« Unmask Our Viewers/Our Viewers Unmasked »
Face masks are well known cultural items within indigenous cultures in Canada and have been collected and displayed as museum items and research material. Such face masks are generally perceived among scholars as a technique for transforming identity either through modification of the representation or as a temporary extinction of identity. For several years Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) used such masks in an advertisement contest to address stereotypes of aboriginal people in Canada and to educate the Canadian television industry about its viewers. The « Unmask Our Viewers/Our Viewers Unmasked » contest was specifically targeted and designed to inform and educate the media community, or more specifically advertising agents, about APTN’s audiences. This paper aims to show how the contest served a function that anthropologist Arjun Appadurai termed « deep democracy ». The practices of deep democracy endeavor to introduce or revive democratic principles in a way that « suggests roots, anchors, intimacy, proximity, and locality ». Such practices and their organization, like APTN, are considered an extension of aboriginal peoples’ cultures.