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The standard social science models—especially as taken up by the humanities—have had trouble allowing both for cross-cultural communication and for diversity and individual agency within culturally defined regions. Peggy Phelan once remarked that performance “exists as a negotiation between biology and culture.”1 As a theatre director and teacher by training and trade with research interests in Asia and Latin America, I have found that attention to some of the concerns and findings of cognitive neuroscience can provide a reality check on the rhetoric of the emergent field of performance studies, with its vital links to anthropology and cultural studies. What is the role and what are the limits of “culture” in neural processing? And how are these germane to performance? Gerald Edelman has shown how central categorical constructions are to the workings of our ever-shifting neural networks; surely, the relative strength of taboos and the strength of binaries used in categorical construction vary from place to place and time to time.2 Bradd Shore has argued for a reassessment of the ways in which “cultural models” embodied in cognitive patterns encourage “a significant overlap [among individuals] within a community as to how novel experiences will be reconstituted as memory,” with nurture becoming nature.3 Granting this as a possibility, I propose to tease out some of the limitations and functions of cultural constructs while considering a phenomenon that seems to transcend culture: the “archetype” of the demonic face and its mirror opposite, the apotropaic (protective) face, as encountered in masks and mask-like images around the world. In place after place and time after time, masks and sculpted faces have been deployed that feature bulging eyes, full lips, flared nostrils, bared fangs, and, frequently, distended tongues. The Gorgoneion of Greece, Rangda and Bhoma of Bali, Kirtimukha of South and Southeast Asia, Shakti figures of India, enraged

Minding Bodies: Demons, Masks, Archetypes, and the Limits of Culture