Masks and how they mark and effect change

     How do masks mark and effect change? This is an interesting question that I will answer using the Bwa people as a example, but before I do we need to ask a few other questions. First what are the functions of masks? The answer to this is simple there are many different functions, however two of the main ones are that they are a form of theater and they are a form of worship. Who dances masks? the answer is young men. in Herbert M. Cole's essay it states that in one of the myths of the Dogon, Senufo, Baule, Kuba, and Igho people, women were the first to have the secrets of the masks and that women were the first masked dancers. After which the masks and their rituals were taken completely over by men, who then usually excluded women from all rites except as onlookers. Today women dance not with the masks but they can dance during the masquerades. The next question is who owns the masks? basically different families own different masks and will carve their own. Families such as the Bonde family in Burkina Faso consecrated a mask called the hornbill mask. On this mask there two colors black and white. Black symbolises knowledge and white symbolises those who are just beginning to learn. Another mask called the Do mask is made out of leaves it is typically danced at funerals and ensures the renewal of life. Yet another mask called the Serpent is danced at harvest time and helps the men be able to court and marry women. The story with the serpent mask is that a group of people from the Pa village tried to raid a nearby village for wives but they were ambushed and so they ran and took shelter in a snake hole crying out to the serpent save us and we will worship you. So the serpent agreed. The people built a mask to honor the serpent and from then on the men have been lucky in courtships. That's just one way that a mask has effected change. The last question is what seems to be the interaction between maskers and the audience? There is a variety of different interactions depending on the mask. Some maskers make fun of people in the audience. Others lash out at them in anger. While some people in the audience will get up and dance with the masks. Masks have authority over the dancers the same authority as a teacher. The masks are supposed to represent change. The change of a group of people over time. The dancer becomes embodied when he actually in a sense becomes the animal doing the same things that it does by actually in that moment becoming the animal or as Cole said in the essay, "Spirit characters vibrate between opposing forces and transcend them. The structural integrity of these binary oppositions, moreover, is in part defined by spirits who separate the two while simultaneously bringing them together. Ultimately, it seems, the mediator bridges the gulf between opposites and creates of them a kind of spiritual, conceptual, and cosmic unity. Many specific masking situations can be cited to exemplify this role of spirit as mediator and, finally, unifier. "Ancestral" maskers bring the "incarnate dead" into the realm of the living, linking these worlds and showing them to be one."



                                                         Bethany <><