On the 31st October, we host a meeting with the author Peter Sahlins about Mikhail Bakhtin’s book, Rabelais as well as about David Graeber’s new book, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World.
Peter Sahlins is the author of, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France, which tells the history of the The War of the Maiden’s War. , A peasant uprising in France from 1829 to 1832.
The “Maiden’s War” of 1829-1832 was a peasant revolt in the heavily forested Ariège department in southern France where young men partially disguised themselves as women chased out state guards and private charcoal makers from the forests. It’s long been of interest to social historians and students of popular protest, including Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and Natalie Davis. But the real keys to understanding the ways in which local communities drew on popular rituals including carnival are Mikhail Bahktin and David Graeber. Bahktin gives us a literary carnival that in the work of Rabelais subverts and liberates; Graeber provides us with an idea of Carnival as a festive moment of political imagination and experimentation. Together they provide us with alternatives to thinking about carnival as “merely” festive or, as older theorists like Gluckman would have it, inherently conservative. This talk takes Carnival seriously to show how it became an important element in the language of protest — in the Ariège and beyond.
Since the meeting will be held on October 31, which is Halloween, we plan to take the opportunity to dress up for the occasion. You can register Here.