The Gaze of the Nemboro Woven Masks

This post is part of the series "Nemboro. The Power of Fictions", where I explore how a set of so-called "nemboro" woven masks I encountered in Panama —marketed as ritual artifacts from the Embera Indigenous people— led me from enchantment to rupture, and from personal encounter to broader questions about metadata, ontology, and the ethics of classification. Each installment stands on its own, but together they trace a progression: from the seduction of objects to the recognition that even fictions —especially fictions— shape knowledge systems. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Hanging on a wall that they completely covered, three hundred faces woven from plant fibers watched me with their three hundred pairs of empty eyes. They formed a landscape of hollow, tawny, cream, mahogany, and ashy gazes — their rough threads tracing curves and straight lines, their ancestral designs evoking animal profiles...

I'd just arrived in Panama City (Panama), and one of my first strolls had taken me straight to the Old Town: a gridded colonial peninsula overlooking a bay that stretched toward the Pacific, nestled among islands and mangroves, within the tristes tropiques that Lévi-Strauss so well described in his renowned travel diary.

And in that corner of a small, humid, and intense city —hotter than the fifth pot of hell, as we say in Spanish— I found a curious place: a kind of store-gallery tucked along a narrow street. A street strung with colorful hats, suspended several meters above the ground by ropes stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk.

There, in that gallery, nemboro were sold. Nemboro: the by-now-famous "masks" made by the women of the Embera Indigenous people of Panama's Darién rainforest, woven from the fibers of the chunga palm, and always representing animals.

The gallery's owner told me that the Embera of Colombia made them too, as did their Wounaan neighbors, inhabitants of the Chocó department's lowlands. But I don't recall hearing about them during all my years living in Colombia. Here, however, the artisanal creations of the Panamanian Embera seemed to be very well known — for their designs, their details, and, above all, their meanings.

Nemboro, I was informed, are not actual masks. They are not merely meant to disguise their wearers or conceal their identity. At least, they are not only that. Their original name —which, I was told, translates as "head" in the Embera language— offers a clue to their deeper function. By wearing them on their faces, those who don them not only obscure their features but assume the nature of the being the nemboro represents.

And they literally become something else.

Hence, a "mask" of an eagle is not just a disguise: it transforms the person wearing it into that bird. And it does so to protect the life of the one behind the mask. Apparently, nemboro were originally used only by the jaibana —the "shamans" of the Embera people— during their healing ceremonies. Armed with sacred wooden staffs and entranced by hallucinogenic herbs, those healers battled against the evil spirits that dared to afflict the bodies and souls of their communities. And during those long rituals, they would place one or many nemboro "heads" over their faces. Transformed into something else —or into many consecutive beings— the jaibana were able to mislead and confuse their adversaries… and continue the fight.

Once their mission was accomplished, the nemboro used in those healing ceremonies were burned. Inevitably. No one wanted the defeated spirits, in a fit of vengeful rage, to seek out and find those false faces that had humiliated them.

Moreover, these objects were reportedly imbued with a particular energy after the ritual — an energy no one wished to harbor in their home. It would be like someone in our Western culture deciding to save the flowers used at a wake or funeral and display them in a vase as a centerpiece. Most would agree that such flowers should be discarded, as they carry a symbolic charge few would welcome in their daily lives.

Interestingly, nemboro are nowadays among the most coveted artisanal products in Panama, alongside the mola textiles made by the women of the Gunadule Indigenous people from the San Blas archipelago, on the eastern Caribbean coast.

It is within this commercial context that I had my first encounter with the Embera "masks" — there, in the Old Town of Panama City, on a January Sunday, taking refuge inside a shop to escape a noonday sun that scorched everything in its path.

That Sunday, I left the gallery carrying more than the weight of the tropical sun. The masks had followed me home in my thoughts, not only as objects of beauty but as possible carriers of meaning. Could they be read as documents, as texts in fibers and threads? The question lingered — and it would change the way I looked at them forever.