A Reflection on BaKhtin's Carnival in Takht- e Hozi

The theoretical framework of this article is built on Iranian people`s need to carnival which had been met through Takht -e Hozi (exhilarating comedy) held in ceremonies. Public participation of different social classes in certain time and place, feasting and drinking, carnival laughter, upside down world, the exchange of master and servant`s (Sultan / Haji / Molla Vs. Siyah) social classes and consolidating social system at the end of the performance are reviewable subjects that can be traced in ceremonies and Takht -e Hozi comedies. According to Bakhtin, these characteristics describe “Carnival”. Regarding carnivals, there are four basic categories which have been applied to Takht -e Hozis as well: Free and familiar contact among people, Eccentricity, Carnivalistic misalliances and Profanation. 1. Free and familiar contact among people. People how in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival. The category of familiar contact is also responsible for the special way mass actions are organized, and for free carnival gesticulation, and for the outspoken carnivalistic word. 2. Eccentricity. A new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterpoised to the allpowerful sociohierarchical relationships of noncarnival life. 3. Carnivalistic misalliances. A free and familiar attitude spreads over everything: over all values, thoughts, phenomena, and things. 4. Profanation: carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic debasing and bringing down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings, etc. Bakhtin adds the 5th category as “Mock crowning and subsequent de-crowning of the carnival king”. This ritual is encountered in one form or another in all festivities of the carnival type: in the most elaborately worked out forms _ the saturnalia, the European carnival and festival of fool; in a less elaborated form, all other festivities of the type, right down to festival banquets with their election of short -lived kings and queens of the festival. These carnivalistic categories are not abstract thoughts about equality and freedom, these are concretely sensuous ritualpageant “thoughts” experienced and played out in the form of life itself, “thoughts” that had coalesced and survived for thousands of years among the broadest masses of mankind. Actually, Bakhtin provides us with tentative and dogmatic reading of Takht -e Hozi comedies simultaneously. What makes cultural studies different from its previous critical theory is the ability to put affirmative and privative readings together. The perception of the audience as an active and resistant subject is defined as the best example of this matter. Accordingly, Takht -e Hozi can guarantee the continuation of the current situation and at the same time provide the underprivileged classes with a weapon against social order. So Takht -e Hozi serves the power (s) and the poor (s) at the same time. Hence, the seeds of an institutional revolution can be embedded in Takht -e Hozi as a temporary revolution.