For centuries there have been Carnaval celebrations all over the world.
It has been argued for many that these expressions (of Anarchy, of symbolic overthrow of power, of shifting genderrole, of the temporary embracing of the profane) where a way to "get it out of the system" the church looked the other way and it worked by stopping revolt.
It has been also argued that DURING TIMES OF GREAT CRISIS these annual expressions acted like seeds providing symbols and stories that helped to drive real change.
For example, the "uppity woman" archetype often portrayed by clown surved to continue oppression but also provided the nessisary inspiration to trigger, suddenly, a new understanding of the role of woman in society. The same is true of times like the Reformation: the images of topling the pope were suddenly filled with real meaning.
They allowed for a conversation about power to happen under the guise of sillyness and parody.
Carnaval is hardly expressed in the States except in the form of Mardi Gras in the city of New Orleans.
This seat of specical and parodied psudorebellion of control anarchy can also be an agent of change for our country and our world.
This is one of the most blanted examples of the route we are on:
-Racism
-The change of climate
-The negilance and incompetance of the Bush administration
-The fragility of Oil
-The waste caused by the War
-The idiocy of Homeland Security
- and so on...
I PROPOSE that this Mardi Gras. February 28th 2006, we hold a nation-wide carnaval/mardi gras.
in solidarity with the people of New Orleans
in celebration of life and the topling of power
let fools dress as bush and be dunked in tanks
let the gods of climate fight with the gods of war
let there be music and costume and feast
let it rage
i BELIEVE that if there is enough energy put into this, it is a LEVERAGE POINT that will help give expression to the frustration, fatigue, anger, outrage, disbeleif, sorrow, this plague that the bush administration has brought to us. and that though giving expression, it will allow the wheels of fortune turn.
|
"[W]here change is in order, dirt-work also has a role to play, for it simply isn't true that these rituals are always conservative. Dirt rituals may stabilize things for years on end, but when the order is in fundamental crisis these rituals can become the focal points for change, catalytic moments for dirt's revaluation and true structural shifts. Every so often Fat Tuesday does leak over into Lean Wednesday, and into the rest of the year as well. Regular dirt rituals are like nodes on a shoot of bamboo, repeating year after year to strengthen the growing stalk, but then, when conditions demand it, splitting open to produce new growth.
Historians have recently provided us with a number of specific cases that demonstrate this general model. It now seems clear, for example, that carnival's ritual debasing of the Pope played a key role in the Reformation in Germany. The ritual container broke, the pollution leaked out, and the Church itself was fundamentally altered. It seems clear also that play with gender roles has sometimes leapt the fences of ritual. The historian Natalie Zemon Davis has argued that the gender reversals of various early modern European festivals served to "undermine as well as reinforce" prevailing social structures. The carnival image of unruly women, normally the object of joking and ply, sometimes turned out "to sanction riot and political disobedience for both men and women in a society that allowed the lower orders few formal means of protest." Davis is well aware that letting carnival's "woman-on-top" have power during the holidays usually served to keep women on the bottom when the holidays were over, but once such an image exists it is hard to control, and this one sometimes also "promoted resistance," "kept open an alternative way of conceiving family structure," and served as "a resource for feminist reflection on women's capacities."
...