Life and work of an indy scholar part 6 - On Friday the 13th I moved to the south for a couple of days—the main reason why I skipped last week’s blog. My brief remigration was caused by carnival, that outburst of festivities that Catholics traditionally use to bolster themselves for a period of 40 days of fasting. Traditionally, because nowadays only some rituals remain and hardly any of the revelers are hardcore Catholics, even less of them fast. I love going back to my hometown for carnival and if you bare with me, there’s a second lesson for independent scholars in it as well.
What is carnival about anyway? I’ll highlight three points. As we celebrate it in my home town and in most parts below the rivers (it’s not a tradition in most of the Protestant north), carnival is a vice versa. The king is a clown and the clown is a king. Well, sort of. It’s a period in which the game of social power is played out by reversing the hierarchy. That used to work well when class hierarchy was explicit, but now that power balances are more implicit and sometimes downright denied, anybody can be anything these days. For instance, one of the days I dressed up as a deer, while there is no genuine counterpart in wild life to swap back with me after Ash Wednesday.
What I particularly like are the carnival jokes people make. Most of them play with double meanings. For instance, while being a deer I had a large heart pinned on my chest which said ‘hertepien’. Hertepien means ‘pain of a deer’ in my hometown dialect, but also ‘heartache’. On the back I had a sign with ‘aangeschaote wild’, with ‘aangeschaote’ as both ‘wounded’ and ‘tipsy’, and ‘wild’ both as ‘game’ and ‘fierce’. On my head I carried antlers, which in my home dialect means ‘gewei’ and me carrying them referred to the dialect word ‘geweid’, which means crazy.
To bring some order into the chaos, one has to register for participating in the official parade. We, however, wore our deer and hunter outfits when we crashed the parade, finishing a bottle of Jägermeister and slowly but surely growing into our character. Nobody arrested us and the many other illegal acts weren’t thrown in jail either.
So what’s there to learn from all this for the independent scholar? Well, for anyone in my field of work, I’d say everything. Carnival is sometimes said to be a travesty, and I agree. It magnifies the human desire to have a say about our own lives, something we demonstrate on a smaller, more modest scale in everyday subtleties. To illustrate my point, let’s revisit the points I made.
The first one was the vice versa. I may joke when I say that I of course didn’t literally switch roles with a deer and that in fact anybody can be anything for a few days, but there’s more to it. Carnival is still about power, role reversal and positioning. In the larger scheme of things, it remains, at least where I come from, a liberation from the shackles of everyday-life routines and the yoke of the north where the government resides, the standards for language and culture are laid down and most of the money goes to. In these few days, we don’t say one big ‘fuck you’ to Holland, we simply ignore it, showing the ultimate sign of sovereignty. In ordinary life, we revert to passive-aggressive sabotage, we show outbursts of frustration or joy, we recognize informal leadership. Moreover, the travesty itself shows that we are more than just the social roles we play in official life. Our identities are volatile when we dress for business or leisure, when we answer ‘as a teacher I would say…’, even during carnival when we know we’re not really a deer, nor a dear for that matter.
The second point was about the language games. This relates to my previous point. To the public of the parade all the ambivalences in my outfit and signs were immediately understandable. Me explaining them here would probably feel to them as killing the jokes by stating the obvious. As part of the same linguistic community we don’t need all those extras, to us an unmarked language suffices. But to non-members of this linguistic community (and thus to most of my readers), more information is needed to understand what the joke is all about, resulting in marked language. Language is always a game for insiders and always has an inherent ambiguity. We embrace it during carnival but for the rest we tend to see language as a neutral medium. Politicians know this all too well when they fake surprise and say ‘Oh, you meant that when you asked if I have had sex with that woman?!?’
The third point was the parade. There’s the legal participation and there are the illegal crashers, both appearing in public life. The line between what is legal and what isn’t may be clear, but still we manage to tolerate their coexistence. Eye-catching examples outside carnival are graffiti and buskers. They reminds us that morality and law aren’t interchangeable and that life is more than coloring within or singing along the lines.
To conclude, carnival is not an as-if play in which we just pretend to be someone else, it’s us living out our real potential for creativity and human flourishing. And it demonstrates that organized anarchy is not a contradiction in terms. So here’s the lesson: if you look beyond the acute travesties and recognize the carnivalesque as everyday life, all the analytical tools—negotiating power, language games, volatile identities—become available for you to help all sorts of clients with their issues. Use society as your canon and you become versatile in your independent scholarship, regardless of the specific content in which you graduated.
Part 5: Don’t leave your clients floored Part 7: If it smells cheesy, rethink your priorities All weekly blogs
