Festive environmentalism: A carnivalesque reading of eco-voluntourism at the Roskilde Festival

Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque is applied here to a case study of eco-voluntourism at the Roskilde Festival, an international culture and music event held in Denmark. In the literature on popular forms of environmentalism a dichotomy between engaging and educating about the political ecology of environmental issues through empathy and affect versus fun and entertainment, is often drawn. We argue that the carnivalesque enables festivals to move beyond this dichotomy by implicitly acknowledging a mind-body tension (against a fixed binary), as embedded in Western culture, and by offering a venue for both to be stimulated.