Ritual Masks: Deceptions and Revelations

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.

Henry Pernet received his Ph.D. in history of religions from the University of Chicago where his advisers were Mircea Eliade, Joseph M. Kitagawa and Frank E. Reynolds. As an historian of religions, Pernet served as the State expert overseeing examination in this field at the University of Lausanne, and as an expert for the Swiss National Foundation for Scientific Research on cultural pluralism and national identity. He sat on the committees of the Swiss Society for the Study of Folklore and of the Swiss Society for the Science of Religions. He edited a book series in history of religions and was a member of the board of the Editions Labor et Fides, Geneva. Pernet has published articles in professional journals on the subject of mask and masking and is the author of articles on this subject in The Encyclopedia of Religion. He was a member of the group charged with the translation of Carl Gustav Jung's works into French and was instrumental in the preparation of the French editions of several of Mircea Eliade's works.