Carnivals, Carnival, and Carnivalization, or How to Make a Living without Actually

Working
Author(s): Daniel J. Crowley
Source: Western Folklore , Summer - Autumn, 1999, Vol. 58, No. 3/4, Studies of
Carnival in Memory of Daniel J. Crowley (Summer - Autumn, 1999), pp. 213-222
Published by: Western States Folklore Society

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 Carnivals, Carnival, and
Carnivalization, or How
To Make a Living
without Actually Working
DANIEL J. CROWLEYI

A certain critic of mine, who shall be nameless, is quot

remarked that "Crowley doesn't know Bakhtin (the Russian
and sociolinguist) from Bactine, the disinfectant." Following th
of the man who didn't know shit from Shinola, and whose sho
were quite a mess, it can be said that this address may be
naive, but at least it will be clean, even antiseptic, and perh
slick. But before I face up to the august subject of this swan-s
you will indulge me in a little autobiographical survey, to expl
here.

My critic was right in pointing out that theory has not been my forte
during my professional career now stretching back over four decades. Not
only am I a "self-confessed Boasian particularist"-there are not too many
alive who can say that-chary of supracultural generalizations, but far
worse, I am much too much in love with my field data for its own sake to
care too much what it all might MEAN - if anything. This fascination with
the cultural variety in our world is quite simply "the fire in my furnace,"
and easier to understand when you realize that I was born in that doyen of
American cities, Peoria, Illinois, the grandchild of Irish and Alsatian-
French migrants, son of a surprisingly successful plumbing contractor, a
whitecollar kid in the quintessential bluecollar town. Having access to The
National Geographic and a public library, I soon realized that there had to
be better places for me than Peoria, and my subsequent career can be seen
as a long hard struggle to get away from there and to stay away. This
explains my exotic Trinidadian East Indian wife, the focus on such

Western Folklore 58 (Summer/Fall, 1999):213-22

213

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 214 WESTERN FOLKLORE

obscure areas (in the '40s

concentration on such arc
Eschewing Peoria-favo
Protestant Northwestern i
museums, and after havi
after Pearl Harbor, I got m
aged ex-cruise liner, the
Maru, the Japanese Secre
landing barge crews on S
siderably better than bei
gerous, so I soon transferr
war over an early versio
messages. While decomm
and at age 24 found myself
my arms and legs.
To their credit, the Nav
Warm Springs (which ha
wheelchairs, help toward
other gear, money for e
helped pay for all that tra
ber that you know someon
put some thought and mo
paid taxes all these years. W
people, I came to realize th
get out of the back bedroo
ket-case, I realized that all
somebody might pay me
choose something I thoug
by rehabilitating the imag
the eyes of both African an
two years teaching at Br
for basketball scandals, I went to see Herskovits and Bascom back at
Northwestern to ask where I could find an Art History program that
covered African art. They just laughed, and said, "Ah, art history, they're
still doing the Renaissance. You would have to learn Italian-so why not
become an anthropologist and study all the arts in their full cultural
contexts?" It was easier in those long distant days, no GREs, no tran-
scripts, just a phone call to the Dean of the Graduate School and I was in-
and within a few weeks I realized I had indeed discovered the "discipline"
(or lack of it) that I was looking for.

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CARNIVALS, CARNIVAL, AND CARNIVALIZATION 215

On the shores of Lake Michigan, Northwestern was a pu

for me during the long icy winters. So, in 1952 I headed fo
island I could find that had real live "natives" on it-Nassau in the
Bahamas, a $50 flight east of Miami-sponging freely on all the War
Springs alums enroute. My ad in the Daily Northwestern for a "swashbuck
ling student to accompany anthropological field expedition, British W
Indies," brought 21 answers within an hour of hitting the street, includin
Joann Kealiinohomoku, the now-distinguished dance ethnologist (bu
didn't think my mother would approve). I chose, however, a shar
elbowed Milwaukee German kid whose subsequent business career ha
allowed him to keep a yacht in the Caribbean ever since.
Ostensibly we were to study African "retentions" in the local charisma
Protestant sects, on which I later published an article in French in Prisenc
Afticaine, which was never heard of again by anybody. However, our neig
bors in the slum where I settled admired our big box tape recorder wi
revolving reels and heavy chrome microphone that looked like the on
used for radio performances. So they asked us if we would like to he
some of their "old time old stories." Remembering that Elsie Clews Parson
had published a Bahamian tale collection in 1918, and had supported t
Herskovits's first field research in Suriname, I figured I had better record
a few of these stories. Of course one guy got hold of the mike a
wouldn't stop until I got over a hundred. The very first story I recorded wa
about a character whose name was "Boy Nasty, because his clothes was dirt
and he face was full of beard and t'ing ...." My blood ran cold-B'Anan
the spider trickster of West Africa! Remember in those days we were still tr
ing to prove, as one roommate put it, that all these Black people real
came from Africa. More to the point, we were trying to find evidence of a
the significant elements of African cultures that might have been brough
over in the middle passage and preserved and modified in religion, me
icine, folklore, cuisine, and more and more, we realized, even in political,
economic, and social forms. I believe we Herskovitsians succeeded in
that. What strikes me as strange is that we ever had to fight so hard to make
that point.
When Herskovits heard the tapes, he said, "Well, there's no money
around for research in African artjust now, so use these tales to parallel our
Suriname Collection." I boggled, proclaiming, "I'm an Art Historian,
not a literary scholar or a Folklorist. I don't know anything about literary
form!" He snorted, "Well, learn about it. You're going to starve to death the
way it is. Better have two arrows in your bow." So I became a Folklorist in
spite of myself, and I must say that has been the most successful aspect of

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 216 WESTERN FOLKLORE

my career, the sub-discipli

The next year Andrew Pear
the drum and sing extempor
him out for a pizza and he
my own way). Once there,
Tutor in the then fledglin
based University College o
Stafford Prize paper in h
1953), and introduced me t
Trinidad, that crazy, mixe
anthropological tools for
dulled, and rusty. I wrote it
in Trinidad," still probably
pologist in 1957. A few year
Studies, CUNY Queens, m
implications, seeing it as a
tionism. Honest-he really d
lished as I Could Talk Old-Sto
1966) has been called a classi
loristics, and was reprinted
During my three years in T
grade school principal at a U
generation descendant of I
abled men have some probl
glass of Cointreau-so we've
ognizing the chasms betwe
backgrounds, to say nothing
phrase-and she went off to
western for my Ph.D. After
me and my family in Peoria
Mexico suitably chaperone
question in the parking lot
on the island of Grenada,
Dame. It was in Sociology, 12
called "Marriage and the Fa
rying the girl down the blo
felt welcome.

We then got an incredible $18,000 Ford Foundation Fellowship to

study art in the Cameroon Grasslands. A possibly related phenomenon was
her getting pregnant. After three months studying Cameroon specimens

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CARNIVALS, CARNIVAL, AND CARNIVALIZATION 217

in European museums, we found ourselves in London where

duced son Peter, now 33 and an Arabist at Princeton.2 Cameroon
blew up in a three-way war, the French cancelled our visas, and I
Jacques Maquet, later of UCLA, and with my usual foresight agre
him at his new University in the Belgian Congo, and study the ar
Chokwe, Badjokwe, Batchioko, Watschiwokwe, or Quicos peopl
guage has a different name for them. Five months later, the Con
at "Ondepondonce," and we had to run for it, arriving ultimat
es-Salaam, Tanzania, where Pearl produced daughter Eve,
Ph.D. in Anthropology and currently a consultant with the Gu
government, and mother of our only grandchild, four-month old
guirre. In the Congo, we had received a wrinkled aerogramme off
half ajob at some cow college in California, IF Anthropology
suade the Art History Department to take my other half. They d
was so eager to get out of the snow of the Midwest, I signed up s
the academic ladder (I was 39, with 35 publications) that I g
raises before I ever set foot on the Davis campus in January,
Maggie arrived in 1962, and is now in the UC Berkeley Computer
We built a house in 1964. I was Chair of the Department from
and since then you've sat through my innumerable papers report
research in the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, and Brazil, n
Cape Verde, Canary Islands, and Goa.
But now back to Bakhtin and my title. Although I had se
Orleans Mardi Gras as a teenager, the 1954 Trinidad Carnival
lation, as that rather stuffy British colonial society blew up into a
street parades preceded by daring calypso songs and showca
recently-invented steelband. I was delighted, fascinated, mystified
am. With a number of other scholars, mostly local amateur
duced a special issue of Caribbean Quarterly in 1957 devoted t
which has been recently republished, and I organized the fir
exhibition at the Royal Victoria Institute, now a permanent g
exhibits of masks and costumes changing yearly at the Nation
The copies I made of the extensive Arthur Greenhall Collecti
commercial calypsos became the nucleus of the T & T Nationa
founded by Dr. J. D. Elder, and other copies are preserved at the
of Traditional Music at Indiana University, along with my Baham
Lucian materials.

Besides keeping track of the changes in Trinidad Carnival, still in

view the most truly creative in music and concept of all I have stud
have had opportunity to study the Carnivals of Rio de Janeiro, unq

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 218 WESTERN FOLKLORE

tionably "The Greatest S

immense floats; Salvador da
and Trio Eletrico musical so
playing Frevo music and d
the Cape Verde Islands off W
is huge helmet masks inspir
trolled Canary Islands; the
faraway India (the only Car
Gras with its showbiz hype
summer Carnival in San F
tional Carnivals of Caracas,
towns, Havana and many o
exists), Nice and Cannes
most German and Swiss c
revived medieval Carneval
Brooklyn, Miami, Toron
Copenhagen and Akureyr
Buenos Aires is high on the
tica and sponging off my C
The very multiplicity of
unexpected picture emerges
is its conservatism of form
and creativity. The more
street parades, the masks,
bonfires and effigy-burning
even the throwing of water
horse-drawn floats repres
Spain, as was the "reversa
children play adults, men p
the poor rich. Every year s
such a narrow set of them
plation of as much of this
the required frisson of aest
found that compares favo
VALS.

In his 1968 study of Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais and His Wor
Bakhtin pointed out the truly subversive nature of festivals in general
Carnival in particular, even those sponsored and organized by the p
cal and religious authorities. Even more important, his "dialogism"
a case that all interactional speech, i.e. conversation, carries comp

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CARNIVALS, CARNIVAL, AND CARNIVALIZATION 219

historical reference that gives it multiple possible meanings, w

valization" as the ultimate expression of this dialogism. Ac
Roger Abrahams (1989: 203), verbal interchanges that take
marketplace contain "alternative and confrontative voices...e
the opening up that occurs [there], both through the pro
gaining and through other contentious, stylized, and dramat
that accompany buying and selling at high pitch." For observer
performance, the marketplace can be seen as a powerful metaph
complex interchanges that take place not only during a tra
formance, but in every exchange in the "marketplace of ide
hams says:
The Bakhtinian breakthrough occurs at the point where the o
of cultural performances is directed to occasions that have a
of centers of activity, each of which may employ distinctive
styles, and methods of amplification and hypertrophization.
in Bakhtin's thinking, is the model occasion for the
intense involvement of the populace in festivities. This pre-L
ebration transvalues the landscape and makes an assault up
day notions of order and hierarchy. Carnival, as Bakhtin desc
is Janus-headed, looking to the past in drawing on devices
tional festival vocabulary, but also looking to the present and
in elaborating on the interactional style of the face-to-fac
(Abrahams 1989: 203).
Although Bakhtin seems to imply that Carnival in its pu
longer exists since the Renaissance, this is hardly the case, and
chief appeal of his work, the reason why it has been discussed
the western world, is that post-modern scholars such as St
White (1986), Bristol (1985), and Agnew (1986), see Carniva
way of foregrounding politically and socially subversive motive
in literature or in gatherings of people such as riots, marches,
More than "a new way of discussing the playful motives embod
forms," they use Bakhtin to discover "a new way to think
texts...a perspective useful in rethinking the productions o
sance theater, especially in England" (Abrahams 1989: 2
Bakhtin, "Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they liv
everyone participates because its very idea embraces all pe
[1968]: 7). With the distinctions between art and life as wel
tion and representation broken down, Carnival becomes "life it
all voices and all expressive forms and codes brought into conte
one another. One small problem: no such Carnival has ever

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220 WESTERN FOLKLORE

indeed Bakhtin had no fiel

through Rabelais.
Suggestive as they have b
a kind of cultural artifact, a
ple participate in Carnival is
beach at Carnival time in T
hell out. They don't want a
want to get away, where it
Tenerife or any other place.
if this isn't something Bakh
the lady said about Bach, "I
Carnivalization of "the mark
to describe the intellectual f
a simply trendy and mislead
In an age when epistemolog
to reverse and displace ev
ceptual order with which it
my hands and more and m
cepts" are now mere "noti
social organization is taken t
no observer or group of ob
understand, a single Carniva
In honesty, we knew that w
data are useless. In pursuit o
cinate me, every year whe
my Dean for "one more sh
most of the last fifteen y
grams (UREP), which arrang
once" during the Carnival
taxes when they get home. O
people have one thing in com
are jaded with ordinary trav
everything, and they rejoi
route,and those long nights
tryouts. Whether our wor
seen. Remembering my de
Breen's book on St. Lucia
[Carmichael 1961]), and th
contemporary cultures, I th
and photographic documenta

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CARNIVALS, CARNIVAL, AND CARNIVALIZATION 221

future who might care about the Carnival for itself, and how i
it will be then-and maybe even what it all might mean. In the
this old man is content to keep collecting and analyzing his dat
can, in its own terms, because it is valuable in itself, and also t
life-far better indeed than actually working for a living.
I thank you for this opportunity to explain myself, to justify
make a case for continued observation, and the collection an
field data. I also managed to read a paper about festival wi
tioning liminality and Victor Turner.

Notes

1 Distinguished-Scholar Lecture delivered at the joint meeting of the Sou

western Anthropological Association and the California Folklore Society in
Diego, California, April 24, 1993. This publication is based on Crowl
manuscript and additional material transcribed from a videotape of the lectu
Peter Tokofsky has incorporated minor editorial changes.
2 Peter subsequently spent eighteen months on a Fulbright research fellows
in rural Yemen, studying the qat industry, land tenure, and employment.
lives with his wife, Kelley, in Martinez, California--ed.
S Eve is presently the Technical Adviser on Household Food Security and G
der Issues for the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Dev
opment (IAFD). She lives in Rome with her anthropologist husband, Pab
Eyzaguirre, and her two daughters, Jaya and Maita--ed.
4Maggie lives in Berkeley, California, and is Webmaster for the Department
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Califor
Berkeley--ed.

Works Cited

Abrahams, Roger D. 1989. Bakhtin, the Critics, and Folklore. Journal of American
Folklore 102: 202-206.
Agnew, Jean-Christophe. 1985. The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American
Thought, 1550-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984 [1968]. Rabelais and His World. Translated by H6l8ne Iswol-
sky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Breen, Henry Hegart. 1844. St. Lucia: Historical, Statistical, and Descriptive. Lon-
don: Brown, Greeen and Longmans.
Bristol, Michael D. 1985. Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of
Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen.
Carmichael, Gertrude. 1961. The History of the West Indian Islands of Trinidad and
Tobago, 1498-1900. London: A. Redman.

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 222 WESTERN FOLKLORE

Crowley, Daniel J. 1953. Fo

Quarterly 3: 218-234.
. 1957. Plural and Differential Acculturation in Trinidad. American Anthro-
pologist 59, 817-824.
_ 1966. I Could Talk Old-Story Good: Creativity in Bahamian Folklore. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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