Paper Short Abstract:

In alignment with the goals of the “mask and masking” panel, this presentation will reconsider the case of the masks (once) at the heart of the Cherokee Booger Dance. The central fact to be revisited is that most extant Booger masks were produced for outside buyers. They were thus made to be collected and viewed but not worn and performed.

Paper Abstract:

The Booger Dance is a dance and ritual episode of the Eastern Cherokee people residing today on, and around, the Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina, USA. Documented in the work of folklorist and anthropologist Frank G. Speck (Speck and Broom 1951) and other scholars among the Cherokee during the 20th century, the Booger Dance shared much with masking rites found around the world. Ethnographic accounts of the Booger Dance make clear that performing or witnessing it was a rich, multisensory experience. In it, masked performers lampooned, and thus critiqued, the social norms characterizing non-Cherokee peoples. Over the course of the 20th century though, Cherokee Booger Dance masks came to be primarily carved for sale to non-Cherokee collectors. In alignment with the goals of the “mask and masking” panel, this presentation will reconsider the case of the masks (once) at the heart of the Cherokee Booger Dance. My purpose is to reflect generally on situations in which masks and mask making persist but become divorced from practices of masking and shorn of the sensory and experiential perspectives that center the panel’s project of unwriting mask studies. Alongside the panel’s work on unwriting, my goal is thus to reflect on the un-rite-ing of masks. Such dynamics are found in many settings wherein masks are moved into art, craft, ethnography, or souvenir markets or reframed as heritage objects. Original data for this study comes from ethnographic notes, and an associated museum collection of masks, held by the Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA).