Essential information on the origins and history of Carnival is provided, together with some remarks about the changes in Carnival practice, which were caused by political changes in Croatia. The author explains the Carnival terminology, discusses the place of Carnival in the Christian calendar, and writes about ancestral masks and the legacy of the Late Antiquity in Carnival customs. He points...

Images of reversal twist through many folklore traditions, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king and condemning the powerful to ruin. For Mikhail Bakhtin, such reversals express the creative energy of "a carnival sense of the world." In carnival, laughter and excess push aside the seriousness and the hierarchies of "official" life. Carnival shakes up the authoritative version of language a...

Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1984). For a fuller understanding of Bakhtin's work one should read the work in full, but I hope the following will serve to introduce Bakhtin's concepts to beginning students of renaisance drama. Page numbers after particular passages refer the reader to the book. "Bakhtin's carnival, surely the most productive concept in this book, is not only ...

The seasonal patterns of conceptions and births differ between geographic areas. Several potential determinants of this variation have been identified, including biological, environmental and behavioral elements, but festive events are rarely mentioned. We investigated the possible association between the carnival and seasonal fertility variations in the French West Indies. We ran a retrospecti...

Notting Hill Carnival is undeniably a spectacular event with the flamboyant costumes of dancing mas bands, the splashes of colourful body paint, mud or chocolate staining the bodies of its J’Ouvert opening parade’s revelers. But Carnival also has an explosive auditory impact due to its cacophony of sounds, in which soca, steel bands, calypso and static sound-systems mix and mingle in a multi-me...

Background Every year in May, the biggest carnival in Scandinavia takes place in Aalborg. 100.000 people are gathered in the streets to celebrate, and of these more than 25.000 enters the carnival compound. During the day, the streets of central Aalborg are effectively closed due to the massive number of people. Historically, Danish Red Cross volunteers have set up first aid stations and treatm...

wellspring of inner contradictions of the folk imagination, involving a dynamic balancing of ambiguous and dichotomous forces. Drawing liberally on the ideasof Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilmore explains that carnival and its songs contribute to an ongoing cultural dialectic; carnival is a true "ideological hybrid," heteroglossic in Bakhtin's terms, upholding and...