Public Performances

Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque

Jack Santino, Jack Santino

• Éditeur: Utah State University Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781607326359
• Sujet: Ciencias sociales
• Sous-sujet: Sociología

Public Performances offers a deep and wide-ranging exploration of relationships among genres of public performance and of the underlying political motivations they share. Illustrating the connections among three themes—the political, the carnivalesque, and the ritualesque—this volume provides rich and comprehensive insight into public performance as an assertion of political power.

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

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From Carnivalesque to Ritualesque

Public Ritual and the Theater of the Street

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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.

Figure 1.1. Carnival at Dunkirk, France, 2011

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 also Rappaport 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 ...