مقاومت چریکی از طریق مناسک

پويان جان،
ايده‌ی جالبی است و فکر می‌کنم خود سينا هم در گزارش‌اش اشاره‌هايی کرده بود. جالب است اگر ادامه‌اش دهی.
امّا راست‌اش من با نظرِ اکو -به خصوص در مورد رسانه‌هایِ جمعی نه شکلِ آيينی که شما رويش انگشت گذاشته‌ايد- موافق نيستم و به نظرم زيادی خوشبينانه و ساده‌انگارانه می‌آيد و حتا انگار خود اکو هم می‌داند که قضيه به اين سادگی‌ها هم نيست که در نهايت با نوعی لحن اعتراف گونه/دعا گونه جمله‌ای را می‌گويد که میداند از پيش منتفی و محکوم به شکست است: باشد که اراده‌یِ ما...
من درموردِ رسانه‌ها و ايدئولوژی همچنان تاحد زيادی به ايده های «سياه» آدورنويی/هورکهايمری باور دارم.
قربانت.

فكر مي كنم ارائه توصيف هاي دقيق تر با ارجاع به مثال ها و نمونه هاي مشخص لازم است تا آن رفتار خاص نمادين كه منظور شماست را تشخيص دهيم و به عبارتي به درك بين ذهني از مسئله يا پديده اي كه عنوان كرده ايد نائل شويم. در حال حاضر تنوع زيادي در رفتارها به چشم مي خورد. شما كدام تيپ هاي خاص را مد نظر داريد؟ شكلي از رفتار كه در عين حال از ديد يك گروه "لاابالي گري" باشد و در نظر گروه ديگري نمود مقاومت يا به عبارت ديگر دهن كجي به گروه مسلط باشد كدام است. هرچند مي توان حدسهاي احتمالاَ درستي كه به نظر شما نزديك باشد زد اما بنظرم يك مقدار محدود كردن حيطه يا مصاديق مشاهده ضرورت دارد. و يك مقدار هم در باب آگاهانه بودن و هدفمند بودن اين رفتارها با توجه به فرضيه پردازيهايي كه مي شود در مورد جوانان در سطح خرد يعني فرد شك دارم!

ديگر اينكه شما بحث از جوانان ايران مي كنيد! بايد دانست تا چه حد اينگونه رفتارها يا نمودها در سطح ايران مشاهده مي شود يعني در مورد تعميم دادن آن به كل ايران شك دارم. حتي در محلات مختلف شهر تهران نيز مي توان تفاوتهاي قابل ملاحظه اي را شاهد بود چه برسد به كل ايران و شهر و روستا!

بهرحال موضوع بسيار جالبي است براي طرحريزي تحقيقات آينده! خسته نباشيد!

ايده ي عالي اي بود. من خيلي خوشم اومد،به نظرم اما كلي بود:) تحقيق در مورد اين بحث ادامه داشته باشه، كار نو و جديدي ميشه! اما نمي دونم چرا عكسهاي روزنامه جمهوري رو ديدم يه كم نظرم عوض شد در مورد ظاهر و باطن آدمها...هميشه اعتقاد داشتم كه نبايد از روي ظاهر در مورد افراد قضاوت كرد ولي اين عكسها،يه كم نظرم رو عوض كرد.البته كاري به گزارش روزنامه ندارم.
مراحل آدمها فرق مي كنه،مرحله ي زيبايي شناسي،اخلاقي و مذهبي.عده اي در مرحله ي زيباشناسي مانده اند.

CARNIVALESQUE

http://www.english.uga.edu/~amitchel/4830_carnival.htm

Rabelais and His World

The author, Mikhail Bakhtin, was a Russian theorist in the 1930s and is an often cited scholar in contemporary thought. Bakhtin’s immediate point of departure is François Rabelais, a French writer during the Renaissance. Bakhtin insists that within the scatological writing of Rabelais exist the necessary evidence to discover the history of folk humor, as well as the shocking practices of the Renaissance carnival. The immediate goal of Rabelais and His World is to uncover the peculiar language and practices of the carnival environment. Bakhtin is quick to distinguish the carnival culture of old from the holiday culture that exists now. The carnivals that exist today pale in comparison to the unbridled lusting, crazed bingeing, and even physical mutilation that occurred in the carnival environment of days past. The carnival that Rabelais wrote about is quite unlike the modern carnival. In fact, so distinct are they that they share little more then just their common name. The Renaissance carnival culture involves the "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men … and of the prohibitions of usual life." (p15) Those that lived the carnival immersed themselves in the frolicking physical mutilation, bingeing and primordial gaiety that was the carnival. The term "carnivalesque" refers to the carnivalizing of normal life. Bakhtin divides the carnivalesque into three forms: ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, and various genres of billingsgate or abusive language. Although Bakhtin separates the forms of the carnivalesque, they are often connected within the carnival.

Bakhtin describes the carnivalesque as something that is created when the themes of the carnival twist, mutate, and invert standard themes of societal makeup. Bakhtin made contemporary theory aware of how much popular culture in early modern Europe involved flourishing traditions of carnivalesque that mocked those in authority and parodied official ideas of society, history, destiny, fate, as unalterable. With its masks and monsters and feasts and games and dramas and processions, carnival was many things at once. It was festive pleasure, the world turned topsy-turvy, destruction and creation; it was a theory of time and history and destiny; it was utopia, cosmology, and philosophy. The very pleasures of carnival were at the same time philosophical modes. The extravagant juxtapositions, the grotesque mixing and confrontations of high and low, upper-class and lower-class, spiritual and material, young and old, male and female, daily identity and festive mask, serious conventions and their parodies, gloomy medieval time and joyous utopian visions. The Renaissance carnival culture involves the "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men … and of the prohibitions of usual life." (Bakhtin 1984, p. 15) Those that lived the carnival immersed themselves in the frolicking physical mutilation, bingeing and primordial gaiety that is the carnival. Bakhtin sees forms of the carnivalesque emanating beyond the Renaissance carnival into literature, art, and everyday life. The carnival has been forever immortalized in the famed literature of Goethe, the fine arts, and in vernacular that is used today. More broadly, the aesthetic trends of artistic humanism are a reaction against the universal self-image that dominated the carnivalesque. Lastly, one can see vestiges of the carnival in the everyday life of modern times. Bakhtin writes that the formulation of humor took place within the carnival. Indeed the whole idea of bringing life "down to earth" is concept that was a central to the carnival.

Carnivalisation thus "makes it possible to extend the narrow sense of life" (Bakhtin, p. 177), or as Foucault observes, it helps to "extend our participation in the present system" (Foucault, p. 230). The aspiration of carnival is to uncover, undermine - even destroy, the hegemony of any ideology that seeks to have the final word about the world, and also to renew, to shed light upon life, the meanings it harbours, to elucidate potentials; projecting, as it does an alternate conceptualisation of reality. Dialogism is a fundamental aspect of the carnival - a plurality of 'fully valid consciousnesses' (Bakhtin, p. 9), each bringing with them a different point of view, a different way of seeing the world. "Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence' (Bakhtin, p. 252); if dialogism ends, reveals Bakhtin, 'everything ends' (Ibid.). Bakhtin argues that by being outside of a culture can one understand his own culture. This process is 'multiply enriching' (Ibid), it opens new possibilities for each culture, reveals hidden 'potentials' (Ibid.), promotes 'renewal and enrichment' (Bakhtin, p. 271) and creates new potentials, new voices, that may become realisable in a future dialogic interaction. Thus the outsidedness of groups marginalised by a dominant ideology within non-carnival time not only gain a voice during carnival time, but they also say something about the ideology that seeks to silence them. Thus two voices come together in the free and frank communication that carnival permits and, although 'each retains its own unity and open totalitythey are mutually enriched' (Bakhtin, p. 56). Carnival and its accompanying components represent a theory of resistance, a theory of freedom from all domination. "Carnival is the place for working out a new mode of interrelationship between individuals . . . People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free and familiar contact on the carnival square" (Bakhtin, p. 123). There is a motivation during carnival time to create a form of human social configuration that 'lies beyond existing social forms' (Bakhtin, p. 280). Thus Bakhtin's carnival theory is not reducible to terms such as anarchic, nor irresponsible, it is, in fact, a diverse tactic, one that may be implemented and sustained wherever there is a dominant regime.

Manipulating the Sacred
Yorùbá Art, Ritual, and Resistance in Brazilian Candomblé

Mikelle S. Omari-Tunkara

http://wsupress.wayne.edu/africana/afranthropology/omarims.htm

At a time when the art of the African diaspora has aroused much
general interest for its multicultural dimensions, Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara contributes strikingly rich insights as a participant/observer in the African-based religions of Brazil. She focuses on the symbolism and function of ritual objects and costumes used in the Brazilian candomblé (miniature "African" environments or temples) of the Bahia region, which combine Yoruba, Bantu/Angola, Caboclo, Roman Catholic, and/or Kardecist/Spiritist elements. An initiate herself with more than twenty years of study, the author is considered an insider, and has witnessed how practitioners manipulate the "sacred" to encode, in art and ritual, vital knowledge about meaning, values, epistemologies, and history. She demonstrates how this manipulation provides Brazilian descendents of slaves with a sense of agency—with a link to their African heritage and a locus for resistance to the dominant Euro-Brazilian culture.

Theories of Carnival and Revolution
the carnivalesque and/as anticapitalist resistance

http://anarchistu.org/TheoriesOfCarnivalAndRevolution

Mondays at 6pm to 8pm starting on Janary 17, 2005

Chris Smith c_smith@yorku.ca

This course starts with some writings about carnival by philosophers and literary critics. It applies these ideas to contemporary protests such as Reclaim the Streets.

Detailed Outline

In the modern world, the notion of 'carnival' exists both as a state sanctioned form of collective celebration, and as a mode of resistance and protest practiced by autonomous groups and organizations, often in direct and defiant opposition to the formal state apparatus. In the first instance, the carnival has historically functioned as a highly regulated, state-sanctioned outlet for the venting/release of naturally occurring (anarchic?) human energies, as evidenced in Toronto's Carribana, London's Notting Hill Carnival, Rio's Carnivale, etc.

In the second instance, the notions of 'carnival' and the 'carnivalesque' have recently been resurrected as an aesthetic form and mode of attack that have been consciously employed by the contemporary anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements. Evidence of this can be seen in the WTO protests in Seattle, and the Summit of the Americas protest held in Quebec City, which was dubbed by organizers as the 'Carnival Against Capitalism'.

Through a close, critical examination of literature, literary theory, anthropology, and personal, experiential-based narratives, this course will seek to interrogate the (theoretical and everyday, historical and contemporary) interrelationships existing between carnival, the carnivalesque, festival, and spectacle.

While the first half of the course will be primarily devoted to a theoretical examination of the issues, the second half will directly draw upon the interests and experiences of the course participants themselves, with the hope of inspiring and/or generating individual projects and presentations. By exploring the notion of 'carnival' in all of its various different historical forms and manifestations, the core course group will ideally work towards determining the potential relevance and applicability of the abovementioned ideas in disrupting and defamiliarizing the dire state of everyday alienation that has come to pervade our current, immediate social surroundings.

tentative course outline

1. Carnival, Festival and Spectacle: introductions and definitions

2. Mikhail Bakhtin: Carnival, the Carnivalesque, and the Carnival Square

3. Henri Lefebvre: festival and everyday life

4. Bataille and Foucault: festival and/as transgression and the inversion of social hierarchy

5. Victor Turner: towards an anthropology of carnival and/as cultural performance

6. Case studies (1): examining the historical origins of the state-sanctioned carnival (Trinidad, Rio, London, Toronto)

7. Case studies (2): examining the contemporary resurgence of carnival as a form of anti-capitalist resistance ('Reclaim the Streets', 'Technival', 'Night of Dread')

8. Course Projects/Presentations (1)

9. Course Projects/Presentations (2)

10. Conclusion: the carnivalesque and/as anti-capitalist resistance

tentative reading list

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Wayne C. Booth Ed. Trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8), 1984. [excerpts]

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Helene Iswolsky Trans. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1984. [excerpts]

Bataille, Georges. "Sacrifice, the Festival and the Principles of the Sacred World". IN The Bataille Reader. Fred Botting and Scot Wilson Eds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997 (210-220).

Bataille, Georges. "The Festival, or the Transgression of Prohibitions". The Accursed Share, Volume II: The History of Eroticism (Part Four: Transgression). Robert Hurley Trans. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Callois, Roger. "Festival". The College of Sociology, 1937-1939. Denis Hollier Ed. Betsy Wing Trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 41) 1988 (279-303).

Foucault, Michel. "Madness and Society". IN Essential Works of Foucault, Volume II: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Paul Rabinow Ed. New York: The New Press, 1998.

Lefebvre, Henri. "Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside". Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I: Introduction. John Moore Trans. London: Verso, 1991 (201-227).

Turner, Victor. "Images and Reflections: Ritual, Drama, Carnival, Film and Spectacle in Cultural Performance". The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987 (21-33).

Carnival, Carnivalesque and the Grotesque Body

Notes from Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester University Press, 1997), ch. 4.

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~cklestinec/Teaching/LCC3218.Bakhtin.html

Based on Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

Bakhtin’s discussion of carnival as an element of popular history (folklore) that emerges textually. That is, the carnivalesque (body, sentiment. humor) is essentially a textual phenomenon.

Points of interest:

Ritual Spectacles: carnival pageants, comic shows of the marketplace

Comic verbal compositions: parodies both oral and written, in Latin and in the vernacular

Various genres of ‘parody’: curses, oaths, popular blazons

Carnival is ‘a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators’, as its participants do not watch ‘live in it’ with its suspension of ‘hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it.’

Carnival allows ‘free and familiar contact between people’ who would usually be separated hierarchically, and allows for ‘mass action.’

Carnival misalliances allow for unusual combinations: the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.

Carnival profanation consists of ‘a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth’ to the level of the body, particularly in the case of parodies of sacred texts.

Death and renewal are central to carnival, represented most often by the carnival act of ‘the monk crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king’; the two states are inseparable in the carnival view: crowning entails decrowning.

Carnival laughter is directed at exalted objects, and forces them to renew themselves; thus its debasing results in new life, and it is ‘ambivalent’; ‘much is permitted in the form of laughter that was impermissible in serious form’.

Carnival parody survives in attenuated form in the ‘narrowly formal literary’ parody of modern times; in the original kind, ‘everything has its parody, that is, its laughing aspect, for everything is reborn and renewed through death.’

Carnival in contemporary literature does survive generically although its influence is usually limited to the work’s content; its traces may be detected, for instance in representations of legends and unofficial history (Toni Morrison’s Beloved), and certain kinds of laughter, image system, parody; within the individual character’s ‘ambivalent passions’.

A local carnival feature is its ‘sense of a great city’ such as St. Petersburg (Dostoevsky), Paris (Balzac), London (Dickens)…

Carnival time: characterized by ‘moments of death and revival, of change and renewal [which] always led to a festive perception of the world.’ Carnival is the ‘true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.’ This renewal occurs within the body of a people (not really individual—though representations can place it symbolically on the body of ‘one’).

Grotesque realism, a kind of genre that opposes ‘high art’ and literature. It includes parody and any other form of discourse which ‘brings down to earth’ anything ineffable or authoritarian, a task achieved principally through mockery: “the people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes.’ And, “to degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and brith. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth.” (Sacrifice and bodily dismemberment can be a part of the death-life cycle).

In addition to the ideas just stated, the following terms seem relevant and often repeated in discussions of Bakhtin and in work on historical practices associated with Carnivale:

Folk Humor
Bodily margins: bodies extending themselves, being extending, with protrusions, pockets, permeability and malleability
The Maternal: reproductive and also material
Food: as a communal product, something around which community takes shape, and something which increases the body or extends bodily margins
Death: which cannot be separated from Life, the one entails the other

RITUAL AS AN INSTRUMENT OF POLITICAL RESISTANCE IN RURAL JAPAN
Scott Schnell
Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242-1322
JOURNAL of
ANTHROPOLOGICAL
RESEARCH
Volume 51, Number 4, Abstracts

http://www.unm.edu/~jar/v51n4.html#a2

Ritual has been acknowledged as an important form of social practice, especially as it is employed by subordinated peoples to demonstrate their opposition toward a dominant ideology. So far, however, the recognized effects of such ritual activities have been limited to simple consciousness-raising. The following analysis assigns a more instrumental role to the performance of ritual itself. It adopts a historical perspective in examining how an innocuous drum ritual, which originally marked the beginning of a local Shint shrine festival, emerged as a medium of political resistance during Japan's modernization. More specifically, it interprets the ritual as an institutionalized opportunity for negotiating power relationships and redressing perceived social injustices. These assertions are supported by the symbolic structure of the ritual, continual efforts by the authorities to suppress its development, and several instances in which the ritual performance escalated into genuine acts of politically motivated violence.

سلام
پويان جان موفق باشي

چرا همه مي گن پويان؟! من مي گم امير يا امير پويان! به هر حال يه فكري براي فونت و ي هاي ناچسب و خط هاي مختوش بكن كه اصلا قابل خوندن نيست!

چرا چند وقتي هست كه صدايي ازتون در نمي آد ؟! شايد كنكور رو دادين و رفتين سفر ، مثلا گرگان ، پيش مامان بزرگ ؟! هستين يا ... ؟!

امير مشغول کار علمي با منه در تهران نه در گرگان !!!

سلام. حالتون چطوره؟
مثل هميشه سلام گرگ! بی طمع نيست. از نوشته آخرتان خوشم آمد و دوست دارم تا دير نشده و هنوز از ماه محرم نگذشته، اگر شما موافق باشيد و اگر در سايت سينا، مشکل مضمونی نداشته باشد،از آن استفاده کنم. با ذکر نام شما. لطفا اگر موافقيد، به من زود خبرش را بدهيد. موفق باشيد.
ش-آ

حالا که من اومدم تو نيستی! کجايی پسر؟! مثلاً قرار داشتيم با هم ها! جواب ايميل رو هم که نمی‌دی...

من كه مي گم رفتين گرگان ! حالا به روتون نيارين ! به خدا سوغاتي نمي خواهيم !!

پويان جان، چندوقتي است نمي نويسي. تو و محمد اعتصاب كرده ايد؟! خب، خوب و خوش باشي، هميشه.

يک سري هم به ‏michel de certeau‏ بزن. اين ايده‌ي مصادره به مطلوب متن توسط خواننده را ‏بدجوري تئوريزه کرده.‏