Carnival celebrations in the Caribbean would be nothing without the colorful and almost inexplicable charm of masquerades. In contemporary carnival celebrations across the Caribbean, masquerades are often adjusted and tailored to fit the local context but, as Robert Wyndham Nicholls demonstrates in The Jumbies’ Playing Ground, many aspects of these masquerade performances have antecedents in Old World (in this case, Western African and Western European) traditions.
Eschewing the notion of parallel evolution, Nicholls argues that many of the beliefs and customs undergirding masquerades in the Old World crossed the Atlantic and were transmitted into, among other places, the Caribbean region. The text examines the similarities between Afro-Creole masquerade traditions from Barbados, the Leeward Islands, the Windward Islands of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Carriacou as well as Jamaica (located in the Greater Antilles) and those found in several areas of West Africa and Western Europe, even today.
The book is divided into seven chapters and further separated into several subsections. Nicholls attempts, in the first two chapters, to address themes that apply somewhat universally to masquerades in both the Old World and in the Eastern Caribbean region. In the first chapter he briefly outlines similarities in appearance, roles, and behavior between masquerading practices in the Eastern Caribbean and those of West Africa and Western Europe. He notes, for instance, that “masquerade prototypes in the Leeward Islands were formed primarily from a fusion of styles from the Upper Guinea region of West Africa—loosely defined as stretching from Senegal to the northwestern Ivory Coast—and Western Europe, especially Britain’s West Country and Scotland, Ireland and Wales” (25). Notably, it is in this chapter that the book’s title is illuminated. Nicholls describes how the Jumbie, a term used in the Caribbean to describe ghosts or spirits, is connected to many Old World beliefs surrounding deceased ancestors and the spirit world. Making reference to research by Roger Abrahams and John Szwed, Nicholls also highlights the cultural significance of play as well as the playground, the physical spaces in which ritual performances are enacted.
Chapter 2, replete with several pages of color images of masquerade characters from countries in Western Europe and in Western Africa, addresses the aesthetic aspects of masquerades and describes some of the social and psychological purposes of disguise. Unlike the first two chapters, chapter 3, focused specifically on the Eastern Caribbean, describes the relationship between masquerade group members and outlines several social occasions during which contemporary masquerades take place.
Chapters 4 through 7 prove to be the most interesting and most useful in the book, in my opinion. Not only do they outline and categorize several masquerade types and characters by name and by the Caribbean countries in which they are practiced, but they also attempt to identify specific examples of West African and Western European masquerades which may have pre-dated them and may have been subsequently transmitted into the Eastern Caribbean. Nicholls again refers to these examples as prototypes, reinforcing the notion that the roots of many of the masquerading practices found in the Eastern Caribbean can be traced back to the Old World. Chapter 7 in particular makes direct comparisons between both spiritual and secular beliefs and practices among West Africa, Western Europe, and the Eastern Caribbean. At the end of this chapter, as in chapter 2, there are several pages of color images of masquerade characters from a number of Caribbean islands. The book concludes with a discussion of the effects of religious censure on masquerading and the resultant iterations of practices and traditions in the Caribbean.
Ultimately, this text generally serves as a good introduction to the rituals and customs associated with disguised performance traditions such as masquerades and is a useful resource for research concerning intercontinental and interisland cultural diffusion. Its primary strength, however, lies in the meticulous listing and description of various masquerades found in Western Africa, Western Europe, and the Eastern Caribbean.
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[Review length: 646 words • Review posted on December 5, 2013]