7 - Embodying cultural infrastructure in Carnival

Summary

INTRODUCTION

All cultures enact rituals to mark or celebrate significant events. Some are rites of passage marking life stages, like initiations, weddings or funerals, while others follow an annual ritual calendar. Carnival in the Christian calendar is one of these: a period of revelry and overindulgence that culminates in Shrove Tuesday – Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”, a last day of fun and feasting before the fasting period of Lent, which begins the following day, Ash Wednesday, and continues until Easter Sunday, 47 days later. The earliest written records of Carnival festivities date to the twelfth century, and it is still celebrated in many places around the world.

What Carnivals share is a cultural infrastructure that allows certain kinds of things to happen: forms of sociability and exchange, performances of parody or pageantry and affectively charged sensory and aesthetic experiences of music, movement, spectacle, food and other stimulants. This chapter argues that Carnival as cultural infrastructure is a product of the encounter and negotiation between three other kinds of infrastructure: (1) an overall temporal and organizational infrastructure; (2) the embodied infrastructure of the people who create and enjoy Carnival; and (3) the regulatory infrastructure that permits, monitors, categorizes and accepts or rejects elements of Carnival. This argument is illustrated using a case study from New Orleans, Louisiana, the largest Carnival in North America. The rest of this introduction sketches out Carnival as a global phenomenon. The first section situates Carnival in New Orleans, tracing its history and the specific temporal and organizational infrastructure on which it currently depends. Second, Carnival is discussed as embodied infrastructure, bound up in the physical, sensory joys and pains of the people who make it happen. The body is central to Carnival, since costume, movement, exuberance and sensory excess are what demarcate the festivities from the everyday. The third section reflects on Carnival's encounter with the regulatory infrastructure of the city, specifically the processes for securing permits and policing. The discussion centres on a particular subset of Carnival practices, drawing on ethnographic research conducted since 2016 through participant observation in Carnival, semi-structured interviews with its practitioners, and analysis of social media, news media and municipal documentation.