valid points that I would like to talk a little about them this week in my blog.

One of those points that stuck out to me is the difference between representing and being embodied by the spirit of the mask. He stated that people of English speaking background pen the word mask as being a representation of a spirit not as seeing the person being embodied by the spirit within the mask. If we think about Cole's point, we as western people do have a tendency to just see the people in the masquerades as representing the mask and not as some who is possessed by the spirit or taken over by it. As he stated in his article African cultures see it not as a representation but more as the human being taken over by the spirit. It's the way the spirits come back to interact with the real world. Like we stated in class during discussion, the embodiment is the person becoming the spirit and the representation is the mask itself. So for example the Crazy Man mask of the Bwa culture is a representation of a anti-social man but once danced it becomes embodied into a real live spirit that shows this representation. It's part of their culture and their religious beliefs to see these mask as more then a mere representation.

Something that I notice this week while looking through the slides and watching the DVD about the masquerades was that taking the masks away from their context and outfits makes them seem so sculptural and insignificant to what they were meant to be used for or what the were designed to be. I found that just looking at them without the rest of the outfit makes them loss a lot of their visual intensity. They seem so incomplete. Maybe this is why we see them as representational items in the West instead of spirits like the African cultures do. It also could be because we have a hard time believing that people can be taken over by spirits, but for whatever reasoning we need to see them as the African cultures see them. It may be different if we were to see the masquerades in their settings in Africa because I feel you can't get the complete effect of the masks and how big they are to the African cultures until you see them in their normal settings. Something about seeing something live and in person is different then seeing it through the TV screen. It's kind of like a concert, seeing it on TV is just not the same as being there in person, because if you are at the live performance you can get a vibe from the audience and the performer and with the TV you just can't, which I'm sure would happen if you were to see a masquerade live.

The DVD we watched that showed a Bwa masquerade was very interesting to me. Even though it's not the same as being their to see it, it still gave good insight to what a masquerade is, and what it looks like performed. I have always found the masquerades to be interesting but the more I learn about them the more I find them intriguing. One of the things that I learned that I didn't know about was the darkening of the masks, the more dirty and worn the masks are the more knowledge that masker has compared to the clean white mask who are obviously beginners or learners of masquerading. Also when a masker dies the mask maybe put in a shrine to represent that person. I would have thought that these were consider sacred in away and wouldn't be put in shrines to represent that person's life, since these masks are an embodiment of another spirit and not the human that performed it. But I can also understand why they would do this because it's obviously part of what that human being did during his life time.

Masquerades and masking are essentially a big part of African culture and have been for many years. Still very influential to their culture and are still taught to the children. It is one "tradition" that has with stood the globalization of the rest of the world around them. Even though masking has forced some change to the recent masking through competition for the tallest mask or the coolest mask from culture to culture or village to village. It still has the same meaning and sacredness that they have always had in the past. I'm sure from years on they will still be of the same importance to their society.