What is Carnivalesque Leadership?
Centuries Old - Relevant Today
Carnivalesque Leadership has been employed since humans formed in hierarchical social groups. Today, it is seen in communities and organisations across the world, providing an opportunity for safety-valve release of pressure and exposure to different modes of being.
Invisible
Carnivalesque Leadership is so deep rooted in societies and organisations that it is normalised to the point of invisibility. By exposing how, when and where it is employed, we can understand not only its potential for preserving the status quo but also its potential for transformation.
Strategic
Leaders may already be operating Carnivalesque Leadership strategies without necessarily harnessing their full potential. Altternatively, they may be completely unaware of this centuries-old leadership strategy to release pressure from the system. This website and associated services aim to expose and harness the potential of the Carnivalesque.
What are Carnivalesque Leadership Components?
Collectivity
Humour & Laughter
Humour & Laughter
The collectivity of carnival and the dissolution of the individual is central to the effectiveness of Carnivalesque Leadership strategy. On one level, established festivals and carnivals bring communities together. On a smaller scale, Carnivalesque Leadership can also bring people together and create a sense of belonging. Leaders do not need to host a full-scale carnival to acheive this but understanding the Carnivalesque model provides useful and dynamic leadership insights.
Humour & Laughter
Humour & Laughter
Humour & Laughter
Shared humour and laughter can bring people together, release tension from a situation and transform relationships and power dynamics. Laughter has the power to challenge hierarchical structures. Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that “Laughter is a weapon, like fists and sticks”. But humour and laughter can be both liberating and controlling. It can build cohesion and increase division, to build relationships and to shatter them. Strategic awareness and understanding of the power of laughter should not be undersestimated.
Fun
Humour & Laughter
Communal Food and Drink
Fun and play in all its forms can be employed effectively in a Carnivalesque Leadership model. Dancing and singing are commonly associated with community carnivals and festivals. Sport and spectator events generate billions of dollars worldwide through monetizing fun. By strategically enabling fun, leaders can signal a break from normal routines which lets the pressure out of social and organisational structures.
Communal Food and Drink
Communal Food and Drink
Communal Food and Drink
Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that feasts encompass “the people’s hopes of a happier future, of a more just social and economic order, of a new truth”. From cake days, lunch runs, lunches out to full-blown celebratory meals at key points in the year, the sharing of food and drink is an opportunity for group bonding and the exploration of alternative power relationships.
Sanctioned Subversion
Communal Food and Drink
Sanctioned Subversion
Carnivalesque Leadership temporarily suspends established norms, structures and routines and provides safety-valve release through sanctioned subversive fun. This sanctioned subversion takes many forms.
Carnivalesque Leadership Case Studies
Transformation: Trinidad Carnival
Transformation: Notting Hill Carnival
Transformation: Trinidad Carnival
Shifting power dynamics can be traced through the history of Trinidad Carnival. In a Carnivalesque Leadership model, the spaces provided by carnival offer an opportunity for both safety-valve release through a subversive break from the norm and the potential for longer-term change, partly through increased visibility. African traditions of Kambule and European traditions of Mardi Gras have combined with other influences including Hosay tradition as Trinidad's carnival has developed from uprising and subversion into Trinidad and Tobego's world famous annual carnival.
Transformation: Pride
Transformation: Notting Hill Carnival
Transformation: Trinidad Carnival
Featuring dancing, singing, music, dressing up, laughter, food and drink and communal joy, carnival is fun but it is not frivolous. It can be easy to dismiss the impact of Carnivalesque Leadership because its constituent components prioritise communal experience and a sanctioned break from normal routines and usual rules and constraints. The evolution of reactions to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, located on Christopher Street in New York City, in June 1969 led to Pride marches and parades thereby providing an example of the dynamics and power behind Carnivalesque Leadership.
Transformation: Notting Hill Carnival
Transformation: Notting Hill Carnival
Shoring up the status quo: Works Socials and Sports
The foundations of Notting Hill Carnival, London, are multi-layered. Developed from Claudia Jones' first indoor 'Caribbean Carnival' in January 1959 which was a direct response to racially-motivated violence and Rhaune Laslett's organisation of the first Notting Hill Fair Parade in 1965, Notting Hill Carnival is now the biggest street carnival in Europe. The carnival's roots in Trinidadian carnival traditions and its growth during times of racial tensions in London, means that is has a long legacy of subversion and celebration.
Shoring up the status quo: Works Socials and Sports
Shoring up the status quo: Works Socials and Sports
Shoring up the status quo: Works Socials and Sports
Carnivalesque Leadership has been evident in organisations for centuries. It can operate both a transactional tool which exchanges short-term safety-valve release for longer-term compliance and as a conduit for transformation through exposure to alternatives to the established hierarchical norm. Corporate sanctioning of communal activities, such as works days out, sport, food and drink consumption, humour, laughter and play, offers a break from the everyday norm and in doing so maximises the impact of carnivalesque components to shore up exisiting systems and structures.
Shoring up the status quo: Nomikai
Shoring up the status quo: Works Socials and Sports
Shoring up the status quo: Nomikai
The Japanese tradition of nomikai seemingly bears little resemblance to Bakhtin’s exploration of feast and carnival. However, nomikai, which involves sanctioned drinking with colleagues after work, offers potential for temporary safety-valve release from rigid hierarchical structures in a controlled, ‘official’ manner and therefore offers an extreme example of the mechanism. The expected aim of this structured drinking culture is to strengthen camaraderie between bosses and employees.
Status Quo and Transformation: Team Building
Shoring up the status quo: Works Socials and Sports
Shoring up the status quo: Nomikai
The Team Building industry has successfully commodified the process of creating a break from the norm to provide bonding opportunities. These opportunities might include outdoor physical challenges such as abseiling, rafting, hiking, which may represent individual and collective challenge, or communal art/craft/performance events which enable a realignment in creativity, or a theme-focus event offering exposure to a chosen subject, with any variety of these usually coupled with communal eating and drinking.
Who Was Mikhail Bakhtin?
The Philosopher who best captured Carnival
Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the twentieth centuries most significant thinkers and philosophers. His unfinalisable ideas of the dialogic, heteroglossia, polyphony and his interest in subversive folk tradition can be tracked through his academic career.
Born on November 16th 1895 in Oryol, 220 miles southwest of Moscow, Bakhtin's life spanned multiple Russian revolutions, the establishing of the Soviet Union era in the early twentieth century and the rise of Lenin and Stalin. His writing is implicitly imbued with explorations of subversion, power and hierarchy, with the authorities’ distrust of Bakhtin resulting in his exile to Kazakhstan.
Bakhtin was plagued with ill health and had his right leg amputated in 1938. Despite the challenges created by this life-changing illness, Bakhtin’s intellectual profile started to increase in the early 1940s. He wrote his doctoral dissertation for the Gorky Institute on “Rabelais in the History of Realism” which was submitted in 1940 and which was later adapted into the text published much later in 1965 and which would become known in the world decades later as Rabelais and His World. Bakhtin's ideas on the Carnivalesque are extrapolated mainly from this work to form the basis to explore Carnivalesque Leadership.
Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for the truth”
For Bakhtin, carnival “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions”.
Want to know more about Carnivalesque Leadership?
Coming soon -YouTube Channel
New YouTube Channel shares the word about
Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas and Carnivalesque Leadership.
Carnivalesque Keynotes
Dr Jo Trevenna is available for keynote speaking and corporate events. Carnivalesque Leadership may well be centuries-old but it is more relevant today than ever given its potential for recognisiing individual disconnect from the collective, its challenge to monological discourse and the transformative power of safety-valve Carnivalesque release.