As festive parades spark a raucous blur of purple, green, and gold on the streets of New Orleans, Louisiana, a different kind of Mardi Gras will blossom in the state's rural Cajun communities.
Mardi Gras is French for Fat Tuesday, the final day of the weeks-long Carnival season of feasting and celebration. For Christian revelers, it is the final blowout before Ash Wednesday and the pre-Easter penitential season of Lent.
The New Orleans version of Mardi Gras is well known for the beads, cups, and coins that "krewes" on passing floats toss to the crowds pleading, "Throw me something, mister." The rural version is becoming known for its often comedic, chaotic, and beer-fueled chicken chases.
Barry Jean Ancelet is a professor of French and folklore at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and host of a weekly live Cajun radio show broadcast from Eunice. He said the Cajun Mardi Gras is much more than chicken chasing and beer drinking.
"It is a reaffirmation of community. It is a source of homemade entertainment. It has religious, social, and psychological value for all participants, those running and those receiving," he said.
Carl Lindahl is a professor of English and folklore at the University of Houston in Texas. He has has extensively studied the Cajun Mardi Gras celebration in the town of Basile and agrees with Ancelet's view. "Mardi Gras is about community ties, and almost all outsiders miss this," he said.
Cajun Mardi Gras
Ancelet describes the Cajun Mardi Gras as controlled chaos. Starting early in the morning, masked revelers go from house to house in the countryside. They beg for ingredients and money to make a gumbo that will later be enjoyed by the entire community.
Some people give rice, flour, onions, or money—but one of the ideal ingredients, according to Ancelet, is a live chicken. The chicken is tossed out into an open field. The revelers, many of whom start drinking beer early in the morning, are expected to catch it.
The ensuing chaos is mixed up in a swirl of mock trials, abductions, tree climbing, singing, and other acts of tomfoolery, all of which serve to infuse a burst of energy into the doldrums of winter, Ancelet said.
According to Lindahl, much of the clowning around is associated with skills the region associates with manhood—the ability to ride a horse, dance, sing, play and take jokes, and drink a lot.
"During Mardi Gras, young men try to do all of these things in greatly exaggerated form at the same time, all day long," he said. "The chaos comes in part from the attempt to do all these things at once."
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