Book: The Way of the Masks

Overview

Claude Levi-Strauss’s The Way of the Masks examines the ceremonial masks of the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America, especially Tsimshian, Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw (formerly called Kwakiutl), and neighboring groups, as a coherent symbolic system. Rather than treating masks as isolated artworks or as simple reflections of beliefs, he shows how they communicate through differences, contrasts, and transformations. The book brings together ethnographic description, museum collections, photographs, and myth to reveal the logic that links visual forms to social relations and cosmological ideas.

Masks as a System

The central proposition is that masks derive meaning not from their individual motifs but from the network of relations they form across regions and lineages. A beaked profile, a split face, a protruding tongue, or a recessed eye makes sense because it is opposed to, or transformable into, another set of traits in neighboring styles. By tracing how a feature migrates, flips, inverts, or combines with others, Levi-Strauss reconstructs a matrix of possibilities that artists and performers draw upon. Style, in this sense, is a grammar. Each mask is like a sentence composed within a shared language, its meaning emerging from the contrasts it activates with other sentences in the corpus.

Transformations and Myth

The book pairs masks with myths of Raven, Bear, Salmon, and other beings whose stories pivot on metamorphosis, crossing boundaries between human and animal, land and sea, nature and culture. Transformation masks, hinged objects that open to reveal a second face, literalize this logic, staging the passage from one identity to another. Levi-Strauss argues that the same structural oppositions that organize myths also structure visual form: symmetry vs. asymmetry, inside vs. outside, life vs. death, affinity vs. descent. A zigzag may echo lightning or a serpent; a labret or lip ornament signals rank and marriage rules; a paler interior face reversed within a darker exterior face performs, in wood and paint, the mythic moves that narrative accomplishes with characters and plot.

Art, Performance, and Social Life

Masks do not sit still; they are danced, sung, and exchanged. Their public display mediates tensions between clans and moieties, articulates rights over names and crests, and regulates the flow of wealth at potlatches. A mask’s identity is thus both aesthetic and juridical. Levi-Strauss shows how the same motif can function differently across social settings: a cannibal figure on one coast may correspond, through systematic alteration, to a trickster elsewhere, yet each is positioned to solve local contradictions about marriage alliances, mourning, or resource use. Innovation by carvers is real, but it plays within the constraints of a shared combinatory, ensuring recognizability even as forms evolve.

Method and Significance

Dialogue with Franz Boas’s documentation and with museum collections allows Levi-Strauss to compare distant pieces and reconstruct lost sequences, countering the illusion, created by cabinets and vitrines, that each object stands alone. He resists simple diffusionist accounts that attribute similarity to contact alone, arguing instead for structural homologies: different groups solve analogous problems with parallel transformations of shared elements. The result is a demonstration that visual art is amenable to the same structural analysis as language and myth, and that meaning resides in relations and operations rather than in fixed essences.

The Way of the Masks thus offers a map of forms in motion. It shows how faces carved in cedar become operators in a calculus of difference, how performances enact conceptual moves, and how a regional art makes visible the logics by which societies balance exchange and identity, continuity and change.