David Gilmore - Ethnographic Fieldwork in Spain

David Gilmore has been studying carnival in southern Spain for over twenty years. In the village of Fuenmayor, carnival -- a week-long bacchanalia in mid-February -- is the high point of the ritual calendar. Everyone in town participates. The people masquerade in colorful homemade costumes, pack the bars, sing acerbic and ribald songs, and single out deviants to persecute. Male transvestism is the order of the day. The festival is fiercely anti-clerical, highly politicized, and aggressively irreverent. People cover their faces completely, disguise their voices and thereby avoiding detection, ventilate normally-forbidden behavior.