Carnival Matters: A Multiscalar Approach to the Rotterdam Summer Carnival

Abstract

The Rotterdam Summer Carnival (RSC) is an annual celebration in which many people participate. Students from the former Dutch Antilles started organizing the RSC in the 1980s. People with many cultural backgrounds started participating, causing the RSC to transform into a superdiverse celebration. In 2023, the RSC was inscribed onto UNESCO’s international Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Underneath the RSC’s development and recent heritagization is a complex story that extends beyond Rotterdam and the Netherlands. The thesis presents an ethnographic analysis that uses a multiscalar perspective (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018) to illustrate how the RSC’s is entangled with institutions, histories, and people. Stakeholders’ conflicting ideas and interests become visible in the discourses surrounding tensions and heritagization which I analyze.

The thesis finds that the RSC’s development resulted in an expansion of the networks in which it is entangled. This expansion makes it difficult to keep the ‘community’ together. The Foundation navigates this issue by maintaining a pragmatic approach that focuses on keeping people together. Moreover, the RSC’s superdiverse character does not mean difference is erased. Groups and individuals maintain and present a connection with their nationality and culture. Finally, the thesis concludes that the RSC’s heritagization provided valuable recognition to the ‘community’ but also resulted in the reproduction of essentialist ideas in which nationality and culture are conflated.