Masked observers and mask collectors: entangled visions from the eighteenth-century Amazon

Abstract

This essay explores the culture of mask use and mask collection in eighteenth-century Amazonia as a way of bringing together the reciprocal observations undertaken by indigenous, European, and peoples of mixed race and identity in South America during the colonial period. By focusing on masks as physical objects containing attributes that can be studied with reference to historical and contemporary indigenous Amazonian groups, it attempts to disrupt the binary opposition between observers and observed and argues for a more connected set of epistemologies in the study of the colonial world. One central proposition is that European naturalists and those who accompanied them in the tropics may have been implicated in the fluid ontologies that were proposed by the objects worn and wielded by indigenous groups. It thus becomes necessary to reinterpret European ethnographical description to account for the agency of indigenous objects and individuals, leading to a more imbricated vision of engagement and encounter than an earlier generation of scholarship has tended to portray.

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