(Brace yourself. This is going to be theoretical –and long…).
This post is about how people “mask” whenever they portray someone or something: masking is indeed a crucial feature of every effort at portraying someone, however realist or naturalist that effort may be.
To be clear: A mask is not just a set of lines on a sheet of paper, not just layers of colourful paint on canvas, or not just the shapes the sculptor cuts in a block of marble. A mask materializes an ongoing process of identification, of intersubjectivation, between a maker, a thing, and another actor who, like the former, actively engages with the object of perception. Masking –the gerund– should hence be understood as an ongoing, active performance engaged in by the artist, her or his audience, and the object itself, as much an act as it is a relationship. But “masking” is not limited to art or artistry. It is an activity we all continuously engage in; it is an existential capacity of being human, one that underlines the dividual character or, quoting Marshal Sahlins (2011a,b), the “mutuality of being,” of our being-in-the-world.
In Europe artists started to sign their work around the end of the fifteenth century; about the same time they also started to focus more than before on a realist or naturalist portraiture. These two evolutions illustrate the growing importance of the individual in western philosophy, politics and art, and indeed in daily life. My Namibian interlocutors, however, did not like pictures that only show their face. For them, these headshots were incomplete, as they did not show the entire body (orutu oruhe).
For them, a portrait –a close-up of someone’s face– fails to show what Terence Turner (1980) referred to as the social skin: the way people dress, adorn, paint, scar their bodies, the way they wear their hair, and so on.
“The surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual, becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialisation is enacted, and bodily adornment (in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing and from feather head-dresses to cosmetics) becomes the language through which it is expressed” (Turner 1980:113).
Turner here seems to overemphasize the skin as a means of expression rather than as a meaningful performance in and of itself. Hair, belts, clothing and jewellery do indeed signify one’s social status and position (as youngster, mother-of-one, mature woman, widow, bachelor, husband) and reveal certain characteristics (such as shrine guardian, as mourner, and so on). But they are not just expressions, or representations. They also make someone’s status and position, and actively present her or him in social space. Hence one could say that a mere portrait refuses to take these identifying actants (or “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference,” Latour 2005:71) into account, and hence refuses to properly identify someone with or in the position he or she claims or takes up in society. From this point of view, then, a portrait dismembers rather than re-members.
Perhaps more profound than this sociological observation is that by resenting portraits my interlocutors also refused to be reduced to their individuality. For them, a person in the first place is a node in a meshwork of relationships that are materialized in the things they wear, their garments, hairstyle, and jewellery. These relationships are what defines a person, meaning that the source of one’s self is not to be found within, but without, in the people, things and animals one is surrounded by, in the places one dwells in, and in the living and deceased members –the ancestors.
Masking
Going through my collection of graphic novels and comic books, I realized that masking actors in a play, or in a comic book, actually is a rather common practice. Think in this regard of ancient Greek drama, or of most superheroes in contemporary popular culture. Think of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Will Eisner’s Spirit or, in Europe, Sokal’s Canardo. About masking in comic book art, Scott McCloud asks the question why we recognize a circle, two dots and a line as a “face”, and why we are as much, or more, involved with cartoons as we are with more realistic images like photographs. Cartooning, he writes, is not “just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing” (McCloud 1993, 31; also see Causey 2016). The apparent simplicity of drawings helps us to focus our attention on an idea, instead of losing ourselves in the intricate details of reality. Such an abstraction allows us to identify with a drawing (even if it only consists of said circle, dots and line): “When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face”, McCloud writes/draws,
“[Y]ou see the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon you see yourself. (…) The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled… an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it” (McCloud 1993:36, emphasis in original).
The strength of drawing, says McCloud (1993: 24–47), is its capacity to involve the audience. This happens through the technique of masking as it that reduces the complexity of our observation (of someone’s face, for instance) to a few lines on paper, the contours of an empty canvas that allows us to project ourselves onto it. Observing that comics often combine realistically drawn objects and backgrounds (to look at and objectify) with highly stylized faces –masks– to identify with and to be, McCloud (1993: 41) then argues that “[b]y de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favour of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts.” Continuing this line of thought, one could argue that we do indeed recognize ourselves in the human persona (the Clark Kents, Linda Princes or Bruce Banners in the comics multiverse), in their human-ness. The fact, however, that they are portrayed more realistically, with all their doubts and fallibilities, as humans, allows us to objectify and take our distance from them and thus identify with their masked superhuman (or posthuman, see Jeffery 2016) counterpart. An afterthought: is this process of masking that different from the ways anthropologists usually introduce the persona (Narayan 2007: 134) or characters (Pyne 2009: 156) that populate their accounts?
One reason for me to mask the actors in Six Circles –even if my interlocutors do not have a tradition in that sense– was that it allowed me to provide an answer to the resentment of my interlocutors towards portraiture. Another one, following McCloud, was that I did not want them to appear as objects to look at and observe, and read about, but as actors to identify with and to think with. Also, it allowed me to draw the ancestors –not as disembodied individuals but as dividual members of society– by drawing them wearing the cattle skulls my participants used to place on their graves.
In sum…
The Latin word persona originally meant “mask”. Worn during plays –for obvious practical reasons– it allowed the audience to abstract the character in the play from the actor playing it. At the same time, it also allowed to identify with the character played, to understands its motives and reasons, its history and aspirations. These masks, then, became actants, as they brought about a crucial distinction between actor and character, not unlike the masks of contemporary superheroes. They mark and bring about the distinction between the recognizable, daily life character –fallible and flawed– and its superhero other side. Thus they enable us to cut ourselves loose –if only temporarily– from our own limitations and from the concreteness of our own daily lives, and to recognize ourselves in the more abstract ideals presented by the mask and costume. They remind us that we always are someone else –that the powers that allow us to be ourselves are not within, but always originate in the outside (be it a distant planet, a spider bite or a high-tech costume).
Today persona is (almost) synonymous with identity. I would argue here that we all wear or are made to wear masks. In the plural: we have different masks that we apply or put on depending on our understanding of the situation. This does not only point towards the multiplicity of identities (we all have many of them), or to their fragmentary character. As these masks are themselves an abstraction, a reduction or stylization of the complex, kaleidoscopic persons we are, they allow us to partake in social interaction and thus become …us. This is the dividual (dimension of) personhood and selfhood that finds its origin in and is morphed by others, the material world, the food we eat, the spaces we move through, and so on, one that that originates in “outer” fields of meaning, a de-centred or ex-centric understanding of what it means to be human.
Everyone wears masks. Superheroes do. Film, book and comic book characters do and, in fact, we all do. Masks are what allow us to see ourselves in others, allow us to identify with and be identified –subjectified– by them. They enable us to arrive at the mutuality of being Marshall Sahlins talked about. Dividuality, hence, thus understood, is not the fact that we become different persona: it is a relational co-presence made possible by the different masks we wear. They allow us to identify, and be identified, with. This is what divisibility refers to: not to the partibility of “identity” but to the relationships that are us.
This post is based Van Wolputte, Steven. 2020. Masking and the Dividual: An Exploration. In Revisionen des Porträts: Jenseits von Mimesis und Repräsentation, edited by T. Greub. Paderborn: Brill, Wilhelm Fink, pp. 55–72. A previous version of this post was published on June 17, 2017.
References
Causey, Andrew. 2017. Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Eisner, Will. 2000 [1985]. Comics and sequential art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social. An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Narayan, Kirin. 2007. Tools to Shape Texts: What Creative Nonfiction Can Offer Ethnography. Anthropology and Humanism 32 (2):130-144.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding comics. The invisible art. New York: Harper Collins.
Pyne, Stephen J. 2009. Voice and Vision. A guide to writing history and other serious nonfiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2011a. What kinship is (part one). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (1):2–19.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2011b. What kinship is (part two). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (2):227–242.
Spiegelman, Art. 1997. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books.
Spiegelman, Art. 2011. MetaMAUS: Art Spiegelman Looks Inside His Modern Classic, Maus. New York: Pantheon Books.
Turner, Terence S. 1980. The social skin. In Not work alone. A cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival, edited by J. Cherfas and R. Lewin. London: Temple Smith.
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