The Semiotics of Igbo Masquerade Performance: Language, Symbol, and Social Reproduction in Contemporary Practice

This dissertation conducts a semiotic investigation of Igbo masquerade performance as a complex multimodal communicative system, examining how verbal language, costume symbolism, musical structures, dance movement, and spatial organisation function as an integrated sign system that reproduces social order, mediates spiritual communications, and encodes cultural memory in contemporary Igbo communities. Masquerade scholarship in Igbo studies has historically privileged anthropological and historical approaches, leaving the specific semiotic architecture of masquerade as a communicative system theoretically underdeveloped. The study conducts fieldwork across twelve masquerade events in four geopolitical zones of Igboland over a twenty-two-month period, building a multimodal corpus of audio-visual recordings, transcribed masquerade speech and song, costume inventory documentation, and spatial mapping data. Peircean semiotics, multimodality theory, and African performance theory are integrated as the analytical framework. Findings reveal a hierarchically organised semiotic system in which verbal language occupies the indexical apex, functioning as the primary anchor through which other semiotic modalities derive their contextual meaning. Masquerade verbal genres including proclamatory speech, riddle-contests, curse formulas, and praise songs demonstrate distinct sign-function profiles that correspond to differentiated social reproduction functions. The study identifies a systematic transformation of masquerade semiotic content in contemporary urban adaptations, with spiritual indexicality being progressively replaced by entertainment and identity symbolism. Keywords: Igbo masquerade, semiotics, performance, multimodality, cultural reproduction.