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John Canoe, John Koonah, or John Kooner is a ritual once common in coastal North Carolina and still practiced in the Caribbean in islands that are or were part of the British West Indies, particularly The Bahamas. It is thought to be of African origin. Historian Stephen Nissenbaum described the ritual as it was performed in 19th-century North Carolina: :''Essentially, it involved a band of black men–generally young–who dressed themselves in ornate and often bizarre costumes. Each band was led by a man who was variously dressed in animal horns, elaborate rags, female disguise, whiteface (and wearing a gentleman's wig!), or simply his "Sunday-go-to-meeting-suit." Accompanied by music, the band marched along the roads from plantation to plantation, town to town, accosting whites along the way and sometimes even entering their houses. In the process the men performed elaborate and (to white observers) grotesque dances that were probably of African origin. And in return for this performance they always demanded money (the leader generally carried "a small bowl or tin cup" for this purpose), though whiskey was an acceptable substitute.'' (Nissenbaum 1997, 285) Nissenbaum likened John Canoe to the wassailing tradition of medieval Britain, seeing in both a ritualized inversion of the established social hierarchy that provides, simultaneously, a temporary suspension and powerful reaffirmation of that hierarchy. Wassailing performed this inversion along the axis of social class, whereas the 19th-century American version of John Canoe performed it along the axis of race. Both John Canoe and wassailing bear strong resemblance to the social inversion rituals that marked the ancient Roman celebration of Saturnalia. ==See also== *Junkanoo, an equivalent practice in the Bahamas 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John Canoe」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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