The Sherpa Dumji Masked Dance Festival

Introduction The anthropology of the Sherpas, the Dumji festival as held in a local community, and the project Every year, the Sherpas of the Lamaserwa clan flock together in Gonga Zhung. Solu Here they gather at the village temple to celebrate the Dumji, which is their main annual festival In particular, the Lamaserwa people come to see the public part of the solemn performance and its culmination, the spectacular masked dances, to generate merit, receive the blessing of 'long life, and indulge in a range of mundane entertainments.

In the local tradition of the Lamaserwa clan the Dumji's goal is achieved by the performance of an elaborately orchestrated sequence of ritual practices that are basically of wrathful character. The wrathful characters aim first at subjugating and destroying the enemies of the Buddhist doctrine, and then at expelling both the malignant forces that, having accumulated over the course of the preceding year, molest the community and the 'five different kinds of poisons or evil spirits which reside within the individual self. All these ritual activities are affected by the village lama who, in the process of tantric meditation, invokes and visualizes the tutelary deity associated with the Dumji festival, and who himself subsequently becomes this powerful deity. Thus, the Dumji celebration ensures with the deliberate destruction of the evil the renewal of the positive forces, which the well-being of the celebrating community is dependent upon.

Chr. von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909-1995), the pioneer of the anthropology of the Sherpas of Solu-Khumbu, provides the first short description of the Dumji festival as it was performed in the twin-villages of Khumjung/Khunde in the northern Khumbu. According to him this colourful festive event "...involves nearly every member of the village community and serves as an annual expression of the unity of all those who share one temple.

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