Festival Encounters

Theoretical Perspectives on Festival Events

Michelle Duffy, Judith Mair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781032242149
• eBook ISBN: 9781317287971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Festivals and events are of enormous significance to many communities around the world. They can have historic, religious, cultural and traditional significance, and they are also important parts of community building.

This book focuses on these small-scale, non-metropolitan events (i.e. rural, regional and peri-urban) to explore the complex relationships between place, community and identity and the ways in which festival events bring these into being. By drawing on the notion of 'encounter', this book examines how festivals and events can be seen primarily as spaces where different people meet. This notion of encounter helps us to understand how conviviality and social relations are developed, and what this then means in terms of social cohesion and social justice. It also draws on current theoretical and methodological approaches that can tell us about the role of festivals in contemporary life, and it includes the sensual approach, the geographies of affect and emotion, the notion of the right to the city and nonrepresentation theory.

The book brings together these perspectives and examines their relevance in the community events context, identifying and discussing theoretical frameworks drawn from (including but not limited to) human geography, sociology, anthropology, leisure studies and urban planning, as well as tourism and event studies. For these reasons, Festival Encounters will be a valuable read for students and academics working on a wide range of disciplines.

1 Introduction

This book will consider the interrelationship between festivals and communities on a number of levels. It will look at how festivals have traditionally been celebrations of various notions or definitions of community, and it will also consider how the modern world is changing this. The book will also examine how festivals have become an instrument of policy, particularly at the local authority level, staged and funded with the aim of achieving particular policy goals, often around economic and community development.

In order to position our book, we will start by considering how we are defining some of the concepts that we will be using, starting with the concepts of ‘festival’ and ‘community’.

Definitions of festivals

The structure and role of festivals in the contemporary world have their origins in religious celebrations and public cultural practices. Many festivals retain links to specific traditions (Ahmed 1992; Diaz-Barriga 2003; Nolan and Nolan 1992; Ruback et al. 2008). Religious pilgrimages, the feast days of saints, and carnival are events that purposely separate the time and space of the festival from that of everyday life. Activities such as rituals and associated symbolic practices are used as a means to identify group members. They also help reinforce Durkheim’s (1915/1976) notions of binding people together through the festive play and rhythm of special events, which then encourages opportunities for enacting a collective consciousness (Eade and Sallnow 2000; Falassi 1987; Handelman 1990; Sepp 2014).

Festivals have been defined in various ways over the years, and the disciplinary background, as well as the paradigm of authors, has influenced these definitions. For example, Falassi (1987: 2), coming from an anthropological tradition, defines festivals as ‘a sacred or profane time of celebration, marked by special observances’. Falassi (1987) also points to the display, consumption and competitive rites that form part of a festival. Culture is also an important part of festivals for geographers. Gibson and Connell (2011: 4) define a festival as an ‘irregular, one-off, annual or bi-annual event with an emphasis on celebrating, promoting or exploring some aspect of local culture’. Getz (2005: 21), on the other hand, coming from a business perspective, opts for a much broader definition of festivals as ‘themed, public celebrations’. Festivals can be considered to be different from other types of planned events because of their celebratory or thanksgiving focus (Getz et al. 2010; Sharpe 2008) and the fact that they incorporate many ‘cultural and social dimensions of ritual and symbolism’ (Getz et al. 2010: 31). The most common typology for events is that proposed initially by Jago and Shaw (1998) which divides events into mega, major, hallmark and local (or minor). Festivals may be considered in this typology in relation to their size, rather than any other specific characteristics. Arguably, there is no agreed typology for describing and categorising festivals.

Getz (2010) undertook a review with the aim of defining and delimiting festival studies. Drawing from the tourism, hospitality and events literature, he identified three major discourses from this review – a classical discourse, concerning the roles, meanings and impacts of festivals in society and culture; an instrumentalist discourse, where festivals are viewed as tools to be used in economic development, particularly in relation to tourism and place marketing; and an event management discourse, which focused on the production and marketing of festivals and the management of festival organizations (Getz 2010). His first conclusion was that the classical discourse was under-acknowledged in extant festival studies and that more connections should be made between festival studies and other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. Additionally, Getz (2010) noted that there was an over-emphasis on consumer motivations and economic impacts, with a corresponding lack of emphasis on comparative and cross-cultural studies. He concluded that a triple bottom line approach was lacking in much of the research included in his review (Getz 2010). However, as this review focused on studies published in the areas of tourism, hospitality and events, there is a possibility that these conclusions may apply only in those contexts.

Other reviews of festivals have also been limited by a focus on papers published in journals associated with only one discipline or field of study. For example, Cudny (2014) took a geographical perspective and identified that much of the existing work could be categorized under a few key themes including culture, a social perspective, economic impacts, political and historical issues and time-space analyses – research focusing on the spatial distribution of different types of festivals and their evolution in time. Cudny (2014) called for more theoretical research to underpin the future development of festival studies.

In anthropology and sociology, festivals are often conceptualised as events set apart from the everyday (Durkheim 1915/1976). Engagement through rituals enables participants to enter another state, one of in-between-ness or ambiguity, defined by anthropologists as a ‘state of liminality.’ The liminal period temporarily suspends conventional social rules, thus opening up a space in which existing tensions may be resolved or where change may be facilitated (Gluckman 1955; Schechner 2003; Turner 1957, 1969). Liminal events are understood to offer some contact with the sacred or divine. Hence, they support the individual’s transformation into a full participant of the community or group, exemplified in anthropological literature by ceremonies of initiation (Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993).

Frost (2015) reviewed anthropological studies of festivals, which broadly position festivals as sites of cultural practice and experience. Frost (2015) contends that festivals have been studied over a long period of time from an anthropological standpoint and, therefore, any contention that festivals and events are a new area of study should be rejected. Nonetheless, it is argued (Getz 2010) that the ethnographic approach that commonly informs anthropological studies can go only so far in terms of understanding and conceptualizing a range of business, management and tourism issues related to festivals.

Discussion of community

Community is most often understood as being those people, usually of a specific locale (be that real or virtual), who share a set of values and social relations characterised by personal connections. Yet many commentators have noted that in Western communities generally there has been a loss of a sense of community. Sennett (1970) has argued that the new global economy has led to increased anxiety and a much more fragmented sense of identity. This new global economy is embedded within processes of globalisation in which the turbulence and uncertainty generated by the rapid circulation of people and ideas, and the sorts of strategies created in response to social change, has led to feelings of social disintegration and disconnection (Sernau 2012). This, in turn, has led to questions over who has the right to belong, a contestation that is played out in the public spaces of cities and towns (Harvey 2003; Lefebvre 1996; Purcell 2002). In a more nuanced reading of public space, Butler (2015) points out that debates about who has freedom of assembly – that is, who can rightly claim to be of ‘the people’ – is part of an inherent tension in democratic theory. As she explains,

when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space (including virtual ones) they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more liveable set of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity.

(Butler 2015: 11)¹

Public spaces are important sites for social relations, because it is here that different types and forms of relational networks overlap and meet. However, tensions can arise because of perceived or real fears about crime, violence and terrorism; racial intolerance; uncertainty; and insecurity, such that some groups feel uncomfortable and excluded from public space – and, as Butler (2015) suggests, such exclusion is deliberate. Hence the once common idea that public space is a shared space for social interaction comes under question. As Brown (2012: 801) notes, ‘the capacity to share public space has been identified as a crux contemporary issue, especially where claims to space are being made through increasingly diverse subjectivities.’ How individuals and groups respond to diversity is itself varied: some people celebrate these everyday spaces as a representation of a cosmopolitan sense of shared connectedness; others may feel uncomfortable, excluded or alienated; still others will use public space as a means to challenge normative processes of place making. Nonetheless, there is a strong argument for the openness of public space, because it is here that we can encounter and engage with the ‘vital mix of uses critical to urban life’ (Vidler 2001 online), the ‘common ground where civility and our collective sense of what may be called “publicness” are developed and expressed (Francis 1989: 149; see also Iveson 2007). We therefore need to carefully consider the ways in which power is embedded within public space; that is, how difference is defined within the public sphere and the ways in which otherness and hence ‘not belonging’ are constructed.

One popular form of creating and/or re-affirming a sense of community has been to generate festival events that serve to create a sense of shared identity and belonging (Gibson and Connell 2005; Quinn 2003). What underpins such festivals is the desire to promote social cohesion through discourses of an official ‘imagined’ community (Anderson 1991), even as others suggest that tension and debate – perhaps better conceptualised as agonism (Mouffe 1996) – plays an important role in acknowledging the heterogeneity of contemporary life and thus retains the potential to transform democratic politics. Therefore, festival events are much more than simply a source of financial gain; rather, the processes of festivals enable notions of place, community, identity and belonging to be created, questioned and experienced. Festivals are significant to a politics of belonging because of the ways in which they are utilised as a common framework for community celebration and for reinvigorating notions of a shared community (Jepson and Clarke 2015). In this framework, these community-oriented events are most often actively constructed by local government, organisations and audiences as being about local communities situated in a particular place and celebrating a local communal identity (De Bres and Davis 2001; Duffy 2000; Getz 2007; Jaeger and Mykletun 2013; van Winkle et al. 2013) or generating new forms of identification (Auerbach 1991; Lavenda 1992; Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993; Picard 2015). This focus on a celebration of ‘community’ constructed within a festival framework is particularly evident in places of cultural and ethnic diversity, where organisers as well as participants view social cohesion as the goal of the event (Auerbach 1991; Permezel and Duffy 2007). Festivals are viewed as a means to contribute to processes that facilitate new forms of belonging and enabling active public engagement, as well as incorporating activities that foster social harmony and integration (Derrett 2003; Duffy 2003, 2005; Duffy et al. 2007; Gibson and Connell 2005; Kong and Yeoh 1997; Leal 2015; Lee et al. 2012a; McClinchey 2015; Österlund-Pötzsch 2004; Permezel and Duffy 2007; Quinn 2003; Shukla 1997; White 2015). A focus on enabling active public engagement is understood as especially important for promoting ongoing dialogue and negotiation between members of diverse communities, such as migrant, diasporic and transnational groups (Permezel and Duffy 2007). Festivals have a powerful and intoxicating effect that is significant to sustaining and transforming social life. Festivals, then, not only recreate and celebrate a feeling of connection to place and people, but also are sites in which notions of community and who belongs can be playfully questioned and at times more rigorously challenged.

What is also important in this focus on the festival as a site of community identity and notions of belonging is that the festival event is considered congruent with its geographical and social context. Increasingly the focus in some fields of festival research is for a better understanding of the influences and effects of the festival event as it spills out beyond its temporal and spatial boundaries, a process called festivalisation (Roche 2011; Yardimci 2007). Festivalisation processes draw on collective understandings and practices of space, time and agency that are then deployed so as to shape communal notions of identity and belonging (Roche 2011). Moreover, these events are interpolated into a community’s calendar of “memorable and narratable pasts, with the sociocultural rhythm of life in the present, and with anticipated futures” (Roche 2011: 127–128; see also Duffy et al. 2011). Festivals, rather than transcending the everyday, are now examined for the ways they are intimately embedded within the public sphere as normative and at times transformative processes (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011). As such these events are recognised as political mechanisms that help constitute individual feelings of acceptance and belonging within an imagined, collective sense of community.

Yet the notion of belonging that underpins the festival event is complex and problematic. Defined in terms of a politics of belonging, these feelings of attachment create a sense of connection in particular ways or to particular collective identities, and these attachments and identities are embedded within the narratives that people tell about themselves as a community. We can belong in many different ways and to many different objects, people and places. Such senses of belonging and connection range from an abstract feeling about what we think of as ‘our’ place or community to a much more concrete notion of belonging in which we participate in activities that display our allegiances, such as dance and other cultural performances, the wearing of certain costumes, and the availability of specific foods that are viewed as representative of certain communal identities. These processes and activities, and the feelings they produce, are dynamic things, arising in and out of certain moments of generating community. In an increasingly globalised world – where cultural difference, in its broadest sense, is the norm in everyday life, particularly in urban but increasingly in regional locations – local communities become places through which issues of difference, and the dynamics of coexistence, isolation, inclusion and racism, are played out. Festivals have been proliferating in response to a range of social and planning policies that encourage participation by all so as to increase opportunities for interaction, thereby minimising so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Approaches to festival research
• 3 Encounter as our underpinning theory
• 4 Rituals of community: encounters of cohesion and subversion
• 5 Mobilities and the shaping of encounter
• 6 Festivals, non-representation theory and encounter
• 7 Festivals and social justice
• 8 Social inclusion, social exclusion and encounter
• 9 Festivals and social capital
• 10 Encounter with past, present and future: Yakkerboo and the rural-urban fringe
• 11 Experience! The Casey Multicultural Festival: encounter with ‘the other’
• 12 The Clunes Booktown Festival: encounters with class mobilities
• 13 The Noosa Jazz Festival: encounter with the senses
• 14 Conclusions
• Index