mask, Eharo, dansmask

Dansmask. Eharo

Se baksidan.
Papua-terr.
Gäller även 36.32.5.
This is literally a "Dancing Head" (eh, dance: haro, head). The eharo appear prior to the Sevese Festival, in a series of dances. The eharo masks are often a totemic nature, with representations of birds, fish etc. They almost always dance in pairs. These examples area a pair of a Ma-Sevese i.e. water - or sea-Sevese, though they are not the Sevese proper. The Sevese are supernatural creatures thought mainly to reside in the sea. At the festival the tall masks (sometimes 20 ft. high) which have been made secretly in the men's house, descend and dance on the beach and in the village. The fiction is that they have come up by night from the sea to the men's house, where they wait for the festival. After the conclusion of the dancing they are burnt (out of sight of the uninitiated). but there is a subsequent ceremony under cover of darkness in which they are supposed to return to the sea.The Sevese masks proper are tall flat structures say 10 ft. high x 2 ft. broad, though some are much higher, worn upright, the body of the wearer bring conceald with a mantle of sago-leaf. The material is rough bark-cloth stretched on a frame of ratten cane. The patterns are outlined with thin strips of cane stitched on. The pigments are red ochre, charcoal and lime. The mantles are of dryed sago leaf.

Samling 1936.32.1-49 är enligt generalkatalogen: "36.32.1-44 gåva av E.Williams, Port Moresby Museum, Papua. 36.32.45-49. gåva av Hon. J.G. Nelson, Woodlark Island, Papua."

Se korrespondansen 1936 och 1937 under Nelson och Williams.

F.E. Williams var "government anthropologist" i Papua och skrev flera studier och rapporter över Papua och Nya Guinea. Två böcker berör samlingen 1936.32.1-49:

Anthropology. Report No. 5. The Natives of the Purari Delta. Port Moresby 1924.

Papuans of the Trans-Fly. Oxford at the Clarendon Press 1936.