Assume Vivid Astro Focus, eat your heart out. The vid is from the documentary directed by Pat Mire, Dance For a Chicken: The Cajun Mardi Gras—the whole film is online, thanks to the amazing Folkstreams; the website has interesting stuff for years. (I got this from somewhere and I can’t remember! Holler if it was your blog.) From an interesting essay on the tradition:

Led by a flag-bearing capitaine, this colorful and noisy procession of masked and costumed men on horses and wagons go from house to house in the countryside asking for charity in return for a performance of dancing and buffoonery. The participants are earnestly employed chasing chickens, the most valued offering, and they pride themselves on their ability to collect enough “live chickens” to feed the entire community “free of charge.”

At an organizational meeting before Mardi Gras, Wendell Manuel instructs the group, “when you get to a man’s house . . . get off that horse and dance for him and beg to him . . . . Do whatever you have to do to get his chickens or his sausage or his rice or his money . . . . Anything we can do to get the goods for the supper.” Mardi Gras is after all a redistribution of wealth and beneath its many layers of exotic behavior lies a serious message of survival which goes back to pre-Christian festivals and ancient rites of passage.

During this festival where everyone gives and everyone receives, which supports the egalitarian values of Cajun culture, humanity’s story of sharing is told over and over in the course of the day. In one of mankind’s oldest games of trying to fool your closest neighbors and best friends, these masked beggars symbolize anyone who may be hungry. The idea is that when they visit someone, those visited should share. Theft is part of the tension in the drama of this ritual play, but has no problem turning into “enforced charity” when the runners feel that the homeowner is not giving enough.

The Tee Mamou group has maintained aspects of a very old begging tradition and uses a gesture of pointing to the open palm, which centuries ago may have distinguished carnival beggars in Western Europe from another group of beggars known as the “bashful poor.” Recent discovery and observation of the Hathaway Mardi Gras reveals similar and possibly older traditions. They have what they refer to as “our beggars” who wield rolled burlap whips leading the procession with the capitaine. The whipping traditions have been preserved along isolated pockets of the Cajun prairie’s cultural edge west of Highway 13. Whipping has its origins in the pre-Christian festival of the Lupercalia or the wolf festival which was thought to promote fertility. Hathaway’s ritual beggars are blackfaced and are the first to approach a house where they dismount from their horses and confront the homeowners on their knees with their hats in their hands and genuinely petition resident members for charity. This appears to be a vestige of the poor man’s carnival of the Middle Ages and may even have roots in the most widely celebrated festival of the Roman Calendar, the Saturnalia, where people masqueraded and blackened their faces.

Outside reporters invariably focus on the issues of racism, sexuality, and alcohol. It is important that people not misunderstand this as a racial issue. Reversing social order and pretending to be someone else go much farther back than our immediate roots of racism in the south. Still today, Black Creoles frequently whiten their faces and the earliest illustrations of African and Caribbean carnival include Blacks in white face. Related to this is the fact that most older Cajun runners identify themselves with the sauvage, which is the Cajun French term for Native American. This is their version of l’homme sauvage or the wildman in European tradition. Evidence includes the traditional Cajun costume which from shoulder to ankle is clearly Native American and the many masks that bear a striking resemblance to illustrations of the wildman. Concerning alcohol, many people forget that Mardi Gras is based on rites of passage that have for centuries used mind-altering drugs which loosens inhibitions and allows participants to “play the other.”