If you haven’t already noticed, I try to keep abreast of Ann’s topics so I can come up with related and appropriate subject matter for Andy’s Corner. Ann’s topic for today had me stumped for a while and I was sure my blog was going to be a bust, but then it came to me like a flash – the free market economy!
I’m sure you’re wondering how the free market economy relates to Ann’s topic. (Spoiler alert – if you haven’t yet read Ann’s blog or didn’t catch the drift of my first paragraph, it deals with the public display of women’s breasts). Although I would like to take the credit, the connection between such public displays and a free market economy was the brainchild of Wes Shrum, a former LSU colleague.
Shrum didn’t just dream this up sitting in his office chair. His conclusions were grounded in extensive ethnographic research and painstaking analyses of videos that he and his research team took of Mardi Gras revelers in the New Orleans French Quarter. In 1996, he and John Kilburn, then a graduate student, published the research findings in an Oxford University Press research journal. The title of the paper is “Ritual Disrobement at Mardi Gras: Ceremonial Exchange and Moral Order.“
[Editor’s note: If you suspect that Shrum’s research may have been motivated by prurient interests rather than an intellectual curiosity, I invite you to take a peek at the article. It’s an impressive piece of empirical and theoretical scholarship that I only briefly touch on here. Plus it’s damn interesting. I should add that for years I assigned this article to my students as an an example of how acts of “social deviance” can often have some rather unexpected, yet rational and common-sensical explanations.]
Acts of “ritual disrobement” (the baring of breasts in public) according to Shrum
… are deviant in most social contexts and are officially proscribed even during Mardi Gras, yet they remain common for both sexes. Intimate body parts – ordinarily concealed even from close friends – are unveiled for the acclaim of strangers, sometimes numbering in the hundreds.
But why do some Mardi Gras revelers reveal their bosoms (among other things)? Shrum claims that while this may seem to be a type of debauchery it is more accurately described as “an expression of moral commitment to the market economy as well as conventional notions of gender and hierarchy.“
The “market economy” that Shrum refers to is based on the exchange of beads for “goods and services.” In an interview on a Lake Charles TV news program Shrum put it like this:
The beads are a prominent symbol of the Cajun celebration. Instead of dollars and coins, we have beads and they are all different in a sense – denominations, all different values depending on how long and bright and colored and shapely they are. So those are the most significant aspects of beads which make them more or less valuable, and subject to an exchange process…
I’ve never been in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras so I’ve not had the opportunity to personally witness the “disrobement rituals” that Shrum describes. However, I’ve been to a number Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans with our family and can fully appreciate the value that beads can have during these events.
I’ve witnessed some of our reserved and rather stodgy friends jumping up and down with extended arms yelling at the passing floats, “throw me some beads!”. And I’ve even found myself being envious of those who were sporting greater quantities and better looking beads than those around my neck. In the heat of the moment these beads are precious and the conspicuous possession of them a sign of a successful Mardi Gras participant.
Of course, the value of the trove of beads amassed during the festivities diminishes quite quickly. This is a fact that always struck me on the drive back to Baton Rouge following a day at the parades with our kids. Each of us in the family would be wearing our hard-earned beads, and we would even hang some from the rear view mirror. But the further we would get from New Orleans the more we began to see the beads for what they really were: relatively inexpensive, mass-produced strings of shiny bits of plastic that ultimately would be stored in the attic and forgotten.
I often wonder what those enterprising “disrobers” do with their bartered-for beads when the Mardi Gras free market is over. Do they continue to wear them when they go back to their jobs or out to dinner? Do they display them on their walls as testimony to their disrobing prowess? Or, like so many others, do they just toss them, contributing to the annual massive post-Mardi Gras mountains of plastic trash?
At least our family treasure of beads did not end up in the catch basins of New Orleans. In fact, our stash made it into the moving van when we left Baton Rouge to live in Glen Ellen. Some day, amongst all of the boxes stored in our attic, I will try to find the one marked “Mardi Gras Beads.” Will seeing them spark some of the excitement I felt so long ago at those parades, jumping up and down yelling “Throw me some beads?” Probably not.