Paper short abstract:

Over the twentieth century, changes to how Panamanians constitute and practice carnival know-how have helped to refigure understandings of belonging and the proper way to carnival.

Paper long abstract:

Patriotism functions as a rhetoric. Having established its locus in the conceptual hyphen that separates as well as links putative nations and apparent states, patriotism eludes precise definition. It presumes its objects (the nation and the state) but cannot constitute either. This rhetoric trades on Panamanians' abilities to express their knowledge and experience of Panamanianess and belonging, through different modes of practice. In patriotism, Panama and Panamanians emerge as both the object and subject of their own claims to knowledge and practice. Carnival offers one of the key modalities through which such emergent, practiced knowledge finds ritualized expression.

At least since Derrida scholars have accepted that material absence helps produce socially mediated local knowledge. The primary spatial domain of that knowledge emerged as Panama City and found expression via navigation strategies and tools. Carnival too produces socially mediated local knowledge that transcends its territorial borders and roots itself in other local domains via the people who live there. This paper will explore how carnival practice has changed over the course of the twentieth century in Panama and shifted localities from Panama City to the Interior of the country fracturing Panamanianess along ideological and racial lines. This can be witnessed in the forms through which carnival is practiced.