- 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:
Masking has long been a source of anthropological interest. This paper draws on ritual and performance theory to consider dichotomised responses to mask-wearing in the UK and USA, and explore how visual humour both expresses and transforms that structural opposition.
Paper long abstract:
Masking practices are famously polyvalent in their applications and interpretations. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic of 2020, mask-wearing, along with social distancing and restricted movement, has been a key measure introduced by governments to contain the spread of infection. Within the crisis of contagion, masking creates a crisis about self and other, individual and society, structure and agency, key oppositions within social theory. Theories from anthropology, ritual, and performance (i.a. Cohen 1993, Napier 1986, Emigh 1996, Gell 1975, Girard 1972, Kertzer 1988), including structure and process, explain masking practices in a pandemic that can be characterised as a long liminality (Van Gennep 1909 then Turner 1966), adding to the sense of ambivalence and dislocation that culminates in masking. The ambivalence around masking as a prophylactic precaution can be elucidated with reference to anthropological approaches to masking practices across the world that call into question of personhood, power, and society, from possession drama in Bali (Emigh 1996) to carnivals and masquerades across Europe (Trentini 2009-17). These existential, metaphysical and political elements help to account for the highly polarised responses to mask-wearing among the public, particularly in the UK and USA. This opposition is modulated by visual humour, which reflects and deflects binary attitudes to masking. This humour can be associated with the carnivalesque as a performative dramatization of ambivalence about the boundaries of the self in relation to society and its power structures. The methodology is a new form of armchair anthropology, in front of the computer screen.
Paper short abstract:
Investigates the varieties of responses by Muslim women in an East London neighbourhood to the recommendation of face covering in public during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
Across the world the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a number of directives to regulate social behaviour and bodily practices at an unprecedented scale - see the neologism virocene (Phillippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2020, Fernando 2020). This snapshot ethnography undertaking during October-November 2020 in London's East End documents the responses of local Muslim women to the prescription of wearing 'masks'. Given the polyvalence of meanings assigned to the practice of Islamic veiling in European contexts (Hirschmann, N. 2002; Göle 1996, Lyon and Spini 2004, Dwyer 1999) the pandemic has added new considerations, such as concerns over health and conformity to safety recommendations that either confirm or conflict with embodied practices and create new ambiguities and possibilities for the performance of identity and agency.
Paper short abstract:
How can professional artists productively inform anthropologists about new ways of theorising the masks, their agency and performativity? This paper seeks answers to this question through an ethnography of creative mask-making carried out by four female artists during the global pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
This paper uses an anthropological lens to make sense of the expanding artistic creativity, related to hygienic masks and other face-covering devices in the times of Covid-19 in relation to other social meanings attributed to these objects. My reflection is based on ethnographic accounts of mask-making by four female artists (of Japanese-Canadian, Finnish, Ukrainian origins). They are all professional mask-makers, and produced masks before the pandemic. How did the global epidemiological situation change their vision of their art? How can these visions by professional artists productively inform anthropologists about new ways of theorizing the masks, their agency and performativity?
Theoretically, I am interested in the symbolic polyvalence of masks as hygienic, aesthetic, sartorial and identitarian objects. How do new pandemic-induced meanings intersect with more ancient or traditional interpretations of masking for ritualistic purposes?
Historically, ritualistic mask-wearing was often taboo for women (e.g. performances in ancient Japan, Africain tribes, during winter carnivals in Europe). In modern times, however, masks as epidemiological objects have been mostly crafted by women. This paper addresses the entanglements of all the (controversial) aspects of masking, stimulated by the global ascendance of masks as indispensable objects of the everyday. As my interlocutors suggest, after 2019 masks became sites for aesthetic and semiotic experimentation with different facets of femininity and gendered aspects of work. I argue that mask-making and face-wearing for artistic purposes sheds light on the inversion of traditionally distributed gender roles, and allows women to overcome isolation through (feminist) carnivalesque, that is often performed online.