Mardi Gras is French for Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday. In the Christian tradition, the forty days prior to Easter constitute Lent, for many a somber spiritual period of fasting and penance. Lent starts on Ash Wednesday, and, on the Tuesday immediately before Ash Wednesday, Mardi Gras is celebrated. It is a rich and complex psychological, social, and economic phenomenon that takes place in locations all over the Christian world. The concept and the experience of Mardi Gras are part of the larger celebration of carnival. Carnival, loosely translated as "festival of flesh," is actually a season that can last up to two months, whereas Mardi Gras is one day and is usually the apex of the season.
Given the widespread shedding of inhibitions, purposeful violation of social convention, and reversal of roles, it is not surprising that masking is a common element of carnival and Mardi Gras. The timid may become bold, and plebs rulers. Men may become women and vice versa. Obviously, disguises facilitate these inversions. In addition, these actions involve some risk to participants. The anonymity offered by the creative and elaborate costumes is necessary to protect all but the most unacceptable actions.
Work Cited:
Yoder, D. G. (2004). Mardi Gras. In G. S. Cross (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America (Vol. 2, pp. 10-13). Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3434800159/GVRL?u=berea&sid=GVRL&xid=dc3c1c64
Check out some of our book titles below for more information about Mardi Gras:
All on a Mardi Gras Day by
Call Number: E-Book (Berea College only)
Publication Date: 2009-06-01
With this colorful study, Reid Mitchell takes us to Mardi Gras--to a yearly ritual that sweeps the richly multicultural city of New Orleans into a frenzy of parades, pageantry, dance, drunkenness, music, sexual display, and social and political bombast. In All on a Mardi Gras Day Mitchell tells us some of the most intriguing stories of Carnival since 1804. Woven into his narrative are observations of the meaning and messages of Mardi Gras--themes of unity, exclusion, and elitism course through these tales as they do through the Crescent City. Moving through the decades, Mitchell describes the city's diverse cultures coming together to compete in Carnival performances. We observe powerful social clubs, or krewes, designing their elaborate parade displays and extravagant parties; Creoles and Americans in conflict over whose dances belong in the ballroom; enslaved Africans and African Americans preserving a sense of their heritage in processions and dances; white supremacists battling Reconstruction; working-class blacks creating the flamboyant Krewe of Zulu; the birth and reign of jazz; the gay community holding lavish balls; and of course tourists purchasing an authentic experience according to the dictates of our commercial culture. Interracial friction, nativism, Jim Crow separatism, the hippie movement--Mitchell illuminates the expression of these and other American themes in events ranging from the 1901 formation of the anti-prohibitionist Carrie Nation Club to the controversial 1991 ordinance desegregating Carnival parade krewes. Through the conflicts, Mitchell asserts, I see in Mardi Gras much what I hear in a really good jazz band: a model for the just society, the joyous community, the heavenly city...A model for community where individual expression is the basis for social harmony and where continuity is the basis for creativity. All on a Mardi Gras Day journeys into a world where hope persists for a rare balance between diversity and unity.
Manners and Southern History by
Call Number: E-Book (Berea College only)
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
The concept of southern manners may evoke images of debutantes being introduced to provincial society or it might conjure thoughts of the humiliating behavior white supremacists expected of African Americans under Jim Crow. The essays in Manners and Southern History analyze these topics and more. Scholars here investigate the myriad ways in which southerners from the Civil War through the civil rights movement understood manners. Contributors write about race, gender, power, and change. Essays analyze the ways southern white women worried about how to manage anger during the Civil War, the complexities of trying to enforce certain codes of behavior under segregation, and the controversy of college women's dating lives in the raucous 1920s. Writers study the background and meaning of Mardi Gras parades and debutante balls, the selective enforcement of antimiscegenation laws, and arguments over the form that opposition to desegregation should take. Concluding essays by Jane Dailey and John F. Kasson summarize and critique the other articles and offer a broader picture of the role that manners played in the social history of the South. Essays by Catherine Clinton, Joseph Crespino, Jane Dailey, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Anya Jabour, John F. Kasson, Jennifer Ritterhouse, and Charles F. Robinson II Ted Ownby teaches history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi.
Mardi Gras, Gumbo, and Zydeco by
Call Number: E-Book (Berea College only)
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
The detectable identity of southern Louisiana's one-of-a-kind culture has been expressed in numerous descriptive phrases--"south of the South," "the northern tip of the Caribbean," "this folklore land." A strange, piquant, and savory mixture, it also has been likened to one of the region's signature dishes, gumbo. Capturing this elusive culture and its charm has challenged many authors, anthropologists, and anthologists. Coming perhaps closest of any book yet published, this new anthology of readings affords reflections on southern Louisiana's distinctive traditions, folklore, and folklife. Crystalizing its rich diversity and character, these sharply focused essays are a precise introduction to aspects that too often are diffused in sundry discussions of general Deep South culture. Here, each is seen distinctly, precisely, and uniquely. Written by leading scholars, the thirteen essays focus on many subjects, including the celebration of Mardi Gras and of Christmas, Louisiana foodways, the delineation between Cajun and Creole, the African Americans and Native Americans of the region, Zydeco music, and Cajun humor. The essays show great range and are reprinted from hard-to-find publications. They include a description of Cajun Country Mardi Gras on the prairies of southwestern Louisiana, an analysis of the social implications of the New Orleans Mardi Gras parades, a study of the Houma Indians of coastal Louisiana, and an analysis of the devotion given to a young Cajun girl whom many regard as a saint. Collected here, the essays portray a land and a people that are unlike any other. Marcia Gaudet, a professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is the author of Tales from the Levee: The Folklore of St. John the Baptist Parish and Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer's Craft. James C. McDonald, a professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is the editor of The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for College Writing Teachers.
Blues for New Orleans by
Call Number: E-Book (Berea College only)
Publication Date: 2010-11-24
"A furious, blues-tinged, erudite hymn to our greatest vernacular city. Read it and weep; read it and rejoice!"--Edward Hirsch, President, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Cajun Foodways by
Call Number: E-Book (Berea College only)
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Cajun food has become a popular ethnic food throughout America during the last decade. This fascinating book explores the significance of Cajun cookery on its home turf in south Louisiana, a region marked by startling juxtapositions of the new and the old, the nationally standard and the locally unique. Neither a cookbook nor a restaurant guide, "Cajun Foodways" gives interpretation to the meaning of traditional Cajun food from the perspective of folklife studies and cultural anthropology. The author takes into account the modern regional popular culture in examining traditional foodways of the Cajuns. Cajuns' attention to their own traditional foodways is more than merely nostalgia or a clever marketing ploy to lure tourists and sell local products. The symbolic power of Cajun food is deeply rooted in Cajuns' ethnic identity, especially their attachments to their natural environment and their love of being with people. Foodways are an effective symbol for what it means to be a Cajun today. The reader interested in food and in cooking will find much appeal in this book, for it illustrates a new way to think about how and why people eat as they do.
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