Makishi: Mask Characters of Zambia Manuel Jordan's Book to Accompany the Fowler Museum Exhibit © Henry Berry Mar 25, 2007 Masks have an important role in initiations and public ceremonies in Zambian tribal cultures Twenty-four African masks from Zambia newly added to the collection of the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles are the basis for Manuel Jordan's new book Makishi: Mask Characters of Zambia. "Makiski" is a general term for mask in the language of the peoples centered in northwestern Zambia and Angola including the Chokwe, Lunda, Luvale, Lwena, Luchazi, and Mbunda. "Makishi" is from a word for "sing" in the shared basic language of these groups, which in turn is related to the widespread Bantu concept for the "manifestation or representation of a spirit, usually that of a deceased person or ancestor." Jordan is a widely-recognized authority on the arts and cultures of Angolan and Zambian tribal groups who since 2001 has been a special-collections curator at a center for visual arts connected to Stanford University. The Fowler Museum's new masks are pictured in color photo close-ups with captions. Jordan identifies the materials a mask is made of and comments on its symbolic features, craftsmanship, context or trait represented by a particular mask. Color photographs show the mask being worn by an individual in an initiation or public event. "As stunning as [the masks] may appear when encountered in a museum, [they] were once worn in a variety of dynamic performative contexts and...each category of mask had distinctive ways of relating to other types of 'makishi' and to various audiences and audience members." The masks are divided into the four main psychological and social types - aggressive, sociable, ambiguous, and royal. Masks can cause their wearers "to assume the nature and being of some other person, spirit, animal, or even abstract quality." Though limited in number, the masks nonetheless relate to much of the African regional cultures. Thus, with Jordan's knowledgeable text, the work is not only an ideal companion to the Fowler Museum masks, but also a concise anthropological study of African tribal masks. Makishi: Mask Characters of Zambia by Manuel Jordan. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2006. 84 pages. $25.00 trade paper, 8" x 10", ISBN 978-0-9748729-7-1. color photographs, map, bibliography, index.