Michigan Today's John Woodford interviewed alumna Natalie Zemon Davis at the Institute for the Humanities:

Michigan Today: Let's begin with your 1952 pamphlet, Operation Mind, which was a catalyst in the events of the 1950s. What did it say?

Natalie Zemon Davis: Libby [Prof. Elizabeth Douvan) and I were grad student members of the campus Council on the Arts, Sciences and the Professions, which included professors, staff and students whose ideas were left of liberal and who were willing to work with Communists. But it wasn't a Communist thing. The group just met now and again—those were times in which Progressives were a small group. She and I did the research and writing. Chan typed it up. We had quotations showing the House Un-American Activities Committee was not going after people because they represented a political or security threat, but to try to stop them from expressing their ideas and principles. Later that year, when they lifted our passports, they interrogated Chan about Operation Mind. That disappointed him a bit. He said, "Here they are going after me, and they aren't even basing it on the things I wrote!" He points out that the fact they took away my passport along with his proved they wanted to punish people who were not even on the hit list delivered to the U-M administration.

You and your husband were caught up in this turmoil for almost 10 years. Did it hurt you emotionally or professionally?

I was in my 20s and early 30s when the McCarthy era was causing problems, a period when I was having children and working on my PhD—projects and experiences so primal and absorbing that I didn't have time to get very upset by the campaign against my husband, friends or myself. But as a social historian who always focuses on how individuals figure out how to resist by creatively making rise of options available to them, I was a bit perturbed to learn later that individuals could be trapped in a conspiracy organized by powerful figures. In his interview in the documentary about those days [Keeping in Mind—the McCarthy Era at the University of Michigan by Adam Kulakow '89], Harlan Hatcher gave me pause when he said he had conferred with the FBI on how to handle the HUAC investigation and on who would be offered as sacrifices. They decided the outcome beforehand from on high, or attempted to, and I told Chan that really bothered me, but he said that in that case Clement Markert's escape was an important victory because it wasn't supposed to happen.

Does the furor back then, the clash between partisans of the left and right with plenty of people pulled this way and that in the middle, seem odd or futile when you look back at it now?

History has never failed me in this regard: There is never going to be a time that someone won't come up with utopian ideas. Over the 2,000 years that I know, someone was always coming up with wild ideas. It might be the result of reflection and tough reasoning. Or the impulse may not be conscious; it might come through a dream or a waking vision or through voices, or it might take the form of a fairy tale or legend. When I look at the turmoil of the former communist states now, it reminds me of early violent feudalism, when people were desperate, people were stealing everything and anything they could. But even during such times you meet people trying to think in new ways about human values. Something always bubbles up.

Part of your reputation as a historian seems to rest on your ability to see these "bubbles" of human resistance and to reinflate them for your readers.

Illustration: From the Roman de Fauvel, facsimile reproduction, Broude Bros., NY, 1990 Davis has explored 'rituals of inversion' like the charivari (or 'shivaree' in Eng- lish) and other carnivalesque practices in medieval Europe. Costumed com- moners boisterously humiliated new- lyweds to assert community control over them, or satirized authority fig- ures as a way to press social demands. The first known use of the term and depiction of a charivari (in the form 'chalivali') is from the Roman de Fauvel, a French musical and literary satire circa 1310, shown here.

I've always had a strong interest in rituals of inversion. One type of such are the charivaris and similar festivals in medieval Europe. While working on another topic, I read about charivaris conducted by printers in France. They dressed up in costumes and were led by someone dressed as the "Lord of the Misprint." Behind such actions were rational demands for wage hikes, better working conditions and so on. I asked a friend of mine in anthropology how to find out about festivals and learned of the work on folk customs by Arnold Van Genapp, a French anthropologist. Most social historians at the time were not interested in festivities and carnivals. I never forgot about that festival. I found the English had similar festivals, one in which they followed the "Abbots of Misrule." Such rituals rested on the idea of telling the truth while disguised as a way to find a way to reconciliation rather than in exclusion. But a charivari could end in a revolt or a tarring and feathering. In the main, the participants could go back to living together. I have a nagging concern with instances in which the world is turned topsy-turvy.

Look at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. That is a creative mode today where we don't have the carnivalesque option of releasing feelings comically as a way to reconcile. I see the Truth and Reconciliation meetings as one of the greatest social experiments of our time. People are not dressed up in disguises and yet are telling painful truths to one another. As Desmond Tutu says, it's a way to seek 'amnesty without amnesia.' When the hearings are on TV there, the whole country is riveted to them. They are seen as a performance.

Do you see any counterparts to rituals of participatory playfulness or inversion in our society today?

Davis is most widely known for her book The Return of Martin Guerre (1984), which she wrote after consulting on the film of the same name. This year she has published Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision and The Gift in Sixteenth Century France.

Speaking broadly, the Calvinist regimes stamped out playfulness. Other societies, too, have contracted the scope for playfulness. Some even attempt to contract the field of humor. Look at the Soviet Union. Telling jokes was an act of resistance there.

I've become interested in humor in concentration camps recently. Of course that was a somber time, but survivors report on the telling of bitter jokes in the camps. At Terezin in Czechoslovakia, at the Theresienstadt camp, an inmate who was a composer, Viktor Ullman, wrote an opera in 1944 with a libretto by another inmate, Petr Kien. It's called The Emperor of Atlantis. The camp officials initially supported the project.

In the story a wicked emperor declares a total war, and the character Death goes on strike, saying he's being overworked because the emperor's war is "too mechanized and too modern for me." The emperor declares that he has defeated Death. But he soon sees that if no one dies, that also causes problems—disease, prolonged suffering, crowding, antagonism—so he pleads for Death to come back. Death says OK but the emperor must be the first person to die. The emperor has a conversion and says yes. It shows that even there, in such conditions, people reflected with humor on the human issue of death in a way that saw death as a consolation and that also expressed a naive hope that an evil man might convert. The Nazis stopped the opera at the dress rehearsal stage, apparently deciding that similarities between the emperor and Hitler were too close. They took Ullman and Kien to Auschwitz and gassed them two weeks later.

In North America today perhaps the confessional daytime television shows serve some function of playful inversion. Sure, they are appalling. But they are unfortunate examples of making the private and the intimate public. In early days of Christianity they had public confessions. These daytime shows are topsy-turvy and crazy versions of that. Some can find them funny, although the audiences clearly look down upon, jeer at and condemn the confessors.