Skyros Carnival by Dick Blau et al. (review)

For anthropologists, conveying the richness of our experiences in the field in text and image remains a perpetual challenge. The authors of Skyros Carnival have responded to this challenge by creating a kind of portable multimedia museum exhibit that engages the eyes and ears as it describes the engrossing festivities that take place each year during the three weeks before Lent on Skyros, an island in the Sporades chain. This annual celebration has been the most important event on the island for over a century; while many scholarly works have studied, recorded, and theorized about it, few have captured its intense sensory impact in quite the same way as this volume.

The very layout of the book underscores the immediacy of Carnival on Skyros. After brief introductory statements from each contributor, the book presents 37 color photographs taken by Dick Blau. These depict the satirical performances of the “gathering of donkeys” (8–13) and the “fisherman’s celebration” (14–17), along with the masquerading processions of the central trio of Skyrian Carnival figures: the yeros with his black hooded goatskin jacket, kidskin face mask, and the heavy copper goat bells around his waist; his companion, the korela, dressed in a combination of Skyrian bridal wear and shepherd’s pants and shoes; and the comic frangos. Included among these images are the onlookers who witness the performances in the streets and public spaces of Hora, the main settlement on the island. Importantly, this section also includes photographs of Skyrians gathered around long tables to feast and sing the τραγούδια της τάβλας (table songs) that provide the sonic counterpoint to the din of the goat bells, even if they do so from private, interior spaces of homes and tavernas.

Following the color photographs, Agapi Amanatidis and Panayotis Panopoulos provide a thirteen-page interpretive essay. While acknowledging the value of classic scholarship that characterizes Carnival performances as sites of class struggle, as social dramas, or as ritual reversals of everyday social relations, Amanatidis and Panopoulos argue that beyond such analyses lies transformation. The Skyrian Carnival allows the community to celebrate itself and to hold “a mirror to its internal and mundane affairs” (46), even as it is reborn in the revels that mark the transition from winter to spring. From this perspective, Carnival on Skyros has less to do with subverting the social order and more to do with exploring “the fluid boundary between actor and audience [that] creates carnival selves who traverse the distinction of the singular and multiple” (46).

In keeping with such a phenomenological approach, the authors discuss how these “carnival selves” come to life in multisensory performances. Visual and written representations fail to capture the true chaos and mess of this spectacle as it is experienced in the moment, they argue. Rather, the true meaning of Carnival emerges through its soundscape, marked by the relentless roaring of the goat bells worn by masqueraders; this sound transforms everyday village life into Carnival. Furthermore, the Carnival soundscape can only be understood in contrast to the relative silence and neat boundaries of everyday life on Skyros, governed as it is by “a strong sense of visual and acoustic impenetrability” (48). Such everyday impenetrability proved essential during the island’s many conquests and invasions, as the book’s brief overview of Skyrian history shows, and renders the lifting of boundaries during Carnival all the more powerful by contrast. Likewise, the authors point out the significance of pastoralism on Skyros, which has lent to Carnival its dominant symbols and regalia: the shepherd’s crook, goatskin cloak, and goat bells of the yeros.

Transformation lies at the heart of this account of Carnival, which Skyrians express metaphorically by use of the verb γίνομαι (to become; 55––56). Following the written essay, the book presents 24 black-and-white photographs by Dick Blau that depict the process of becoming: Skyrians dressing in Carnival regalia, masquerading in the streets, and interacting with...