Mardi Gras: Celebration, Freedom, License, Disturbance |
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ìIt could be said (with certain reservations, of course) that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two lives: one that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety... |
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| The other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and everything. Both these lives were legitimate, but separated by strict temporal boundaries." (Bahktin) | The carnivalesque, by contesting and destabilizing the cultureís established norms, ridicules the normal hierarchy, subjects the authority to irreverent laughter, and critiques the status quo. |
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