Minding Bodies: Demons, Masks, Archetypes, and the Limits of Culture
2011; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/dtc.2011.0025
ISSN2165-2686
Autores ResumoSpring 2011 125 Minding Bodies: Demons, Masks, Archetypes, and the Limits of Culture John Emigh The standard social science models—especially as taken up by the humanities—have had trouble allowing both for cross-cultural communication and for diversity and individual agency within culturally defined regions. Peggy Phelan once remarked that performance "exists as a negotiation between biology and culture."1 As a theatre director and teacher by training and trade with research interests in Asia and Latin America, I have found that attention to some of the concerns and findings of cognitive neuroscience can provide a reality check on the rhetoric of the emergent field of performance studies, with its vital links to anthropology and cultural studies. What is the role and what are the limits of "culture" in neural processing? And how are these germane to performance? Gerald Edelman has shown how central categorical constructions are to the workings of our ever-shifting neural networks; surely, the relative strength of taboos and the strength of binaries used in categorical construction vary from place to place and time to time.2 Bradd Shore has argued for a reassessment of the ways in which "cultural models" embodied in cognitive patterns encourage "a significant overlap [among individuals] within a community as to how novel experiences will be reconstituted as memory," with nurture becoming nature.3 Granting this as a possibility, I propose to tease out some of the limitations and functions of cultural constructs while considering a phenomenon that seems to transcend culture: the "archetype" of the demonic face and its mirror opposite, the apotropaic (protective) face, as encountered in masks and mask-like images around the world. In place after place and time after time, masks and sculpted faces have been deployed that feature bulging eyes, full lips, flared nostrils, bared fangs, and, frequently, distended tongues. The Gorgoneion of Greece, Rangda and Bhoma of Bali, Kirtimukha of South and Southeast Asia, Shakti figures of India, enraged John Emigh is professor emeritus of theatre arts and performance studies at Brown University. He was founding chairperson of the Association for Asian Performance, is the author of Masked Performance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and of other writings on South and Southeast Asian performance, and in 1996 was principal consultant for the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts'exhibit Masks, Mind, and Man in New Delhi (CD forthcoming). He has directed over seventyfive plays and performed one-person shows based on Balinese masked dance and theatre. In 2009, he received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's Career Achievement Award for Educational Theatre. 126 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Boddhisatvas of Tibet, certain Iroquois False Faces of North America, the fierce generals of the Anshun Earth Opera of China, the auspicious Shi-shi Mai of Japan and festival dragons of China, the jaguars and goddesses of old Mexico/new Spain, the Xue Xue of the Northwest Coast Kwakiutl, and variants of the Devil and Witch found throughout Europe and the Americas all fit this description (see figs. 1 and 2). There are, of course, other masks in these locales, and routes of transmission can be speculated about and have sometimes been determined. Still, this approach to incorporating certain images into masks is not only broadly distributed, it frequently reappears after periods of absence. What, then, accounts for the appeal and staying power of these images? Why do they occur and reoccur with such frequency?And in such various contexts! The masks tend to be quite large and, when worn, are out of proportion with the trunk of the body as perceived by the visual system. They often blend human traits with those of powerful beasts of prey: lion, tiger, bear, or jaguar. Sometimes the references are more fanciful:thedragon,thechimera,and the Warner Brothers' "Tasmanian Devil" (see figs. 3, 4, and 5). Studies of visual tracking indicate that the eye focuses obsessively on the mouth, nose, and eyes to "read" a human face, perhaps to glean the Fig. 1. Terracotta Gorgon Relief, Archaic Greece , 625600 BCE (Courtesy Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi, Siracusa, Sicily, Italy) Fig. 2. Mask of Kali on an unfinished statue, Andhra Pradesh, India (© John Emigh) Fig...
Referência(s)