Call for Papers

MARTOR 31/2026

Mask-making and mask-wearing: Shifting im/materialities in ritual and performative contexts

Guest Editors:

Dr. Maria Pilar Panero (Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Prehistory, Archaeology, Social Anthropology and Historiographic Sciences and Techniques / Director of the Chair of Studies on Tradition – University of Valladolid, Spain).
Dr. Adelina Dogaru (Lecturer at the Cultural Studies Department of the Faculty of Letters – University of Bucharest / Researcher at the „Constantin Brăiloiu” Institute of Ethnography and Folklore – Romanian Academy, Romania).
Georgiana Vlahbei (researcher at National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Ethnology Studies dept., Romania).

Deadline for abstract submissions: 25^th of February 2025.

Publication date: November 2026

The Museum of the Romanian Peasant is seeking contributions for its annual journal Martor 31/2026, on the topic of Mask-making and mask-wearing: Shifting im/materialities in ritual and performative contexts. Martor is a peer-reviewed academic journal, established in 1996, indexed by EBSCO, Index Copernicus, CEEOL, DOAJ, AIO, ERIHPLUS, SCOPUS, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology and museology.

Permeating throughout human history, in religious and secular practices, masks are intricately complex cultural systems and a widespread cultural phenomenon. From religious contexts and ritual practices to social, political systems and structures analysis, anthropological research showed that masks are engaged in a variety of relationships with external determinants that often lead to mutations of their functions and meanings. The way masks adapt to new contexts of existence both in the ritual or artistic field, the economic and social change of our societies, the artisan role, the techniques and materials used in their creation – are only some of the themes that become necessary to revisit.

Masks possess the capacity to create more-than-human beings. As sites of cultural encounters, masks can define and relate the Other to the Self and create liminal space-times where social groups define relationships, roles, functions and identities. Furthermore, masks are privileged objects through which to examine issues of representation. Ultimately, masks create a privileged space for individual expression. They remove the individual from the normative (dominant) social system of everyday life and place him or her in a space of absolute freedom of expression. This process enables mask/masking to find an ever-renewed place in different societies, and across time scales, up to the most dynamic contemporaneity.

The broader academic interest on masks and masking has come from a variety of territories: as well as overlapping or trans-disciplinary frameworks. Masks and masking were discussed especially regarding their symbolism, ritual context and functions. Semiotic approaches emphasize their ability to evoke and invoke meanings, identities and characters, embedded in local or national festive lives of the communities. The anthropological research often lightens paradoxes: the ambiguous relationship established with the body wearing it and their ability to reveal and hide at the same time, their mutability in form and significance, their power both on symbolic and social level to simulate disorder and solving conflicts and so on. Often masks become a symbol of local and national identity or, while they suffered spectacular transformation or lost their original ritual meaning, masks are continuously evolving as an important part of the cultures preserving them.

Modernity has infused the mask-making process with significant shifts that are still left largely unaddressed. Changes in mask-making materials and techniques can be linked to efforts of preservation ie. intergeneration transmission, attesting to the communities’ need of legitimizing their past. Masks are being saved and re-composed inside communities, or, even further, transformed beyond the point of recognition. The role of the mask creator, be it community insider, performer/actant, artisan or artist, in the perpetuation of the knowledge, craft, skills and techniques, has received less attention, though. With national and trans-national economic fund schemes and grants placing significant interest on the professionalization of mask-makers, new entrepreneurial/ business endeavors of configuring mask revenues are supported, and new interest is placed on the educational value of the transmission of the craft, employing various actors from within and outside the community space. Even before the new global heritage scenario, masks had acquired the status of commodities. Decontextualized from their ritual environment, they are widely used as objects of decor – largely present publicly as marketed items, for instance as tourist art, in souvenir shops, on displays within festivities or masked celebrations and in museum gift shops. Within the heritage-turn, masks have entrained new types of trajectories for collectivities and individuals that create them, in relation to the new heritage consumers.

Moreover, the activity of masking can be also understood as part of wider performative processes. Drawing inspiration from archaeological or ethnological collections, sometimes assuming anthropological gazes and informed by critical readings, contemporary artists are (re)creating masks that respond to wider concerns and debates in the larger public arena.

For the forthcoming Martor issue, our aim is to present a varied yet cohesive collection of insights concerning masks and masking. This collection should address contemporary social, cultural, and artistic engagement with masks. We seek to maintain our approach rooted in evidence garnered from analyzing social contexts, functions, and the objects themselves. Thus, the present issue welcomes proposals situated in-between transcendental and secular usages of masking, grounded in critical theory and approached from the lines of: cultural and visual anthropology, critical heritage studies, material culture studies, symbolic studies, ethnology, design, the study of crafts as well as performative arts. We are interested in papers investigating the cultural, social, artistic dimensions of masks today, in relation with both past and futures of masks. Topics should be related, but not limited to masks and masking in connection to:

Ritual time – norms, transgression, disruption, liminality: presence of masks in today’s collective rites (funerary, fertility, protection rites and other ritualized practices). Dynamics of customs and transformations occurring within the ritualized presence of masks;
Masquerades and carnivals in rural and urban contexts. Evolution, adaptive and other processes within the re-framing of cultural legacies as e.g. festivization;
Masks as heritage artifacts. The heritage-turn and its interplay with mask-making and/or mask-wearing practices. Processes of heritage-making/ heritagization: revival, recovery, self-patrimonialization (and so on). Actors and arenas; roles of museums, private collections, NGOs and heritage-communities in promoting and valorising masks as objects of heritage – institutional and grassroots initiatives, projects, funds for safeguarding, education on and disseminating of mask worlds, including innovative exhibition designs or museography projects, community-workshops, participatory actions etc.;
The old and new markets for masks as artisanal objects. The social lives of masks as commodified goods.
Roles of artisans and craftspeople in the continuation/disruption of mask-making practices in relation-adaptation to new economical contexts (professionalization, entrepreneurship, e-commerce etc.).
Skills, crafts and techniques of mask-making, including revival of old craft, shifts, adaptations of techne and materials – both under internal and external demands for continuation;
Materialities and processes of construction of masks and mask-costumes: changes, evolution, adaptation of used materials, textures of masks in ritual, festive and/or artisanal schemes.

We are equally interested in trans-disciplinary approaches, coming, for example, from the field of contemporary performance art, design. How do contemporary works of art interpret and employ mask wearing and mask-making in their various settings?

What are the new contexts of masks (re)emergence in the art/design/performance world and why does it take place now?
What types of relationships do masks as art objects evoke today – in connection to social, political and even environmental concerns? Masks as sites of power, in reference to colonial pasts. Masks and the social / political critique they enable. Masks and identity representation (ethnic, gender, class. non-human etc.) – in relation to resilience, conflict, protest, power structures.
How do these forms of expression articulate a relationship to the past and past uses of masks (for example, through the reappropriation of ritual masks in off-ritual contexts)?
The transformation of both body and perspective, that mask wearing facilitates. Masks as processes, and the ontologies they reveal. How masks configure body processes and performativity.
Types of relations that the material specificity of masks creates in its various performative contexts in relation to its specific audiences; how do these materialities transfer and translate in digital displays.

Lastly, the present MARTOR volume welcomes participation from voices outside of academic scholarship, giving floor to testimonies or interviews of artisan/ craftspeople themselves, or participants in mask-making workshops of any age, encouraging, as well, the employment of visual methods, including creative visual ethnographies.

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Please follow the guidelines for authors of the Martor journal: http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/for-authors/.

Martor is a journal where authors are encouraged to publish experimental ethnographic research and accompany their text with high standard visual material, thus, all contributors are encouraged to use ample images to accompany their texts.

We invite contributors to send an abstract (300 words) by Tuesday 24^th of February 2025. Final texts will be submitted on 1^st of November 2025. Submissions will be in either in English or French.

Proposals, manuscripts, and other editorial correspondence should be sent to the following e-mail: revistamartor@gmail.com.

Previous calls for papers: