Abstract
The following article is an autoethnographic reading of carnival as an inter-cultural and interpersonal event, and one that does not always profit from anthropological models such as inversion or safety-valve theories. The radical proximity of carnival experience problematises the objectivity of the event and makes it meaningful also as a lived-in moment, a sensory affair. The following is an account of an individual experience that defines the significance of carnival as a form of kinesis, a sensation of inebriated movement shaking up of the static ethnographic "I". The essay looks in particular at the movement of humping conducted by the character of the tranga, in the Pyrenean carnival of Bielsa in Spain. My theoretical framework touches on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Judith Butler. The analysis of their concepts of dialogism and performativity lead to a series of questions concerning the transformation of the everyday kinetic experience of the body as it becomes intoxicated by carnivalesque performance.