Masking Gender: A German Carnival Custom in Its Social Context

Abstract

his essay on Carnivals, Carnival, and Carnivalization this issue, Daniel Crowley observes that astonishing characteristic of Carnival is its conservation of form a situation designed to maximize innovation and creativity. Despite staggering variety of costumes, customs, displays, dramas, and forms of organization found Carnival celebrations over six continents, festival ultimately consists of, as Crowley puts it, such a narrow set of themes! Among this small number of recurrent themes, surely none is more essential to idea of carnivalesque than what Crowley calls reversal phenomenon, Carnival upside-down, which status, age, wealth, and, most prominently, gender get turned on their heads (Babcock 1978). It should come as little surprise that gender, a basic organizing principle all human societies, figures so centrally a festival which, wherever it occurs, involves temporarily inverting social norms. -The most notorious yet long-lived Carnival tradition, suggests Reid Mitchell, was that of cross-dressing (Mitchell 1995: 135). V.V. Ivanov also notes that the inversion of binary male/female.. appears to be a determining factor a significant number of carnival rites involving status reversal. those areas of Western Europe where ancient carnival tradition has been preserved, donning of masks of opposite sex by carnival participants remains salient feature of ritual.... Ivanov concludes that the archetype explaining establishment of these rituals [of transvestism] and their continued practice (in both ritual and nonritual, ordinary behavior) is apparently universal (Ivanov 1984: 12, 13). The symbolic play with gender norms found Carnival is one reason those scholars Crowley dubs have found concept of carnivalesque so appealing and fruitful. Yet despite interest carnivalesque gender inversions, surprisingly little ethnographic research has focused on division of participatory roles between men and women, and relationship of these roles to representations of gender within specific Carnival traditions. Instead, many of post-modern scholars who have reinvigorated study of carnivalesque prefer to read gender inversions on a symbolic plane and then, perhaps, generalize about their social significance, rather than other way around. For instance, Ivanovl cites numerous examples to ascertain that in contemporary ethnology, transvestism (as other carnival rituals) is considered to be an instance of a ritual neutralization of semiotically significant oppositions, this case male/female (Ivanov 1984: 14). But Ivanov offers little information about men and women actually engaging this transvestism, or their conventional positions within their own societies, and instead uses insight about semiotic mediation of binary oppositions to interpret selected literary works. his study of Brazilian Carnival, Roberto DaMatta observes that opposition between street and house is basic, and it can be a powerful tool analyzing Brazilian social world (DaMatta 1991 [1979]: 64). Clearly this symbolic dichotomy is deeply invested matters of gender roles and representations: In house relationships are ruled by 'natural' hierarchies of sex and age... (DaMatta 64). Yet DaMatta remains on level of symbolic generalization, and barely touches on gender at either social or symbolic level; he does, however, briefly conclude that the women of Carnival parade as whores, high up on platforms where they draw attention of everyone's eyes, or around tables and boxes of ballroom where they stir passions (DaMatta 108). Presumably women would disagree with at least portions of this characterization. At DaMatta's personal invitation, Victor Turnerwhom Crowley boasts of not mentioning his paper-also turned his attention to Carnival of Rio. …