Culture of Laugher

Contemporary festivals derive from the ancient history and the philosophy of carnival which has the “notion of laughter’s therapeutic and liberating force” (Bakhtin) and also sanctioned by the highest ideal aims of human existence, not by the world of practical conditions.

Festival, as a gate which opens beyond the normative understanding of modern society, is a declaration of the utopia.  Temporary existence of the festival is an attempt to enter into collective ancestral body that indicate freedom, joy and abundance in life.

Construction of the festival based on creation of alternative social space. This very artistic act of creating the alternative social space proposes the significance of the moment despite its temporality. The permanent placement losses its construction by penetration of the temporal one.

There is no strict boundary between performers and the spectators in the festival place.

Mikhail Bakhtin was one of the most important Soviet thinker and theorists of social sciences in the twentieth century. His writing embodied the qualities of the Carnival in medieval culture. According to his writing carnival retains the opposite power toward to feudal in medieval wolrd. There are four categories of Bakhtin’s carnivalistic sense of the world:

1. Free and familiar interaction between people: in the carnival normally separated people can interact and freely express themselves to one another.

2. Eccentric behavior: behavior that was otherwise unacceptable is legitimate in carnival, and human nature’s hidden sides are revealed.

3.Carnivalistic misalliances: the free and familiar attitude of the carnival enables everything which is normally separated to connect – the sacred with the profane, the new and old, the high and low etc.

4. Sacrilegious: the carnival for Bakhtin is a site of ungodliness, of blasphemy, profanity and parodies on things that are sacred.

 

 

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Pierre Bourdieu – Habitus, Cultural production, field, doxa, capital;  social capital, cultural capital, financial capital, and symbolic capital.

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Lefebvre  – Place as a social product

According to Lefebvre, space is a reason and the result at the same time for the societies and ideologies. Ideologies define the way of production that might work as an evidence of product (space.) The production of space creates other spaces. One of the hypotheses of Lefebvre “if space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expand the process of production.”

Since the consciousness only exist within the interaction it is crucial to sustain those alternative social bodies to have an polygonal structure.

 

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Social epistomology refers to web of belief