Masquerades

This week we talked about masks and masquerades. I found Herbert Cole's essay to be interesting as well as informative. In the essay it begin discussing about the myths of these masks in Africa and they all have one common theme to them. Women were the first to have the secrets of the masks and also the first dancers until men took over both entirely. From these myths conclusions were made that it was males fears of female power and reproductive capacities. the article goes on to explain that men avenged this power by forming secret associations and taking control of cults. at the begining of the week we learned about these associations in the bamana. The men had secret societies in which they made offerings to these clay Bolis using bload seman, fingernails, and other things to activate them. The article went on to talk about the spirits of the masks that are made and many of these masks have different functions. One particular mask is called "gods power" this mask is produced to promote crop growth. Other masks are made for entertainment reasons and to educate the young. Also the article discussed the spiritual embodiment during these dancers which we have been discussing over the last couple weeks.
The article also discussed how when masks are displayed in museums they are taken out of there culture and treated as independent sculptures and they loose the meaning behind them. I know in the past I would see pictures of them or a display and had know clue that there was a deeper meaning behind it.
One of the last things that I got from the article was the part of the article that discussed change in sculpting and that is it doesn't change very quickly they tend to stay with there original style that they learn first most change that occurs is towards the borders where the cultures start to mix styles. There was an example in the video we watched Thursday where one tribe had a giant masks depicting the serpent and one of the neighboring peoples wanted to create a larger masks so they added a meter to it. This article we looked at ties in with the three particular groups we looked at this week the Bamana, Bwa, and the Baule. The most common thing that all of these groups have in common in the sense of masks are they serve several functions. I believe we were talking about the Bamana and how they use there masks to educate the young and these dances they preform are for different stages in life ones for learning purposes and another is for initiation into adulthood. I never would have thought that these masks were so diverse and played so many different roles in each group of peoples even colors have different meanings among them. The more and more we study these cultures the more I find myself contrasting and comparing them to our culture.