Me and my Avatar: acquiring actorial identity

Masks have become a ubiquitous feature of political protest, but they drew widespread media attention in November 2015 when some individuals attending a masked protest in London refused to give police their names. The police initially brought criminal charges, but these were subsequently dropped as they were apparently unable to identify the legal persons involved (Greenwood and Hughes, 2015; Allen and Ledwith, 2015). This is but one instance of what Pilcher (2015) refers to as the ‘nameless body identity problem’ and well illustrates how there can be a separation between the physical body of a man or woman and that individual’s representation, the legal person. This incident, at a masked demonstration, is not without irony in that the origin of the word ‘persons’ derives from masks; specifically, those worn by actors in ancient Greek and Roman theatre. Adopted into legal practice, the word persona originally referenced artificial beings, and a man’s rank or status; not the man himself, but ‘ ... the state of the man [sic], the part he plays in society, abstractly, without considering the individual.’ (Andrews, 1910 p.157, 159160).