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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center and Regents of the University of California are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Arts. PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions (Cole) and a Kuba mask (Weston). We sometimes speak (as Robert Horton did in his response to Oedipus and Job in West African Religions) of a Niger-Congo culture complex, but rarely have we the chance to validate traits of this complex, especially in such an important phenomenon as masquerades, in so comprehensive a manner as following the essays in this book allows. Of course a book like this does not offer the satisfaction of exploration or definition that the Drewals' Gelede or Cole's Mbari does, but that is not its modest intention: it aims to set the stage for a comparative study of a crucial aspect of African culture, and it succeeds in doing so neatly. A last note. In his short essay on the Salampasu mask, Cole includes a letter written in 1944 by the original collector, a man named Henderson (is it serendipity that led Saul Bellow to so name his Rain King?), whose arrogance seems matched only by his ignorance and the brutality with which he unmasked the spirit who donned it. To read the letter is to validate Achebe's realism in Arrow of God ("These are the ways of Savages") and to throw an important new light on just how we assembled (dare I use the past tense?) the objects that are the focus of this journal, and this monograph. The chilling letter alone commands the price of the book.

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