Everyday social life is about people playing their assigned roles. Every now and then, however, our accumulated excess energy needs to find an outlet. We call such moments “festivities.”
It was still dark when I emerged from the Metaxourgeio subway station in Athens. A while before, when I was on the train—the first in the Sunday schedule—I noticed a girl wrapped in a fuchsia scarf. Fuchsia was the theme color of the city carnival I was going to. I figured it made more sense to follow the pink bacchant than a pin on Google Maps. The collection point was in a small square between vacant buildings that reminded me of the industrial past of this neighborhood. Once home to weaving workshops, today, this area is mostly inhabited by expats and artists. The local bohemians came up with the idea of an independent urban carnival. There is nothing about it in the media; the news is spread by word of mouth. Nevertheless, the event draws thousands of people. I participated in its more intimate part—the beginning of the period of celebration.
Disconnecting
A January day was dawning, it was just before five, and a group of thirty pink figures were behaving as if at a neighborhood picnic. It reminded me of the period preceding the ceremony at the Chebika oasis, as described in anthropologist Jean Duvignaud’s book Le Don du rien. Before the celebration begins, there are moments of relaxation, filled with ordinary conversations. The researcher believed this would introduce revelers to the process of abandoning social roles. Moreover, this suspended time creates an impression that the festivity appears spontaneously, out of thin air.
Once you get immersed in anthropology, it’s hard to shake off associations with cultural texts. One can feel like the protagonist of the series Dream On, who spent his childhood watching movies and experienced his adult vicissitudes via recurring clichés. In order not to stand out from the rest, I chose participant observation. This type of social research assumes involvement and, if possible, identification with the group described. At this early hour I was warming myself up with mulled rakomelo. Truth be told, I didn’t refuse anything all day. Strangers were treating me to various mind-altering substances, which undoubtedly prepared me for the trance and brought me closer to becoming one with those of the fuchsia tribe.
Excessiveness and unbridled consumption are integral to festivities. Advocates of biological-environmental determinism believe it to be an echo of the oldest prehistoric rituals organized by hunter-gatherer groups. These proto-celebrations followed a pattern of fertility and scarcity related to the stages of plant development, as well as environmental changes. According to this theory, one over-ate in hope for a plentiful hunting season, while the symbolic traces of seasons of scarcity survived as periods of fasting. The school of symbolic anthropology, while not questioning the influence of nature’s cycles on the first holiday calendars (we can infer them from the succession of festive periods in monotheistic religions), proposes a different interpretation of this kind of debauchery.
Ethnologist Roger Caillois, in his classic text on the theory of festivity, saw in debauchery a motif of rebirth. Analyzing the spiritual calendar of tribal communities, he contrasted sacred time with secular time. The latter consumes social energy just like nature, whose life-giving force diminishes as the year progresses. In this perspective, celebration is necessary for social revitalization. Intemperance here symbolizes fertility, re-birth, or life itself.
Dawn brought the music of the gaida, an instrument similar to the bagpipe, producing a drawn-out bass sound countered by the high notes of the pipe. Then the clarinet joined, playing a faster tempo. Having everyone around the campfire created an element of ritual and separation from the surrounding urban reality. Two policemen on motorcycles tried to stop us from leaving the secular dimension. Post-Covid restrictions were still in place at the time. The law enforcement officers, however, had to fall back, bested by the universal merriment. Isn’t laughter, an integral part of celebration, the best weapon against authority? The rhymes chanted over the campfire also had a ludic and folksy nature. I learned from Eleni, my friend and guide, who translated for me, that they were bawdy dialogues between the vagina and the phallus, and used a form derived from Greek folklore.
Erotic symbolism was omnipresent: the pink coryphaeus that set the tone for these chants was adorned with a pig’s tail hanging down to his knees, and many of the participants—including your reporter—were adorned with phallic paintings done on their foreheads in pink lipstick. Literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, whose interests included carnivalization in the novel and the culture of “popular laughter,” connected carnality—i.e. everything related to the lower half of the body, like excretion and copulation—to carnival’s repertory. In this view bawdiness is a weapon against the seriousness of the ruling classes’ language.
Between Worlds
I was fully immersed in this grotesque reality before the sun had reached its peak. A cheerful procession set out to reclaim the urban space. Being a part of it, I realized that we were crossing the route that connected Athens with Eleusis. In ancient times, for several thousand years, people traveled this road, with the same enthusiasm as ours, to participate in the Eleusian Mysteries. The performative elements of our meeting also brought to mind the Dionysia that are the root ancient theater (for festivals are primarily spectacles). I was in a contemporary city and participated, as it were, in an ancient procession, and at the same time, I was neither here nor there; I was between two orders of time and place.
It is the kind of suspension the anthropologist Victor Turner called liminality (from the Latin limen, or “threshold”). He proposed a structural description of festivities that organizes their seemingly chaotic nature. Festivities are usually about celebrating social change (e.g., a change of status, like an initiation where a child enters the community of adults). Turner relied on the terminology coined by Arnold van Gennep, a researcher of rites of passage, who distinguished three phases of such rituals: separation, liminality, and incorporation. The first involves separation from the community, a symbolic farewell to one’s previous status. The second is a state of being in-between. The third brings the person back into the community.
Turner focused on the middle phase, whose main characteristic is ambivalence. The liminal phase—when a person has already lost their previous form but have not yet gained a new status—is often described as a symbolic death or return to the womb.
A similar situation experienced by a group has been dubbed by Turner as communitas, and it is characterized as standing in opposition to society, which is built on status differences. Communitas finds its realization in a festivity that dissolves the hierarchies established in society, establishing in their place a new egalitarian community. It is the transition from one model to the other that seems to be a basic human need, and the driving force behind the dynamics of social life. Today, the distinction between these two seemingly radically different states is all the more difficult as modern culture attacks consumers with images of unending holidays and relaxation, and blurs real social differences and limitations.
Chaos in the Park
The lack of hierarchy in our procession aroused spontaneous discussions about the choice of route. The tone was set by the voice of women, which reminded us of the contemporaneity of the event. Or did this manifestation of matriarchy harken back to much older layers of culture? The voice of the people pointed to Philopappos, a green hill southwest of the Acropolis serving as the city’s park. I tried to walk close to the drummer so I could feel the low vibrations in my entire body.
Halfway down the slope, our next stop was a circular clearing that quickly filled with dancing figures. The carnival revealed its inclusive power as families with children, enjoying a Sunday afternoon in the park, began to appear on the “dance floor.” The music became faster and invited the dancers into a trance. The body, subjected to hours of monotonous stimuli that have an impact on the nervous system, falls into a particular state. Reaching this state is facilitated by a special sensitivity of the participants at the time and the mood of communal anticipation.
French anthropologist Jean Duvignaud saw trance as a re-establishment of the connection between the real and the imagined. For him, this restructuring of the self was the true meaning of festivity. He made a distinction, however, between trance, where at various points the entranced person regains consciousness, and possession, characterized by a complete break with reality. Trance is one of the threshold, in-between, or—as Turner would put—liminal, states. Both researchers agree that, through the trance’s release, an individual can once again find their place in the cosmos. For Duvignaud, it is also a moment of getting in touch with the fixed values of culture, and of transcending the exhausting participation in everyday events.
What was a dance slowly turned into a trance frenzy. A Cycladic musician with the gaida was lying on his back while playing the instrument. He was like a medium through which the melody flowed from the depths of the earth toward the sky. Caillois, argued that the paroxysms of energy manifested in movement, shouts, and theatrical gestures make festivity the culminating moment of collective life.
All the confusion also has a symbolic meaning, as it connects with the image of the world before creation. In almost all myths, the world’s birth is preceded by Chaos. Any festivity, a ritual, in order to renew social forces and initiate a new order, must first invoke that primordial disorder from before the foundation of the cosmos. In mythical times, the earth was inhabited by a plethora of creatures, while humans—before they acquired their present form—had animal traits. Hence the array of animalistic props and representations of mythical monsters that we so often see at carnival masquerades.
New World
The rays of the setting sun illuminated the hill and brought out a heavenly view of spherical mulberry trees, interspersed with columns of cypresses. I glanced at Eleni, whirling between worlds, and started down the slope. I was on the subway again. Intuitively, I rubbed my makeup off my forehead, which clearly marked a return to social norms and conventions. I no longer needed the mask that symbolized my new role. I was returning to my regular self. I got off at the station Neos Kosmos, or “New World,” which seemed like an apt place to end my trip. After sixteen hours in the procession, I felt fatigue mixed with a sort of lightness.
The aforementioned researchers were skeptical about the possibility of experiencing social renewal in an atmosphere of fun and laughter in today’s conditions. Turner looked for liminality in countercultural activities, for which Duvignaud, who remembered the period of civil and societal unrest in Paris in May ’68, also felt a distinct nostalgia. For Roger Caillois, the figure of festivity in modern society was war as a moment when social energy overflows, and the laws of the “normal order” are suspended. Duvignaud wrote that a festivity is an equation with many variables and we can only experience some of its components (such as entering a trance). He believed that, in consumer society, festivity has been replaced by dreams. At the same time, he did not definitively rule out the possibility of experiencing something special in the astructural crevices of reality that “human imagination transcends social behavior.”
Sources
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky
Jean Duvignaud, Le Don du rien.
Read similar:
