Anthropology, Festival, and Spectacle

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Anthropology, Festival, and Spectacle PING-ANN ADDO

Online Publication Date: 01 July 2009

To cite this Article ADDO, PING-ANN(2009)'Anthropology, Festival, and Spectacle',Reviews in Anthropology,38:3,217 — 236 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00938150903110625 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00938150903110625

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Reviews in Anthropology, 38:217–236, 2009 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online DOI: 10.1080/00938150903110625

Anthropology, Festival, and Spectacle PING-ANN ADDO Curcio-Nagy, Linda 2004. The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performance, Power and Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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Mauldin, Barbara, ed. 2004 ¡Carnaval! Seattle: University of Washington Press, and Santa Fe, NM: The Museum of International Folk Art. Immerso, Michael 2005. Coney Island: The People’s Playground. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

This article weaves together analyses of three recent books which, despite their being compiled primarily by scholars outside of the discipline of anthropology, make theoretical and methodological contributions useful to the anthropology of festivals and ritual, both religious and secular. These works demonstrate that spectacle has been ritualized into festive practices of modernity and identity in multiple places, times, and cultural contexts. Greater attention to how this works from a general anthropological perspective is needed. KEYWORDS

carnival, festival, ritual, spectacle, tourism

INTRODUCTION Classical studies of ritual include those which define the phenomenon as a set of actions, often thought to have symbolic value, the performance of which is usually prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community and reinforced by everyday politics or formal laws. Anthropological approaches to ritual include critical examinations of how their perceived efficacy renders them symbolic and necessary aspects of societal regeneration (Geertz 1973, 1977) and reinforcement (Leach 1966). This is the idea Address correspondence to Ping-Ann Addo, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125, USA. E-mail: Ping-Ann. [email protected] 217

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of rituals as processes that ‘‘heal’’ a society around moments of ‘‘life crisis’’ (Turner 1957). As Durkheim (1965[1915]) proposed, the collective effervescence of rituals is hard-wired into the human psyche. Gluckman (1955), Turner (1957, 1969), and many others have theorized how rituals oppose existing tensions or conflicts and allow for their perceived resolution. There are also anthropological approaches which codify ritual as an aspect of theater, such as that of Richard Schechner (2003), who has tended to pursue in-depth examinations of performance as ritual while emphasizing its repetitive, intensifying, and liberating aspects. Given that large-scale public rituals such as theater usually constitute spectacles in themselves, William Beeman (1992) has stated that spectacle is a cultural institution and a structured social process for accomplishing particular aims in a society. Spectacle may be defined as a visual part of the aura around a remarkable or lavish display which is, itself, consumed by an audience (Inomata & Coben 2006). Yet spectacle, as both an ingredient and an effect of the festive, has been given relatively less attention by anthropologists than other aspects of ritual. This essay demonstrates how spectacle can be contextualized and analyzed across cultural contexts and how such analyses might be applied across all four subfields of anthropology. Spectacle is a useful concept for thinking about the basic source of ritual efficacy—the human psyche, socialized to perceive its own transformation through ritual action—and about how power, role reversal, and the festive operate in public celebrations such as carnivals. Spectacle constitutes both performance in itself and an aspect of performances. In modern festivals— defined as organized sets of acts performed to commemorate an event, person, deity, or the common identity of the performers—audiences and performers often coincide in ritualized spectacle. Three recent books illustrate how certain genres of ritualized festivals, such as carnivals, afford fluidity in the statuses of performers and audience. The books I discuss are The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performance, Power and Identity by Linda Curcio-Nagy (2004), ¡Carnaval! edited by Barbara Mauldin (2004c), and Coney Island: The People’s Playground by Michael Immerso (2005). I compare these books for their analysis of specific ritualized and routinized spectacle in contexts which can loosely be labeled ‘‘carnivals’’—calendrical festivals such as pre-Lenten carnival, carnevale, and carnaval, its respective Italian and Spanish equivalents (see Mauldin 2004c and Curcio-Nagy 2004), and carnivals in the sense of amusement shows with their rides and sideshows (see Immerso 2005). Carnivals are sites that centralize the fantastical, other-worldly, deified, or otherwise marginal (if powerful) beings into contemporary reality. So it is appropriate that the case studies in these three books involve folk productions— collective acts of working class, poor, and powerless masses—in modern and modernizing state-level societies.

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The books have few literature citations in common, which suggests that very divergent theoretical approaches are being employed in explorations of ritual and spectacle in the humanities and social sciences. Reading these books together underscores the often unarticulated role of spectacle in reinforcing modern identity constructions, demonstrates how festivals reveal the often contested histories of such identity formations, and highlights the role of power in ritualistic contexts as revealed through analysis of social experience. Viewed through a general anthropologist’s eyes, each work demonstrates that spectacle can serve as a valuable lens through which to study large-scale public events like festivals, as well as their relationship to power in entertainment, empire, and identity formations, using a four-field anthropological approach. While there is no inherent link between festival, or the festive, and spectacle, I argue that reading these books together demonstrates that ritualizing spectacle comes to play a similar role in social identity as that historically played by commemorating deities, nations, monarchs, or by marking seasonal changes. Where wide power differences exist in a society, spectacle may be constructed as integral to social processes of identity-making in ways that include recognition, and yet elision, of social difference. Thus, this essay explores how the very process of encountering spectacle is ritualized in modernity using New York’s Coney Island, civic festivals in colonial Mexico City, and pre-Lenten carnivals in Europe and the Caribbean. Beginning with this theme, I summarize each book and then compare all three in a discussion of some common themes they address.

CARNIVAL IN CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: MAUDLIN’S ¡CARNAVAL! Barbara Mauldin’s (2004c) edited volume ¡Carnaval! is a full-color, glossy-paged text written to accompany a recently concluded traveling exhibit of video, photo murals, costumes, and other material culture from eleven carnival festivals around the world. As a volume, it provides comparative case study evidence for how religious colonization by a given tradition is differentially manifested, and continually resisted today, across former colonies and metropoles. The disciplines covered by authors in this volume include history, anthropology, art history, and urban studies, all of which in some way or another must inevitably grapple with the experience of spectacles as arresting, visual encounters in both ritual contexts and everyday lives. Mauldin’s introduction (2004c) provides a useful comparative historical analysis of eleven carnival festivals according to practices of masking, crossdressing, political satire, and ritual throwing of water, mud, and other projectiles which Gilmore (1988) refers to as ‘‘controlled violence.’’ Such acts may, literally and momentarily, disrupt the semblance of order among spectators or an audience. The case studies demonstrate the remarkable fluidity enabled

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by festive behavior, as well as the effectiveness of festivals in articulating different cultural and political interests. Each essay introduces collective events where individual performers are also spectators of others’ performances. As Beeman (2000) states, seeing past the artificially constructed dichotomy of audience-performer is integral to how anthropologists should be thinking about rituals because it makes apparent where power is operating to keep people in what might be considered their place, both physically and hierarchically. Where spectacle is being produced, there is a performance, and, by implication, an audience-performer divide. However, as case studies of the ta’ziyeh, a genre of traditional Iranian theater, suggest, these are not strict boundaries and they may shift at any moment, thus including the audience in the performance, and vice versa (Dabashi 2005). The essays also reflect a range of non-elite voices, which are empowered through reversals or inversions of normal, everyday hierarchies (see Bakhtin 1984; Turner 1984). The local is clearly discussed to illuminate the global, as in the essays on Venice’s carnevale (Falassi 2004), on carnival in Bulgaria (Fol 2004), on carnaval in Oruro, Bolivia (Samake´ 2004) and Laza in Galicia, Spain (Regalado 2004), and on Mardi Gras in Basile, a rural town in Louisiana (Lindahl 2004). These case studies present evidence that today’s pre-Lenten carnivals in small towns in Europe, South America, and the Caribbean are all historically connected through religious symbols and the Catholic church, as well as through global capitalism and tourism. These chapters provide varying levels of detail, aided positively by the researchers’ varying access to interviews with visual performers, costume makers, musicians, children, indigenous people, church participants, and, to a lesser extent, tourists engaging with locals. However, only in one essay—by Donald Cosentino (2004), whose title echoes that of Geertz’s classic Negara (1980)—is the significance of a carnival examined as a site for shifting politics of nationalisms. Cosentino identifies Haiti as a ‘‘carnival state’’ where idioms of rule and resistance are amplified during the pre-Lenten and Lenten period of jocularity, masking, and public performance. From Cosentino’s moving, reflexive ethnography one gains a sense of the tensions and the methodological challenges inherent in doing ethnography in a place so deeply marked by social, political, and economic stress. Cosentino further refers to the paradox of enabling truths through humorous inversions in a place which he characterizes as so ‘‘not itself.’’ Themes of ambiguity and ambivalence are revealed in discussions of costume and disguise, highlighting how carnival becomes a context for temporarily revealing identities hidden throughout the rest of the year. Authors in Mauldin’s book provide useful ethnographic details about the relationships between aspects of identity that are revealed in everyday openness and efficaciously hidden by ceremonial masking. These essays join works such as John Nunley’s (2000) superb exhibit catalogue entitled Masks, in theorizing the role of masking in creating a space for agency by people

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whose identities are stereotyped and marginalized, such as elderly women and prostitutes. According to Lindahl (2004), who discusses Mardi Gras in Basille, Lousiana, and to Nunley (2004), who explores Trinidadian carnival, such powerful personas are dangerously potent because of the negative associations of hyper-sexuality and curtailed fertility. Yet in classic ritual reversal mode afforded by carnival, these identities become centralized, presented with an ‘‘aura’’ of spectacle that is seemingly celebrated (Inomata & Coben 2006). This volume contributes in the vein of other works in the anthropology of festivals (including Falassi 1987; Mauldin 1999; Napier 1986) and of exhibit catalogues (Nunley & McCarthy 2000; Turner 1982). Mauldin’s (2004b) wonderful essay on carnaval in Tlaxcala, Mexico, is one of several in the volume which contribute to an already rich literature on the role of masks and masking as staple practices in many Latin American carnivals (for example, see Beezley et al. 1994). Other essays suggest that masks can be humorous, as in Oruro, Bolivia, (Samake´ 2004), or distorting and intentionally grotesque, as in the masks of clown-like characters which are called ‘‘Mardi Gras’’ in Basile, Louisiana (Lindahl 2004). Masks can be quite plain, like the Tlaxcala masks of Spanish conquerors, which are most striking for their bright pink skin, or like those depicting blushing if somewhat plain women (Mauldin 2004c). Alessandro Falassi’s (2004) chapter on masking practices in Venice does the most thorough job of analyzing this widespread phenomenon of adornment, mimicry, and representation. Themes of reversal and sexuality are most marked together in several case studies in which masking is practiced by men portraying women; often masks depict the faces of matronly mestizo women or attractive young girls (Falassi 2004; Mauldin 2004b). While many essays in Mauldin’s volume show that marginalized or hidden forms of sexuality are, ironically, revealed by masking, another staple of many carnivals—publicly glorified sexuality—is little highlighted. Cosentino explains that the Vodou deity Gede constitutes the ‘‘common denominator of everything [and] is the master of the two absolutes: fucking and dying,’’ is caricatured as ‘zozo’ or phallus, and is, thus, both genitor and life-taker’’ (Cosentino 2004:284). By citing Gede as the nexus for Haitian national politics, religion, and carnival, Cosentino suggests a depth to carnival’s life force which other authors in this volume eschew. Were it not for Cosentino’s essay, public sexual playfulness would be left almost untouched in Mauldin’s volume despite other essays’ explorations of humor, satire, socially sanctioned abandon, and ironic outward role-reversal, such as cross-dressing. Overall, more needs to be made of the links between transgressed sexuality as resistance, acquiescence, and even ambivalence towards political domination. The strength of this book lies in the shared methodology of ethnography, its comparative case study potential, and its attention to how agency and voice are retained in situations of post-colonial resistance. Indigenous peoples, often marginalized in post-colonial struggles within contemporary nation states, are given voice in Mauldin’s (2004b) chapter on carnaval in

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Nahua communities in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Similarly, Cynthia LeCount Samake´ (2004:192) discusses the recently developed Ananta Andina event which afforded Indian groups from neighboring villages a more central place in the week-long carnaval festival in Oruro, Bolivia. Mauldin’s book is an excellent introduction to the sociology of contemporary carnivals of the new and old worlds, and spectacle is clearly a central feature in all of the case studies. However, to serve the purpose of a more conventional academic collection, readers will want more coherence between the essays, and perhaps greater theorization of phenomena such as spectacle and power than the introductory essay provides.

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CONEY ISLAND AND THE SPECTACLE OF LEISURE Michael Immerso’s (2005) Coney Island: The People’s Playground, is a rich historical accounting of a wide range of activities, polemics, political aims, and infrastructural mishaps at Coney Island’s famous amusement park and beach complex in southern Brooklyn, New York, USA, over the last 170 years. The author attempts to historicize Coney Island’s role in popular amusement in America through a largely archival history, with some links to the present made by contemporary interviews. Employing scores of archival photographs and journalistic prose, Immerso situates his study within the historical context of an early expanding U.S. industrial empire. He describes how immigrant working class people used their consumption of Coney Island to mediate their own and others’ desires for leisure and assimilation in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. The ritual examined here is visiting Coney Island, with its rides and arcades, its crowded beach, and its numerous concessions stands. The book’s thesis is that Coney Island constituted a frontier for the ‘‘melting pot’’ of America by affording the working class and immigrants a right to the pursuit of leisure. Its nine chapters provide a chronological tour through the evolution of Coney Island from a mere strip of beach front which opened in the 1840s to a site for architectural and engineering experimentation, a favored filmmaking location, an amusement park with rides for children and freak shows and ethnographic displays for adults, and the home of contemporary parades. This book is extensively researched and employs archived interviews with park owners, urban planners, and ride supervisors from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries. It is highly useful for its historical description of Coney Island as a symbol of leisure and citizenship during a crucial period of United States national consciousness formation. Immerso portrays Coney Island as always having been at the margins of respectability and, I would add, as a place where the mood was often far from festive. It was crowded, gritty, visually jarring, and even dangerous, and visitation did feature the ritualistic element of liminality.

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As Immerso argues, Coney Island was a site where daily life activities are temporarily suspended for visitors, though people did visit Coney Island on their own schedules and for their individual purposes. Immerso states that, in its heyday, Coney Island was a spectacle of industrial modernity with the constant motion of the ocean, of people, and of the parks’ many mechanical rides, the technology for which was often piloted exclusively at the parks. Hundreds of light bulbs illuminated the amusement parks within a year of Thomas Edison’s installation of Manhattan’s first light bulb in 1882. The fortunes of the park complex waxed and waned with wider economic successes in the United States: movies were filmed, songs were composed, shanty towns grew, were ‘‘cleaned up’’ with gentrification, or remained, reifying New York’s ethnic, class, and gender divisions. During the World Wars, electricity was rationed, spurring a surge in popularity of the beach and causing the cost of some attractions to drop from five cents—a feature that earned Coney Island the nickname of ‘‘the Nickel Empire’’—to a penny each. While it is based on an interesting premise, the book would be a more useful study for some anthropologists had Immerso incorporated a critical theoretical approach to the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality which, today, are integral to studies of both contemporary and historical U.S. identity formations. Immerso’s approach reifies the rendering of otherness as spectacle at Coney Island by his uncritical examination of the role of power in maintaining class position. He does not grapple with the political economic conditions prevalent during more recent waves of immigration to the United States. For example, Immerso (2005:168, 169) states that ‘‘game stands during the first decades of the century had ‘Hit the Nigger’ ball toss games and blatantly racist ‘coon songs’ were common in the . . . concert halls’’ of one particular amusement park at Coney. Yet there is no theorizing of power in this, or any other of Immerso’s examples of non-whites or non-U.S. born individuals and other ‘‘othered’’ freaks being transformed into spectacles. It seems that to Immerso, these power dynamics constituted a mere backdrop for U.S. postindustrial modernity and that Coney Island should be examined uncritically for its place at the forefront. The politics of respectability could also stand to be more critically examined in this book. For example, during a period, conservative laws restricted particularly bawdy shows from opening and beer from being sold on Sundays. One archival photograph which is stamped with ‘‘c. 1897’’ suggests that park organizers felt it in their interests to protect proper (middle class, married, older) women from the seedier side of Coney Island’s attractions. A sign posted at the entrance to the ‘‘Algerian Theatre’’ in this photograph reads ‘‘wives checked free with gentlemen’’ to the ‘‘Oriental shows’’ whose female ‘‘cooch dancers’’ included women dancing with live writhing snakes (Immerso 2005:112). While Immerso does not go much further than arguing that it was a microcosm for the diversity and the struggle of being working class American

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and immigrant American as the 20th century loomed in the wake of industrialization, this turns out to be one of the book’s greatest strengths. It does provide myriad interesting and truly amazing details of some of the ways in which the wider American social-political context impacted what happened here—famous gangsters competed at cards and some even shot each other; performers mimicked exotic others; pyrotechnics impressed; freak shows attracted, titillated, and amazed. Overall, Immerso’s book is useful for the anthropology of spectacle because it captures historical and contemporary archival and sociological data on the meaningfulness of entertainment and the role that spectacle has long played in how national identities are formed around work, as well as leisure, entertainment, and othering. The book ends with a focus on contemporary Coney Island visitors, activities, and images. If it were not for the fact that Coney Island’s contemporary amusement park closed for razing and development in August of 2008, there would still be great potential for an interested ethnographer to add to the wealth of information provided by Immerso (Fahim 2008). This book, with its journalistic writing style and its in-depth archival research approach, will remain a highly informative reference about the meanings of this popular site of constant spectacle.

MEXICO CITY AND COLONIAL SPECTACLES, 1500–1821 Linda Curcio-Nagy’s 2004 book is based on extensive research and synthesis concerning an impressive list of primary and secondary archival materials and provides rich details of the civic festivities in the ‘‘impressive metropolis’’ that was Mexico City, or The City of Palaces. The book is a highly-readable cultural and social history of the colony through the lens of festivals celebrated on the z ocalo (central town square) between the 16th and 19th centuries. The author describes the aesthetics and institutionalization of festivities, which featured often in grand displays of performance, music, dance, and pyrotechnics. She demonstrates that hierarchical relationships between rulers and subjects were mediated through public festivals, under the dynasties of the Hapsburgs (1500–1721) and the Bourbons (1721– 1800), ending with a grand festive celebration of an entirely different import—the independence of Mexico in 1821. The book is premised on the idea that indigenous, colonial, local-born European, and African slave identities all found their unifying symbolism in the authority of the King who embodied God for the Catholic Church. This authority was effected through the spectacle of empire afforded by the viceroy—a male Spaniard representing and ruling on behalf of the king in the Mexican colony—parading through the city streets and bestowing his benevolence on all who beheld him. In the mid-17th century, ceremonial oaths of allegiance to the King became common in public ritual, shifting

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attention away from the viceroy. By the late 17th century, the viceroy’s symbolism as a powerful proxy to the monarch was considerably weakened as revenues for viceregal entries plummeted and the viceregal office became more bureaucratic and less charismatic. Other rituals, like the festivals of devotion to the Virgin of Remedies, the Royal Banner ceremony, and the religious observance of Corpus Christi, were contexts for effecting miracles from which people of all ethnicities and social classes felt they benefited. In the city’s festivals, loyalty was not just portrayed, it was performed by crowds playing the necessary role of an audience for the viceroy, while also consuming the broader context of visual spectacle. Enormous paintings, several stories high, adorned public avenues and architectural structures, past which viceregal visitors or city inhabitants were led on a tour through the city. Curcio-Nagy’s six main chapters focus on particular roles, one of which was that of the viceroy, who was documented as ‘‘The Ideal Prince’’ (also the title to chapter 2). An African and indigenous Mexican colonial subject could be called ‘‘The Perfect Vassal’’ (title to chapter 3) when acting out the roles assigned to him or her in the imperial hierarchy as noble savages dressed in jaguar furs and eagle plumes. At later festivals, as described in chapter 4, ‘‘Celebrating Apollo,’’ the Spanish monarch was indexed with an image of the sun and called Apollo, thus cementing his status as the source of religious and earthly power. Decorated triumphal arches—sponsored by ‘‘middle-class’’ criollo (Spaniards born in the colony) guild members—bedecked the streets in celebration of the viceroy. Curcio-Nagy’s analysis revolves around behaviors and discourses of guild members and elites—people whose voices were officially documented. The fact that this book is less strong in capturing the true complexities of identities among indigenous Mexicans and also of Afro-Mexicans suggests textual limitations to the specificity of her archival information with regard to indigenous and other non-elite ethnic groups and political consciousness. Historical anthropological methods that put political economy, power, and identity at the center in reading texts might have something to offer in this vein. Curcio-Nagy’s book has added much to the anthropological literature on the place of Mexican festivals in civic life, joining sociocultural anthropological volumes like that by Beezley, Martin, and French (1994) and several essays from Mauldin’s book, mentioned above. More broadly speaking, the book joins other Latin American case studies of festivals and nationalism (see DaMatta 1991 and Guss 2001).

COMPARING THREE TEXTS: THEMATIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF SPECTACLE From an ethnological point of view, the mimetic quality of ritual performances is integral to what makes them potentially able to capture the senses,

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as well as to be rendered spectacular. As actions are repeated or ritualized, they become increasingly open to creative possibilities and to experimentation. Moreover, these actions are always tremendously variable within the acceptable, formal boundaries of behavior, which communicates a particular idea (Schechner 2003). Thus various essays in Mauldin’s book (2004c) seem to have taken up Roberto DaMatta’s (1991) mantle: as an experience, Carnival enables people to viscerally feel that they belong to a distinct social and political entity. Several essays in her volume suggest that festivals, especially carnivals, are vehicles whereby citizens find voice against the state and racist societal divisions. Carnival also affords people a context in which to oppose the nation’s perceived hierarchies. Likewise, Immerso’s book, in particular, suggests that spending working class wages on public consumption of festive leisure provides people a spectacle of themselves as active participants in progressive, if crowded, humanity. Other themes emerging from a reading of these books and which illuminate a concept of ritualized spectacle include ribald sexuality, humor, and reversal; masking and cross-dressing; and tourism and the commodification of culture. I discuss these in turn below.

Ribald Sexuality, Humor, and Reversal Humor, reversal, and satire constitute main frames within which carnivals are generally theorized in the social science and humanities today (Beeman 2000; DaMatta 1991; Eco 1984; Nunley & Bettelheim 1988). Carnivals feature inversions whose purpose goes beyond humor and satire, entering realms of overt political resistance, demands for institutional change, and re-assertion of pre-modern local deities and calendrical rites in formal religion. Similarly, in religious states such as Mexico and many other settings for essays in Mauldin’s book, festivals allow people to merge sacred and secular on their own terms, or to invert the normal contexts for encountering phenomena so termed. In so doing, agents are able to reverse and moreover reinvent the particular class configurations of their inter-societal connections. Reversals are effective for the same reasons that humor is effective in discourse. States Beeman (2000), in humor, recognizable frames of knowledge are shifted to suggest unexpected but alternative interpretations of an initial linguistic proposition. Even if a proposition is intended to be humorous, and it challenges an ideal held by the audience, it may be rendered offensive, rather than humorous. There is much less risk of offending others in carnival because reversal and temporary frame shifting are assumed, expected, and desired. Temporarily accepted forms of aesthetic transgression, such as bawdy or berdache displays, afford social actors the chance to indulge in ribald sexual jokes and actions not permitted in everyday interactions. The appeal may lie in the liberating effects of temporarily normalizing practices with seemingly ambiguous meanings, a point used by Bakhtin to qualify laughter in

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the context of one particular carnival: ‘‘the people’s ambivalent laughter [expresses] the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing [at the world] also belongs to it’’ (Bakhtin 1984:12). It is well documented that during seasons for large public events like carnivals, both locals and tourists often seek sexual gratification or express themselves sexually with more abandon than in everyday contexts (Crick 1989; Engerman 1994; Reid-Pharr 1993). Boyd (2001:18) suggests that ‘‘sexual and ethnic entertainments function as hegemonic texts for white and heterosexual tourists’’ who seek meaning and bring authenticity to their own lives through experiencing cultural practices beyond their own life sphere. Sex sells, and, as stated earlier, a definite parallel exists between some of the case studies in Mauldin and Immerso where ritually heightened sexuality—and the spectacle whereby it is expressed—marks the norms of suppression (see Cosentino 2004 and Falassi 2004).

Masking and Cross-Dressing The ritual efficacy of costuming, in general, and the spectacle of crossdressing, in particular, constitutes another sub-theme at which the case studies in these three books articulate. Cross-dressing relates more broadly to latent fluidity in the performativity of gender. When men and women cross-dress, many more possibilities for interpretation of femaleness and maleness arise (Butler 1990). David Gilmore (1998) suggests that it is in the interstices between the two categories that we find some of the greatest creativity and resistance to power-laden gendered norms—and so bawdy acts of transvestitism are often central to carnivals where homosexuality, and transgenderism are marginalized in daily life. Writing on contemporary Spanish carnivals, Gilmore cites such practices as further evidence of pre-Lenten carnivals as periods during which ambivalence and ambiguity about the identity categories of daily life are allowed to prevail. As discussed above, in most of the essays in Mauldin’s book, masking practices are considered forms of mimicry. The degree of literal depiction used to index an idea is important in a mask’s effectiveness in conveying ideas integral to a carnival celebration. But the political effects of masking and remaking personalities and identities through visually altering their signification are important in Mexican civic rituals, as described in Curcio-Nagy (2004) as well. For example, indigenous people were succored to participate in the festivals and dramas in full native regalia, to emphasize both their difference and their inclusion in the colonial social structure. Not just a concealing of a person’s face, masking is also evident when men cross-dress as women, like those who, at certain times during the festival, willingly depict female dance partners for other men, or those who dress up as old hags like Baba in the Bulgarian carnivals that are related to the Eastern Orthodox Christian calendar (Fol 2004).

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Tourism and the Commodification of Culture Thinking about festivals as staged spectacles, which are regularly included in communities’ expressions of modernity, one is moved to consider the modernist trappings of tourism (Gotham 2005): trappings trap, to use the words homonymically. I embrace the critical approach of Coco Fusco (1994) who characterizes spectacle as inherent in intercultural performance, which opposes actors and audience along the lines of class, race, gender, or indigenous statuses, and which reifies power disparities through subjecting performers to the humiliation of scrutiny. These conditions, states Fusco, are historically part of anthropological displays of non-whites for the amusement or education of whites of all classes. I would add that they are also part of the processes of modernity that constitute festivals as documented by CurcioNagy, Immerso, and Mauldin (2004c). All three books highlight the theme of audience playing the performer. On the one hand, Mauldin and CurcioNagy describe practices of leisure and pleasure constructed to influence or appease the masses; on the other hand, however, these displays of power, inversion, and spectacle are impossible without the masses that become those who gaze upon them. Much has been written about the gaze in the anthropology of tourism by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), MacCannell (1999), Urry (1990), among numerous others. The gaze can be defined as the power dynamic effected when the position of an already subordinate subject is reinforced by the visual scrutiny of another. Writing about modern city dwellers and travelers, John MacAloon (1984) puts forth an argument about notions of civilization, modernity, and civility that are generative of Western touristic desires. He states that by putting others on display we portray ourselves as members of a civilized society. With festivals and other events made more appealing by gazing upon ourselves in the act of gazing upon others, the boundary between performers and audiences is highly porous. In thinking through a related concept, MacCannell’s notion of ‘‘staged authenticity,’’ Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) discusses how spectators derive pleasure from spectacles of themselves looking at or consuming others. Much like Renato Rosaldo’s (1989) notion of imperialist nostalgia, which relegates ‘‘the other,’’ which modernist selves have destroyed, to the space of nostalgia, consuming spectacle through tourism relegates the local other to the realm of something to be ogled and owned. The power dynamic set up between oneself as performer and oneself as audience reinforces the potential for spectacle to be continually reproduced at large scale events and for the ritualization of spectacle through repetition as rites. Adding a critical focus on the politics of one’s own tourism of oneself illuminates social behavior during modern festivals and opens up further scholarly avenues to engage with commodification of spectacle. With its holistic, cross-cultural,

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and self-reflexive approach, anthropology is one of the disciplines best positioned to undertake such a task.

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SPECTACLE IN FOUR-FIELD ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Sensory overload often abounds in festive and public events like carnivals, many of which can be characterized as ‘‘urban spectacles’’ (Gotham 2005). Beyond the visual, sound and smell are amplified in, and integral to much spectacle. As in the cases discussed by many of Mauldin’s authors for carnivals during hot weather or summer months, and in summertime at Coney Island, body temperature and body heat also become sensorial aspects of spectacles. Spectacles feature arresting sounds as well. During a typical festival, music, cacophony, or language may be at play in disseminating the message of a festival. Coney Island’s appeal was shaped, in no small part, by the sound of the ocean and the roar of park rides, which added to the pull on the already visually enthralled crowds of visitors. The fireworks displays employed in certain colonial festivals in Mexico City, no doubt, made an impression with their loudness and brightness, as well as the roars they drew from the crowds (Curcio-Nagy 2004). Other auditory aspects of spectacles include the role of liturgical language in creating the spectacle that constituted, for example, the festivals around the viceregal entrances in colonial Mexico City. Scholars approaching ritual and festival from the resistance model promulgated by Marxistinfluenced anthropologists such as Kertzer (1988) and Cohen (1993) would be interested in these studies for their illumination of the imposition of colonial language—itself reinforced through spectacle and ritual—and the concomitant erasure of local and indigenous languages. Some of the greatest influences on anthropological examinations of verbal performance and performativity come from outside of the sub-field of linguistic anthropology. John Austin’s notion of the performative (1962) has inspired numerous scholars of sociolinguistics, among them Richard Bauman’s (1975) interdisciplinary approach of certain forms of oratory and verbal art as performance. Stanley Tambiah (1979) suggests that ritualized performances are creative, rather than merely re-creative, or re-iterative and Dell Hymes (1975) states that repeated performance is revealing of underlying social structures which are ‘‘emergent in action.’’ In other words, for utterances or actions to be ritually efficacious, they must set up the appropriate conditions for agents to receive them as such. I would argue that spectacle is one such condition of ritual. People are socialized to expect and respond to its arresting and captivating effects in order for societies’ tensions and hierarchies to be made, periodically at least, more bearable.

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Modern, urban, human-inhabited spaces are not the only contexts in which anthropologists remain interested in the efficacy of ritual and ritualized communication. In the archaeological vein, Houston (2006) describes spectacles as large performances of human authorship that exhibit a particular scopic, effervescent, and awe-inspiring quality. Spectacle has been defined in ways that run the gamut from ‘‘just looking’’ (Hodder 2006) to constituting public theatrical events (Inomata & Coben 2006). Qualities of spectacle include the visual; people tend to appreciate spectacles through excessive visual probing, which Houston (2006:136) labels with psychoanalyst Olin’s (1996:211) term scopophilia, a tendency to derive pleasure from intense public visual engagement. With reference to linguistic anthropological theorizing, Houston also characterizes spectacles as marked performances, stating that their markedness is indexed by an outer limit of ‘‘sharply festive behavior.’’ Following Christopher Steiner’s (1999) suggestion about the role of repetition in creating an aura of authenticity around so-called ‘primitive’ art objects, I would add that spectacle features visual markedness that, in its very repetition, comes to embody a sense of the necessary in rituals. What these various approaches from different subfields of anthropology suggest is that spectacle is integral to the processes whereby power over subordinate subjects, their bodies, and their material culture has been historically effected in hierarchical societies. Inomata (2006) further suggests that large public events were integral to the development of large, stratified societies such as that of the classic Maya in Mexico. Similarly, my own reading regarding stratified, state, and urban societies from Mauldin (2004c), Curcio-Nagy (2004), and Immerso (2005) is that power is cemented by particular articulations between ritual and spectacle. For example, Curcio-Nagy’s case study provides a useful continuum with works like Inomata’s by showing that spectacles of Maya dancing reframed politically important periods of time, making them sacred moments. Along with other anthropological explorations of Mexican and Latin American festivals, Curcio-Nagy’s book demonstrates how over three centuries of colonialism, Mexico City’s inhabitants had naturalized the importance of spectacle for demonstrating devotion, faith, and participation to the empire and the church (Beezley et al. 1994). A similar demonstrative function can be seen in Immerso’s exploration of Coney Island, a beacon of leisure for working class and immigrant Americans in the rise of U.S. capitalism and urbanism. Physical anthropologists have also been interested in ancient patterns of ritualistic behavior among humans and in primate groups. The behavior of non-human primates, such as chimpanzees, suggests that for our closest relatives as well, repeated, cyclical, and learned aspects are integral to ritual behavior, which has social effects of producing harmony, solidarity, and common identification (Goodall 1975). Lorenz (1967) theorized that the

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cultural processes leading to the development of humans’ propensities towards communicating through rites is evolutionarily linked to phylogenic processes that give rise to what he termed ‘‘ceremonies’’ in animals. Such ceremonies include displays associated with mating, defense of turf, and fight or flight responses to challenges from other animals. Citing early 20th-century evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, Lorenz refers to such behaviors as ritual. Schechner (2003:98) explains that humans do not hold the monopoly on producing deliberate, conscious behavior that has efficacy for survival. He states,

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. . . examples abound of ‘animal rituals’ or ‘playing’ [and] even events as regulated by instinct as the ‘triumph dance of geese,’ or the offering of the throat by a vanquished wolf to the victor can indicate the bio-antiquity of behaviors where status, territory, mates, and social hierarchy are mediated by rituals rather than by direct combat.

Schechner’s useful argument is that, as in power-laden human social situations, ritual has mediated conflict, enabled or augmented access to resources, and is related to social identification among nonhuman primates. His suggestion that humans may be evolutionarily predisposed to produce ritualistic behavior to bring about relief of social stress and to ensure survival is reflected in the life-force giving sense about ritualized spectacles which I have been discussing.

CONCLUSION In concluding, I return to thoughts about the role of spectacle in festival tourism and city and state formation. Just as in colonial Mexico City where individuals and institutions with the material means to sponsor festivals and other media for propaganda assumed a large degree of control over the consumption of the festival, so too, virtually all of the festivals discussed in Mauldin and Immerso’s books are increasingly accessible to cultural outsiders as commodities or touristic experiences afforded by contemporary global forces and movements. Yet, one message to discern from reading Immerso, Mauldin, and Curcio-Nagy together is this: Witnessing spectacle is more reductive than experiencing the festive from which spectacle is produced. Perhaps this is why human beings and their fellow primate cousins seem to delight in creating the participatory show that is spectacle. As all the case studies discussed here highlight, the myriad, true meanings and histories of festivities are accessible mainly by repeatedly participating in them, while maintaining a sense of their transformative potential for oneself. That is, we understand festivities best by recognizing them as rituals while consuming them as spectacles. If ritual plays a basic biological and cultural role in ensuring a continued

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human propensity towards social integration and reinforcement in highly differentiated societies, then spectacle must continue to be examined as a useful tool for thinking about the historical and cross-cultural efficacy of ritual in human experiences of, and with, power.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sincere thanks are extended to Niko Besnier and Mieka Ritsema for providing comments, to Roger Lohmann for his patient and supportive editing, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

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