Each night from the veranda of the house where I was staying I would watch the girls performing the graceful and energetic yatuiye and yamayili dances … With their hair specially braided and adorned with snail‑shell toggles and wearing brightly coloured beaded headbands, groups of girls passed from house to house around the village, dancing, clapping, and singing that their girlhood days were almost over. The daylight hours too were crowded with activities. Visitors poured into the village … all while the neophytes continued to circulate around the village in the company of indefatigable drummers … Then women performers danced before us too. One was dressed in men's clothes with a wild fruit hung from a chord across her forehead. She imitated the maladroit dance movements of men, her face expressionless, while other women surrounded her, clapping, singing, and laughing. (Jackson 1989:124‑5)

quest for semantic truths also explained my inability to participate in the spirit of the performances and why I spent time asking people to tell me what was going on, what it all meant, as if the painted bodies and mimetic dances were only the insipid remnants of what had perhaps once been a symbolically coherent structure of myths and masks. (127)