When I worked for Paul Allen Group in Bellevue Washington / NFL team owner / NBA team owner... there was the business card / job identity mask / brand / identity in Seattle.
Even when it is a non-famous person, go to strip clubs and study how men behave. Look at the men around you and how they react to cosmetics / clothing / mask of the women working their hardest to draw attention and earn money. The effort in cosmetics. Study the post-Woodstock liberation 1970's acts / 1980's / 1990's / before the Internet could do images and live video easily. (1971 was a post-woodstock year to study in USA https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/28/fact-check-9-things-women-couldnt-do-1971-mostly-right/3677101001/ )
Lecture I.1.2 - The Individual in Oriental Mythology
By Joseph Campbell (Sarah Lawrence College for women)
Date: February 20, 1961
TRACK 2: Individual Identity in the Occident and Orient
To make myself clear, let me pause for a minute to say a few words about what seems to me to be the Western idea of the individual. I will take a few rather well known examples to illustrate the fact.
Carl Jung in his work speaks of the integration of the personality, and uses the word “individuation” rather frequently. And to make clear what he means, he points out that each one of us is, by his society, invited to play a certain role, a certain social role in order to function. We play roles. These roles he calls personae, from the Latin word for the mask worn by an actor.
We all have to put on a mask of some sort in order to function in the society. And even those who choose not to function in the society—to revolt from the society—put on masks too. They wear certain insignia, you might say, that indicate, I am in revolt.
One can be impressed by a persona, by a mask. For example, if one meets a person and is talking to him and thinks one is beginning to establish some kind of rapport, and then learns, let us say, that this is the distinguished ambassador from such and such a place, the mask comes in front of that person and a certain awe in your relationship to him, and this person becomes what Jung calls a mana personality — a personality with magical powers — so that you are not talking directly to him.
In order to be individuated, in order to be an individual, we must distinguish between ourselves and the mask that we wear. Now this mask goes very deep; it includes moral ideas, it includes judgment systems. These archetypes for action have been impressed upon us by our society.
Now I take Jung’s idea of the individuation as a rather clean-cut example of an Occidental ideal: that one should put on the mask and take it off. When you come home in the evening are you still Mr. President, or do you leave that in the office? If you keep your mask on, you know what we say of such a person: he is a stuffed shirt. The personality gradually disappears, and this is a particular disaster if one becomes impressed by one’s own mask. Here we have a real mirage phenomenon: nobody there.
Now let me say that the typical ideal in the Orient is that one should become identified with the mask. The whole pattern of education throughout the Orient is Believe what you’re told, do what you’re told, do not ask questions. For an Occidental teaching Oriental students, it is absolutely bewildering—the submissiveness. For an Oriental teaching Occidental students, the challenges are shocking. There is no respect for the professor qua professor.
TRACK 3: Are You Your Body?
Now in the wonderful Inferno of Dante, as he wandered through these hell pits, he recognized all of his friends there as we should recognize ours if we went. And proceeding through Purgatory, and even to Heaven, he knew who those people were. Their personalities—their individual personalities—were preserved, even in the afterworld. The personality here is a permanent part of a permanent entity. You are born once, you live once—you are that. There is an identification with the body. In the Greek world, when the heroes go to the underworld, again they recognize their friends. However, in the Oriental hells and heavens, whether of the Buddhist or the Hindu or the Jain type, you do not recognize anybody. They are not the same person they were on Earth.
Now, let me make a point. The hero in Europe—in the Greek tragedy, in Dante’s Commedia, in Jung’s idea of the individual—is this individual, this temporal being here now. In the Farther East of India and China and Japan, the hero is—and I’ll use the crucial word—the reincarnating monad: that entity which goes through bodies, puts them on and puts them off as clothes.
This is a continuing theme in the Orient, in the farther Orient. You are not this body, you are not this ego. You are to think of this as merely something put on to be thrown away again. A fundamental distinction here between our European concept of the individual, and that of, let us say, India and the Far East—the reincarnating principle makes quite unimportant this particular temporal phenomenon that we now are. There is an expansion of the ego concept, or an annihilation of it, so that it is not identified with this temporal phenomenon here now, but with the reincarnating principle. Now the differences from belief to belief, which I am going to try to describe, have to do with the identification of the monad. What is it that reincarnates?
Where Hindu / Buddha and Levant Quran are part of the education of a school teacher.
“We felt like the Taliban saw us as like little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He would not have made us all different.” ― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. October 8, 2013
"Fashion, the rich man's foible, distracts him from distraction by distraction. Fashion is, as it were, the poor man's art, the usually unbought grace of life which he participates in only as a spectator. In sen- sory terms fashion has a kind of libility infal-about it. As with hit tunes and hit pictures and hit entertainments, fashion rushes in to fill the vacuum in our senses created by technological displacements. Perhaps that is why it seems to be the expression of such a colossal preference while it lasts. James Joyce gives it a key role in Finnegans Wake in his section on the Prankquean. The Prankquean is the very expression of war and aggression. In her life, clothing is weaponry: "I'm the queen of the castle and you're the dirty rascal." In the very opening line of Fin- negans Wake — "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..."— Joyce thus indicates the re- versal of nature that has taken place since the fall of man. It is not the world of Adam and Eve, but one in which there is priority Eve over Adam. Clothing as weaponry had become a primary social factor. Cloth- ing is anti-environmental, but it also of creates a new environment. It is also anti- the elements and anti-enemies and anti- competitors and anti-boredom. As an adjustment to the world, it is mainly an adjustment to a world that has been made by fashions themselves and consists of imitations of older dress. As Lowenstein explained in his passage on sight as a quite arbitrary adjustment to a man-made world, fashion also has a kind of inevita- bility of sensory response to a man-made world.
In a tribal or oral world there are no fashions in the sense of changing designs and fabrics. All clothing and all technol- ogy is a part of a ritual that is desperately sought to be kept stabilized and perma- nent. An oral or tribal society has the means of stability far beyond anything possible to a visual or civilized and frag- mented world."
1968 book "War and Peace in the Global Village"
Page 21 onward
Marshall McLuhnan
University of Toronto
https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_in_the_Global_Village