The Living Carnival: When a City Surrenders Itself to Chaos

There is a particular kind of madness that descends upon a city during carnival — a sanctioned, communal delirium that strips away the ordinary hierarchies of daily life and replaces them, however briefly, with sequins, noise, and a collective willingness to be utterly ridiculous. To dismiss carnival as mere spectacle is to fundamentally misunderstand what it does to the people who inhabit it, not as spectators but as participants woven into its fabric.

The origins of carnival are tangled, as origins tend to be when something has survived long enough to accumulate mythology. The word itself is commonly traced to the Latin caro vale — farewell to meat — a reference to the fasting period of Lent that historically followed the festivities. Yet anthropologists have long noted that pre-Christian cultures across Europe, Africa, and the Americas already practised seasonal reversals: moments in the calendar when the poor might mock the powerful, the solemn might be made absurd, and the rigid social order was, at least symbolically, turned upside down. Christianity did not invent carnival so much as absorb and redirect it, giving a theological frame to something far older and arguably more instinctive.

What distinguishes the great carnivals — Venice, Rio, Trinidad, New Orleans — from one another is not merely geography but the particular cultural sediment each has accumulated. Venice's carnival trades in masks and anonymity, a tradition born partly from a republic in which sumptuary laws once dictated what each social class could wear; the mask dissolved those distinctions in a single stroke. Rio's carnival, by contrast, is an exercise in collective choreography so intricate and physically demanding that samba schools rehearse for months, pouring entire neighbourhood budgets into costumes that will be worn for a matter of hours. Both are carnivals, yet they inhabit almost entirely different philosophical territories.

What they share, however, is the principle of inversion — the idea that carnival operates precisely because it is temporary. The philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in Soviet Russia under circumstances that gave him particular reasons to value the idea of liberatory laughter, argued that the carnival spirit represented a deep human need to periodically unmoor oneself from structure. His notion of the carnivalesque — the grotesque body, the levelling crowd, the irreverent voice — remains one of the more illuminating lenses through which to view why these festivals endure when so many other traditions have quietly dissolved. People do not simply attend carnival; they use it.

There is, of course, a tension at the heart of modern carnival that is worth acknowledging without sentimentality. As festivals grow in international profile, they attract tourist economies that gradually shift the centre of gravity away from community and towards performance-for-consumption. The insider gives way to the onlooker; the spontaneous gives way to the scheduled; the raw gives way to the picturesque. This is not a new problem — patrician Venetians complained about unruly visitors even in the eighteenth century — but it sharpens in an era of social media, when a festival's visual economy can outgrow its cultural one with alarming speed.

And yet carnival persists, and not merely as a brand. In the backstreets of Port of Spain, in the neighbourhood associations of Rio's Zona Norte, in the tiny masked processions of Swiss Fasnacht villages, something genuinely transgressive and communal continues to breathe. Perhaps this is what carnival ultimately teaches: that human beings require periodic permission to be ungovernable, and that the most durable traditions are not the ones that resist change but the ones that know, with uncanny instinct, exactly how much chaos a society can productively absorb before the masks come off and the ordinary world resumes.