MASKING EMPIRE: THE MATERIAL EFFECTS OF MASKS IN AZTEC MEXICO CECELIA F. KLEIN la mascara es ... el simbolo de una falsa realidad. (Adolfo Best Maugard, 1945) Ideology is a mask and is not easily seen. (Mark Leone, 1978) Scholars since the turn of the century have recognized that masks played an important role in Aztec society. I Well over four dozen Mexican masks attributable to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the Nahuatl- speaking Aztec were at the height of their power, survived the Spanish Conquest to become housed in museums and private collections around the world. In addition, Aztec pictorial manuscripts and sculptures represent numerous masked deities and living persons, while sixteenth-century Spanish chronicles mention dozens of specific instances of Aztec masking. The sheer number of reported uses of Aztec masks alone justifies including the Aztec among what Claude Levi-Strauss (1967: 256) terms 'mask cultures.' Recent discovery of dozens of cached masks in the foundations of the Aztec Templo Mayor, the main temple in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City), merely confirms the high value placed on masks by this prehispanic people. To date, however, scholarly studies of Aztec masks for the most part have been restricted to descriptive reports of individual masks still in existence, often with attention to their authenticity, provenance, dating, and history of collection. When the question of the reason for the original importance of the masks has been raised at all, the answers have been largely confined to attempts to identify their subject matter, the ritual uses made of them, and the magico-religious beliefs that they allegedly connoted. These beliefs in turn have been put forward as the primary motivation for, and thus the explanation of, Aztec masks in general. All current 'explanations' of Aztec therefore have been, in anthropological terms, strictly ideational and 'emic.' To understand the signification of an artwork is not, however, equivalent to understanding its significance. The latter entails much more than just the object's intended and understood messages, the meanings that it hopefully and/or actually conveys. It involves as well that object's not always perceived, or at least acknowledged, material and social effects. These effects can be at variance with the object's intended and/or perceived connotations; there can be a contradiction between what the object is thought or said to 'mean' and Art History Vol. 9 No.2 June 1986 ©RKP 1986 0141-6790/86/0902-135 $1.50/1 14678365, 1986, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8365.1986.tb00192.x by University of California - Los Ange, Wiley Online Library on [19/01/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License