Fusions. Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa

Titel: Fusions
Subtitle: Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa
Author: Richard Farndon
Series: Saffron Afriscopes Series, Number Two
Series: Chamba Arts in Context, Volume 2
Publisher: Saffron Books
United Kingdom, London 2010
ISBN ‎1872843603 / ISBN 1-87-284360-3
ISBN‎ 978-1872843605 / ISBN 978-1-87-284360-5
Original Hardcover, 22 x 30 cm, 208 pages, numerous b/w and colour photos, drawings and figures, 4 maps

Condition:

Very good. Minor shelf ware on the hardcover, inside like new, as if the rare book had never been read.

About: Fusions. Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa

Fusions. Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa takes the masks of West Africa's Upper Benue River region out of the museums and private collections, where many accumulated in the twentieth century, and restores their cultural and social contexts. Richard Farndon argues that Benue masquerades deserve appreciation as the materialized forms taken by the thought styles of their original creators and users. Masquerades are 'theranthropic': they fuse characteristics of animals with those of living and dead human beings to create entities to perform the powers and dangers inherent in people's lives.The subtle variety of the ways that different masquerades, and other performances, achieve this, reveals facets of an understanding of the human condition: of relations between the genders, the living and the dead, animals and people, kings and commoners, colours, seasons and so forth, shared by the peoples of the Benue.

Part One provides an intensive analysis of Chamba masquerade (of the Cameroon/Nigeria border area), based in fieldwork experience stretching over three decades, as well as accounts both of the history of collection of Chamba masquerades from the earliest colonial times, and of their local formal variation, based on research in museums, private collections and archives. Attention moves westwards in Part Two to an analysis of Mumuye masquerade, and a bold revisionist reading of the many forms of Jukun masks, before surveying the significance of the now-defunct masquerade traditions of the Jos Plateau of Nigeria. Part Three moves eastward from the Chamba to demonstrate that peoples who had no masquerades in the strict sense, nonetheless materialized a similar thought style through their use of actual skulls and animals. By showing the similarities in both their conceptions and uses, this book will change the way readers look at, and understand, the masquerades of the Benue River region.

Profusely illustrated, and with numerous tables and diagrams, Fusions. Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa guides the reader through what is, in art-historical terms, one of the most celebrated of West Africa's style regions. Like its companion volume on statuary (Column to Volume, Afriscopes, 2005), "Fusions" demonstrates the scholarly dividends that come from blending long-term ethnographic familiarity with particular cultures, research in museums and archives, and anthropological comparison based upon a critical rereading of previous writers. The subject and method of this inter-disciplinary endeavour will interest social anthropologists, art historians and collectors, as well as providing the state-of-the-art account of Upper Benue masquerades.

Richard Fardon began research in Cameroon and Nigeria in the mid-1970s. Since 1988, he has taught anthropological theory and the ethnography of West Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Author or editor of numerous books on anthropology generally and West Africa in particular: his most recent publications include a companion volume to this. Column to Volume: formal innovation in Chamba statuary (with Christine Stelzig, Saffron Afriscopes Series, 2005), and tela in Bali: history through ceremony in Cameroon (Berghahn/Cameroon Studies, 2006). He was Chairman of the University of London's Centre of African Studies for eight years, and he has been editor of AFRICA, the Journal of the International African Institute, since 2001. Together with Graham Furniss and Francis Nyamnjoh, he is series editor of Saffron's Afriscopes.

Content: Fusions. Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa

Part One: Chamba Masquerade
The ethnographer's account - a singular fusion
Accenting the masquerade - template and variety
Chamba masquerade: template
Chamba masquerade: early colonial documentation (1903-21)
The German colonial period before the Frobenius expedition
Leo Frobenius's Chamba expedition (1911-12)
Lilley's collection under British administration (1921)
Variety in Chamba masks summarised
Post-colonial acquisitions and the composition of the Chamba collection
Conclusion
Part Two Westward - Fusion Masquerade
Mumuye masquerade - fusion refracted by gender
Jukunoid masquerades - fusion refracted by gender and animality
Aku-ma - myth and form
Other Jukun masquerades
Aku and aku-ma in performance
Around the edges of the Jukun
Goemai-aku appropiated
Kuteb and Yukuben - animal-human dimorphism revised
Conclusion: formal variation in Jukunoid masks
On the margins of comparison
Conclusion
Northward - bovid referents diversified
Southward - animal referents multiplied
Mambila
Wuli (with notes on Wawa and Yamba)
Dii
Toward the Grassfields - the pitfalls of formal comparison
Part Three Eastward on Without Masquerades
Two types of absence - Pere and Koma
Pere - coevals without Masquerades
Koma - Masquerades inverted
Conclusion
Death and fusion - Dowayo
Bovine theranthropic fusion materialised - a regional thought style
Conclusion
Appendix Table - Chamba masks in collections
Bibliography Published sources
Unpublished sources
Index
Errate and update