Carnival and Culture: Sex, Symbol and Status in Spain (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Carnival and Culture: Sex, Symbol and Status in Spain Gary W. McDonogh Carnival and Culture: Sex, Symbol and Status in Spain. David Gilmore. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1998; 256 pp. David Gilmore has been observing carnival in Andalusia for more than a quarter of this century. Hence, his articles and books have chronicled Spain's fundamental political transition in this time from the conservative national Catholic Franco regime (1939-1975) to a robust democracy. Political change, moreover, has been linked to economic developments within the European Union and changes in social mores shaped by economics and politics as well as the penetration of mass media and mass consumption into smaller cities. Through this era Gilmore has assiduously documented changes in carnival while looking for its historical continuities as an arena for contestation of the meanings of gender, sexuality, and status. Thus his work poses a haunting question for anthropology in Europe-what are the traits that define Mediterranean cultures in a world of continuing connections and change? Once, a near-ahistorical Mediterranean seemed to mirror ethnographic visions of other peoples around the world. Yet, the complexities of written historical records, the cooperation of interdisciplinary studies and the changes anthropologists themselves have witnessed defy easy identification of eternal traits. At the same time characterization of Mediterranean lives as historical products of ever-changing connections of peoples, social and economic ties and ideas scarcely represents the continuities and memories we know in the field. While the Mediterranean may be a shifting construct, even for its citizens, we must describe and analyze more. Carnival, a long-standing central cultural performance replete with multiple levels of dialogue, meaning, and ambivalence as well as change, then, exemplifies this dilemma. Gilmore's presentation of carnival is at once ludic in its examples and carefully structured. His analysis incorporates psychoanalytic insights that he has pursued in previous works and a critical response to Marxist models, tempered by his sensibilities of what carnival means in concrete places to concrete persons. Above all, Gilmore writes with an awareness of history as lived experience and rich documentation: the texts here, gathered from decades of carnival songs, represent an important ethnographic contribution in themselves. Gilmore first presents carnival vividly as an historically-based experience of the Mediterranean, stressing the central elements of the Andalusian festival-the songs, divided between bawdy chirigotas and more solemn estudiantiles, the performance of sexual inversion by male participants, and the aggression above and below the surface of street festivities. He also reviews the extensive literature on carnival in Spain and other relevant cases, underscoring the strengths and weaknesses of the analyses this key event has evoked. Gilmore weaves these strengths together in his vision of carnival as a festival of contradiction itself. Subsequent chapters explore Andalusian gender and sexuality as enduring categories negotiated by both individual and society. Gilmore first counterposes the degradation of women by the joking chirigota bands to the sentimental laments of the estudiantiles. The first chastise bad girls and harridans through inventive coplas (verses) in which Gilmore reveals the subtlety and ambiguity of gendered criticism and expression. These verses are countered by songs focussed on the deserving mother or the deceived fallen woman, which create a much more ambivalent portrait of women (who still remain silent in this world). Ambiguity intensifies when coplas are delivered by men dressed as various alluring or frightening female figures. Gilmore develops gender ambiguity further through male carnivalesque roles and the definition of masculinity in Andalusia. Building on work by Brandes and Murphy, Gilmore shows how male roles are defined by relations to mother, wife, and other men. Here, the texts already presented prepare us for detailed analyses of male gender identity in psychoanalytic as well as ethnographic terms. The intersection of individual portraits, extensive social data, psychological analyses, and texts provide a nuanced counterpoint to the female roles men have discussed and enacted in public. Gilmore extends these discussions further into the textual realm through his analysis of the geometry [End Page 94] and geography of sex. Relations of "higher" and "lower" reverberate with multiple meanings and experiences of power, while returning to the sexual segregation of carnivalesque performance itself. Although one...