Knowledge in Practice

Kresse, Kai; Marchand, Trevor H.J.

doi:10.3366/e0001972008000570

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The authors account for their presence at particular events and their interviews with people with different experiences of masquerade. Their attention to their role in the construction of knowledge reflects an understanding that the status of objective researcher is impossible to maintain (Favret-Saada 1980 [1977]: 16–24; Kresse and Marchand 2009: 7–8). The authors similarly recognize the different positions of the people they interviewed.…”

Section: Shifting Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such a process-centred analytic that focuses on specific individuals within specific contexts will illuminate past and present dynamism. And as Kai Kresse and Trevor Marchand (2009: 3) explain, context ‘is not merely location’ but also encompasses material objects, built environments, interpersonal networks and specific events. It is in such contexts marked by the shifting webs of relations and events in local, regional and global spheres that masquerades transpire.…”

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Art and the individual in African masquerades Introduction

Gagliardi¹

2018

Africa

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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,

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Section: Shifting Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%