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Carnival and Culture: Sex, Symbol, and Status in Spain. David D. Gilmore. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 244 pp.
MARY M. CRAIN University of Barcelona
In Carnival and Culture, Gilmore explores the ways in which both coplas, oral songs associated with the celebration of preLenten carnival in southern Spain, as well as a wide array of other distinctive carnival ceremonies enacted in the streets, the bars, and the households of rural Andalusia during the month of February, speak to the issues of sex, gender, and status in Andalusia. Pace Gilmore, carnival's public displays as well as its narrative genres offer stories that Andalusians "invent that define themselves to themselves" (p. 3), yielding societal secrets, those powerful feelings and impulses otherwise hidden by the repressive moral codes that have governed everyday life in Andalusian communities. The local secrets that structure Andalusian society are revealed through the prism of these coplas, composed and performed exclusively by working-class men. While working-class women participate in carnival, they do not occupy central stage. Neither composing nor performing carnival songs, women serve as the audience of these songs. Similar to their male counterparts, they partake in the pandemonium in the streets and in the bars-public spaces-which male ideologies normally construe as off limits to them in this spatially segregated society. These public spaces are the arenas in which working-class men perform the daily rituals of manhood. During carnival both men and women masquerade, but only men cross-dress, The latter don transvestite costumes while women opt for fantasy costumes, often imitating television personae or generic princesses.
While Mintz's recent work Carnival Song and Society (Berg, 1997), on carnival in the province of Cadiz, devoted more attention to the satirical and lewd chirigota coplas, echoing comic styles predominant in carnival celebrations in other Mediterranean societies, Gilmore draws our attention to the fact that in many parts of Andalusia there are actually two distinct genres of carnival song, the chirigota and the estudiantil...