More than 1,200 citations, ranging from making masks in kindergarten to academic books on the anthropological theory of masks.

Masks are objects that demonstrate creative skills of many different periods and cultures. Masks are a nearly universal phenomenon, but their uses and meanings are strikingly different across cultures. In this book, eight leading experts explore the stories of masks across ancient and modern civilizations in a survey of their meaning and power.

Ritual masking is an important institution in many traditional societies and has attracted much attention from Western scholars. In 'Ritual Masks', Pernet provides a thorough survey of masks and masking traditions in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, based on a close analysis of the literature in several languages. Pernet's approach provides him with an opportunity to examine issues of importance to the history of religion and anthropology. These include the influence of theory on the interpretation of prehistoric documents; androcentrism in anthropology and the history of religions; and Western scholarship's recurrent problems in interpreting preliterate or traditional societies.

A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass media This fascinating book presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and media. Ranging from funerary masks and masks in drama to the figural work of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman and Nam June Paik, renowned art historian Hans Belting emphasizes that while the face plays a critical role in human communication, it defies attempts at visual representation. Belting divides his book into three parts: faces as masks of the self, portraiture as a constantly evolving mask in Western culture, and the fate of the face in the age of mass media. Referencing a vast array of sources, Belting's insights draw on art history, philosophy, theories of visual culture, and cognitive science. He demonstrates that Western efforts to portray the face have repeatedly failed, even with the developments of new media such as photography and film, which promise ever-greater degrees of verisimilitude. In spite of sitting at the heart of human expression, the face resists possession, and creative endeavors to capture it inevitably result in masks—hollow signifiers of the humanity they're meant to embody. From creations by Van Eyck and August Sander to works by Francis Bacon, Ingmar Bergman, and Chuck Close, Face and Mask takes a remarkable look at how, through the centuries, the physical visage has inspired and evaded artistic interpretation.

"The entire town is disguised," declared a French tourist of eighteenth-century Venice. And, indeed, maskers of all ranks—nobles, clergy, imposters, seducers, con men—could be found mixing at every level of Venetian society. Even a pious nun donned a mask and male attire for her liaison with the libertine Casanova. In Venice Incognito, James H. Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He draws on a wealth of material to explore the world view of maskers, both during and outside of carnival, and reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history. This vivid account goes beyond common views that masking was about forgetting the past and minding the muse of pleasure to offer fresh insight into the historical construction of identity.

Includes section: "Some Michigan books."

This is a description of how memories of the past become traditions, as well as the role of these traditions in the institutional development of the noh theater from its beginnings in the 14th century through the late 20th century.