Rituals and Traditional Events in the Modern World

Jennifer Laing, Warwick Frost

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134593200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Many events have evolved over centuries, drawing on local customs and conditions. However, as the world becomes increasingly globalised, traditional events and the identities they support are increasingly being challenged and rituals may be lost. Reacting against this trend towards homogeneity, communities strive to preserve and even recreate their traditional events, which may require rituals to be resurrected or reinvented for a new audience.

The aim of this book is to explore the role of traditional events and rituals in the modern world. The 16 chapters cover a range of case studies of the performance of ritual through events, including their historical antecedents and development over time, as well as their role in society, link with identities both seemingly fixed and fluid and their continued relevance. The cases examined are not museum pieces, but rather vibrant festivals and events that continue to persist. Drawing on the power of history and cultural tradition, they are manifestations of heritage, existing in three temporalities: celebrating the past, occurring in the present and aiming to continue into and influence the future. Iconic events including Chinese New Year, Hogmanay and the New Orleans Mardi Gras are examined and examples are drawn from a diverse range of countries such as South Korea, China, Laos, the United States, Scotland, Italy, India and Haiti.

This volume provides a deep understanding upon the role of tradition and ritual within events, from a global perspective and will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics interested in events, heritage and culture.

1 From pre-modern rituals to modern events

Warwick Frost and Jennifer Laing

People nowadays often bemoan the disappearance of festivals. It was the same in the eighteenth century … we should hesitate before speaking, in the singular, of ‘the traditional festival’. If it is at all possible to do so, it is only because all festivals were the object of general disapproval. The traditional festival conjured up a repellent image.

(Ozouf 1976: 1)

Introduction

In pre-modern times, rituals and events were major elements of everyday life. Whether agricultural or hunter-gatherer, communities needed traditional ceremonies to mark the important dates in the seasonal calendar, pay homage to their deities, formalise rites of passage and reinforce local identities. In more complex societies where there were small urban and military elites, ritualised events both cemented hierarchies and reassured community members of the social exchange of surplus production for protection. Survival in uncertain times required people to band together, forming tight-knit parochial groups based on trust and personal connectedness. Events and their rituals held a dual role in creating identities. They brought people together, reinforcing their connections and obligations; but they also distinguished other groups as different and potentially hostile. All around the globe, the social roles of events followed similar patterns, even if there were marked variations in form.

With the advent of industrialisation and urbanisation, communal societies rapidly evolved into much larger and more complex nation states. As Benedict Anderson (1983) has argued, modern times saw the rise of imagined communities. Instead of knowing everybody in the group, people were now connected to thousands, if not millions, of others whom they could never personally interact with. For such national societies to work, new institutions, symbols and ceremonies needed to develop to convince people that they now shared in this much larger national identity.

Accordingly, as nation states developed, new events, rituals and traditions were created. These had the purpose of affirming national identities and the authority of rulers and governments. Often these were organised and promoted by governments with the quite deliberate intention of encouraging loyalty and disseminating a national story that everybody could feel part of. For example, in our recent work Commemorative Events: Memory, identities, conflict (Frost and Laing 2013), we examined how state-sponsored events had proliferated in modern times, utilising commemorations of important historical events and national days to keep large and sometimes diverse societies glued together. Similarly, mega-events, despite their international format, are typically used by the governments of host nations as a means to stimulate national pride and solidarity.

However, despite the changing roles of events related to the rise of nation states, traditional rituals and events remain with us in the modern world. This is quite a puzzle. If they originally developed in response to the needs of traditional societies that were insular and geographically limited, why should they persist? The local customs and conditions that drove their evolution have now been replaced by globalisation, urbanisation and mass media. The features and constraints of the modern world have created new types of events – such as mega-events like the Olympics, World Cups and World Fairs – but they have not blotted out the traditional. Indeed, far from disappearing, there are many traditional rituals and events that remain popular and continue to be enthusiastically staged. And this phenomenon is global.

The aim of this book is to explore the role of traditional events and rituals in the modern world. The 16 chapters cover a range of case studies of the performance of ritual through events, including their historical antecedents and development over time, as well as their role in society, link with identities both seemingly fixed and fluid and their continued relevance. The cases examined are not museum pieces, but rather vibrant festivals and events that continue to persist. Drawing on the power of history and cultural tradition, they are manifestations of heritage, existing in three temporalities: celebrating the past, occurring in the present and aiming to continue into and influence the future.

Many events have evolved over centuries, drawing on local customs and conditions. However, as the world becomes increasingly globalised, traditional events and the identities they support are increasingly being challenged and rituals may be lost. Reacting against this trend towards homogeneity, some communities strive to preserve and even recreate their traditional events. Globalisation and modernity thus occupy important spaces in the staging and development of events. On the one hand, they may be viewed as challenges, encouraging homogeneity and threatening the continuation of tradition. However, on the other hand, they may also be viewed as drivers, stimulating a reaction whereby people and societies place greater value on maintaining their heritage. The latter concept is widely acknowledged within heritage studies (see, for examples, Laing and Frost 2012; Lowenthal 1998), but is more commonly applied to tangible buildings rather than the intangibility of events.

The processes are complex and varied, but four major patterns of the continuance of traditional rituals and events may be identified:

• Preservation. Rituals and traditional events are staged continually, with organisers and participants placing great value on maintaining the format and components as closely as possible to how they were in the past. The resultant event is promoted as preserving traditions against modernity and globalisation and claims high levels of authenticity and provenance.

• Adaption. The event evolves over time, incorporating new elements, but still maintaining some customary rituals. The authenticity of these remnants is highly valued and may be juxtaposed with modern components to promote an appealing mix.

• Appropriation. Events take rituals and customs from elsewhere and incorporate them into their staging. These may be from other events, or from other parts of customary life. The Maori Haka, for example, is performed by teams from New Zealand and other Pacific Ocean nations at sporting events, whereas it originated as a warrior’s challenge. Furthermore, it is performed by team-mates from both Maori and European heritage. In 2006, players in an indigenous Australian junior football team were so impressed by a Haka performed by their Papua New Guinean opponents that they developed their own ritual. Since then, this has been performed by other indigenous teams (for example, versus Ireland in 2013), though it is presented as a ‘Challenge’, with no reference to the Haka.

• Invention. This concept, made famous by historian Eric Hobsbawm, refers to the process of the creation of rituals and symbols that quickly take on the appearance and reputation of being traditional (see the next section for a more detailed exploration). An example of this is the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, where athletes of all countries parade together – in contrast to the opening where they march as national teams. This was suggested in 1956 by a Melbourne schoolboy and taken up by organisers who wished to defuse tensions arising from the deterioration of the Cold War.

Some key theories

Two particular theories are often invoked to explain the significance and resilience of traditional rituals and events. These are Falassi’s Ritual Structure and Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition. Interestingly, both of these were published in the 1980s, well before the rise of events studies. Accordingly, their application to events studies has been somewhat uneven; mainly being utilised by those taking a social sciences or humanities perspective and often noticeably lacking from those following a business paradigm. In the case studies that constitute this book, most authors refer to one or both, reflecting their importance to the general study of traditional events.

Falassi (1987) introduced an anthology of writings on events by arguing that most follow a ritual structure, that is a series of common rites or components. He argued that this structure was rarely deliberately planned by organisers, but rather grew organically or subconsciously as a response to our basic human needs and beliefs. In essence, these represented a series of underlying meanings that underpinned most events and their significance to societies. Particularly apparent in traditional events that had evolved over centuries, Falassi argued that they were still apparent in recently constructed events. Other researchers, for example Seal (2004), have found Falassi’s ritual structure a valuable framework for explaining modern events and their meanings.

According to Falassi, the chief rites commonly found in events are:

• Valorisation. Time and space are claimed for the event through an opening ceremony. The event is now marked as symbolically different from normal time and space.

• Purification. There are ceremonies to cleanse and safeguard the festival and its participants.

• Passage. Rituals that mark transition from one stage of life to another, particularly for young people.

• Reversal. Normal behaviours and roles are reversed. The illicit may be respectable. A common form is the coronation of a ‘fool’ as the king of the festival.

• Conspicuous display. The most valued objects are displayed, for example, religious relics are paraded.

• Conspicuous consumption. Abundant, even wasteful, consumption, particularly of food and drink.

• Dramas. Treasured stories are told through dramatic or musical performances.

• Exchange. Symbolic exchanges of money, valuables or tokens. The wealthy might distribute gifts and money to the poor.

• Competition. Typically games and sporting contests, often between rival groups. Such games may be a substitute for armed conflict.

• Devalorisation. A closing ceremony marks the return to normal time and space, perhaps with a promise of a future repeat of the festival.

As with Falassi, Hobsbawm (1983) set out his theory in an introductory essay to an edited collection. His thesis was that ‘traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented’ (1983: 1). A specialist in modern history, he observed that this tendency towards invention was a characteristic of modern society, being particularly apparent in Western Europe during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here was a major paradox in modernity. In a period of increasing change, many old traditions, rituals and festivals were disappearing at a rapid rate. However, at the same time, societies were creating new traditions. This propensity to invent, Hobsbawm reasoned, was a product of the stresses of modernity and accelerating change. These new traditions were purposefully functioning to maintain social cohesion and support changing institutions. Published in the same year as Hobsbawm’s work, Anderson (1983) had argued that the development of nation states demanded that there be symbolic events reinforcing loyalty and inclusiveness. Hobsbawm took this a step further in arguing that these would have to be specifically created. Most importantly, Hobsbawm demonstrated that it only takes a short space of time for new rituals to be widely accepted as traditional and venerable.

A historical overview of traditional events and rituals

To better understand the role of traditional events in the modern world, it is valuable to consider how they originally functioned and developed in pre-modern societies. Due to constraints of space, we can only do this in a limited way. Rather than a comprehensive examination of traditional events and rituals, the following sections serve only as an introduction. Furthermore, our choices are highly subjective, reflecting our interests and knowledge – in many ways Anglocentric. Instead of attempting to cover a wide range of societies and cultures, our focus is on a small group of case studies. These are merely intended as examples and their purpose is to provide a general historical foundation to the events and rituals covered in the later chapters. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that historical cases and description have a key role in examining and analysing the evolution of events. As historian David Cannadine argued:

Like all cultural forms which may be treated as texts, or all texts which may be treated as cultural forms, ‘thick’ rather than ‘thin’ description is required … in order to rediscover the ‘meaning’ of … ritual during the modern period, it is necessary to relate it to the specific social, political, economic and cultural milieu within which it was actually performed. With ceremonial, as with political theory, the very act of locating the occasion or the text in its appropriate context is not merely to provide the historical background, but actually to begin the process of interpretation.

(1983...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 From pre-modern rituals to modern events
• Part I Asia
• Part II Europe
• Part III The Americas
• Index