SUMMER 2010 african arts | 79 book review Masquerades of Modernity: Power and Secrecy in Casa- mance, Senegal by Ferdinand De Jong Bloomington: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 2007. 228 pp. 16 b/w plates, 16 b/w igures, 5 maps, 2 tables, index, bibliography. $39.95 cloth. reviewed by Sidney L. Kasir It is more than a little ironic that students of African art, having largely abandoned the study of masking and related practices in the past decade, can now look to the anthropology of globalization for the reframing of “tradi- tion,” including “traditional art,” and its deeply modern reasons for survival and lourishing. his is a book primarily about Jola (Jula, Diula) and Mandinko initiatory ritual—theo- rized by the author Ferdinand De Jong as a form of locality (cf. Appadurai 1995, 1996) but by the Senegalese themselves as “cultural heritage”—and how it has been transformed through urban migration and regional poli- tics in Senegal. More speciically, De Jong examines the ideology and practice of secrecy which characterize male initiation and how they are leveraged to political advantage in the Casamance region as well as continuing to be used in more familiar forms of social control by initiates over the uninitiated (including the anthropologist himself). One powerful focus of this secrecy is the Mandinko Kankurang masquerade, a typological descendant of Fran- cis Moore’s famous “Mumbo Jumbo” that he encountered on the Gambia River in 1738, shrunken to roughly human size from Moore’s “eight or nine foot high” version (p. 131) and now sporting a costume of “industrially pro- duced materials [rice sacks]” instead of the hard-to-ind bark of the Fara tree (p. 144–45). Although ive of the nine chapters have already appeared in journals or edited books, it was my pleasure to be reading them for the irst time. he author modestly describes them as a set of related essays, but they cohere quite seamlessly as a brief but highly original mono- graph. Under review here are not only the book’s contents but also the salience of some of its ideas for the study of masking and initia- tion more generally. Because De Jong is very several centuries. his is not just a random detail but has important weight in their inter- pretation, especially relative to the concept of the sacred forest. Another mask for which one wishes there were more of an explanation is the striking Jola horned helmet mask, ejumbi (pp. 42, 60), appearing dramatically against a bright yellow ground as the book’s jacket image and then in a footnote cross-reference. We are told in the book only that it is held by some initiates in the coming-out stage. What does it have to do with them? Why held instead of worn? hen again in the excellent black and white plates, Plates 1 and 2 show initiates wearing elaborate horned helmets (not masks) which the caption calls usikoi caps. Try as I might I could ind no reference to these in the text. Can we presume that both ejumbi and usikoi are about Jola bull symbolism and relate also to the bulls sacri- iced at the beginning of the initiation before entering the forest? It would be helpful if there were an actual discussion about all this instead of simply cross-referencing important works such as Peter Mark’s he Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest (1992), which the reader of this work may not have read. For example, given the evidence of strong Mandinko inluence on Jola initiatory ritual, is this another instance of “mandinkisation,” or does it come out of Jola beliefs and performative imagery? Returning to the Mandinko Kankurang masquerade, Peter Weil (1971, 2005), Peter Mark (1992), and Rene Bravmann (1974) have all written on Senegambian masking and Weil has followed the changes in Kankurang since 1971. What makes this study diferent is its avowed theoretical task: to take on the prob- lem of secrecy (of masking and more gener- ally, initiation) in the context of modernity and, if we enlarge the Casamance diaspora to include Paris, even globalization. What hap- pens to “the secret,” the author posits, is always situational but can include everything from its politicization to its secularization as a com- modity. He argues that regardless of its speciic cultural content in time and place (the sacred forest of a village in Casamance, the regional city of Ziguinchor, Dakar, Paris), secrecy or “the secret” serves to produce locality, in the wider (more global) cultural ield. In other words, despite the fact that secrecy is by deinition exclusionary, it also produces a strong communal afect among those who share the secret. his amounts to what De Jong prefers to call a local (which can also be gendered or ethnic) subjectivity. Why does that matter enough to write a book about it? Because as Appadurai has argued and De Jong reformulates here (p. 15), in the face of “large- scale social formations” (such as nation- states), small-scale societies must struggle to “produce context,” to matter, to be seen and heard and taken account of by the wider emphatically an anthropologist of art, he has approached masquerade as an expressive form through its political-cultural manifestations rather than starting with analysis of the form itself and then expanding outward, as a typi- cal art historian might have done. While this produces a richer, more layered account, its limitation is to come up a bit short on the side of formal connections, mask history, and per- formance details. For example, does Kankurang dance or just rush around? Does it have its own music? How did little boys come to have their own “fun” version (Figure 6.1) when as recently as 1987 its public “unmasking” by a newcomer caused that person to be beaten to death and then set on ire (pp. 133–38)? Each is discussed in its appropriate section (commodiication, violence) but the disparity itself is let aside. We know from other mask literature (e.g., Ogunba [date] on Yoruba festivals) that types made of bark or leaves are locally considered more ancient than carved and textile mas- querades in places that have both or all three, a suggestion borne out by Moore’s descrip- tion. And one may posit that acoustic masks such as the Jola Assaye “master of the forest” are even older, given their very wide distribu- tion across the continent even in cultures such as the Equatorial Forest Mbuti, who have no other masks (Lifschitz 1988). I mention these because the book’s narrative frame (aside from a few tantalizing pages on the Portuguese trad- ing on the Casamance River from the mid- 1600s) is roughly the 1940s up to the present, with the heaviest emphasis on the mid-1990s, the period of the author’s principal ieldwork. his shallow time depth situates all the masks on the same historical footing, whereas they probably developed in a deinite sequence over