SNOY

The first ethnographers, and possibly the first Westerners, to participate in a Kalasha Chaumos were the German anthropologists Adolf Friedrich and Peter Snoy, who spent a whole winter in the Bumburet valley as members of the German Hindukush Expedition of 1955-56.

The only eye witness account of the event is that provided by Snoy who in 1955, after undergoing the purification ritual, was allowed to remain at the shrine for the nocturnal ritual.

In this light we must equally reject Jettmar's further suggestion--formulated indeed in quite contradictory terms--that the Balimain complex may be a very recent development: a suggestion based on the circumstance that at the time of Friedrich's and Snoy's first visit in 1955-56, the cult of the visiting god appeared to be clad in secrecy and limited to a section only of the Kalasha population, while, at the time of Snoy's second visit in 1970, it turned out to be widely acknowledged (Jettmar 1975: 358-59).

In more reasonable terms, Snoy suggests that the cult may pertain to a more recent layer of Kalasha culture, associated with the cultivation of wheat, as opposed to an older layer, represented by the other rites of the Chaumos festival, associated instead with the cultivation of millet and beans (in Jettmar 1975: 394).

Snoy (2006) Die Deutsche Hindukusch Expedition (DHE) 1955-56.