Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events.

Out of the ordinary: Everyday life and the “carnival of Mussolini”

“…Not all carnivals are opposed to the everyday: for instance, Maurizio Bertolotti's (1991) Carnevale di Massa 1950 describes the case of a communist-organized carnival in the Mantuan village of Governolo, in which elements of the traditional Italian village carnival were fused with popular political images and ideas (see also Boarelli, 1993; De Clementi, 1993;Raggio, 1993), and much of the anthropological literature on carnival in Europe notes that it is of course often highly formalized (e.g., Fabre, 1992). One might also wish to read the Predappiesi response to the "carnival of Mussolini" as a sort of public ritual itself a kind of "event-that-re-presents" (of which carnival is the classic form in Handelman, 1990) insofar as it stages a vision of the way life ought to be, rather than is. For masterly reviews of the extensive literature on festivals and carnival in Europe, see Testa (2014Testa ( , 2020.…”

Event ethnography: Studying power and politics through events

“…The infinite plurality of these experiences notwithstanding, the event becomes a space for geographers to get to know their community, to build a new community, or perhaps to be excluded from it by not attending. It is thus that Handelman (1998, p. 15) argues that the mandate of events “is to engage in the ordering of ideas, people, and things.”…”

“…This is because events “mediate persons into collective abstractions, by inducing action, knowledge and experience through these selfsame forms. They are culturally designed forms that select out, concentrate, and interrelate themes of existence—lived and imagined—that are more diffused, dissipated, and obscured in the everyday” (Handelman, 1998, pp. 15–16).…”

“…The existing literature that incorporates event ethnography is diverse, but what holds this research together is that it positions the “event” as a site for studying broader networks of power, politics, and political geography. Scholars conducting research on and at events recognize, as Handelman (1998, p. 16) says of public events, that, “As phenomena, they not only are cognitively graspable, but also emotionally livable. Therefore, they are devices of praxis that merge horizons of the ideal and the real, to bring into close conjunction ideology and practice, attitude and action.” The sheer diversity of events is not a problem that researchers need to “solve” with precise schemas and categories; rather it is a methodological opportunity for researchers who are open to thinking in and through events.…”

“…They are, Campbell et al. (2014, p. 4) emphasize, an “active political space,” in which “researchers can observe the processes that produce (or fail to produce) outcomes, as well as the particular politics (e.g., of knowledge, scale, or performance) employed in such processes.” Handelman (1998, p. 9) likewise explains, events “constitute dense concentrations of symbols and their associations, that are of relevance to a particular people. It is in various public occasions that cultural codes—usually diffused, attenuated, and submerged in the mundane order of things—lie closest to the behavioral surface.”…”