Carnival: A Paper
Andrea Cast reports on Colin Sheringham's talk
Colin Sheringham has been a visiting scholar with the Research Centre during
the past six months. Before returning to Sydney he talked about his research.
Lynn Martin, dressed in a gold gown with an irreverently placed baseball cap
on his head, first introduced Colin’s gut, then Colin himself. All present
blew their party horns in jubilation. Colin paraded descriptions of wild celebration
before his audience. He painted a picture of the exchange of gifts, genders
and body fluids throughout the ages. Festivals such as the Egyptian cult of
Osiris, the Mesopotamian festival of Sacaea, the Jewish Purim, the Bacchanalia,
and the Saturnalia all contributed to the long history of turbulent partying
that expressed itself in the Christian era as the Catholic festival of Carnival.
After covering the popular theories on the cultural meanings of Carnival, he
put to us the idea that the Church simply spread a thin veneer over the earlier
pagan rituals and at its heart, Carnival is primarily about gastronomic and
sexual overindulgence. Colin discussed the various meanings of Carnival food,
particularly the antithesis of Lenten food, the pig. He linked the eating of
pig and pork sausages to symbolic cannibalism, Christian rejection of Jewish
food laws and, of course, penises. The food consumed over Carnival and Lent
represented the two extremes of food culture, one indulgent and animalistic,
the other austere and focused on ritual purity. The food regimes involved in
the two celebrations represented, as Colin put it, “man’s ambivalent place in
the cosmos”.
After the paper, the audience retired to refresh themselves. They were rigorously
divided into a “Carnival” and a “Lent” group. At one end of the courtyard,
the Carnival-goers received phallic-shaped sausages, pastries shaped like male
genitals and biscuit resembling breasts. For their further refreshment, they
chose from a selection of wine. At the other end of the courtyard, the Lenten
group received pure and unadulterated food as the Church intended it; their
table contained water and a raw head of cabbage. After some initial hesitation,
the Lenten group rushed the Carnival table and gobbled up as much of the penises
and breasts as they could get their hands on and washed it all down with oceans
of free-flowing wine. The cabbage, I believe, was deposited into the bin.
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