Fusions: masquerades and thought style east of the Niger-Benue confluence, West Africa (review)

This book is the second in a two-volume series on 'Chamba Arts in Context'; the first, co-authored by Fardon and Christine Stelzig, looked at Chamba figurative statues (Column to Volume: formal innovation in Chamba statuary, 2005). Both volumes focus on the material culture of Chamba peoples residing in the Nigeria-Cameroon borderlands, at the eastern end of the West African Middle Belt.

This large, handsome volume, complete with numerous striking photographs, addresses the 'wonderfully bizarre' (p. 21) masquerades of the Chamba and nearby 'ethnic' groups. It is a work of regional comparison, confining itself to a geographically small but culturally diverse area. Fardon's comparative approach tries to provide an alternative to both ethnographic particularism, which might result in instances becoming incommensurable, forcing us to forego even a covering term like mask/masquerade, and broader cross-cultural comparisons of Patrick McNaughton's type, which risk imposing outsiders' categories and are perhaps lacking in ethnographic detail. Contrasted with accounts seeking single categorizations or essentialized meanings, Fardon gives the reader an image of the complexity and variability of practices which utilize masquerades and the thinking behind them.

The masquerades are treated as materializing the 'thought styles' (the term is derived from its usage by Mary Douglas) of their creators and users. Particularly important to the book are 'theranthropoic fusion' (derived from Victor Turner) thought styles, which juxtapose and integrate various human and animal elements. Reduced to an abstract, simplified form, Fardon suggests, the Chamba mask can be seen as two shapes, one animal (the elongated rectangular shape of theriomorphic skulls) and one human (the roundness of anthropomorphic skulls). But this way of viewing the masks, as one might do in a museum context, Fardon convincingly argues, is not the best way to appreciate them: it is better to consider how they are utilized in their social and cultural contexts and ultimately how they are connected to the thought styles of their creators and owners.

Drawing on themes discussed in his previous publications on the Chamba (particularly Between God, the Dead and the Wild: Chamba interpretations of ritual and religion, 1991), Fardon articulates an eloquent vision of the Chamba masquerade as occupying the centre of a web of associations relating not just to human and animal, but to the feminine and the masculine, the living, the dead, cults and the wild. Depending on context, the masquerade can be motivated by individual users to pursue different combinations of these links.

Fardon then situates the Chamba as geographically and conceptually central in taking them as a starting point to work outwards to their eastern and western neighbours. Their status as a people with a single masquerade, among western neighbours possessing multiple masquerades and eastern neighbours who lack masquerades, gives them a privileged position of singularity. If he had started instead with the Jukun masquerade or indeed the Pere who lack a masquerade, then the nature of the comparisons and the conclusions advanced would probably be very different. But that is stating the obvious. The predicament here is that these other groups inevitably come to be defined by their relation to Chamba masquerades and thought styles rather than in their own right. It is a predicament rather than a criticism, through, seeing that Fardon begins the book and ends it with insightful reflections on this very issue. In doing so he raises many interesting points regarding the nature of comparative practices.

I found this to be an immensely stimulating book; it is a work of focused West Africanist scholarship that conveys extraordinarily detailed knowledge. To properly evaluate the accuracy of Fardon's argument would perhaps need extensive knowledge of the masquerades, which I lack. I can however conclude that the argument presented here is intellectually impressive, while the ethnographic knowledge and comprehensiveness of museum research seems similarly accomplished. The index is remarkably meticulous and it is a nice touch to have an appendix detailing Chamba...