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Paper short abstract

Why were children excluded during the ritual of the Piaroa Indians? Why did the Busó men harass women? How can we speak to children in an ethnographic museum? Two things are constant: the power of nature and the fear it evokes; the element that changes is our relationship to these two forces.

Paper long abstract

The masks still “work” today. At the center of our presentation is a museum education program that gives children space to reflect, express themselves, or to act out their opinions and feelings about the now-silent masks of a bygone era. In our dynamic, interactive presentation, we will introduce three masks from the vast collection of the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest—which holds over 250,000 objects—that are most closely tied to nature and most deeply embody human fears.

Please don’t be startled by the sound of the rattle! —we will also include folk nursery rhymes and live storytelling, so that the audience, too, can be immersed in the experience of fear. We then resolve this by presenting the secret ritual of the South American Piaroas, once performed only by men but now “known” to women as well; the Oceanic malagan funeral masks, which we would never have encountered if an ethnographer had not picked them up from the ground; and the Hungarian Busó folk tradition, which once included insulting women but today is recognized as part of UNESCO’s World Heritage. Through these examples, we examine the problem of colonisation, the re-evaluation of historical value systems, the documentation of a people on the verge of assimilation, and the afterlife of these practices and their impact on both children and adults.

What mask do we hide behind today?