The Fiction and the Void

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.

In the last post, I imagined the Embera masks as multisensory documents, full of possible metadata: textures, smells, ritual codes, cultural annotations. That speculative exercise was exhilarating — but speculation alone wasn't enough. I wanted evidence. So, after pondering all of the knowledge-related possibilities, I brought the mask home. And, being who I am, I began to search.

I looked for the word nemboro in Embera dictionaries, linguistic corpora, and ethnographic records. I consulted old anthropological sources on the Embera and Wounaan: Nordenskjöld, Wassen, Reichel-Dolmatoff… I traced references to Chocoan material culture, ritual implements, and shamanic paraphernalia — from Stout's chapter in the Handbook of South American Indians to the foundational work of the Panamanian Reina Torres de Araúz. I combed through handicraft inventories and regional reports up to 2010.

And I found nothing.

Nothing. No mention of nemboro, or of "masks" whatsoever. No references to ceremonial face coverings. No documentation of ritual burning of palm-fiber heads. No visual record. No ontological precedent. The closest linguistic trace to the entire story might have been the expression nem(e) boro — "animal's head," according to Holmer's dictionary.

All the rest was silence — and not the sacred kind, but the archival kind. The kind born not of erasure, but of invention.

Then, slowly, another kind of evidence surfaced. Design blogs. Tourism brochures. Ethical décor boutiques.

On the website of Ethic & Tropic —an artisan platform aimed at "conscious consumers"— the word nemboro appeared prominently. I dug deeper. And in Madame Figaro, a French lifestyle magazine, I found a lead: a 2022 article celebrating the "extraordinary adventure" of these so-called shamanic masks, allegedly "revived" by a French interior designer for high-end home décor.

There it was. The full story — or the full fiction. A reinvention of traditional Indigenous basketry techniques, first adapted in the 1960s and 70s for the souvenir market, rebranded in the 80s and 90s for export, and now transformed again for global ethical consumption.

The narrative was beautiful, seductive. It spoke of spirits guiding a European woman into the Darién, of ancestral rituals, of techniques on the verge of disappearance now "saved" through design markets. It might even be that some Embera artisans echoed those ritual claims when speaking with outsiders — not as deception, but as a way to meet demand, to supply the ritual authenticity that buyers were already expecting. Yet whether invented in Europe, offered in the Darién, or co-constructed between them, what mattered was the desire that drove the story forward.

And that desire was not grounded in Embera ceremonial life. It was not attested in linguistic or ethnographic memory. Not claimed, as far as I could tell, by any jaibana.

So what, then, was hanging from the wall of my apartment, looking at me with its empty eyes? Who authored it — and who profited from it?

Was this part of an internal process, as described by Theodossopoulos, in which Indigenous groups in the Tropics rearticulate identity under the pressures of cultural tourism? Was it a myth of resilience? A tactical fiction? A mirror held up to the expectations of outsiders?

Or was it simply another act of symbolic dispossession — another archive built on absence?

And more importantly: what did it mean when librarians, archivists, and researchers catalogued such objects without questioning their provenance — as I did? What were we preserving? What were we legitimizing? What kind of knowledge system were we extending, when we "listened" to a document scripted by someone else's desire?

(In that moment, I realized that librarianship is not only a descriptive apparatus — it is a desiring machine as well. It classifies not only what exists, but what it hopes exists. And I remembered that classification and documentation systems are never neutral. They easily absorb invented stories when shaped by aesthetic desire, market logic, or colonial expectations.)

Even if many of my reflections on the "masks" —semantic, classificatory, conceptual— remained valid in the abstract —and even more interesting and challenging regarding this "invention"—, mine was not a minor misstep. For me, it felt like an epistemic rupture. A fracture in the ethical scaffold of documentation.

And from there, there was no neutral position.

That silence, and the seductive fictions that filled it, forced me to confront my own profession. What happens when libraries and archives absorb inventions as if they were truths? What kind of systems are we sustaining when we classify desires rather than realities? These questions led me into a deeper reckoning — with librarianship itself.