ABSTRACT
Long the territory of literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists, the study of “carnival” is gaining visibility in cultural sociology because of the analytic purchase it yields on questions of aesthetics, performance, and power. This essay begins by contextualizing carnival historically and describing carnival’s two best-known manifestations, Brazilian carnelevare and North American Mardi Gras. I then elaborate on the concept of carnival culture by discussing its commodification and commercialization, from New Orleans’s yearly festivities to shock music scenes. To plumb the conceptual depth of carnival, the body of the essay is divided into three parts, each of which integrates important recent scholarship on a distinct topic. The first (pp. 203-205) probes how carnival is traditionally understood as an instance of “liminality” that in these terms offers participants both a “second life” and a “second voice.” The next part (pp. 205-207) elaborates on a debate that crosses nearly all carnival studies: whether carnival’s “second life” fulfills positive or negative functions, and whether carnival reinforces or challenges oppressive features of the everyday status quo. The third part (pp. 207-208) delves into the more esoteric terrain where carnival and postmodernism meet and concludes with a discussion of how the supposed implosion of meaning-and therefore the absence of “safety valves”—in postmodern society gives way to a no-exit “Clockwork Orange” dispersion of carnival in haphazard and violent forms. The essay concludes by considering future directions for carnival culture studies. Carnelevare (meaning literally “to lift up” or to say “farewell to the flesh”) is a pre-
Lenten meat-eating feast, dating back to about 965 CE (Kinser 1990). The years 1000 to 1300, the Christian middle ages, known as the “cradle of carnival,” were followed between the 1300s and 1500s by carnival’s fullest European development. There was subsequent diffusion through colonization. One of the world’s most famous carnivals, Carnevale, originated in Brazil in 1641. It is held in late February or early March, four days before Ash Wednesday, in Rio de Janeiro and Sa˘o Paulo, as well as other cities such as Salvador, Porto Seguro, and Recife. Highlights today include over 100 blocos (block parades) around Rio and the lavish, high-profile competition between “sambo schools” that lasts the entire four nights of the festivities at the Sambodromo open stage. Both McGowan and Pessanha (1998) and Peronne and Crook (1997) provide historically
contextualized and vivid ethnographic vignettes describing people dancing and singing in the streets, in dance halls and clubs, and on beaches amidst an air of extroversion, sensuality, and frivolity (see also Peronne and Dunn 2002). These accounts convey carnival’s roots in pre-Christian Greek and Roman celebrations and carnival’s arrival in Brazil as a “chaotic Portuguese entrudo, in which celebrants would go to the streets and throw mud, dirt, water, flour balls, and suspect liquids at one another, often triggering violent riots” (McGowan and Pessanha 1998: 36). The most widely known contemporary rendition of carnival in the United States
is Mardi Gras, a yearly public festival held in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, with tracings to Caribbean roots (not French roots, as commonly supposed). This pre-Lenten Gulf Coast celebration lasts from ten days to two weeks and is held before Ash Wednesday (the number of days depends on the date of Easter). Like Carnevale, Mardi Gras involves the grandeur of street masking, costuming, dancing, drinking, feasting, chanting, and cheering amid elaborate floats, bead tossing, and parade stripping. An air of sensuality and freedom from sexual repression takes hold, and it is common to see bodies barely covered with paint, stripes, glitter, or feathers. The festivities climax (no pun intended) on Fat Tuesday with two parades, one at midday featuring the pseudo-monarchs and one in the early evening showcasing the two oldest secret societies-Mobile’s Order of the Mystics in Mobile and New Orleans’s Krewe of Comus.
