“Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators…. Eccentricity is [its] special category, organically connected with the category of familiar contact; it permits–in contcretely sensuous form–the latent sides of human to reveal and express themselves….[It] brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”

                                  — Michael Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 122-23

Photo Credits:  Ricardo Moraes/Reuters – Images 1, 4, and 5; Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images; Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images;