Mask-making and Mask-wearing: Shifting Im/materialities in Ritual and Performative Contexts. An Introduction

The introduction to the special issue of MARTOR dedicated to the European project “MASKS” provides a framework for understanding mask-making and mask-wearing as mutable, yet enduring material, embodied, relational, and performative processes. It argues that the contemporary significance of masks lies in their capacity to mediate between permanence and transformation, concealment and revelation, individual and collective identity, and inherited practice and reinvention. The introduction integrates the volume’s contributions into a four-part framework linking mask materiality and aesthetics, ritual embodiment and community, ethnographic experience, and contemporary artistic practice. An interdisciplinary convergence of anthropology, ethnology, heritage studies, material culture, as well as creative ethnographies, visual and performance arts, the volume brings forth various analytical and creative formats (anthropological text, observational notes, dialogues etc.) to provide a diverse yet coherent account for how masks mediate relationships between bodies, objects, communities, and different orders of reality in the present day. Collectively, the seventeen contributions demonstrate how masks from particular local contexts actively participate in producing identities and social worlds rather than merely representing them. The volume approaches masking as a process of representation, identification, othering, and ontological transformation, emphasizing the conditions through which identities, social relations, and forms of belonging are temporarily suspended, negotiated, or reconfigured. It further explores the heritage-making processes through which masks and associated knowledge are selected, authorized, transmitted, commodified, and re-signified by communities, craftspeople, institutions, and other heritage actors. Mask-making is presented as an embodied form of technical and cultural knowledge that articulates craftsmanship, local economies, professionalisation, and intergenerational transmission.