Now and then, I think of Walter Wippersberg’s Das Fest des Huhnes (The Festival of the Chicken), a satirical film about a team of sub-Saharan anthropologists traveling to Upper Austria to study the strange rites of the native population. These whites who gather in big tents, drink large amounts of yellow liquid, and flap their arms like wings when dancing—so the anthropologists conclude—seem to worship a new idol: the chicken.
I recently revisited Wippersberg’s 1992 film when I stumbled upon a note referring to a young anthropologist from Burkina Faso named Marc Coulibaly. In the early 1990s, Coulibaly came across a postcard sent from Appenzellerland, the same hilly region at the foothills of the Swiss Alpstein where I spent the first eighteen years of my youth. The card showed a man masked with leaves, his costume strikingly similar to the ones worn by the Bwa in Coulibaly’s Burkinabé village of origin. Stunned by the idea that somewhere in Switzerland, people were performing similar rites as in rural Burkina Faso, the researcher decided to travel to the Appenzell Hinterland to see with his own eyes the strange but familiar costumes.
What Coulibaly had come across was a Silvesterchlaus: every New Year’s Eve (once on December 31, and again on January 13 at the insistence of those unwilling to let go of the Julian calendar), small groups of local men assemble in the area of Urnäsch, the village in which my mother, a butcher’s daughter, grew up. The men dress up in elaborate costumes that fall into three groups: the pretty ones—die Schöne—with painted wax faces, red-cheeked and red-lipped, carrying heavy bells and giant headdresses adorned with pearls and little mirrors, topped with meticulous dioramas depicting scenes of everyday life; the ugly ones—die Wüeschte—with monstrous faces, pig teeth, and bones, clothed in holly and pine, hair and bark; and die Schö-Wüeschte, which combine elements of the two. Wandering around, they stop in front of houses to sing slow, wordless songs and sound their bells by shaking their torsos and jumping up and down.
Regarding his fieldwork, his studies sur le terrain, Coulibaly wrote in 1998: “This type of new perspective, or inverted ethnography, proves that the West can in its turn be an object of study for us, observers who have come from the South.” Half a year later, six Chläus from Urnäsch accompanied by a local historian boarded a flight to Burkina Faso’s capital city Ouagadougou. Their luggage was peculiar: two large custom-made shipping crates holding a number of bells, costumes made of horsehair, straw and wood shavings, and papier-mâché masks with giant hollow eyes and bovine teeth. The men were young and had barely traveled before. They belonged to a group of Wüeschte. In Ouagadougou, they presented themselves at the Maison du Peuple where an exhibition curated by Coulibaly displayed the costumes of the Silvesterchläus alongside those of the Bwa, and in the following days, the Chläus traveled to the village of Paradé, where they met with the Bwa. They each performed their rituals for each other, and before the Swiss departed again, they were presented with a goat and some chicken as gifts. A student wrote in the guest book at Ouagadougou’s Maison du Peuple, “I’m very surprised that whites are wearing masks in Switzerland. Could they have tricked us?”
The African journey was paid for by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Coulibaly himself hoped for a cultural exchange that would renew the Bwa’s appreciation of their own customs, though he was well aware that the tradition of Silvesterchlausen wasn’t particularly old. Oft-repeated claims that locate its roots in pagan times have never been substantiated. The earliest sources mentioning a variant—all of them considering it “obscene”, “aggravating”, “a reprehensible means of collecting alms”—date back only to the seventeenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century and until after World War II, local authorities tried to prohibit or limit the activity of the Chläus; only in 1972 did Urnäsch lift the last restrictions. While die Schöne are likely to have originated in the middle of the nineteenth century, die Wüeschte didn’t exist in their present form until the 1950s, when a local teacher—with the help of anthropologists—tried to rehabilitate the lewd and unsightly Spasschläus (Fun Chläus) by creating a new kind of mask inspired by those worn around the same time of year in other parts of Switzerland and neighboring Austria.
As a teenager, when I was still living in the Appenzellerland only a few miles from Urnäsch, hitchhiking was often the only way to get home from the nearest city at night. In the darkness of those cars driving up winding roads, the same dialogue would recur. After some minutes of silence, the drivers—local men, farmers, sons of farmers—would ask a question that roughly translates to: “And what kind are you?” The answer could never be just your name. In 1980, the canton in which I spent my childhood had 13,000 inhabitants who shared just eighty last names; 933 families alone were registered as carrying the name “Manser.” With so few surnames, bynames were necessary to differentiate the many branches of these families. If you, the hitchhiker, had no such nickname, the lack of a moniker meant you had no clan, no land, and thus no past. The men would inquire no further and drive on in silence with you, the ghostly stranger in the passenger seat.
Since I have moved continents, I’ve enjoyed the fact that calling myself “European” seems to be a satisfactory answer to most questions regarding my origins. When I get pressed for specifics, I, who have always lacked a clan, sometimes resort to talking about the region’s characteristic peculiarities, its anachronisms. It’s a safe way to entertain and works well at every New York magazine party. Yes, women weren’t allowed to vote until the 1990s. Yes, men carry a rapier when they assemble to vote. Yes, the cheese, you’re right, it’s so good. (Oh really, they have it at Zabar’s?) Yes, my cousin married one of the Chläus. And yes, their bells are so heavy, and their hats are so high.
People take pleasure in these kinds of fun facts. Seen this way, the Silvesterchläus seem to be pure anomaly—curious remnants of a long-bygone era in an otherwise progressive country. But more than embodying a tradition, one could argue, they reflect a fairly recent and dubious longing for tradition. (A longing most evident in the Wüeschte, who might have been invented by anthropologists.) In the end, questions about the tradition’s true age or origins might not matter. Nobody who’s seen these men, wearing their odd hats like giant crowns and intonating their outlandish, admittedly beautiful yodel, will doubt that they are exactly what they purport to be. Just like people bopping around a tent with their elbows flapping like galliform birds are undeniably doing just that.