Even Fictions Have Power

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 previous post, I argued that documentation is never neutral: to catalog is to intervene, to classify is to enshrine. That realization marked a rupture in my practice. But rupture alone is not enough.

The fiction was not real — but the gaze was.

It was mine: curious, attentive, trained to decode documents, and seduced by the possibility of holding something ancient, charged, and meaningful. That gaze built a scaffold of interpretation around a palm-fiber object. And that scaffold held — until it didn't.

But the gaze did not disappear. It changed.

It now knows to pause before it classifies. To ask about authorship before assigning authority. To recognize the power of metadata not only to describe, but to invent — and to erase.

The librarian, too, remains. Still committed to the ethics of description, still believing that documents can teach. But now committed, above all, to asking: Whose story is this? And who has the right to tell it?

The mask still hangs on my wall. It is not a ritual artifact. But it is still a document. One that now holds multiple layers of interpretation, interruption, conflict, interest, myth, exoticism, and rupture.

This was never just a story about a mask. It is a case in metadata epistemology — of how librarianship may participate in the construction of cultural meaning, of how we may be complicit in the ontologies we describe, and of what it might mean to build descriptive systems that can hold contradiction, rupture, and doubt. It is the story of what we make visible —and what we make true— when we choose to describe.

This is the gaze that remains: wounded, sharpened, accountable.

Post-script

Before publishing this piece, I shared it with a colleague who has worked closely with Embera communities for over three decades. She confirmed what my own research had begun to suggest: "Yep, the masks were a suggestion by some development consultants so that Embera could diversify from plates (which they excelled at, while Wounaan excel at the fine baskets). I would say that was in 2005-2010, but I am not entirely sure of the year."

Her memory does not claim archival certainty — but it aligns with the broader patterns described in this series, where external imaginaries and market pressures shape Indigenous production. The masks, in other words, were not the continuation of a ritual tradition but a diversification strategy, born at the intersection of community needs and outsider expectations.

I also confirmed that the "masks" are simply an application of techniques the Embera had long used in basketry. The European company that later branded them as "unique" ritual items offers products easily found on the streets of Panama City for a fraction of the price — something I discovered while assembling my own personal collection and, in the process, supporting several Embera artisan women directly.

It seems likely that this same company amplified, and perhaps codified, the ritual mythology surrounding the nemboro — crafting a fiction to boost their market appeal. Yet whether that fiction originated in development initiatives, in strategic local storytelling, or in European marketing, what matters is how quickly it took on the weight of truth.

This series has traced a path from enchantment to rupture, from object to ontology. What remains is a practice of librarianship that can hold uncertainty as carefully as it holds fact — one that recognizes that even fictions have ontology and metadata power.