Carnival or protest?

Men dress up and behave like animals, masters serve their slaves, males and females exchange roles and criminal behavior is considered legitimate or, in any case, not punishable - carnival has the license to temporarily suspend existing hierarchic distinctions, barriers, norms and prohibitions. As such, carnival serves as a brief metaphorical portrayal of broader social processes that would come into play in the overthrow of established authority. It is hard to reason these sudden explosions within well-ordered societies. But is this not in large a question of power in its many manifestations? A power as domination, charisma, hegemony, resistance, bio-power and so forth?

At first glance pairing the terms "Carnival" and "Law" may seem contradictory, perhaps even perverse binding of opposites. Carnival, an occasion for festive transgression, limited only by human imagination flourishes beyond the law, above the law, and even against the law. In the Bakhtinian construction of the European "carnivalesque", seasonal revelry and masquerade offers release from the oppression of official culture, a suspended time when the common people become powerful and the powerful people become ridiculous. The subject matter of these festivities – the transformation of a bourgeois elite into a mystified pseudo-royalty through the iconographic manipulation of costumes, tableaux, floats – on the other hand reiterates polarities of race, gender, and class. While Law is a system of rules that regulates the actions and may enforce the imposition of penalties, Carnival offers a temporary respite from normal relations of subordination, domination as well as norm. But Carnival is more rather political than cultural event. One of the central paradoxes of Carnival is its potential to serve both a socially integrative function and be a vehicle for the expression of protest, opposition and resistance. Carnival is, like rioting and war, the continuation of politics by other means.