On the Concept of Prototype in Songye Masquerades

Abstract

In 1986 I published a book on Songye masks and figure sculpture based on fieldwork conducted in the Lomami region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Hersak 2007). That publication is the product of a particular interdisciplinary way of seeing and thinking about African art history prevalent in the 1970s and ‘80s in anglophone scholarship. It encapsulates a slice of time and academic gymnastics that are also proper to a particular personal experience. In this paper I intend to revisit Songye masquerades (Fig. 1), from another time zone and from the wider angle of what is currently referred to as “expressive culture.” While I have previously concentrated on both field and museum contexts, there is no doubt that I see masking now as an even broader, more dynamic, fluid phenomenon in time and space that cannot be reduced to selective or singular image/performance study. It is a cultural expression that also begs to be viewed from the perspective of multiple sense-scapes and expressive forms in addition to the visual—the auditory or olfactory, for example. Moreover, we sometimes forget that the visual, material object is not necessarily of prime significance in many cultures; it is not considered in isolation, as Zoe Strother has clearly shown with the case of Pende masking, where “the invention of a new mask centers on its dance” (1998:42). As she points out, to Westerners it is difficult to conceive that the sculptor is the “last stop” in the creative process (ibid., p. 30). Hence, static analysis of collectable objects remains the focus of “collection and exhibition” histories which nourish the desired view of the private sector and formal institutional doctrines. The latter is also a traditional Western art historical approach based on a selective construct of the “art” category, privileging so-called high art and discriminating against lowly crafts and, of course, anything coming close to tourist production. Although it is not my intent to tackle all these issues in this paper, I do wish to venture beyond at least some of the previously safe academic havens and look at Songye masking then and now in various spatio-temporal representations. The particular emphasis on the concept of the “prototype,” inspired by a conference on the topic held at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in October 2010, provides interesting food for thought and challenging new angles of exploration.1 In taking this road, I am therefore obliged to ask different questions than those that have preoccupied me before and to accept the risk of healthy theoretical uncertainty. Such a path does not promise to be a straight one, but it can liberate and sharpen our visions, leading to potentially more sensitive and reflective interpretations. As a point of departure, I will begin simply and less tortuously by reviewing the familiar frames of the ethnographic context. The Songye masquerading practices that I had the opportunity to witness and document in the late 1970s were those of Eastern Songye (Fig. 2). It would appear that the origins of this tradition emerged in an area of admixture between Songye and Luba peoples and diffused throughout both culture areas and beyond, adapting to different needs and expressions as is the case with other masking societies (see Hersak 1993). In reality there is therefore not a singular Songye tradition; it is a dynamic, ephemeral phenomenon with variants that have come and gone and may never be known. But as Alfred Gell noted in relation to Marquesan art, “... despite [a] geographical scattering and contextual transformation [the] art retains an inner integrity of its own, as a macroscopic whole rather than as an aggregate of fragments” (1998:221). At the time of my fieldwork in DRC, folkloric masking practices had begun to make their appearance but it was the so-called traditional context of masquerades that was of particular academic interest, one in which ritual rather than theatricality was