ABSTRACT
This chapter provides context by tracing the origins and spread of Carnival, a festival with pre-Christian roots, from Catholic Europe to North America. It analyzes the reconfigurations of Carnival that have arisen through multifarious role of such festivals in US-American urban life as new agendas. The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin locates somewhat different interpretations in the detailed, if scatological descriptions of Renaissance carnivals found in the writings of the sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais. In James Twitchell's Carnival Culture, for instance, 'carnival' is treated as an analogy for the operations of the media, notably publishing, motion pictures, and television, through which images are shown and for the industries that transport these images, audience that makes up the traffic, and the critics who comment on the process. The notion that Carnival symbolism and ritual might be held up as constituting a 'royal road' to developing an understanding of cultural 'deep structure' is shared by a variety of anthropological and historical writer.
