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There is a direct historical connection here. We've already seen how, among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating tem- porary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns). In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in 115

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There is a direct historical connection here. We've already seen how, among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating tem- porary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns). In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in 115
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Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 19:58:56 JST Rasmus Fleischer

"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king, the palace becomes a circus." (some street art)
Or maybe... the palace is just returning to its original form?
According to some anthropologists, the court essentially began as a circus, a "theatre state" as Clifford Geertz termed it. Which must of course be a very ambigous and possibly terrible thing. I think that Graeber & Wengrow's "The dawn of everything" has some brief but nuanced thoughts on that point.

In conversation about 2 months ago from tldr.nettime.org permalink