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

Abstract

A certain critic of mine, who shall be nameless, is quoted as having remarked that Crowley doesn't know Bakhtin (the Russian philosopher and sociolinguist) from Bactine, disinfectant. Following paradigm of man who didn't know shit from Shinola, and whose shoes as a result were quite a mess, it can be said that this address may be theoretically naive, but at least it will be clean, even antiseptic, and perhaps just a bit slick. But before I face up to august subject of this swan-song, I hope you will indulge me in a little autobiographical survey, to explain how I got 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 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, grandchild of Irish and Alsatian-- French migrants, son of a surprisingly successful plumbing contractor, a whitecollar kid in 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, focus on such obscure areas (in '40s anyway) as Africa and Caribbean, and concentration on such arcane subjects as narrative and festival. Eschewing Peoria-favored Notre Dame, I got an A.B. in Design at Protestant Northwestern in `43, getting my fill of opera, symphony, and museums, and after having signed on as a 90 day wonder two months after Pearl Harbor, I got my Ensign's Commission soon after. My ship, an aged ex-cruise liner, USS American Legion, known aboard as the AL Maru, Japanese Secret Weapon, carried on training operations for landing barge crews on San Clemente Island near Catalina. While considerably better than being shot at, those barges were unstable and dangerous, so I soon transferred to Communications, and spent rest of war over an early version of a computer coding and decoding secret messages. While decommissioning ship, I somehow contracted polio, and at age 24 found myself a partial quadriplegic with very limited use of my arms and legs. To their credit, Navy and VA came through with a stay at Warm Springs (which had a Navy unit founded by Roosevelt), a car, wheelchairs, help toward building a wheelchair house, legbraces, all other gear, money for education, and later an ample pension (which helped pay for all that travel). So when you pay your high taxes, remember that you know someone who gets some of it back! Indeed, because they put some thought and money into me, I too became employable and have paid taxes all these years. With help of my parents and some other wise people, I came to realize that if I were going to have a life, I would have to get out of back bedroom and find a way to make a living. As a semi-basket-case, I realized that all I could do was talk, but what to talk about that somebody might pay me for? My VA pension gave me insouciance to choose something I thought needed doing, i.e., improving race relations by rehabilitating image of African and New World African societies in eyes of both African and non-African. After an MA in Art History and two years teaching at Bradley in Peoria, a university famous primarily 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. …