About Fusions
Fusions 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. The book 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 .... By demonstrating the similarities in both their conceptions and uses, Fusions will change the way readers look at, and understand, the masquerades of the entire Benue River.
About the author
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 Lela 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 Afriscopes Series.
Contents [Download original pages, click here]
- Afriscopes – the series;
- Acknowledgements;
- List of illustrations
- 1 | Introduction — Posing the problem – fusion masquerades and the materialisation of thought style; Comparison, materiality, method; The formal distribution of horizontal masks
- PART ONE | CHAMBA MASQUERADE
- 2 | The ethnographer’s account – a singular fusion
- 3 | 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 MASQUERADES
- 4 | Mumuye masquerade – fusion refracted by gender;
- 5 | 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 appropriated; Kuteb and Yukuben – animal-human dimorphism revised; Conclusion – formal variation in Jukunoid masks;
- 6 | On the margins of comparison 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 – FUSION WITHOUT MASQUERADES
- 7 | Two types of absence – Pere and Koma; Pere – coevals without masquerade; Koma – masquerade inverted; Conclusion;
- 8 | Death and fusion – Dowayo;
- 9 | Conclusion | Bovine theranthropic fusion materialised – a regional thought style
- Appendix | Table: Chamba masks in collections
- Bibliography | Published sources; Unpublished sources;
- Index
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