The False Faces of the Iroquois, William N. Fenton (University of Oklahoma: $75; 544 pp.).

European observers coming to New France during the 17th Century constantly compared the face-painting and masked shamanism of the American Indians to the more familiar antics of the jugglers and clowns who ran riot on Shrove Tuesday in provincial France. In this final work in a lifetime study of Iroquois culture and history, William N. Fenton finds no direct links between European and Indian culture--unless, he writes, “there is some universal culture pattern rooted in the human psyche.” But Europeans, if not European culture, did prove influential, for the “Society of Faces,” one of the central features of Iroquois life, evolved as a medicine rite in response to epidemics caused by introduced diseases for which the Iroquois had no immunity.

The masks soon came to express religious beliefs, representing a long tradition of relationships between human beings and supernaturals. The tradition traces back to myths that Iroquois hunters, when traveling in the forest, frequently met strange, quasi-human beings who darted from tree to tree and who often appeared to be disembodied heads with long, snapping hair. “These forest creatures,” Fenton writes, “agreed not to molest human beings, saying that they merely wanted Indian tobacco.” Though largely undocumented until Fenton’s work was first published in the early 1940s, the society is still alive today among traditionalist Iroquois of New York and Ontario.