MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2298930721 · doi:10.14288/1.0094372

The ritual-theatricality of Igbo masks and masquerades

2010· article· en· W2298930721 on OpenAlexaff
Emmanuel Chidi Onwuzolum

Bibliographic record

VenuecIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAfrican history and culture studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIgboArtAestheticsLinguisticsPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This thesis is part of a larger project that included an exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology entitled "The World of Spirits" (July 5 -August 31, 1977), which served as an introduction to Igbo masks and masquerades as embodying some of the most profound and religious beliefs of the Igbo people of South-eastern Nigeria. The exhibit demonstrated that underlying the visual diversity of Igbo art is a unity of Igbo conceptions of the supernatural. Accompanying the exhibition were slide presentations and a live performance, All of the components of the project, including this thesis, are related attempts to present Igbo masks, i.e. material objects normally found in museums, within an anthropological context which takes the museum visitor or the reader beyond the objects themselves into their meaning in terms of Igbo culture. The project is thus a demonstration of the necessary relationship between the practice of museology and the discipline of anthropology. Such a relationship is a bilateral one, in which not only do ethnographic data and the theoretical frameworks of ethnology extend a museum's presentation and interpretation of objects, but the attention of anthropologists is directed towards objects as significant foci for study. More specifically, the thesis provides the indispensable ethnological background upon which the exhibit was based. It includes original ethnographic materials on initiation, masks, and masquerades at Ozubulu, derived from the author's participant observation of both initiation and the Ozoebunna masquerade. This material is augmented with published records from the Afikpo and Awka areas of Igboland to highlight the necessary connection between initiation and masquerade, Then, using conceptual formulations of E.R. Leach on ritual, Mircea Eliade on sacred time, and Elmer Rice on theatre, Igbo masquerade is examined in terms of the concept of ritual theatre. While ritual gives power and meaning to the mask, the masquerade performance is a theatrical experience which involves the initiates of the mmuo society as actors and the other members of the Igbo community as audience, The entertainment feature of masquerades has not previously received due attention in the anthropological literature, probably because anthropologists are not normally participants in them. This project on Igbo masquerade is a presentation of African aesthetics and culture by an African. The number of such studies are growing as it becomes increasingly evident that African scholars must pay greater attention to studying their traditional cultural institutions so as to utilize pertinent aspects of such studies for development and planning, not only in museology but in other areas of contemporary life as well.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.801
Threshold uncertainty score0.989

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.194
Teacher spread0.186 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venuecIRcle (University of British Columbia)Same topicAfrican history and culture studiesFrench-language works237,207