- Convenors:
-
Felicia Hughes-Freeland
(SOAS)
Cathy Greenhalgh (Independent)
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- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 25 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites visual anthropological responses to masking in the ethnography of Covid-19. Themes include aesthetics; the craft of face covering; political and medical discourses; surveillance and control; protest and resistance; risk management; advertising imagery; ecological impacts.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores anthropological responses to masking. Masking is an important element in the ethnography of Covid-19. In performance and ritual studies, masking is usually analysed in relation to personal and social transformation, and ways in which the masker is opened up or exposed to otherness in various forms, with the risk of possession and loss of self. Controversies over veiling in Islam have reinforced notions of alterity, but masking during Covid-19 is challenging this (Eli 2020). Masking has also been a metaphor of invasion by the other, but this view of contagion as alterity that has long been criticised by Napier (1992) and recently reprised (2020). Concealing the face in carnival and protests during the lockdown are recent examples of performative expression as ritual inversion or direct action. Widespread home manufacture of face-coverings and fashion's embrace of the mask as statement underline complex aesthetics and agency at play. Face masks have been highly controversial during the current pandemic arguably because they are where the social collides with the most directly personal embodied engagement with risk management and the threat to personal identity and expressivity. Contributors are invited to explore themes relating to masks and masking, including purely visual presentations (film/photographs) that reflect their own lockdown experiences. Possible themes include aesthetics; the craft of face covering; political and medical discourses; surveillance and control; protest (direct action or humour); risk management; advertising imagery; ecological impacts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The collage functions via appropriation, juxtaposition, recycling and aesthetic distanciation. The mask is a new visual space used as slogan and decoration, as much as decoy and protection. This paper explores the connections between collage and the mask via two projects undertaken during lockdown.
Paper long abstract:
Collage / photo-montage is known as an associative combination form of media, images and text. It often uses appropriation, juxtaposition and recycling for deliberate incongruity, shock, and transgression. Masking as a tool within editing and digital image manipulation denotes revelation, concealment and layering. The mask, or 'face-covering' has rapidly evolved as a new space of expression and identity during the Covid-19 pandemic. It can be used as protection and decoy, slogan and decoration. Indeed, it is a new kind of mini-canvas or screen on the human face in movement through our socially distant workplaces, shops and public transport. Both the mask and collage are a type of 'quodlibet'; a pinboard or collection point of changing ideas. In this paper, we explore two projects which respond to the pandemic through collage, concentrating on both the making process and images of masks themselves that appear in the work. These are Covid Collage Chronicles (Greenhalgh), made on cakeboards with recycled magazines and 'Masquerade' (Williams) using found image in both hand and digital manipulation. We view this collage work as an appropriate way to approach the cacophany of terrible news, as a mode of (aesthetic) distanciation and therapeutic response to the crisis, and as a penetrative ethnographic device in a form of visual anthropology. We draw on theories of strategies or techniques in relation to the mask and collage (Baldacci et al, Banash, Bruno, Cran).
Paper short abstract:
Combining the artistic and anthropologic mediums of the photo-essay and the collage, the project attempts to visualise the burden of Covid-19 through an analysis of the face mask. Accompanied by statements written by the participants, the images serve as ethnographic vignettes of their experiences.
Paper long abstract:
A result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the face mask has become a new part of everyday life for many. A topic deeply rooted in anthropological literature, the mask often 'appears in conjunction with categorical change' and contains a 'special efficacy' that resides in its transformative and paradoxical nature (Napier 1986: xxiv). This project examines the efficacy of the face mask through the mediums of collage and photo-essay, analysing the face mask as an intersectional object saturated with personal, national, and global significance.
Employed as 'a medium for exploring formal boundaries and a means of investigating the problems that appearances pose in the experience of change', the face mask is excised, leaving its notorious outline on the faces of its wearers (Napier 1986: xxiv). The 'formal boundaries' of the mask become a frame, bursting with news clippings from the BBC's coverage of the pandemic. Combining the artistic and anthropological mediums of the photo-essay and collage, the project attempts to make visual the 'problems that appearances pose' by displaying the burden Covid-19 has forced many to carry. The masks, now divorced from their original material form, are laden with words and images, appearing to weigh down their wearers as they confront the daily realities of life during a pandemic. The images confront the viewer, bringing them into an intimate physical and mental space, and complicate the tedious hierarchy between image and text. Accompanied by short statements written by participants, the images serve as ethnographic vignettes detailing their experiences during the coronavirus pandemic.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the pandemic response of Indian artisan communities to the dilemma of self-employment. They have incorporated hand-made mask-making into their art, work and rituals as a 'rescue mechanism', with ingenuity and organisation in the informal economy.
Paper long abstract:
The mask is the ubiquitous visible sign of the invisible, unknown virus Covid-19 and a sign of permissible social engagement. The mask signifies either solidarity against the virus or protest for freedom. Prior mask associations seem eclipsed; ceremonial masks for religious practices, masks worn by Jain monks or face masks worn by Muslim women (Tarlo 2010). Months of pandemic lockdown have deeply impacted the self-employed livelihoods of artisans (Ghai 2020). The mask arrived as 'rescue mechanism', as they took to creating masks to support themselves. Medical masks soon gave way to the cloth mask; handmade and embellished with paintings and embroidery, giving a semblance of 'normal' clothing. Artisan communities adapted the territory of the mask in ingenious ways, with both enthusiasm and duress. This paper discusses artisanal response to the pandemic through their mask-making endeavours and dilemmas. It traces the economy of handmade masks, signifying motifs and meanings, makers' perspectives on how this activity contributes to identity, and new ritual and spiritual practices (such as the adaptation of a 'Coronamata' goddess). We have worked with artisans in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh over many years. Rooted in that ethnographic research and based on new personal interviews and visual field data, the mask throws up fresh questions on how artisans view their art, problematizes the discourse on art and craft purpose, revisits notions of the traditional and contemporary (Subramanyan 1987), and assesses artisan agency in the informal economy.
Paper short abstract:
Researching digital/online and social media representations, the paper analyses the mask as both matter out of place, and as giving form to the formlessness of the Other as matter out of place. It thus interrogates imaginaries guiding the double becoming between the individual and the mask.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the mask through two parallel but inverted paradigms. First, we explore the mask as matter out of place (Douglas 1966), where Foucauldian discipline (1995 [1977]) and governmentality (1978), as constituted by liable relations between individual citizens, society, and the state, seemingly collide with expressions of free will and personal identity. Coterminously, we analyse the mask as giving form to the formlessness of another matter out of place, to the extent that it is through negotiation with a mask that an individual is able to ontologically realize and phenomenologically experience the presence of an unwanted other (is it a virus or somebody else?).
Situating our research within digital/online and social media prosumerism (Miller & Horst 2012), we interrogate imaginaries guiding the double becoming between the individual and the mask (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, Massumi 2010). The mask’s specific visual representations in product catalogues on select e-commerce platforms and media listicles, are then analysed to understand the semiotics adopted by designers and sellers, and how their power/knowledge practices shape ontological realizations and perceptions of masks in popular culture. If a mask is the matter out of place, what are the temporal or spatial elements as reinforced by visual media that constitute or challenge its placelessness? Subsequently, we study reviews and images posted by individual customers/users on these platforms and social media, to investigate how the embodied formation of boundaries at the site of wearing the mask lend themselves to understanding the Self versus the matter-of-the-Other out of place.