Carnival, charivari, democracy

I just caught up with an absorbing post by Ian Bertram over on Panchromatica exploring the history and meanings of carnival, and rightly expressing concern that it is becoming assimilated and controlled. See also Ian's previous posts, on charivari and notions of justice and on carnival and festival generally.

Carnival represents the tradition of collective celebration with relatively little structure, heavily-dependant on people's inventiveness and the enjoyment of outdoor spectacle at walking pace.

Ian also links to this paper by Nicola Frost which draws attention to

the tendency for popular festivals and carnivals, in many parts of the world, and in many historical periods, to be characterised by risqué reversals of hierarchy, ludic mimicry, flamboyant and celebratory cultural expression, and a sanctioned overstepping of conventional rules and norms of behaviour.

That last phrase strikes me as important. I can't help feeling that in a de-structured age of wobbly social norms, where consistent overstepping of rules (watch a top-level professional football match, for instance) is thought desirable, rewarded and lauded, it would be helpful to try to understand this.

In past societies where religious and other power structures exerted rigid social control, it's interesting that crowd-rowdiness still burst out in sanctioned forms at decreed moments. How might we re-invent carnival as pertinent for a less-structured age preoccupied with forced spectacle - where the binge-night-out and the knife-fight are described as a 'good time'? Anyone for jousting?

Charivari, meanwhile, seems to be more about summary community justice, like the 'rough music' tradition in England. (This illustration, I seem to recall, featured on an episode of QI).

I should think it could be quite scary and like much vigilantism, not necessarily dependent on sound evidence. I quite liked this description from Dark Stories, at the limit of my understanding of French:

Le charivari, ou « confusion de bruit », est une forme de justice populaire par laquelle les membres d’une communauté expriment leur désapprobation à l’égard des mariages ou de couples mettant en péril les valeurs de leur société.

I suppose we need to try and capture the community-involvement-around-collective-values component without the summary-justice-which-could-be-based-on-well-spread-rumour-or-just-plain-nastiness component. Ah, democracy.