The Way of the Masks Book

Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Way of the Masks was interesting for the most part. I'm an indigenous person, Tsimshian from the north coast of British Columbia, but I live on the south coast where the masks he analyzes come from. The book is almost entirely about trying to understand the deep meaning of the unusual-looking Sxwayxwey* mask of the Coast Salish, by referring to the origin myths, dances and costumes associated with it. A large part of the book attempts to clarify this by contrasting and comparing it with the Tsonoqua mask which is associated with several tribal groups from various parts of coastal British Columbia. He weaves a huge matrix of elements of the masks, the dance costumes, the dances, the origin myths, related myths, and only kind-of-sort-of related myths.

Lévi-Strauss was the creator and proponent of structural anthropology, which I know nothing about. As far as I can tell, what he does is cherry-pick tenuous connections from innumerable possible aspects of these myths and masks until they 'prove' the connections he is looking for. E.g., if I say "this is black" and you say "this is white" the fact that we say the opposite proves that we're saying the same thing. In this sense, it reminds me of other 'just-so' pseudo-sciences like psychoanalysis.

What I enjoyed, then, were the many illustrations (some in colour) and the recounting of many, many myths. I've always especially enjoyed all kinds of Tsonoqua stories. The rest of it is all very nice for Claude Lévi-Strauss, but he can keep it.

* There are probably a dozen ways of spelling this in Romanised form, but this comes close to the phonetic sound. Ditto for Tsonoqua.