Introduction

This part issue investigates how specific individuals and particular contexts shape masquerades in different parts of West Africa at different moments in time. This approach to the study of the art shifts attention away from understanding each instance of masquerade in terms of its relation to a particular cultural or ethnic group, a framework that lingers in analyses of the arts of Africa despite longstanding critique of it. Indeed, a masquerade in any place reflects the people and circumstances involved in its making and reception. Focusing on these aspects of masquerades uncovers fresh questions about agency, invention and audience for investigations of the art in any location.

A 1978 photograph from Ilaro in southern Nigeria shows a performer with a wooden headpiece balanced on the top of his head (Drewal and Drewal 1983: 266, plate 168) (Figure 1). The headpiece images a human face with bright white, open eyes and an elaborate snake-laced coiffure. Behind the thin veil hanging below the headpiece, the masquerader's own face is clearly visible. His eyes gaze directly at the camera and thus at the photographer operating it. Art historian Henry John Drewal and performance theorist Margaret Thompson Drewal published the image and other photographs of masqueraders' discernible faces in their generative monograph on Gelede performances in communities of southern Nigeria identified as Yoruba. Most Gelede performers they witnessed peered through a cloth or veil rather than eyeholes in a wooden mask covering the head (Drewal and Drewal 1983: 265). Their photographs and assessments of masqueraders' attire suggest that, at least in the late 1970s, Gelede audiences often saw and thus could recognize individual performers' faces.

Yet when Drewal and Drewal published their book in 1983, studies of masquerade and other arts of Africa typically focused on groups rather than on the individuals so clearly integral to any event. Scholars framed analyses in terms of singular cultural or ethnic groups, and they sought to identify the foundational traits of each group. They implied that each group was rooted in a mythic past and people in the group shared a common language, religion, social organization and art. For scholars who before and after 1983 assessed masquerade and other arts as expressions of bounded cultural or ethnic group identities, people considered part of a particular group operated within established parameters consistent with the group identity (see, for example, Griaule 1938; Sieber 1962; Segy 1976; Vogel 1977; Phillips 1978; Cole 1985; Jedrej 1986; Lamp 1996; Haxaire 2009; Bouttiaux 2009a).

Granted, Drewal and Drewal conclude their 1983 book with a chapter entitled 'Gelede and the individual'. They argue that 'a complete and realistic picture… illustrates the dynamics of Yoruba religion and the relationships between art and the individual, between cultural norms and individuality, and between history and diversity' (Drewal and Drewal 1983: 247; cf. Drewal 1989). Placed at the end of their book, the chapter's attention to individuality suggests that it provides a follow-up discussion to their more all-encompassing description of Gelede as a Yoruba phenomenon. This part issue reconfigures the relationship of individuals to the study of masquerade and places individuals at the front of analysis.

Figure 1.

Unidentified Gelede masquerader. Photograph by Henry John Drewal, Ilaro, Nigeria, 1978. EEPA 1992-028-1130. Henry John Drewal and Margaret Thompson Drewal Collection, Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.

No masquerade performers are timeless reproducers of some fixed norm, and observers' experiences of the art in all its heterogeneity have often contradicted their own communally bound interpretive frameworks. Attempting to characterize art identified with a single cultural or ethnic group in his essay 'A Mumuye mask' (1985: 98–9), Arnold Rubin notes that 'Mumuye' refers to 'a heterogenous group of people'. Masks identified with the group, he writes, 'serve many and varied purposes', and yet he still strives to present an encompassing definition of Mumuye masquerades. He signals the importance of group identity over individual identity, explaining that the events 'focus the collective identities of age sets' and 'foster male solidarity and unity' (ibid.: 98). A general description of a single type...