El culo en el cancionero de tradición popular. Escatología y obscenidad en contextos festivos liminares

Abstract

The scatological and obscene folk songs concerning the ass raise the pleasure of the low (subverting the morality and the conventions) and simultaneously degrade and deform the corporal, looking for a utopian and animal equality. This festive, grotesque and ambivalent logic suggests not only the double aspect of the carnal and material (dirty and sinful, but also source of life and fertility), but the eternal battle of opposites, which should activate the cosmic wheel of birth, death and resurrection. Precisely in contexts of liminality and transit -changes of season, bachelor parties and other rites of passages- appears this archaic and ambiguous vis comica, according to a cyclic and bipolar conception of time in which not only seasons, earth and plants, but also the body is hold to a constant and always incomplete metamorphosis.