Masked Identity

image from @ourworldvisual Instagram

Anthropological approaches to masks and camouflaging typically consider the significance and symbolism of masks, and the social elements of concealing customs or rituals. Here, drawing on semiotic frameworks, I consider how masks perform in other ways, as icons and indexes of identity.

One of the most enduring aspects of the turbulent year in which Covid-19 appeared is that of masks. Masks have become part of our daily routines and vernacular; hence an important part of our new urban culture. During 2020, the notion of masks also became the very embodiment of political outrage (the anti-maskers, US president, celebrities), a social necessity, and a passport for free travel but behind the mask, lies some wider commentary on cultural sociology. In this blog, I frame masks as a lens through which to explore wider issues of identity, and masking as a deliberate act and performance.

Identity

It is not that masks are new. Western societies have ‘handled’ (considered and managed) the experience of masks previously in a variety of spaces. (Pollock, 1995) examines the roles of masks in ‘masking’ features of repulsion inscribed on the body through social status, mutilation, decoration or even somatisation. Here masks operate as an everyday tool for camouflaging, changing or displaying identity. In doing so, however, they also hide and mask important cultural embodiments and characteristics that form an intrinsic part of the lived experience for many people. In some social or cultural settings, the hiding of iconicity and indexicality of characteristics can become problematic for broader aspects of cultural sociology.

• Indexical characteristics include biographic characteristics such as age and gender, as well as emotional states that are contextual. Thus, a hidden image represents a meaning and a relationship that holds between an expression or image, and reality. In other words, a sign that indexes an object in the context in which it occurs.
• Iconic characteristics reflect meaning (the form of a sign and its meaning) and might resemble something else (symbolic, emblematic or representative).

The male and female mask we find portrayed in (Emile 1972) shaped a verifiable basis for the gender dichotomy that came to describe a fundamental male authenticity instead cf. female masquerading (Kleine 1995; Vinken, 1999: 38). As Goffman (1959) notes, we wear masks and perform roles for others not because we extravagant ourselves like theatrical characters, but because our expressive activity supports connections through the saving of face. Levi-Strauss (1961) builds on this idea of the mask as a social tool.

Levi-Strauss (p11–12) has taken the face to represent the socialised quality of a human being, as distinct from the rest of the body, and representing the state of nature. As he argues, people add social attributes to the face through cosmetics, to meet society’s expectations. At the same time, producers of television shows and film exploit close-up recording on the broader conviction that the face transmits information about mental and emotional states (Hinde and Society, 1972).

By contrast, Schwalbe (1993) notes the way the lives of men in some subordinated groups could be described by ‘comparative battles to live legitimately without masks’, which are worn more generally to satisfy all the more powerful others. In other words, deliberately ‘un wear’ masks and defy social convention.

Thus, masks hide iconic signs that act as social signifiers and hide the context of other personal characteristics, which might be powerful in certain cultural contexts. As such, masks equate with broader notions of ‘person’, ‘self’ and the ‘individual’, which intersect in the anthropological literature (e.g. Harris, 1989). Nevertheless, Covid-19 has created conditions for both compulsory and optional wearing of masks, which have a variety of wider social, cultural, and individual impacts, which warrant much more detailed analysis than has been given thus far.

Masking as a Deliberate Act

A general relationship between masks and sense of identity or individualism has been recognised previously in the literature. For example, the mask is usually considered a deliberate technique for transforming identity by modifying identity representation or the temporary and representational extinction of identity. For example, Pernet (2006) studies pejorative masking in various cultures.

Urban et al (1983: 181) identify several functions of masks, which have representational, emotional, indexical, disguise and therapeutic meanings. In these examples, masks represent a type of performance with associated cultural (societal) value (Granger, 2020). For example, performing as doing (constructing identity), as an art form (an act and manifestation), as expression (reflecting deeply held views or identity), as power (exerting control), process (achieving social acceptance), and experience (visible, hidden, or private). Many characteristics are ultimately constructed through one’s own (repetitive) performances underpinned by symbols and signs that imply that people and communities are active producers via their masks, rather than the person being a product (see Butler, 1990). Therefore, whether a person decides to wear or not wear a mask is a conscious choice, which is also an act of performing.

Masks can also produce active transformations in a person and are therefore part of an active causal process. Masks can produce an actual transformation in the wearer and in other instances, don’t. When Tonkins (1979: 240) suggests that ‘how masks work’ as a social phenomenon, operators in communicative settings must interpret this as the work masks do, rather than how they do it.

Studies of meaning and social significance of face-coverings also often accompany ritual and art (see Crumrine and Halpin, 1983; Gell, 1975; Napier 1986; Markmen and Markmen 1989). However, the explanations of how masking takes place seem curiously underdetermined.

The mask can fall into two significant categories:

• The primary treat face-covering (masks) as representative structures and finds their importance or interpretive significance in social structural paradoxes (Crocker, 1977) or in the fantasies through which such inconsistencies are changed and settled as in Levi-Strauss structuralism (Levi-Strauss, 1982).
• The subsequent approach may seem unusual to social anthropological audiences. Webber (1983) has zeroed in on the face-coverings (masks) narrow psychological impacts to identify integration, for example, hypothesised links between unconscious and mental processes and neural and cortical designs.

Mask influences also extend to affecting movements in social identity — depending upon social/cultural definitions and convictions, in addition to the presence of imperative inspirations. For example, Levi-Strauss (1961: 19) notes the way masks empower individuals in varied ways to transcend their everyday, commonplace roles and conventions. Taking flight in creative minds from the mundane level of reality, sometimes becoming ‘the medium for men to go into relations with the supernatural world’. Masks are capable of effecting a change not merely in the youths’ social identity but in other individual identity components (Honigmann, 1977).

No doubt, under certain conditions the anonymity/secrecy given by face-covers is a significant component in behaviour associated with masking — yet anonymity cannot generally be the critical factor in unconventional conduct connected with masking, for instance, little networks or small communities where masking happens with inconvenient practices, the identity of the maskers is by and large known (Hongimann, 1997). Pollaczek and Homefield (1954: 299) also notes that “hiding behind a false face” somehow gives the wearer an illusion that he is covered and therefore, that his ego is not responsible for the antics of the created character. The mask acts to disjoin personal identity from behaviours enacted, albeit in a negative-conscious way.

Cheney (1929: 65) also notes the way masks influence behaviour by doing something more than establishing anonymity — their potency lies in restricting the range of human expression emanating from the individual. Levi-Strauss (1961: 35) argues that by hiding the face they “interrupt” or divert the normal communication flow. The social significance of the face, the part of an individual through which others recognise race, personal and some degree social identity. The facial mask temporarily eliminates social intercourse that part of the body through which individuals have long accepted their personal feelings and attitudes are revealed or deliberately communicated to other people. For Hongimann (1997), the face is the organ that self and society carry on the most considerable portion of communication they engage, whether linguistic communication or paralinguistic.

A variety of evidence supports the hypothesis of a close connection linking the face through psychological experiments that have not yet convincingly supported such positions’ validity (Hongimann, 1997). The existence of such popular views indicates that people perceive a connection between identity and the face. Consequently, they are probably in a situation to see a face-covering as shielding normal identity or as keeping it from public identification.

In thinking about these disparate aspects of marks, I ask whether society’s enforcement of mask-wearing during the pandemic might actively promote negative associations through conscious-negative actions or the perceived fear of these. Also, whether, the mandatory wearing of masks militates the perceptions of some people — both form the wearer perspective and the citizen (external) perspective of the wearer. Furthermore, whether mask-wearing will result in very different cultural experiences as a result of fundamentally different indexical and iconic characteristics, different relational interactions, and the assumptions and visual cues that preface relational activities and transactions in society.

References

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