Mascherate invernali e riti stagionali: un percorso comparativo tra America ed Europa

Among the Iroquois and the Northwest Coast people, as well as in other tribes – Winter and the interruption of hunt, food gathering and agricultural practices was the occasion for a kind of temporary interval in the cosmic order. This would allow for a temporary outbreak of disorder among mankind, as barriers among different realities seemed to fall apart. The living and the dead would then be in contact, and the distinctions between man and animals, village and woods, reason and folly seemed almost to disappear. This change was expressed through the irruption in villages of masked figures which represented the presence of the non humans. In Europe the Carnival period – which goes well beyond the week before Lent and Mardi Gras into which the Catholic Church has long tried to confine it – practically coincided with the ceremonial period of the indigenous peoples of North America. It also represented a suspension of order through parades of masked people incarnating hybrid representations of disorder revealing surprising analogies with Amerindian ceremonies.