Public Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque
312
Public Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque
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Overview
Contributors consider how public genres of performance express not only celebration but also dissent, grief, and remembrance; examine the permeability of the boundaries between genres; and analyze the approval or regulation of such events by municipalities and other institutions. Where the particular use of public space is not sanctioned or where that use meets with hostility from institutions or represents a critique of them, performers are effectively reclaiming public space to make public statements on their own terms—an act of popular sovereignty.
Through these concepts, Public Performances distinguishes the sometimes overlapping dimensions of public symbolic display. Carnival, and thus the carnivalesque, is understood to possess tacit social permission for unconventional or even deviant performance, on the grounds that normal social order will resume when the performance concludes. Ritual, and the ritualesque, leverages a deeper symbolic sensibility, one believed—or at least intended—by the participants to effect transformative, longer-term change.
Contributors: Roger D. Abrahams, John Borgonovo, Laurent Sébastien Fournier, Lisa Gilman, Barbara Graham, David Harnish, Samuel Kinser, Scott Magelssen, Elena Martinez, Pamela Moro, Beverly J. Stoeltje, Daniel Wojcik, Dorothy L. Zinn
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781646426249 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2024 |
| Series: | Ritual, Festival, and Celebration |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
From Carnivalesque to Ritualesque
Public Ritual and the Theater of the Street
Jack Santino
Ritual, festival, celebration, carnival, holiday, public display event — these terms and others are used to refer to a variety of public performances. Often the terms overlap. Sometimes they are used interchangeably. In part, this is due to the porous, shifting nature of the events themselves, heavily dependent on context and intended purpose. It is the intention of this essay to examine public performances in order to tease out shared qualities and to set forth ways of apprehending these events in a way that allows us to more fully grasp their purposeful meanings and to articulate ways that they differ. By approaching performance events as carnivalesque and ritualesque, we are able to understand the multiple modes of communication; the simultaneity of joy and anger, of politics and fun; and how "fun" in some contexts equals protest.
Carnival, strictly speaking, refers to the pre-Lenten festival that represents an opportunity for sensual abandon in advance of the deprivations of the forty-day period of Lent. This festive occasion is known in several guises and in fact sometimes occurs outside of reference to the Western Christian church calendar: for instance, Fastnacht is celebrated in some Protestant areas after Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent (Tokofsky 2004); and as European colonizers and settlers brought the tradition with them to the New World, it became heavily synthesized with African masquerade traditions, resulting in a New World Afro- Caribbean and South American carnival complex. As West Indian populations in turn migrated to North America and Europe, Trinidadian- style carnival is often celebrated in summer in these new locations (Allen 1999). No longer tied to a Christian calendar and heavily Africanized, these Trinidad- and Rio-styled performances are being taken up in Europe. In any case, however, carnival refers to celebrations of great abandon, social inversion, public excess, sensuality, and the temporary establishment of an alternate society, one free of or even in opposition to the norm.
Ritual, conversely, in its true sense of "sacred ceremony," is about constructing and reinforcing social categories, even if those categories represent a minority position or a marginalized group. Rites of passage are the means by which individuals and groups transition from one category to another. The categories in question are usually culturally constructed, for example, "husband," "wife," "president," and so on. Even those rites associated with physical and biological realities, such as birth, puberty, or death, are contained deeply within webs of cultural meaning, having to do with perceptions of an afterlife, the presence or absence of beliefs concerning the world of the supernatural, and the nature of the universe. Death, it would seem, is death. But is there a concept of the soul? If so, when does it take leave of the body? In Roman Catholic ritual, a person's soul requires the rituals of the church to usher it into the other world, possibly as late as three days after the physical death. Even something as apparently objective as the onset of puberty is seen to vary across cultures. Thus, ritual constructs and validates the very categories it deals in.
Because it is the way society validates its fundamental categories, ritual is the means for creating and reinforcing power structures, as presidential inaugurations, the installation of queens, or a commencement exercise demonstrate. Ritual is symbolic in nature but felt to be very real by those who are engaged with it; thus, among the transformations that ritual accomplishes, it is a means by which social categories are made real. Ritual actions are thought to have real power; ritual is instrumental, not expressive. As John MacAloon would say, that which occurs in ritual is thought to be real and to partake of unquestionable truths (MacAloon 1984; see alsoRappaport 1999). Ritual, then, is instrumental symbolic behavior. The transformations accomplished by ritual are essentially permanent.
Carnival, by contrast, remains expressive rather than instrumental. It is a temporary period. The understanding is that after the world is turned upside down, it will be turned right side up again. Carnival very often features parody and social critique, but the carnival frame remains expressive. Again following MacAloon, the carnival frame says: "Everything that happens here is fun and temporary, without lasting effect."
However, these terms — carnival and ritual — are idealized constructions. Carnival often leads to riot, as seen from sixteenth-century Rome to 1970s Notting Hill in London. (LeRoy Ladurie 1979;Cohen 1993). Moreover, festive celebrations often serve as rites of season, and a great many sacred ceremonies the world over are very merry and inversive. Finally, a great many events, such as Jonkonnu or the medieval Feast of Fools, fall outside of the Lent-Easter calendrical restrictions, yet seem to be carnivals in their own right.
Mikhail Bakhtin's work on the "carnivalesque" has allowed us to move beyond generic essentialism to understand elements or dimensions of public events as sharing certain characteristics (1984). We identify the carnivalesque in Pride Day celebrations, in spontaneous street celebrations following sports victories, or in protest rallies.
The distinction between ritual and festival (carnival has been called the festival par excellence; Falassi 2004, 71), then, is blurred and porous. Sometimes an event is distinctly one or the other. Often it is a little bit of both. This problematic is due at least in part to the shared use of standardized symbolic frames (certain ways of marking time or space), kinesics (parades, dances, house visitations), sound (noise, rough music, song, chants), and so on. However, we can develop a way of viewing symbolic public events as partaking more or less in the carnivalesque and/or the ritualesque. Thus, we can get past the absolutism and essentialism of assuming or assigning a single type of communication according to genre: for example, if it is ritual (understood as such by the participants), it is sacred; therefore, it is perceived as sacred by the participants in all its aspects (see MacAloon 1984). Most events will have elements of the ritualesque along with the carnivalesque, and the latter does not negate the former. The two are not antithetical, and the genre frames are multivocal. In the ongoing spontaneity of real-time enactments, public performances can signify many things at once.
Yet another important consideration when examining symbolic public events is the question of instrumentality versus expressivity. Ritual can be said to be public symbolic action that is thought to be instrumental — it is done primarily to make something happen. Transformation and transcendence are typically associated with ritual; rituals rely on some sense of transcendent authority in order to accomplish the change, whether that is a rite of passage of the life cycle, a religious service, a healing ceremony, or a commencement exercise. The "ritualesque" refers to those aspects of a symbolic event that are meant to lead to extra- ceremonial change, or transformation. Events such as Halloween celebrations or carnivals are clearly expressive and festive, but will also have ritualesque elements of social critique and political parody. Other events, such as the Parisian manifestations, are primarily intended to bring about social change, and yet they contain carnivalesque elements of costume, music, and inversion. As ritual transformations are meant to continue after the ritual is completed, ritualesque actions are those that are intended to have a permanent effect on society. Ritualesque events aim for change beyond the "time out of time" of the event itself. This ritualesque dimension is not in opposition to the carnivalesque; indeed, it is often with carnivalesque events (such as Pride Day) that the ritualesque is constructed.
We need this concept of the ritualesque to sharpen our understanding of public festivity. When the Halloween masquerade is over, the rules and norms of everyday life are expected by most to resume. But when Earth Day or Pride Day or a Take Back the Night march is over, participants hope they have made a difference in that everyday world.
MATERIAL CULTURE
A through-line in public display events and/or street theater at the folk and popular levels of organization is the claiming of public space by people not in any official way authorized to do so. When one erects a cross on the highway to commemorate a fatality, this is a popular usage — that is, something done by "the people." I am not referring here to official memorials, but rather the self-motivated, self-generated shrines that emerged as a ritual of mourning violent, untimely death in the latter decades of the twentieth century. If such a shrine is created at the entrance to a fast food restaurant or a commercial shopping center, the proprietors might fear that the shrine will discourage customers. Likewise, local and state governments wrestle with the increase in roadside shrines and memorials, some banning them outright, others turning a blind eye, and still others trying to accommodate them in some way (Everett 2002). Here, issues of traffic safety are said to be paramount.
We see in these examples uses of public space (or, if privately owned, space that is publicly accessed and used repeatedly by members of the public) in ways that the owners or the proprietary officials have not sanctioned. In short, people reclaim public space in order to use it symbolically and ritualistically, to make public statements in their own terms. Very often the space is not neutral; it may have important cultural associations of it own (for example, the use of the Place de la Bastille in Paris as a staging site for les manifestations), or it may have been rendered numinous, powerful, and sacred by more recent events that have occurred there, such as is the case of the Charlie Hebdo offices.
An interesting example of this contestation of public space can be seen in the padlock phenomenon that appears to be sweeping the world (I first encountered it in Kemerovo, Siberia). Paris has become noted for the padlocks along the Pont des Arts over the Seine, in front of the Louvre. The custom is for couples to place a lock, often inscribed with their names, on the bridge, then toss the key into the river. The lock represents a permanent relationship. When I first saw these in 2010, on the Pont des Arts and also the nearby Pont Echevren, there were frequent official announcements that the locks must be taken down. Supposedly, city officials did in fact cut locks off the bridges on several occasions. By 2014, however, not only had the custom continued to grow in popularity, the number of locks was now voluminous. Locks were attached to other locks, several inches thick. In February 2015, a panel on the Pont des Arts collapsed from the weight and was removed. Finally, in June 2015, the City of Paris removed all the padlocks from the Pont des Arts, though not from the Pont Echevren, saying that the weight of them threatened the structural integrity of the bridge.
Figure 1.2. Padlocks on the Pont Echevrin behind Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris As in the case of roadside crosses, the rationale of safety very well may be the immediate impetus for the removal of the padlocks. But as I stated, they had been viewed as problematic by city officials long before they reached the point of danger to the bridge. I see here again a popular custom — that is, an emergent tradition of everyday people, in which public space is claimed as available for unofficial actions and communications and for uses unintended by the officials. And here again, this is met with resistance from the authorities, who eventually suppress the activity and reinforce their own control.
The padlocks are most often found at liminal spaces, such as bridges or other places overlooking a body of water. Very often it would appear that the view available, suitably romantic, is the significant factor in the choice of location. In Paris, for example, on a bridge near Notre Dame, only the side facing the cathedral is covered with the padlocks.
The padlocks are also interesting because they differ from many other forms of public display activities that also involve people personally but anonymously leaving signs of their participation, their presence. I am reminded of rag trees and rag wells in Ireland, Scotland, and other places; the spontaneous shrines mentioned above; cairns of stones in Jewish death traditions, and so on. In these cases, the rituals and symbols address serious problems — death and sickness (rag trees and rag wells are primarily sites of healing). The locks reference love. In all instances, however, we see the materialization of hope and the theatricalization of intention (as ritual). As with most votive offerings, the action represents a desired future condition. The objects bear witness to actions intended to influence the future. The padlocks suggest the intention and the hope for permanence, and in that sense they are positive, not negative. They are a form of true popular culture — not popular culture as created by the corporate-owned and corporate-controlled mass media. They are actions and customs initiated and understood by everyday people — and as such, are viewed suspiciously by authorities.
CARNIVALS OF GRIEF
Spontaneous shrines, which have become an international phenomenon, represent the development of a mourning practice from folk precedents. Decorative gravesite elaboration is well known and ancient in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Most likely Catholic Spanish colonizers, soldiers, and priests brought with them to the New World the custom of marking deaths that occurred on the roads with crosses. The custom has flourished in the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America among peoples of Spanish, Anglo, and Native ancestries ever since. Roadside crosses, or other items such as flowers and messages, have become an all-too- common sight on the highways of the United States.
It was perhaps with the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, that people began to evolve the custom to contexts beyond road fatalities. While no one either died or is buried at this site, the monument is not unlike a massive gravestone — slabs of granite inscribed with the names of the deceased. Its design was groundbreaking for war memorials, among other reasons because it lists the name of every person killed, in chronological order. Conventions of military hierarchy were not primary concerns. Also, many of the deceased were lost in battle, their bodies never recovered. For whatever reasons, the memorial has become a site of personal grieving, as individuals leave tokens of significance to them and to the deceased at the wall (see Haas 1998).
As in the case of highway memorials, this type of ritual is different from the grieving traditions engaged in by families and friends at home or in churches, mosques, synagogues, and other sacred places; these are acts that are simultaneously public and personal; anyone visiting the National Mall or driving on an interstate highway may see and comprehend the assemblages that have been created, but the individuals who created them remain anonymous. This reflects and communicates the nature of the deaths involved: violent, untimely, and related to reasons that may have been avoided. There is controversy regarding the Vietnam War; highway deaths sometimes signal unsafe roads or drunk driving. The resultant shrines and commemorative assemblages, then, both address these social issues and commemorate the deceased. They are performative commemoratives; their performativity is like a performative utterance (Austin 1962); they are active social forces themselves. The shrines are meant to have an effect, make a difference, cause a result. Thus, they are not only expressive (of love, of grief), they are also instrumental. And as instrumental symbolic creations, they are very like formal ritual (Santino 2006).
I was in Paris in 2015, three weeks after the attacks and killings at the Charlie Hebdo offices. I was in the city in part to witness the Paris boeuf gras carnival, which has been revived in recent years. The procession led to the Place de la Républic, a plaza central both geographically and symbolically. The mass manifestation on the Sunday following the Charlie Hebdo killings was centered there. I saw that the statue of Marianne, the national symbol of France, was covered with memorabilia dedicated to the Charlie Hebdo victims, along with calls for liberté, galité, and fraternité. Not only was the monument itself covered with flowers and wreaths; it was written upon directly in ways that signaled how extraordinary the occasion was. I noticed that some candles were lit, and while I was there a woman brought a wreath. It was still an active site of mourning, weeks after the event. People were writing — with paint — on the plaza itself. The entire plaza had become a canvas for displays of mourning, celebrations of freedom of expression, and demonstrations of solidarity.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction ix
1 From Carnivalesque to Ritualesque: Public Ritual and the Theater of the Street Jack Santino 3
2 Locality, Spectacle, State Politics: Comparative Study of Carnival Traditions in Renaissance Nuremberg and Modern Trinidad Samuel Kinser 16
3 Conflict Displays in the Black Atlantic Roger D. Abrahams 49
4 Protesting and Grieving: Ritual, Politics, and the Effects of Scale Beverly J. Stoeltje 66
5 Political Percussions: Cork Brass Bands and the Irish Revolution, 1914-1922 John Borgonovo 93
6 ¡Que Bonita Bandera! Place, Space, and Identity as Expressed with the Puerto Rican Flag Elena Martínez? 113
7 The Lives of Processions in Bali and Lombok, Indonesia David Harnish 133
8 The Anthropology of Festivals: Changes in Theory and Practice Laurent Sébastien Fournier 151
9 The Politics of Cultural Promotion: The Umthetho Festival of Malawi's Northern Ngoni Lisa Gilman 164
10 Music as Activist Spectacle: AIDS, Breast Cancer, and LGBT Choral Singing Pamela Moro 189
11 The "Days of Scanzano": The Carnivalesque and the Ritualesque in an Antinuclear Protest Dorothy L. Zinn 205
12 "Some Are Born Green, Some Achieve Greenness": Protest Theater and Environmental Activism Scott Magelssen 222
13 The Material Culture of Remembrance in Ireland: Roadside Memorials as Contested Spaces Barbara Graham 239
14 The Politics of Junk: Social Protest, "Outsider" Environments, and Ritualesque Display at the Heidelberg Project in Detroit Daniel Wojcik 254
About the Authors 278
Index 283