Introduction

          I have an early memory of a square dance near where I grew up in western Pennsylvania. There was a small acoustic band, including a fiddle and guitar as I recall, for the dancers in the dimly-lit barn; it’s just one of many musical memories in a childhood filled with music, although most of it was classical. Despite that, I belong more to the tradition of square dancing. Most of my forebears arrived in that area north of Pittsburgh from northern Ireland, some as early as the late sixteenth century.  Known as Scotch-Irish, they were the immigrants most responsible for the importation of Celtic fiddle music to the Appalachian mountains; along with the Afro-Americans who contributed the banjo, they created what is known as Bluegrass or Old-time music.  Folk music was subsequently popularized by recordings and radio, and in the 1960’s the folk music revival stirred further interest in the traditional tunes and songs. 

As it turned out, I lived in Europe with my family during most of the sixties, spending four years in France.  When I got a guitar at the age of fourteen, in Paris in 1965, I learned my folk songs from a Joan Baez songbook like most others of my generation. As a sophomore at Cornell in 1969, I profited from a solid course in music theory and lessons on the piano in preparation for a minor concentration in music. I left school, and classical music, to pursue a career in traditional music in the seventies.  With the Highwood Stringband, I traveled on three continents and played many of the major folk festivals in the U.S.  Those eight years were a rich education in the traditional musical idioms of the world.

          Back at Cornell as a graduate student in Romance Studies in 1990, I followed a line of research that was suggested by my experience as a performer of traditional music.  During the seventies, the folklore establishment began to reject performers whose ethnic background was not considered sufficiently “pure”, labeling them “revivalists”.  My band was summarily lumped into that category by the powers that be (and that sign the relatively lucrative performance contracts for government sponsored festivals and tours) with very little regard for our close associations with older, more “authentic”, performers (or even for our own ethnicities, which were relatively coherent with the tradition we had espoused). The National Folk Festival went so far as to ban “revivalists” from appearing on their stages even when they were members of bands led by older, “authentic” players.  In one case a compromise was reached when a fiddler from Indiana refused to play without his band: finally the band was allowed to play, but not to sing, not even their usual harmonies to the older man’s vocals!  Clearly this was a troubled policy, and many of us at the time wondered what would happen as we lost our musical mentors and became the older players ourselves. That question is far from resolved at this time.

The same questions of purity and authenticity haunt the broader discipline of cultural studies. In the traditional music world, older legends pass on, leaving those like myself who grew up with radio, television and an increasingly homogenized and commercialized culture.  The subjects of cultural studies in general are inevitably products of the interaction between their inherited ethnic traditions and the mass culture that America, in particular, exports to the rest of the world.  That is not traditional culture; when I discuss popular culture in this work, I mean the term to be understood as the traditions that develop from the bottom up in a society, not the mass culture that is often dictated by profit and in fact shapes the public’s taste toward that end.

I had the pleasure of associating with a number of Cajun musicians in the course of my travels in the seventies. My group’s most memorable trip was a six-week cultural exchange tour of Central and South America which included a Cajun band with whom we became friends, and later visited in southwestern Louisiana. The 1980’s and 1990’s have seen a surge in the popularity of Cajun food and music, cultural artifacts that reflect the original Acadians’ exchange of foodways and other traditional practices like healing techniques with other residents of southwestern Louisiana, who arrived there from the Caribbean or Germany. My interest in their culture took me back to Cajun country as a graduate student, to experience and explore their Mardi Gras celebration. 

While my own past has undoubtedly led to my choice of subjects for a thesis, Cajun culture is intriguing for many reasons, especially because of the embrace of multiple traditions that characterizes their culture. This is reflected in the fact that many younger Cajuns continue to expand upon their eclectic musical heritage, playing Cajun rock or Cajun blues; and of those who play traditional music who are Cajun themselves, some choose to play with people who are not, but rather have moved to Louisiana to learn the music.  At the Festival Internationale in Lafayette, this year celebrating the 300th anniversary of a French presence in Louisiana, the only criterion in selecting prospective bands is that they sing in French: not only does the festival invite African and Caribbean groups, but the bands from Louisiana also have widely divergent styles.  There seems to be no fear of the loss of “pure” Cajun culture, probably because it has been such a mélange from the outset; clearly the French language is the cultural boundary marker that defines the Cajuns’ difference from the rest of American culture. However, the hybrid nature of Cajuns is often represented by Cajun folklorists as the assimilation of these other groups into a Cajun culture that has remained the same.

Folklore has been linked, historically, with nationalist movements, and as a result, with issues of racial purity. The Nazis themselves used this valorization of the “authentic” folk as an argument for ethnic cleansing.  The politics of the folklore establishment has remained conservative; in the Appalachians in the early twentieth century, for example, English traditions like Morris dancing were taught to the mostly Scotch-Irish mountaineers, while African-influenced traditions that existed in the white community, like the banjo, were ignored by the people who promoted folk culture.

The Acadian Village in Lafayette, a theme park depicting the folkways of the ancestors of today’s Cajuns, was constructed with faithful representations of the simple homes of the Acadians who regrouped in Louisiana in the mid-eighteenth century, after the Grand Dérangement when the British deported them from their settlements in what is now New Brunswick, Canada. As in Williamsburg, Virginia, the visitor is shown a slice of Acadian life as it was for the original emigrants from Canada; in fact, not all Cajuns lived this simple life for long. As time went by, their American experience shaped their lives: some stayed in the bayou and mingled with other ethnic groups, learning survival techniques from the Native Americans, sharing their own ritual magic traditions with the African-Americans, adopting the accordian for their bals de maison, and along the way creating the music and cuisine that is known as Cajun. Other Acadians became more affluent over time, and most of those took advantage of the system of slavery to accumulate property and wealth. As a result, Cajun society developed different classes.  While a commercial venture like the Acadian Village has every right to popularize an image of simpler, happier days, all too often those who study Cajun culture seem to accept a simple, or rather selective view of what is considered to be “authentic” Cajun culture.

 As is the general rule in folklore, poor people and outsiders are considered to have culture, while mainstream culture is seen as neutral by its insiders.  Folklorists edit their interpretations of their subjects for the purpose of marketing it, if only to their colleagues; and Cajun folklorists seem to also seek to promote a rosy view of their society to the general public by ignoring its problems and focusing on its Old World exoticism. Their explanations of the Cajun experience in southwestern Louisiana seem to ring of the Acadian Village, where Cajun history is frozen in time and devoid of context, a Disneyesque representation of Cajuns designed for tourist consumption.  It is culture packaged for sale, and devoid of controversy: with no Indian wars, no slavery, and none of the racial violence that was endemic in their region following the Civil War and into the twentieth century.

Yet this reflects the current climate of renewed pride in ethnic diversity; it was not always thus, and what some have called the Cajuns’ reverse snobbery is the backlash of their historically second-class economic situation. In the early twentieth century, federal policies required every child in the U.S. to be taught in English; primary teachers from Québec to Louisiana taped the mouths of their francophone students shut to discourage the use of French. When that same generation of Cajuns fought in World War II, they became relatively integrated into the mainstream culture. Finally, the prosperity brought on by the oil boom of the sixties boosted the traditionally low self-esteem of Cajuns vis-à-vis the outside, anglophone world, and they realized that they had a unique and potentially lucrative cultural product on their hands. Folk customs have been promoted and reintroduced, and folklife centers have been built.  Now that oil no longer provides the same level of income, tourism development is increasingly important for the area.

I applaud the efforts of Cajun entrepreneurs; the American public can benefit from lessons in cultural diversity and southwestern Louisiana can use the environmentally-friendly tourist dollars (Europeans flock there too). What I take issue with is the usual representation of Cajun culture, by those charged with disseminating its image, as primarily a product of their French extraction. What is lost in this distortion is the complexity of their unique, American experience, which parallels that of other residents of Louisiana, not that of their ancestors in France. Cajun Mardi Gras as well contains vestiges of the agricultural festivals that formed the basis of carnival in that era, but as it exists in the 1990’s, Cajun Mardi Gras is an American phenomenon.

I searched the library for the roots of Cajun carnival traditions in early modern France and found an intriguing history of festive forms and the metamorphoses they experienced as the population moved from rural villages to towns and urban centers. The result of this transition was a loss of individual autonomy in general, but this was especially true for women, whose legal and property rights were abrogated during this period. The popular justice that was an important function of youth groups in the villages provided a model for the reassertion of traditional rights and privileges that accompanied the expanding power of the central government in France.  As the population moved to urban areas in the wake of the wars and famines of the early modern era, society became more hierarchized and gender and class role-reversals became more prevalent themes of festive behavior. As conditions deteriorated for people in the cities, tax revolts borrowed practices from the charivaris of village life to fight the growing inequities imposed on them by the government in Paris to pay for the on-going wars. The interplay of the common people’s expression of their ultimate uncontrollability and the attempts of the authorities to control their behavior characterized the carnival celebrations in urban France in the seventeenth century, as it does those in Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans in our own time.

My final chapter discusses the rich ambiguities of gender shading in the narratives of François Rabelais. Among the first generation of writers to use the vernacular, he was equally versed in classical literature and lore. His use of carnival and festive imagery to question the society of his day is a literary manifestation of carnival excess and role-play. Social role-play is central to his work; in a twist on Dante, the Pope in Rabelais’ inferno sells green sauce. His stories feature some female trickster figures, notably the Sybil of Panzoult; yet critics have chosen to see him as misogynist.  A truer reading of Rabelais would take him at his word and look for the marrow in his stories; he acknowledges the indeterminacy of meaning of perceptual reality and of texts, and thus invites multiple interpretations.  Instances of androgyny in his narrative add further ambiguities: in a world of Andouilles, women from the waist up and sausages from the waist down, gender role-play is foregrounded.  Of course no one escaped Rabelais’s satire, but the concept of the relativity of gender roles is central to issues of civil liberties, and hardly misogynist.  A topsy-turvy reading of Rabelais reveals this aspect of his work.

          Carnival is a reflection of, and specific to, the cultures that produce it; context means everything, and carnival is different things to different people. Carnival freedom gives rein to people’s innate love of role-playing; more, it allows them to be the other, if only for the moment, and that leads to the awareness of the ultimately perceptual nature of reality that characterizes our modern age. Carnival is a many-faceted phenomenon; as such it offers a rich field for study, revealing tensions in a given culture. Peaceful or riotous, “rough music” or lynching, festive forms can release social pressure with the pop of a cork, or uncover the explosive power of the people.