Ecopedagogy (Gadotti, 2010) is a paradigm that overcomes mentalistic accounts of education by stressing on informal education processes(Misiaszek, 2015). Given ecopedagogy’s declared focus on sustainable growth and supra-individual processes, cultural heritage is regarded as pivotal to both understand how communities interact with the environment and what fosters the growth of resilient communities.
Drawing on the above paradigmatic assumptions, this paper showcases the results of an ethnographic inquiry concerning the Carnival of Terceira Island (Azores, Portugal). The intensity and peculiarity of such heritage phenomenon places it in a special place with regards to other instances of European folklore (Marcelli et al., 2022). In addition to a more ‘classic’ ethnographic survey, however, a question is raised concerning the way this specific Carnival plays a role in producing feedback processes that ensure community bonding, an opportunity to review current communal practice, and in general, as a powerhouse for competence development among all generations of islanders.
By focusing not on individual learning but on supra-individual processes, a new understanding of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of peripheral participation is achieved, which provides a strong explanatory framework for what is going on during Terceira’s Carnival. As of 2020–2022, the island community shows the ability to place itself at its own periphery—not in the geographical sense, but in the developmental one. Thematic analysis of collected ethnographic data show that Terceira achieves a type of intentional ‘ontological displacement’ that creates a fictionalized distance with its current self. This, in turn, triggers shared processes of revision that result in increased resilience and ability to tackle global and local challenges with both humour and a sense of purpose.
As a consequence of the above, we maintain that Terceira’s Carnival constitutes a major example of shared learning that extends its benefits to members of the island community at large. Furthermore, it does also act as a dispositif that enables the self-directed change (hence, education) of the whole community, which, thanks to the pursuit of Carnival’s collective goals, puts itself in a position to negotiate its role in the World.

Data were collected during three fieldwork stays in Terceira Island (Azores, Portugal), which took place between 2020 and 2022. Direct observation of the Carnival took the shape of rapid appraisals, after the methodology outlined by Ellsberg and Heise (2005). Data from the Author’s ethnographic journal were later validated through interviews with 11 ‘culture experts’ and a collective writing activity that involved six scholars (2 foreigners, 3 Terceiran natives, and 1 non-Terceiran Azorean native). The resulting process matches with Murtagh’s (2007) description of a “critical quasi-ethnographic approach” and benefits from the positive impact of convenience sampling as described by Etikan et al. (2016). Finally, collected data were subject to a further iteration, constituted by a thematic analysis (see Guest et al., 2012).

Results show that the Carnival of Terceira Island is a Foucauldian dispositif (Bussolini, 2010) that ensures peripheral participation in the sense understood by Lave and Wenger (1991). Furthermore, when focus shifts from individuals to the whole island community, Carnival retains its impact of peripheral participatory practice. As such, it fosters the ability of Terceiran people to tackle the challenges of globalization, internationalization, and localization processes (Dicken, 2011)—which constitute both opportunities and stressors for the islanders. The feedback processes involved in the Carnival do for the community what evaluation does for the individual. Such interpretation of Terceira’s Carnival casts intangible cultural heritage as an educational dispositif, whose current purpose takes a different path from the one that was previously highlighted by historians who dealt with the topic (e.g., Enes, 1998). It is yet to be established, however, whether such dispositif stems from post-modern dynamics or if it rather constitutes a special case of ‘intentional Narrenschiff’ (for the concept, see Foucault, 1961), whose existence ensures an affordable type of ontological displacement whose long-term effect, however, is that of reinforcing the status quo.

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