Carnival

(A Life of Response, Washabaugh)

We have been encouraged by the work of Victor Turner to see that societies are fractured rather than unitary, and bi-polar rather than homogeneous. He argued, for example, that the "communitas" experienced by Ndembu boys establishes memories and habits that contrast with the traditional role structures of their workaday life. We will now take an even more radical step in this same direction by following the lead of Mikhail Bakhtin, a critical thinker whose writings on philosophy, literature, psychology and language date from 1920s. The most general lesson that we learn from Bakhtin is that every social life (Yanomamo life or Western life) is a waltzing of porcupines, a constant struggle, a potpourri of nonsequiturs cosmetically resurfaced to seem well-organized. Social life is like "The Mikado" in Mike Leigh's recent film Topsy Turvy , a muddle that goes on and on. Frequently our reflections on what we have accomplished in this muddled life convinces us that our collaborative actions were competent, sometimes even brilliant. They key for understanding both our actions and our reflections is, according to Bakhtin, the realization that nothing is constant. Everything is flluid and negotiated.

Bakhtin's idea can be summarized with the word "carnival." Every social moment in every society is like a carnival in the sense that it is an occasion for artifice in which multiple levels of power and resistance are operative, each responding to different forces in the world at the same time that they accommodate themselves to one another. We will dissect this description starting with the notion of artifice and with the idea that socials events involve pretense, dissemblance, masks of one sort or another. As such, artifice goes much deeper than the conventional functionalist principle that social actors put on masks and play roles. The Bakhtinian notion of artifice says that in addition to actors playing roles, the roles actually turn the tables and "play" the actors by shaping and constructing social persons in response to situations. With this emphasis on roles shaping persons, the carnival model discourages us from trying to look underneath social masks to see who actors REALLY are. They are, in the end, nothing but a confusing accumulation of the social roles they have been played. With this principle leading the way, Bakhtinian anthropology should be understood to be anti-humanistic in the sense explained below, and intensely anti-romanticist.

Second, social moments, in Bakhtinian theory, are carnivalesque in the sense that they involve re-negotiations of power. In his classic example of a carnivalesque society, the medieval European life discussed in this book Rabelais and His World, the power of the serious officials, the

mayors, the priests, the clerks, etc., is constantly being turned on its heads by the laughing crowds. As a result of such turnabouts, social life looks less and less like a neat structure of well-defined roles, and more and more like a rat's nest of confused intentions and chaotic movements. If we portray social experiences in terms of organization, cohesion, and solidarity, then we are, according to Bakhtin, promulgating a delusionary picture and promoting a fiction.

Many anthropologists are embracing this "carnival model" because it enables us to think beyond the boundaries of humanism, boundaries that have so often trapped us into static social theories like Durkheim's and even Turner's. Let's reflect for a moment on the static character of the principles for understanding social life in the bi-polar model. Wilson's and Turner's ideas ultimately hark back to some old dualistic notions of good and evil forces in society. But instead of using these familiar terms, they use more exotic ones like "structure" and "communitas" to refer to artificial ("bad") power and authentic ("good") relations. Their models contain the distinct flavor and strong aroma of the Gnostics who portrayed civil society as evil and oppressive and tolerable only insofar as it is held in check by forces that are individual, sincere, authentic, and pure. This 2000 year old Gnosticism is evident in bi-polar social analyses where "authentic" island values oppose imported European values, where Franciscan sincerity runs up against ecclesiastical chicanery, where Ndembu boys develop skin-to-skin comradery in the face of the distinctions imposed by tradition, where rebellious youth of the 1960s face off against the military-industrial establishment and where soul confronts musical mathematics in the singing of a song. Always, in these bi-polar situations, one finds beleaguered innocence waging a courageous battle against the superior forces of the social establishment, a classically Gnostic formulation. One cannot help but imagine what a society would be like if the resistant forces were to somehow win. Would not the resulting social life be a "Utopia?"

Bakhtin's "carnival model" mounts some stiff opposition to such Gnostic and Utopian leanings in social theory. It does so, for example, by arguing that social actors are rarely "innocent" and by demonstrating that social roles are rarely fixed and shared in any simple fashion. Instead, social actors are usually driven by complex interests which lead them to push and pull at one another at every next turn.

Some recent studies of politeness behavior illustrate the dynamism of these artifices in social life. Politeness, according to social scientists, refer to the verbal devices that are used to compensate others for the burdens imposed on them. When I ask you for a dime, I am, by my request, troubling you or, at the very least, distracting you from your activity. Typically, I will redress this burden by issuing a polite word, e.g. "please." Polite words vary from place to place, partly because different people develop different strategies of redress. One common strategy formulates polite phrases on the assumption that persons always prefer to exercise their own wills and proceed without hindrance or distraction. Following such a strategy, I would politely apologize for bothering you by saying "Excuse me...", and I would say "please" so as to compensate you for having your time directed to my needs. But such phrases of deference are not the only way to be polite. Another common strategy formulates polite phrases on the assumption that persons always prefer to be accepted and loved by others. Following this second strategy, I would politely express my affection in conjunction with my request, not unlike the scene dramatized in an old Bud Lite commercial: "Dad? You're my dad. ..and ah love ya, man!"

Now, these strategies are not always well-matched with each other other. For example, if I embrace you, you may well feel distracted and hindered, but if I make you feel free and independent of me, you may feel unloved. Consequently, as you can see, my politeness gambit is always challenging and never ever completely successful. I might tailor my polite phrase to strike a balance between my interlocutor's needs for attention and independence, finally producing something, "Sorry to bother you, but could I borrow a dime." However, even as I speak it, I cannot know whether I have indeed avoided the one extreme of a fawning sychophant and the other of a brash egomaniac. I juggle the options and spit out my choice, hoping against hope that the resulting phrase will show some sensitivity to the situation, to the status of my interlocutor, to the time of day, the prevailing mood, etc.

What should be evident and clear about my politeness behavior is that it is improvised rather than canned, and created on the spot rather than withdrawn from a store of social facts shared and stored in advance. Interestingly, in different societies, certain forms of politeness are generally favored over others. For example, our "pleases" and "thank yous" strike many Latin Americans as standoffish and stilted, if not false and hokey. By contrast, the brusk tenor of their requests strikes many of us North Americans as bold and pushy. These facts only underscore that unsettling reality that actors, wherever they are, and must be, good improvisers, constantly searching to balance each next social moment in a topsy-turvy world.

Besides emphasizing the improvizational quality of politeness behaviors, it is important to emphasize Bakhtin's celebration of artificiality in social life. The implications that runs through much of his work is: Don't ask which behavior is sincere or authentic or candid; none of them are. Alll behaviors are pragmatic creations. They accomplish social work. Whether they come from anyone's heart is irrelevant - though in our society, expressions of, say, heartfelt gratitude, are supposed to seem heartfelt ...Be sincere, even if you don't mean it! As Bakhtin saw it, no one has access to a private or innocent or direct communication process. Heart-to-heart communication is as mythical as mental telepathy. Does this sound cynical? Perhaps, but ironically, the purpose behind his disclaimer of innocence was to forestall cynicism; If we humans could finally convince ourselves that role-playing is the only game in town, then perhaps we would take our role-playing more seriously instead of persisting in our efforts to supplant it with socially irrelevant moments of sincerity.

As strange as Bakhtin's views might seem to this point, they are about to get stranger, because not only does he emphasize the "naturalness" of an unnatural life of artificial role playing, he also commends us to a life of noise. Nothing could be finer, he contends, than social chaos undisturbed by the balance of harmony or, worse yet, by angelic silence. Tension, struggle, chaos and noise are the human lot.

Human social experiences are rarely neat, seldom consistent, and infrequently identical from person to person. As people play out their social roles, they may well have neat expectations, but such expectations are regularly buffeted by novelties and jarred by unpredictable turns of events. Every next moment of social interaction challenges actors'assumptions, forcing them to improvise, turning social occasions into carnivalesque experiences.

For all these reasons, social life is less an object or a fact than a happening and a process. "Culture", if we must use the term at all, is best used to refer to processes of accomplishment rather than to objects possessed. People accomplish culture rather than have culture. Above all, cultural processes are diverse, complex, confused and always subject to re-construction in and through interactional encounters and dialogic experiences all of which hang on in individuals'memories to shape their identity and direct their movements.

Perhaps the familiar word "memory" is not yet up to the task of carrying all the operations that I am ascribing to it. Too often, memory is simply passed off as "recall"-- "Let's see, where did I put my glasses. I can't seem to remember!" But beyond being a faculty of recall, human memory is a gyroscopic guidance system, one that holds individuals on a course in the same way that one's bicycle tires "remember" to move forward in a straight line. (¹) The tires physically remember direction, and enact it without need of consciousness or conceptual awareness. So too, human memory retains the forms, styles, and directions of experience, and uses these retentions to steer paths through interactions that lie ahead. More than mental memory, this human faculty is physical, even muscular, being comprised of physical honed but always adjustable patterns of behavior. Pierre Bourdieu described these patterns using the term "habitus." This term, so closely linked to "habit", reminds us that these patterns are physical. Michael Jordon "remembers" how to shoot a basketball with his body not his mind. Brett Favre "remembers" how to pass a football with muscle recall, not with mental recall. Basketball and football, as well as, say, musical competence, all rely very obviously on a faculty like "habitus" that range over individual experiences and orchestrates them towards a graceful conclusion. However, we can say the same thing for most human social experiences. Diverse experiences such as nursing at the breast, requesting a pardon for a dinner-table burp, sending flowers to ailing Aunt Mary, are reliant on an analogous "habitus." Each new experience contributes to the construction and confirmation of patterns of action, resulting in a certain predictability. But beyond predictability of behavior, these stored, sedimented, and constantly reshaped patterns of "habitus" actually created our characters as social beings. We become our interactions.

Some, like Harvey Sarles,* have pushed this notion - perhaps a bit too far - claiming that interactions physically transform us. Confirming the folk notion that longtime husbands and wives grow to resemble each other, Sarles contends that repeated interactions gradually creates synchronized muscular patterns that reshape the facial skeleton. Hence, our interactions, our encounters, our contacts, not only recreate us as moral beings, they revise us as physical creatures as well. While one might legitimately question the empirical evidence supporting Sarles's argument, one can nonetheless appreciate his important point: Humans accomplish social life physically.

These views of memory-constructed persons dovetail with much of the work that is currently progressing in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Whereas older Cartesian views portray the human mind as the central processing unit of the person, the computer at the heart of the individual, new views portray brains and bodiesas sites of pandemonium where multiple independent operations take place simultaneously, most of which go unintended and even unnoticed by consciousness. Individuals live blissfully unaware of the cerebral and hormonal complexities that roil their lives. They assume that their minds can simply impose, by will and fiat, a regularity and organization to human behavior. But the view from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is that such assumptions merely our brain-and-body chaos.

Not to say that individuals lives are doomed to disorderliness and destined for messiness. On the contrary, order and even grace regularly emerge. It's just that they don't emerge through thoughtfulness, or will, or choice. They emerge through cerebral and corporeal process that tally up and store connections between experiences, building richer and deeper fields, none of which are well understood in advance, or well-classified, well categorized, or even accessible. These fields of memory in brain and muscle are more like the rhizomic connections in a lawn than the simple branching connections of limbs in a tree. Moreover, one ought not underestimate the possibilities for such connections; a single human cortex, according to Gerald Edelman, has the potential for making more connections than there are atoms in the universe! ⁽²⁾

Most persons live lives that rely on deep sedimentations of social experience, well-defined muscular memories, and conventionalized social habits. Most of the time, the actions they produce when encountering others, are similar to actions produced in the past, and this relative sameness may give off the appearance of something like a fixed and conventional culture in the traditional sense of the term. Recognizing the importance of these gyroscopic muscular habits, we can suddenly appreciate the challenge faced by ethnographers and other travelers who take leave of all this social predictability when they travel to the distant margins of familiar social life. In doing so, they discover, right within themselves, that social life is always an accomplishment rather than a thing, a dialogical construct rather than a possession of an individual or group of individuals. The dramatic experience of fieldwork demonstrates, simultaneously, both to ethnographers and to their hosts just how it can happen that culture and personhood are accomplished in and through interaction.

The "carnival model" suggests that every social encounter is improvized and that social lives are accomplished rather acquired, constructed rather than learned. Rather than saying that the Yanomamo have a culture, better to say they do culture. This denial of culture-as-object does not, as one might fear, put anthropologists out of a job by dissolving the discipline. Ethnographers need not fold up their tents and go home. Far from it. Instead, the doors are thrown wide open for alternative pursuits, and, when developed along the lines of the "carnival model," such alternatives promise to inject new life into the discipline, opening it up for a kind of ethnography that is as rich in self-oriented criticism as much as it is in an other-oriented description. Suddenly, in this new mode, ethnographers are taking up the challenge we faced at the outset, the challenge of using anthropology to practicing our steps in a mirror.

Paul Rabinow seems to be keenly aware of this experience as he reflects, as if practicing in a mirror, on his fieldwork in Morocco: "He (Ali) was constantly being forced to reflect on his own activities and objectfy them. Because he was a good informant, he seemed to enjoy this process and soon began to develop an art of presenting his world to me" (p. 38). "He was intelligent, quick to learn, patient, cooperative, and vivacious. But I do not think that these qualities alone explain his success as an informant. Ali, like serveral other people with whom I worked, was a marginal character in his own social world. He was more self-reflective about his society and his place in it than most other Moroccans I knew" (p. 73). "Despite all the conflict, he knew that the more he did for me the more I was dependent on him, the more I would reciprocate, the more I became 'his' anthropologist." (p. 75). "Whenever an anthropologist enters a culture, he trains people to objectify their life-world for him. Within all cultures, of course, there is already objectification and self-reflection. But this explicit self-conscious translation into an external medium is rare. The anthropologist creates a doubling of consciousness. Therefore, anthropological analysis must incoporate two facts: first, that we ourselves are historically situated through the questions we ask and the manner in which we seek to understand and experience the world; and second, that what we receive from our informants are interpretrations, equally mediated by history and culture. Consequently, the data we collect is doubly mediated, first by our own presence and then by the second order self-reflections we demand from our informants" (p. 119). "Our Otherness was not an ineffable essence but rather the sum of different historical experiences" (p. 162).

A reader can discover in these lines a new model for ethnographer-host relationship, one that serves the need for critical reflection on social living. In a nutshell, ethnographic work bridges cultural barriers by simply interacting across them, as Rabinow has suggested. Comprehension is not a necessary component of this exercise because shared meanings are only important for those still stuck in a Romanticist mindset, that is, for those who continue to place a heavy emphasis on sincere heart-to-heart relationships while short-changing the importance of the physical acts of negotiating social life. In the ethnographic moment, individuals come together as physical organisms, rather than as souls or angels or minds. They come together in dialogic moments that, however halting, chaotic, or conflictual, form the core of human social and personal life.

In such moments, cultural differences cease to be excuses for refusing to interact, and emerge instead as opportunities for the most promising and productive kinds of interactions in which all parties can expect to undergo maximal transformation. Using ethnographic practice as an exemplar, we can all begin to experience the cultural diversity of our cities and our schools as less a problem to be addressed (and certainly not a condition to be erased) than a promise to be appreciated, and an opportunity through which to recreate ourselves. Any individual who is not stretching himself or herself across boundaries, learning new languages, and creating new connections is slowly withering and is destined to become a dry-leaf-empty-shell person. To enter into noisy diversity, by contrast, is to spring forward full flower into the heart of human social life.

1. Distinguish "muscle memory" from the conventional notion of memory as conscious recall.

2. Discuss the disturbing or unsettling aspects of the neuroscientific descriptions of cerebral pandemonium and chaos.

3. In what sense is "open ethnography" a model for living as well as a description.

* For more about Mikhail Bakhtin, see K. Clark and M. Holquist (1984) Mikhail Bakhtin, Harvard University Press.

1. Such a notion of memory as a significant component of human social life is generally absent from Enlightenment, Romanticist, and Modernist social theorizing. As John Ralston Saul says in his Voltaire's Bastards (1992) "memory is always the enemy of structure." ( p. 14) For more on memory see Paul Connerton's How Societies Remember (1989) and Richard Terdiman's Present Past (1993).

2. For more on recent developments in neuroscience, see D. Dennett Consciousness Explained; G. Samuel Mind, Body, & Culture, 1991; M. Donald Origins of the Modern Mind, 1991; W. Calvin The Cerebral Symphony, 1990; Gerald Edelman Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, 1992.