Carnival is the quintessential European festival—its many variants well documented for centuries across the continent and, as a consequence of colonialism, spun into further hybrid forms in Latin America and West Africa. The generally accepted etymology of the festival is from the Latin, carnem levare, to put aside or abstain from eating meat; and since at least the late middle ages, carnival has been conceived of as a circumscribed time of feasting and license that immediately precedes the Lenten period of fasting and penance that leads up to Easter. Yet while Lent has held a place in the Church calendar since the earliest centuries of Christianity, carnival has never had an officially sanctioned status in either Catholicism or Protestantism. Carnival activities are documented in Rome from as early as 1140, but the sources of carnival there and elsewhere clearly predate the advent of Christianity. Scholarship has long recognised affinities between carnival forms and festivals of importance in ancient pagan Rome, such as Saturnalia, Lupercalia and Mamuralia—festivals focused on ritual renewal, purification, and fertility, and involving masking and sacrifice. Among present-day carnival cultures in Europe, Sardinia’s is particularly evocative of those earlier, pre-Christian festivals. This is perhaps most striking in Sardinia’s distinctive indigenous term for carnival: su carrasecare. The Sardu word carrasecare is a compound of two elements: carra is associated with "meat" or "flesh," while secare signifies"to cut or tear" or "to sever." Thus, the literal meaning of the Sardu carrasecare is "the tearing of the flesh”—a phrase suggestive of ritual blood sacrifice, and quite distinct from the accepted etymology of the Italian carnevale.

The writings of rural Sardinia’s local amateur historians and the promotional copy of tour companies make much of carrasecare as the living embodiment of an ancient pagan fertility cult. In ancient Greece and the Near East, the annual renewal of the natural cycle embodied in the death and resurrection of Adonis, Dionysos and other so-called “dying gods” was enacted in ecstatic and sacrificial rites. The local popular understanding is that these cults were introduced into Sardinia in the course of millenia old migrations; and that their traces have survived up to the present in the local festivals held in late winter in the still relatively remote inland mountain villages. While expert academic historians and anthropologists have remained skeptical or outright dismissive of such popular theorizing, it is nevertheless well established that the Nuragic culture that flowered in Sardinia during the Bronze Age had significant contacts with the Mycenean culture of the eastern Mediterranean and that the island was subsequently colonized by the Phoenicians and Romans. Furthermore, intriguing support has recently emerged from genomic analyses of living Sardinians, suggesting that Nuragic culture itself arose subsequent to migration and settlement of Sardinia by early Neolithic farmers from the Near East and Anatolia some 7500 years ago.

Early continental travellers to Sardinia remarked both upon the wildness and backwardness of its peasants and their authentic preservation of ancient practices. Today’s global tourist industry continues to evoke such tropes in its pitch for Sardinian carnival tours. Is it true, then, as local promoters and tour companies would have us believe, that if we venture into the Sardinian hinterlands in February we will be able to experience first hand pagan rituals still performed as they have been for millennia? Of course not. Cultural forms may sometimes evolve slowly but their meanings and functions are in a constant state of historical flux and adaption to changing circumstances. Despite the persistence of recognisable formal elements from earlier festivals, today’s Sardinian village carnivals are not and could not be the same as they were even a few decades ago—let alone a few millennia ago. In fact, many of them did not exist a few decades ago but are rather recently imagined traditions in service of contemporary circumstances and needs.

By the post World War II period, in Sardinia as on the European mainland, traditional village festivals had largely fallen into oblivion, victims not only of wartime deprivation and dislocation but of the postwar spread of commercial mass culture in the West and repressive Communist party policies in the East. However, since at least the 1980s public festivals have been experiencing a veritable renaissance across Europe. This is also true in Sardinia, where a number of today’s most notable carnivals were established or revived starting around that time. However, the circumstances in which carnival is now performed are fundamentally different from those of earlier times; and it was precisely as a manifestation of and response to profound postwar changes that carnival was reinvented in Sardinia as elsewhere. The subsistence agro-pastoral economy that had been the fundamental way of life for most Sardinians from time immemorial had permanently contracted, and farming was now thoroughly commercialized and mechanized. Increased local industrialization and wage labor, and the social and cultural as well as the economic dislocations of globalization severed the link to the traditional agrarian cycle that was the ritual substructure of carresecare. As a consequence of increasing economic migration of Sardinians to the Italian mainland and beyond, depopulation had begun to threaten rural villages with extinction. Its links to the agrarian cycle and the religious calendar having become profoundly attenuated, carrasecare now thrives as a defining source of local identity, solidarity and pride, and as an increasingly valuable source of tourist revenue.

In practice, this intended means of sustaining traditional village culture and society is also the unintended means of changing them. Over the course of the past few decades, the process of researching, reviving and reinventing local traditions has become increasingly organized, bureaucratized, and commercialized. Many villages have established official committees, websites, and publications to standardize and promote their carnivals; legal means have been sought to, in effect, copyright specific carnival features, to protect local brands from neighboring competition; outside funding is sometimes sought from government entities or commercial enterprises to underwrite, expand and professionalize the events; the imprimatur of regional and international organizations is coveted to certify their cultural authenticity. In many villlages, what was once a festive ritual in which the whole community participated has now largely become a performance for visiting spectators—no longer the cultural manifestation of an agro-pastoral subsistence economy but a cultural product of consumer capitalism. Thus, the means to enhance the cultural prestige of local traditions in order to strengthen collective identity gradually erodes what it seeks to preserve. And while village tourism is often motivated by the desire of contemporary urbanites to experience cultural “authenticity,” the very presence and participation of tourists undermines the authenticity they seek. This is not meant as a repudiation of today’s Sardinian carnival for being “inauthentic” but rather to suggest that its authenticity resides precisely in its embodiment of the unstable conjuncture between tradtional forms and contemporary pressures, between the past and the present. If the tension between global and local forces at play in contemporary carnival creates an irresolvable paradox for locals and visitors alike, then carnival is true to its time and place.