This collection of essays presents an anthropological approach to Carnival, primarily in its European context from classical to modern times. The author presents this as a foundational element in the development of European culture, including both elite and hegemonic as well as popular and subversive constructions of the celebration. As the author, Alessandro Testa, a research fellow in anthropology at Charles University in Prague, points out, this work is the product of twelve years of research, much of which was published in several articles in Italian and English, though the author points out in his acknowledgments that 95% of the material has not appeared in English before. As Testa states, the collection focuses on the “symbolic, religious and political dimensions and transformations throughout the centuries.”
The individual chapters range from Gramscian analysis of popular culture, including Carnival and other folklore genres (Chapter 1, “A Theory of Popular Culture from the South”), to an examination of the historical roots of Carnival, particularly during the Middle Ages and early Modern era, drawing on Bakhtin’s 1984 analysis of Rabelais (Chapter 2, “A Critical Model of European Carnival”). This is followed by a chapter dealing with ritual transvestism, zoomorphism, and various ritual aspects of Carnival (Chapter 3, “The Elusive Origins of Carnival”). Despite attempts by others to trace the celebration to “Paleolithic hunters and Siberian shamans,” Testa generally dismisses such claims, instead preferring to see Carnival in more localized, culture-specific terms. Chapter 4, “Ritual Inversions, Cultural Hegemony, and the Structure of the Conjuncture,” deals largely with the historically identifiable development of Roman Carnival in the medieval period, its subsequent spread largely via the Catholic Church throughout Europe, and its subsequent reformation and reinterpretation during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in places such as Florence, Venice, France, and Germany, which I found the most interesting and intriguing chapter in the book.
Though I found the individual essays well written, the collection as a whole suffers from attempts to interpret Carnival from numerous angles simultaneously: historical, anthropological, cultural, and sociological. It does provide a good introduction to the subject, which would make it valuable for a class in folklore or cultural anthropology. However, students would need to supplement it with specific studies, most of which are listed in the bibliography. Testa does provide several images of medieval and early modern mumming, masking, and carnivalesque activities, as well as diagrams dealing with such topics as “the ritual politics of Carnival.” He concludes with a comprehensive statement bringing together various strands of his argument: “Carnival remains an extraordinary object of historical analysis for understanding the sociocultural life of preindustrial European societies” (173). Despite a few references to Carnival in the Western Hemisphere (e.g., in Brazil), the focus remains the European Carnival. Perhaps a final chapter on modern permutations of Carnival would have been helpful.
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[Review length: 467 words • Review posted on January 28, 2022]