Festivals, Tourism and Social Change

Remaking Worlds

David Picard, Mike Robinson, David Picard, Mike Robinson

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781845410476
• eBook ISBN: 9781845412678
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book explores the links between tourism and festivals and the various ways in which each mobilises the other to make social realities meaningful. Drawing upon a series of international cases, festivals are examined as ways of responding to various forms of crisis - social, political, economic - and as a way of re-making and re-animating spaces and social life. Importantly, this book locates festivals in the constantly changing, socio-economic and political contexts that they always operate in and respond to - contexts that are both historical and modern at the same time. Tourism is bound closely together with such contexts; feeding and challenging festivals with audiences that are increasingly transient and transnational. Tourism interrogates notions of ritual and tradition, shapes new spaces and creates, and renews, relationships between participants and observers. No longer can we dismiss tourists simply as value neutral and crass consumers of spectacle, nor tourism as some inevitable commercial force. Tourism is increasingly complicit in the festival processes of re-invention, and in forming new patterns of social existence.

Chapter 1

Remaking Worlds: Festivals, Tourism and Change

David Picard and Mike Robinson

Introduction

The observance of and participation in festivals, and what we may broadly term ‘celebratory events’, is an increasingly significant aspect of the contemporary tourist experience. Historically festivals, carnival processions and pageants have always provided points of meaningful connectivity and spectacle for visitors. Throughout the instances of European touring during the 18th and 19th centuries, the concentrated time-space frame of the festival helped to make visible the social life of ‘foreign’ townscapes and landscapes that while rich in historic and architectural significance, often lacked animation. Goethe, for instance, during his visit to Rome in 1788 reported on the vibrancy provided through the re-invigorated festivities of the ‘Roman Carnival’, loosely based on the early pagan festival of ‘Saturnalia’, an event that also attracted Stendhal, Casanova and Queen Christina of Sweden. Similarly, Thomas Gray and Byron, amongst other travelling literary notables, also observed the liveliness of the pre-Lent ‘Carnevale’ of Venice before it waned in its popularity during the 19th century. And Mark Twain, as ever the critical tourist, wistfully observed the romanticism of the Mardi Gras festival and how it succeeded in animating New Orleans in the last decade of the 19th century.

But independent of these well-documented encounters there has been a long tradition of communities using and devising festivals as opportunities for social and commercial exchange, the displaying of wealth, royal authority, and political/militaristic posturing, which frequently involved, and focused upon, travellers as naive and willing observers (Arnold, 2000). Abrahams (1982) speaks of festive celebrations as occasions for the community to ‘boast’ reflecting a common observation, in both historical and contemporary circumstances, that the various economic, social and political elements and materiality of festivals are geared to deliberate display. Handelman (1998: 41) uses the term ‘events that present the lived in world’ to encompass the variety of social situations and power relationships that are expressed through festivity. But it is the ‘out of the ordinary’ occasions of display, through ceremony, procession and the like, which provide focal points for consumption by an ‘outside’ audience. As Mark Twain (1923) pointed out with regard to the festivities and pageantry of the jubilee celebrations of Queen Victoria, the show and symbolism of such occasions mark them as a sight ‘worth a long journey to see’.

It is not until relatively recently however that festivals have occupied significant status as part of organised domestic and international mass tourism, to the extent that we can clearly discern the phenomenon of ‘festival tourism’, even if it remains too elusive to quantify. The general pattern of tourism development in the developed world over the last 50 years or so intersects at numerous points with occasions of festivity, carnival and performance rituals across the world in general. Festivals, whether as ‘traditional’ moments of social celebration or as constructed and highly orchestrated events, have been absorbed into the expansive stock of ‘products’ that tourists desire.

Since the late 1960s, a steady increase in the number of newly created festivals in all continents has been noted (Arnold 2000; Chako and Schaffer, 1993; Getz, 1997). Some with long histories have been ‘rediscovered’, rein-vigorated and reinvented while others have been created, often as a response to a myriad of social, political, demographic and economic realities. The explanation for the recent proliferation of festivals is complex, but in part relates to a response from communities seeking to re-assert their identities in the face of a feeling of cultural dislocation brought about by rapid structural change, social mobility and globalisation processes (De Bres & Davis, 2001; Quinn, 2003). Moreover, as Long et al. (2004) have suggested, for growing diasporic communities, festivals, carnivals and melas provide important moments of visibility and occasions of concentrated celebrations of identity beyond the confines of their ‘host’ communities. At the same time, the growth in the number of festivals also reflects the feeling of crisis in situations where recognised systems of symbolic continuity are challenged by the realities of new social, economic, and political environments. In this context, new webs of social relations seek to make themselves visible by adapting or reinventing forms of meaningful narration. International travel and tourism, as both a driver and an outcome of globalisation, have had, and continues to have, a significant role to play in the re-formulation of social relationships, providing new economies, audiences, communicative networks and structures for the processes of exchange as practised within a festival context.

In a world where there are few societies which that not open to tourism, festivals as markers of social and cultural life, intentionally or otherwise, increasingly share a set of relationships with tourists and the tourism sector. Tourism as a transitory phenomenon is bounded by and shares limited spatial and temporal realities (MacCannell, 1976). The tourist comes, and goes, with a bounded time and space frame. Festivals too are de facto limited in space and time – or ‘time out of time’ (Falassi, 1987). Both can be conceived of as a series of performances and rituals with attendant discourses that are contested, negotiated and re-negotiated and that generate their own social realities. And both can be viewed as liminal and playful practices, and both fundamentally, offer ways of exploring and securing being, belonging and meaning in the world.

Tourists encounter festivals in a number of ways. In some instances festivals, particularly large and spectacular events, become the key motivator for tourism and occupy a large part of the tourist time-space budget. In commercial terms, ‘packages’ are offered with the festival as the central attraction but increasingly tied to promoting the spatial setting. In such cases places become noted by the festivals they host. In other contexts, festivals merely form a part of, and are used to support, the overall ‘cultural’ offer of a destination. In this way the tourist may, or may not, encounter a festival. Further, beyond the strictures of the promoted place, tourists can stumble unexpectedly across smaller festivals as they engage in their more routine explorations of localities, or alternatively in the deliberate searching for the idea of otherness.

Over recent years the relationships between festivals and tourism have mainly been dealt with in a largely mechanistic and even deterministic way, and in general, have shied away from inductive observations. Borrowing in the main from the discipline and discourse of economics, dominant themes have related to the management and economic ‘impact’ of festivals. In this sense, festivals (often as a sub-set of ‘events’) are described and discussed as ‘products’ that can be ‘purchased’ and ‘consumed’ by festival visitors and participants. The web of social relations on which the festival organisation is based is mainly conceived of from a management perspective: how to involve volunteers; how to market and image festivals; how to deal with health and safety issues; how to ‘produce’ social coherence; how ultimately to make an ‘economic impact’ and generate ‘profit’. While there is a certain social relevance, and indeed, an inevitability, regarding such approaches, it is important to recognise the capitalist, neo-liberal ideologies and contexts from which these emanate. Despite the dominance of such models in contemporary academic festival literature, human relations – the essence of any festival – cannot (nor should not) be reduced, nor confined, to a consequence of political action and to a utilitarian model of individual behaviour. Such approaches are more akin to a political programme seeking to mould social relations in terms of societal and economistic ideals rather than establishing an epistemology that aims to understand what is going on when people celebrate festivals.

Alongside managerial and economic literature on festivals, different anthropological and sociological schools have for a long time been implicated in studies of various a priori festive phenomena including cultural performance, ritual, sacrifice, celebration, pilgrimage, play and war. Approaches to these phenomena share the necessity of having to define a limited time and space frame in which a multitude of social interactions, aesthetic signs and narrative discourses can be observed. Within this however, defining festivals and their typology with any precision is problematic, and to an extent will always fall short of corresponding realities (Falassi, 1987). The interpretation of these observations often oscillates between two theoretical poles. One, based on Durkheim’s idea of collective consciousness (Durkheim, 1976, 1992; Lukes, 1982) enacted through festive play and rhythm, and the other stressing the multivocality of ritual performance (Turner, 1982), and the polyphony of voices in power relationships manifested through the festival frame (Bakhtin, 1984). While these two broad approaches have much to offer the scholar of festival studies, and underscore many of the cases elaborated in this book and elsewhere, we should not be lured into some binary system of analysis. Attractive as the festival has been as a unifying and practical concept – or form – for examining human behaviour, it is nonetheless a contextualised concept, directed internally and externally by other social interactions, economic systems and communicative networks. Festivals, while containing worlds, also open out and spill over into ‘outside’ worlds and their multiple dimensions can only be understood by taking into consideration the different realities of these outside worlds.

The unearthing of festival morphology and meanings, together with its apparently expansive array of folkloric and carnivalesque variants, in both historical and contemporary contexts, has been undertaken and discussed from a variety of perspectives over the years (see for instance: Bakhtin, 1984; Bauman, 1992; Bruner, 1983; Cox, 1969; Danow, 1995; Falassi, 1987; Humphrey, 2001; Manning, 1983; Mesnil, 1974; Pieper, 1965; Turner, 1982, 1986). However, many studies of festivals, in both theoretical and empirical terms, are marked by tightly defined boundaries of their immediate social context, with an emphasis upon closed spaces, fixed times, indigenous social actors, internal regimes and symbolic contexts, and bounded rituals. Fewer studies have sought to position festivals in a context that is fluid, open to different scopes of (transnational) society and cultural vectors, and that resonates with the realities of ongoing change. Burke (1997), in a mainly historical analysis, points to the connections that tie the carnivals of the New World – North and South America – to Africa and the ways in which events such as the Rio Carnival can be viewed as having undergone an process of evolution that is, de facto, ongoing. What is useful in Burke’s interpretation of carnival in South America, in which he draws upon and challenges the work of Da Matta (1978), is precisely that he places it in within a shifting frame of interactions between groups, traditions and practices that resonate with the various stages of development of European carnival, African religion and the rise of popular culture and commercialism. In this sense it becomes increasingly problematic to see the Rio Carnival, for instance, as solely a Brazilian phenomenon and an expression of a particular tradition.

At the same time, it is not a new idea to analyse forms of festivity in relation to, or as a symptom of, social life crisis. However, while most of the sociological and anthropological work has typically focused on cyclically or periodically returning forms of crisis (disease, possession, death, changing of the seasons, coming of age, etc.), little work has considered the appearance of festivals in relation to contexts or eras of rapid change. The principal focus and approach of this book lies in exploring the modalities underlying the relationships between an increasing number of ‘newly’ organised festivals which have appeared over the past 20 years or so worldwide, and the processes of rapid change that have recently affected most societies.

To operate this approach in the following chapters we have brought together a series of case studies that all in some way use tourism and touristic mobility as their central analyser. In these cases, tourism is synchronically related to three different types of social crisis and festivals can be broadly viewed as a form of response. In the first type, tourism development becomes a tangible expression of economic and spatial change and transition, often from agrarian to post-modern forms of economy. Here festivals are used to mobilise, negotiate and test new forms of discourse to make the new social reality meaningful. In the second type, tourism and tourists are used as a form of audience. As willing and usually naive observers seeking intercultural experience and translation, tourists are often mobilised and manipulated for the political and symbolic purposes of festival organisers and stakeholders. In this context, they can become an important social vector in the reformulation of ethnic, regional, diasporic, or national narratives and identities. In the third type of case, touristic mobility itself becomes the defining moment of festivity. Here, transnational events to which participants touristically travel become the symptom of the disappearance of former systems of social and symbolic boundaries and, at the same time, of the reinvention of new patterns of social existence.

Remaking Worlds: Rupture and Re-enchantment

Of course, the observation of a link between festivals and complex, dynamic social contexts is not new or unique to the contemporary era. In different historic contexts, festivals, carnival and public ‘play’ have always been permitted, or have been politically used to mediate rapid change and to re-embed modified social realities in forms of symbolic continuity. Most major social crises, ruptures or revolutions in human history have been accompanied or closely followed by festive events or periods. The theatre plays, costume parties and pleasure gardens of the Renaissance, enacting and re-creating the idea of Eden, have been interpreted as nostalgic reactions to the ‘disenchantment’ of the world following the geographic discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries (Délumeau, 2000). The idea of finding an earthly Eden embodied within the geographic imaginary of at least part of the European aristocratic class suddenly became obsolete and thus the world – abandoned and naked – needed to be re-clothed with signs and meaning. The dominant visions of the world needed to be adapted to the new geographical knowledge. At the same time, new forms of commercial exchange and geo-political organisation in Europe had to find a symbolic expression. Similarly, the scientific revolution and the European Enlightenment, and its ‘discoveries’ of laws and rules affecting (and effecting) the physical world, our perceptions of it, and with Darwin, the very nature and place of the human species within it, challenged the very conception of a God-given existence. The whole concept of society, of humankind and ‘traditional’ ways of thinking had to be re-thought and re-articulated with the new knowledge provided by the scientific approach. However, core beliefs, myths and discourses – religious and secular – often persisted and were promoted as part of the reaction of romanticism in late 18th/early 19th centuries and have, to varying extents, continued to be revealed in periodic ‘rediscoveries’ of the folkloric and re-enacted through festivals. In this sense the religious, albeit as an often challenged category, has continued and persisted despite its transformation in new semantic contexts.

Similarly throughout history, during times of significant political and militaristic revolution, festivals have been used to create a sort of mythical superstructure formulating/re-formulating the origins and compositions (cosmogony) of nation and empire, and, at the same time, providing and preserving social continuity and traditional structures of power through the use of codified symbols and rituals. In this sense, festivals would appear to act in the same way as social movements with their emphasis on the symbolic and their ritualisation of protest (Melucci, 1996) employed not only to articulate ideas but also to generate, structure, secure and highlight ‘situations’ and spaces in which central, meanings can be reproduced (Valeri, 1985). The idea of festivals and carnivals as forms of a social ‘safety valve’ (Gluckman, 1963), allowing the c...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Contributors
• Chapter 1: Remaking Worlds: Festivals, Tourism and Change
• Chapter 2: La Cavalcata Sarda: Performing Identities in a Contemporary Sardinian Festival
• Chapter 3: Gardening the Past and Being in the World: A Popular Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery in La Réunion
• Chapter 4: Becoming All Indian: Gauchos, Pachamama Queens and Tourists in the Remaking of an Andean Festival
• Chapter 5: The ‘Freedom of the Slaves to Walk the Streets’: Celebration, Spontaneity and Revelry versus Logistics at the Notting Hill Carnival
• Chapter 6: The Making of Community Identity through Historic Festive Practice: The Case of Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football
• Chapter 7: ‘Days of Radunica’: A Street Festival in the Croatian Town of Split
• Chapter 8: Enhancing Vitality or Compromising Integrity? Festivals, Tourism and the Complexities of Performing Culture
• Chapter 9: Creating the ‘Rainbow Nation’: The National Women’s Art Festival in Durban, South Africa
• Chapter 10: Kyrgyzstan’s Manas Epos Millennium Celebrations: Post-Colonial Resurgence of Turkic Culture and the Marketing of Cultural Tourism
• Chapter 11: The Camp Oven Festival and Australian Identity
• Chapter 12: Christmas Markets in the Tyrolean Alps: Representing Regional Traditions in a Newly Created World of Christmas
• Chapter 13: The Placeless Festival: Identity and Place in the Post-Modern Festival
• Chapter 14: Gay and Lesbian Festivals: Tourism in the Change from Politics to Party
• Chapter 15: Mobility, Diaspora and the Hybridisation of Festivity: The Case of the Edinburgh Mela
• Chapter 16: Taking Québec City: Protest, Carnival and Tourism at the Summit of the Americas
• Index