Terena (Brazil) Dance Feather Costume: an Experience in Reconstruction

Abstract (English)

The materials of the Second Russian expedition to South America (1914-1915) are still to be discovered in different institutions. The Manizer family owns several unpublished drawings by Heinrich H. Manizer. A black-and-white pencil sketch “Bananal” depicts a full-length standing man with a painted staff in his right hand. Parts of the costume corresponds to the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) RAS ethnographic items in the collection MAE № 2547 “Terena”, registered by Theodore A. Fjelstrup on March 23, 1916. The collection and the inventory, including a map of the peoples' residence, are digitalized. Heinrich Manizer and Theodore Fjelstrup visited the village of Bananal (Brazil) on October 27-28, 1914, but all their materials were lost in the waters of the river Paraguay. Fjelstrup revisited Bananal on November 12-19 and December 4-12, 1914, and added to the diary memories of his first visit to the Terena Indians. Manizer compiled a questionnaire for the Terena (Chané) language, now digitalized in the Russian Geographical Society Archives. Manizer’s explications in Russian and Terena languages elucidate the peculiarities of the sketch: what kind of materials are used to make the costume and the wig, what are the colors of feathers, what dyes the dancers’ body is covered with. Such a costume appears to be used in the Terena ceremonial male dance “Bate Pau” (Oberg 1946) in the early XXth century. Together with a complete Munduruku warriors’ feather costume (the MAE collection by Georg von Langsdorff, 1820es), the just identified MAE Terena festive feather costume (1910es) represents the traditional feather art of the indigenous peoples of Brazil. Modern media make it possible to assemble from different sources a full ethnographic set (objects, collection inventory, field diary, drawing, terminological vocabulary) and to reconstruct important phenomena of traditional cultures.