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

Fusions. Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa by Richard Farndon. Publisher: Saffron Books. United Kingdom, London 2010. ISBN ‎1872843603 / ISBN 1-87-284360-3 / ISBN‎ 978-1872843605 / ISBN 978-1-87-284360-5

Fusions. Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa, by Richard Farndon. Posing the problem - fusion masquerades and the materialisation of thought style.

Comparison, materiality, method

Comparison involves judgements about similarities and differences between whatever is to be compared (in the coming case, masks). But, for this to be possible, we need to have decided how the similarities and differences that are to matter to comparison will themselves be recognised. Hereabouts an interesting complication sets in: what if the process of comparing leads us to revise our criteria of comparison? And does so recursively? To put it another way, is it the case that comparative contexts, and the criteria of difference that make them the same or distinct, change together? If the criteria of comparison are, in some degree, products of the practice of comparing, then comparison must be open-ended and endlessly revisable. Philosophically this is a defensible position; but entirely open-ended speculations committed to paper would make wearying and eventually unproductive reading. Practically, then, how does one compare without the comforts of easy closure or self-evident criteria of difference? The transparency of comparative practices requires at least some recognition of their starting points (whence their interested, initial criteria of difference), and some discussion of why they go on as they do. The next few paragraphs are a gesture in this direction before taking the plunge into the details of masks at the eastern end of the West African Middle Belt. I saw my first Chamba masquerade soon after arriving as a first-time, ethnographer in mid-1970s Nigeria. I did not yet understand Chamba Daka language, or have a clear sense of the lie of Chambaland; but the first African masquerade I had seen - as it were - in the flesh, struck me as a wonderfully bizarre thing. During the couple of years of my initial research, I saw the masquerade perform repeatedly in the Chamba communities where I stayed longest, and often enough elsewhere to be sure it was widely shared by Chamba. Yet my analysis of its significance remained poorly developed. It was not until researches among Chamba Leko speakers in mid-1980s Cameroon that I achieved an interpretative grasp of Chamba masquerade that felt at all adequate to what its initial impact had seemed to bode. My understanding took shape only in relation to a sense of the variability of Chamba practice; I needed a Chamba comparison to appreciate not 'what' but 'how' the masquerade might mean. The idea of a Chamba culture was a useful and necessary fiction for this purpose. I began writing this comparative survey almost two decades after my initial encounter with that first Chamba masquerade, and while completing a monograph on Chamba religious ideas, yet the process of comparison has continued to illuminate what is particular about Chamba masquerade in ways I did not anticipate. Regional comparison is rewarding not just because it reveals how an intensively studied instance fits into a broader pattern, but also because (recursively) it makes the local case regionally specific in ways that could never be evident from the detailed, local investigation that is the ethnographer's stock-in-trade. Comparison has recursively changed my appreciation of the mask I took as my point of departure. Aside from its striking appearance, Chamba masquerade transpires to be unusual for at least two reasons. First, it was found in almost all, if not quite all, the communities that were to adopt twentieth-century Chamba ethnicity, but it never occurred among non-Chamba unless they were Chambaising; [...]

This is an excerpt from Fusions. Masquerades and Thought Style East of the Niger-Benue Confluence, West Africa, by Richard Farndon.

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