Agency in artistry: comments on 'Art and the individual in African masquerades'

Understanding masquerade performance is a difficult challenge because so many dimensions of expressive culture come together. There are questions of performer ambiguity and secret expertise, the confounding relationships between secular and spiritual, the many aspects of secrecy, and the involvement of higher powers. There is also the basic question of what a performance is supposed to accomplish, and the most fundamental issue of individual identity and agency.

The authors in this part issue consider several of these dimensions, with a primary focus on the roles of individuals. They build most positively on a long tradition of highly varied observation and exegesis that includes Ibn Battuta's mid-fifteenth-century account of bird-costumed performers orating accomplishment and caution before the Emperor of Mali (see Levtzion and Hopkins 2000: 293), and the 'Mumbo Jumbo' bark masquerade that Mungo Park encountered suspended in a tree in 1795, which he said was a mysterious and fearsome instrument used to maintain order among wives in Mandingo families (Park 1799: 39–40).

These two accounts herald the difficulties in comprehending masquerade – it is not so easy to garner understanding from observation, and talking to people about what was seen and heard can invoke quagmires of interpretation from multiple entrenched perspectives, mercenary vested interests, and a variety of experiences that could border on the surrealistic because of the many ways in which 'context' can be disembodied and corrupted. Mungo Park used the word 'bugbear' to describe the masquerade he saw, perhaps because of its shape and its alleged use for intimidating wives. An archaic European application of the word was for a fearsome forest creature shaped like a bear, invoked to scare children who were told it might eat them.¹ Mungo Park's account was far less riddled with bias than most early foreign travellers who wrote about the expressive cultures they encountered. And yet Park's choice of this word entered the flow of obfuscation and misrepresentation so characteristic of the early descriptions by explorers, soldiers, administrators and missionaries. With their simple-minded assertions about gender roles and representations, belief and practice, foreigners spent literal centuries in self-induced darkness regarding the cultures they were experiencing (many chapters in Keim 2014 are relevant here). The perhaps innocent use of just one word – bugbear – speaks volumes on the understanding that was forfeit.

Twentieth-century scholarship on masks, masquerades and performance

By the mid-twentieth century, scholars were looking more closely at the social and spiritual contexts of masks and masquerades. They identified functions for performances and meanings for performance characters and the component parts of their costumes. Basic dichotomies were asserted between sacred and secular. Sacred usually involved links to spiritual beings or powers, secret knowledge and restricted audience attendance, often requiring membership in an initiation association or secret society. Secular meant unrestricted public performances with an emphasis on entertainment. Scholars frequently reported a flow from sacred to secular, often in response to colonialism or Islam. All this represented a welcome advance. But, as Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi details in her introduction to this part issue, performance traditions were presented as homogeneous across ethnic groups, with standardized meanings and functions and little attention to the roles of individuals. Missing was an understanding or interest in the variation and diverse perspectives that are expressed within established traditions. Scholars needed to expand their inquiries of context in two seemingly opposite directions. First, they needed to look further out into society, beyond masks, performance accoutrements and performance events, so that the full effect of context on people's imaginations and actions could be understood. Second, they needed to look inside generalizations about expressive structures, to understand the experiences and intentions of actual participants.

As the mid-century decades passed, these changes of focus began to happen. Many scholars redefined the boundaries of context with growing sensitivity to nuance and complexity in considering performers, and expanded understandings of how deep we should go into the elements of society, culture and history that overtly or tacitly populate people's imagination and public discourse – the elements that give performance meaningful life.

In 2001, Karel...