What's in a mask*

Treasures of heaven relics and their consequences, an africanist's view

“…In the course of ethnographic research in the 1960s in Nigeria (see Picton 1988Picton , 1989Picton , 1990Picton , 1991Picton , 1997Picton , 2009Picton , 2011aPicton , 2011b, I found that magical-medicines were a commonplace element of the indigenous traditions of ritual practice in the places where I worked, the dominant presences of Islam and Christianity notwithstanding. An old man presiding over sacrifices to his ancestors might produce from deep inside the pocket of his gown an assortment of blood-blackened things, whether wrapped in cloth or kept within small gourds, so that their energy could be maintained through the application of blood from the animal that had been sacrificed.…”

On staging performance: the masquerade festival of Ìklé Èkìtì*

“…Those works that do, seem to understand well that most masquerade performances exist upon a continuum of experiential states in masked performance that move the state of the performer between a state of being that is recognised as 'me' and one that it is recognised as 'not me' (see for instance Emigh 1996;Napier 1986). This continuum is further supplemented by those articles that recognise that the metaphysical contents of the mask and of masked performances also lies upon a continuum (Picton 1990). Indeed labelling a performance as a masquerade may place a generalised gloss, more derived from a western epistemology of selfhood, than actually takes place in local performance practice.…”

Profiling Masquerade Festival Attendees in Ghana

“…In some parts of West Africa, especially Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, masquerading has religious undertones and are celebrated during ceremonial rituals, ancestral worship sessions, and funerals (e.g., Doris, 2005;Esu & Arrey, 2009;Picton, 1990;Rea 1998Rea , 2007. In Ghana, this is not the case; masquerading in Winneba and, indeed, the country as a whole, has no religious, metaphysical, or mythical connotations; it is celebrated solely for its entertainment value though unlike the rest of the country the merry making in Winneba is underpinned and sustained by the intense rivalry among the competing groups.…”