The target article by Gervais & Fessler (G&F) brings an important contribution to anthropology and ethnology, by means of the Attitude–Scenario–Emotion model of sentiments encompassing contempt; in turn, the model is being given historical consistency, by means of those disciplines. In our opinion, what best illustrates the case of contempt across social historical data is the European institution of charivari. Its own diachrony and amplitude are difficult to delineate, since, as a concept, charivari has been defined as a collective ritual performed mainly by the youth, specific to both urban and rural Western European milieus and documented as late as the 14th century (Castelli Reference Castelli and Castelli2004, p, VIII; Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 131–140). Yet, the literature available on the custom expands its area at least to the eastern border of Europe (Lesourd [Reference Lesourd, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 109–113] calling it charivari; Manolescu [Reference Manolescu and Turcuş1967/2004, pp. 141–176] calling it, in vernacular Romanian, strigarea peste sat, alimori, silitatul, moroleuca); and its existence at least as far back as classical Roman times (see Boiteux Reference Boiteux, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 237–249). The literature also broadens the custom's development to the realm of the rites of passage (Benga et al. Reference Benga, Neagota and Benga2015; Castelli Reference Castelli and Castelli2004, p. IX; Karnoouh Reference Karnoouh, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 33–43) and its historical-religious relevance as deep as the wild hunt/la chasse sauvage (Barillari Reference Barillari, Meisen and Barillari2001; Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 131–140; Reference Ginzburg and Avădanei1989/1996; Meisen Reference Meisen and Barillari1935/2001) and the battles for fertility (Benga Reference Benga2011; Reference Benga, Barillari and Castelli2015; Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg and Avădanei1989/1996; Manolescu Reference Manolescu and Turcuş1967/2004; Neagota Reference Neagota and Benga2012b, pp. 70–71). What then, is charivari, and how can it help us bridge the social affect “contempt” and the collective imagination and rituality?
Charivari is a loud public ritual, a raucous, discordant mock serenade involving a lot of noise-making, frequently with pounding on pots and pans and makeshift instruments. A big sound is produced by a merry procession of youth and others, which is directed either towards the house of the designated “victim” of the charivari mockery procedure (where they yell and ring their bells), or merely led throughout the entire village, meant symbolically to stand for the “victims” who are this time addressed by name and targeted by verbal mockery and loud disharmony. What is being punished by these means? Improper marital behavior (e.g., female domestic violence; a non-native spouse; marrying a widow/widower, or marrying with a wide age-difference, or not marrying at all – as in the case of spinsters and bachelors; adultery) is largely documented as subjected to charivari all across Europe. The custom/practice appears under many names: charivarium, capramaritum, chabro, ciabra, crava, Haberfeld-treiben, katzenmusik, pôeletage, rough music, cencerrada, cochallada, esquellotada, scampanata, caribaria, charavaria, javramaritum, zabramari, zebra, cireri, sireri, bataquarci, burdaleri, matrimügg, cioccada, tuba, tübada, tamburata, tuntuna, tempellata, timpuleada, corna, scornata, sa corredda, ludus turpis, ludus iniquitatis, ludus demoniacus, gioco infernale, gioco d'Acheronte, and so on (Castelli Reference Castelli and Castelli2004, pp. VII–XXIV). As indicated by some of the latter terms in the preceding list, charivari also takes place in the context of private (non-institutionalized) witchcraft practices, which are well documented as existing up to the 20th century in Eastern Europe. (In this context – which has been our field of research from 1997 to the present – public exposure is less evident and the charivari more narrative-confined; that is, recounted in narrative form and accessed through interviews.)
Stripped to the core, the charivari procedure is meant to publicly divulge and actively mock what is perceived as a violation of the norms and moral non-written codes of the respective communities. This kind of verbal and gestural mockery, climaxing in punishment and atonement (by payments in modern times, by public execution of yore – executions scheduled for the days of Carnival, preferred scenario on Shrove Tuesday), has left traces in present-day carnivals across Europe: burying or burning the simulacrum of a person is ultimately common to every carnivalesque cortège (Neagota Reference Neagota2012a). Are they mocking, punishing, or securing the social behavior within the community?
The target article provides the tools to address these enduring ethnological questions. Even though the accent in G&F's article is on the individual generation of contempt, the collective behaviors that the authors cite, as such being solely the economic calculus of benefits (“fitness benefits”; sects. 4.3, 5.2, and 6.1), all the way to “ambivalence” or “indifference” (sect. 4.3), and the overall social effect of the influence of a dominant individual on an other (the “image infection” or “stigma-by-association” paradigm; sects. 5.2 and 6.1), are nonetheless relevant to – and can in turn be illuminated by – the kind of group/community behavior enacted in charivari. Likewise, regarding the norms and predictions that are addressed in sect. 6.1, or regarding the “social-relational affordance” (sect. 4.3), G&F's body of theory will be of essential use in pondering the roles assigned by tradition and “the adaptive grammar of emotions” (sect. 4.3, para. 5) to the hieratic versus carnivalesque cortèges, accompanying, ultimately, every closed-group popular ceremonial (cf. sect. 1.2). Interactive behavior within groups is minutely presented within G&F's Table 1 featuring the eight attributes of “contempt,” and elsewhere throughout the article. The novel explanation of the ASE model of sentiments (sect. 2.6), with its critical formulation (the eight features cohere across populations, why is that?), helps us answer the critical transdisciplinary question: whether we can, or cannot, attach rituality to carnivalesque behavior (cf. Benga & Benga Reference Benga and Benga2006).
Ultimately, the extant questions are: Can contempt be collective? Could we share in the same contempt? Could the mockery and derision assembled in culturally transmitted patterns reach some sort of rituality? Could societies, better than individuals, exchange the permanent loss of respect and status diminution, on such temporary losses, within a cyclic perspective over the ceremonial year within customary societies, aiming at releasing pent-up social conflict tensions (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1965/1984)? Is contempt necessary, less so as leading to anger and hatred, from which it in effect it differs (sects. 1.1, 5.1–5.3, and 6.1), and more so as the sine qua non fabric of salient tradition-bound narratives: such as the Christian gospel, where the god himself is being compulsorily mocked and punished? Anthropologists suggest charivari, the marital-comment format of Western Europe, had a most concrete reason to appear: the strict rules around marriage alliance, forbidding by all means the loss of a young bride to an old bridegroom, and the like (Karnoouh Reference Karnoouh, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 33–43). That we, as a species, could mock with a reason – contempt as a “biologically cultural species” (last line of the target article, sect. 7, para. 2) – is an encouraging thought after all. If we speak about contempt as an evolutionary unit within our cultural phylogeny, we need to remember the grand scale migration routes and historical links within the large landmass of Eurasia, as well as the thousands of years of clustering within the European cultural pool, whose features we may still decipher and delineate with our, relatively late in history, field researches of today.
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The target article by Gervais & Fessler (G&F) brings an important contribution to anthropology and ethnology, by means of the Attitude–Scenario–Emotion model of sentiments encompassing contempt; in turn, the model is being given historical consistency, by means of those disciplines. In our opinion, what best illustrates the case of contempt across social historical data is the European institution of charivari. Its own diachrony and amplitude are difficult to delineate, since, as a concept, charivari has been defined as a collective ritual performed mainly by the youth, specific to both urban and rural Western European milieus and documented as late as the 14th century (Castelli Reference Castelli and Castelli2004, p, VIII; Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 131–140). Yet, the literature available on the custom expands its area at least to the eastern border of Europe (Lesourd [Reference Lesourd, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 109–113] calling it charivari; Manolescu [Reference Manolescu and Turcuş1967/2004, pp. 141–176] calling it, in vernacular Romanian, strigarea peste sat, alimori, silitatul, moroleuca); and its existence at least as far back as classical Roman times (see Boiteux Reference Boiteux, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 237–249). The literature also broadens the custom's development to the realm of the rites of passage (Benga et al. Reference Benga, Neagota and Benga2015; Castelli Reference Castelli and Castelli2004, p. IX; Karnoouh Reference Karnoouh, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 33–43) and its historical-religious relevance as deep as the wild hunt/la chasse sauvage (Barillari Reference Barillari, Meisen and Barillari2001; Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 131–140; Reference Ginzburg and Avădanei1989/1996; Meisen Reference Meisen and Barillari1935/2001) and the battles for fertility (Benga Reference Benga2011; Reference Benga, Barillari and Castelli2015; Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg and Avădanei1989/1996; Manolescu Reference Manolescu and Turcuş1967/2004; Neagota Reference Neagota and Benga2012b, pp. 70–71). What then, is charivari, and how can it help us bridge the social affect “contempt” and the collective imagination and rituality?
Charivari is a loud public ritual, a raucous, discordant mock serenade involving a lot of noise-making, frequently with pounding on pots and pans and makeshift instruments. A big sound is produced by a merry procession of youth and others, which is directed either towards the house of the designated “victim” of the charivari mockery procedure (where they yell and ring their bells), or merely led throughout the entire village, meant symbolically to stand for the “victims” who are this time addressed by name and targeted by verbal mockery and loud disharmony. What is being punished by these means? Improper marital behavior (e.g., female domestic violence; a non-native spouse; marrying a widow/widower, or marrying with a wide age-difference, or not marrying at all – as in the case of spinsters and bachelors; adultery) is largely documented as subjected to charivari all across Europe. The custom/practice appears under many names: charivarium, capramaritum, chabro, ciabra, crava, Haberfeld-treiben, katzenmusik, pôeletage, rough music, cencerrada, cochallada, esquellotada, scampanata, caribaria, charavaria, javramaritum, zabramari, zebra, cireri, sireri, bataquarci, burdaleri, matrimügg, cioccada, tuba, tübada, tamburata, tuntuna, tempellata, timpuleada, corna, scornata, sa corredda, ludus turpis, ludus iniquitatis, ludus demoniacus, gioco infernale, gioco d'Acheronte, and so on (Castelli Reference Castelli and Castelli2004, pp. VII–XXIV). As indicated by some of the latter terms in the preceding list, charivari also takes place in the context of private (non-institutionalized) witchcraft practices, which are well documented as existing up to the 20th century in Eastern Europe. (In this context – which has been our field of research from 1997 to the present – public exposure is less evident and the charivari more narrative-confined; that is, recounted in narrative form and accessed through interviews.)
Stripped to the core, the charivari procedure is meant to publicly divulge and actively mock what is perceived as a violation of the norms and moral non-written codes of the respective communities. This kind of verbal and gestural mockery, climaxing in punishment and atonement (by payments in modern times, by public execution of yore – executions scheduled for the days of Carnival, preferred scenario on Shrove Tuesday), has left traces in present-day carnivals across Europe: burying or burning the simulacrum of a person is ultimately common to every carnivalesque cortège (Neagota Reference Neagota2012a). Are they mocking, punishing, or securing the social behavior within the community?
The target article provides the tools to address these enduring ethnological questions. Even though the accent in G&F's article is on the individual generation of contempt, the collective behaviors that the authors cite, as such being solely the economic calculus of benefits (“fitness benefits”; sects. 4.3, 5.2, and 6.1), all the way to “ambivalence” or “indifference” (sect. 4.3), and the overall social effect of the influence of a dominant individual on an other (the “image infection” or “stigma-by-association” paradigm; sects. 5.2 and 6.1), are nonetheless relevant to – and can in turn be illuminated by – the kind of group/community behavior enacted in charivari. Likewise, regarding the norms and predictions that are addressed in sect. 6.1, or regarding the “social-relational affordance” (sect. 4.3), G&F's body of theory will be of essential use in pondering the roles assigned by tradition and “the adaptive grammar of emotions” (sect. 4.3, para. 5) to the hieratic versus carnivalesque cortèges, accompanying, ultimately, every closed-group popular ceremonial (cf. sect. 1.2). Interactive behavior within groups is minutely presented within G&F's Table 1 featuring the eight attributes of “contempt,” and elsewhere throughout the article. The novel explanation of the ASE model of sentiments (sect. 2.6), with its critical formulation (the eight features cohere across populations, why is that?), helps us answer the critical transdisciplinary question: whether we can, or cannot, attach rituality to carnivalesque behavior (cf. Benga & Benga Reference Benga and Benga2006).
Ultimately, the extant questions are: Can contempt be collective? Could we share in the same contempt? Could the mockery and derision assembled in culturally transmitted patterns reach some sort of rituality? Could societies, better than individuals, exchange the permanent loss of respect and status diminution, on such temporary losses, within a cyclic perspective over the ceremonial year within customary societies, aiming at releasing pent-up social conflict tensions (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1965/1984)? Is contempt necessary, less so as leading to anger and hatred, from which it in effect it differs (sects. 1.1, 5.1–5.3, and 6.1), and more so as the sine qua non fabric of salient tradition-bound narratives: such as the Christian gospel, where the god himself is being compulsorily mocked and punished? Anthropologists suggest charivari, the marital-comment format of Western Europe, had a most concrete reason to appear: the strict rules around marriage alliance, forbidding by all means the loss of a young bride to an old bridegroom, and the like (Karnoouh Reference Karnoouh, Le Goff and Schmitt1981, pp. 33–43). That we, as a species, could mock with a reason – contempt as a “biologically cultural species” (last line of the target article, sect. 7, para. 2) – is an encouraging thought after all. If we speak about contempt as an evolutionary unit within our cultural phylogeny, we need to remember the grand scale migration routes and historical links within the large landmass of Eurasia, as well as the thousands of years of clustering within the European cultural pool, whose features we may still decipher and delineate with our, relatively late in history, field researches of today.