Festival, anti festival, counter festival, non-festival.

Greenhill, Pauline

A colleague recently reported on a study she read which indicated that people who spend at least an hour per day alone were more productive both personally and professionally than those constantly in the presence of others. I surmise that this fact might puzzle the former colleagues with whom I worked as Dean of Residence at a small college of the University of Waterloo in the late 1980s. At our annual retreat for residence assistants, a substantial portion of the workshop activity involved discussing the possibility of suicide among young people away from home for the first time, and perpetually stressed by the requirement for high achievement in University. The message sent by the counsellors and Christian ministers who directed our sessions was that the residence assistant's job was to keep the women and men who lived on their floors busy and sociable with others. We should worry, we were told, about people who spent time alone in their rooms. When I countered that I should personally worry about people who never spent time alone in their rooms, who avoided opportunities for reflection and contemplation, my comments were met first with blank looks of confusion and then with vigorous repudiation.

It was clear that for this bouncy, outgoing lot of undergraduate residence assistants -- as well as for the professionals who guided their work -- the very concept of wanting to be alone indicated pathology. In the residence, we were fortunate not to have any suicides during my Deanship, and I do not know if in fact the residence assistants, busy with their own work, actually managed to prevent any solitary activities. But the inscription of this process reminded me that the panopticon so tellingly theorised by Michel Foucault (1977) lives in many institutions -- not just the prison. Perhaps the obsession with students maintaining constant sociability is not truly about personal mental health. Maybe it is more about the question of what people might be getting up to behind those closed doors, away from the gaze and surveillance of others. Not only suicide, but other heinous sins of contemporary Euro North American society -- drug-taking, alcoholism (someone who drinks alone is almost definitionally alcoholic), masturbation -- can be solitary practices. Surely, mainstream culture contends, a healthy person would not pursue such behaviours. Sociable is good; solitary is bad.

Sociability and collective activity have become so focal for Euro North Americans that they have even built academic disciplinary definitions and practices upon it. Introductory anthropology texts assert, for example, that culture is "A shared way of life that includes material products, values, beliefs, and norms that are transmitted within a particular society from generation to generation" (Scupin and Decorse 2001: 599).(2) Folklore itself is often defined in material terms, as in "Folklore texts have come to be seen not simply as realizations of a normative standard, but as emergent, the product of the complex interplay of communicative resources, social goals, individual competence, community ground rules for performance, and culturally defined event structures" (Bauman 1992: 33).

It's only recently that ethnologists, anthropologists, and folklorists have begun to conceive of culture as something that exists in the mind, beyond material and social practices. Notions like Benedict Anderson's "imagined community" (1991) have a potential to fundamentally alter the ways our disciplines of folklore, anthropology, and ethnology think culture. Not surprisingly, many new ideas come not from within anthropology and folkloristics, nor even from the mainstream of feminist theorising, but instead from individuals whose marginalisation makes their "situated knowledges" and "partial perspectives" (Haraway 1988) particularly acute. Queer theory's notion of sex and sexuality as performative (Butler 1990) but also as intrinsically and analytically central (Doty 1993), and African-American feminist concepts that silence can mean resistence, not only acquiescence (bell hooks 1990), or that freedom of the mind could be useful to liberation (Collins 1990), provide examples of such insights.

And it is important to note that the very fact of partial knowledges -- partial in the senses of incompleteness but also of interestedness, even bias -- means that our disciplines must throw out what were once their epistemological foundations. Objective knowledge is impossible. Home is no less cultural or other than away; the stricture that fieldworkers must spend at least three months in a Third World Country(3) in order to experience the strangeness of the savage primitive Other has become even more ludicrous than it was in the colonial past of anthropology's late nineteenth century development. Without experiencing cognitive dissonance or resorting to a consciously fragmented identity, people can be watchers as well as participants; marginalised as well as mainstream; resistant as well as compliant. The "shouting matches at the border" memorably theorised by Roger Abrahams (1981) are much more common than theorists might have thought when his work was first published.

Where does this leave theorising about festival? Festival is perhaps quintessentially sociable and other. But if it is also multiple and partial, what, then, does festival do? How is it constructed in contemporary societies? What is its relation to other social and cultural manifestations and configurations?

Festival/Non-Festival (Self-Identities)

It may sometimes appear that everything that could be said about a topic has already been expressed. Festival is certainly a well-worn locus for anthropological, folkloristic, and ethnological thinking. Opening up the call on festival to include non-festival, counter-festival, and anti-festival(4) may have assisted those who contributed to this special issue in the recasting of previous writing and analysis, or the revisioning of their work as implicitly if not explicitly relevant to festival theorising. If festival is Alessandro Falassi's classic "time out of time" (1987), it comprises the set apart, the special, the different, whereas the non-festival remains mundane, normal, everyday, the same. Yet as Tracy Whalen's work so tellingly exemplifies in her analysis of Newfoundland novelist Bernice Morgan's Random Passage (and in comparison with American Annie Proulx's The Shipping News), the everyday is as cultural -- and as constructed -- as its apparent polar opposite. Indeed, sometimes the festive is constructed through contrast with the everyday, and sometimes the mundane is recognisable because it is not overtly celebratory, carnivalesque.

But the mundane is rarely considered, and when it is, too often regarded as somehow less cultural, less distinct, than its contrasted form.(5) Further, material and social definitions of culture tend to allow judgments that make sociable, community practices -- of which festivals could be the avatar -- fundamentally useful, functional, and (though few would dare to say it) good. And yet, as the papers in this special issue clearly demonstrate, sociability is not always beneficial to individuals or even to groups. Both within and beyond communities, it can maintain a profound ambivalence. Maria Fowler's paper on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival shows how its conceptualisation in terms of commonality between women -- even of a women's utopia -- can mask a range of underlying variations in experience of the same event. Festivals can deny autonomy to groups and individuals even within their own borders, as Fowler indicates; or their representations can gloss over the economic and social marginalisation of a region, as Tracy Whalen's discussion of the constructed mundane in Newfoundland literature shows.

But festival events, as they obscure contradictions, may also be creating space -- even if it is negative space -- for those they exclude. Fowler asserts that the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival has continually throughout its history moved to incorporate groups who questioned their place there -- women of colour, practitioners of Sado-masochism, and perhaps, one day, even transgendered women. Extensive literature, particularly derived from Victor Turner's concept of communitas as central to festival experience (1969), implies that festival experience is primarily one of unity and similarity. David Harnish's work exemplifies how ethnic difference can impel fundamentally different experiences of festival for participants. Even when they are apparently harmonious, festivals can simply shore up contradictions and ethnic conflict, as described by Harnish for Lombok, and Martine Geronimi in New Orleans' Mardi Gras.

The Black Indians and Zulus of Mardi Gras mark a racist society in which residence, class, and even celebration bifurcate along the constructed signs of racial location. They do so in modes that the white cultural mainstream and tourist audience may apprehend very differently than do the participants. Like the Balinese and Sasak in Lombok, these groups maintain solitudes within the structure of a single festival event. As both Geronimi's and Harnish's works show, the narratives of origin that explain Mardi Gras for whites and blacks, or the temple festival for Balinese and Sasak, are fundamentally dissimilar; one might even suspect that two incompatible, though parallel and even coterminous, events emerge. Yet Balinese and Sasak (and the different groups at Mardi Gras) manage, nevertheless, to produce an overarching experience in which difference is transcended.

Marcia Ostashewski shows how gender can also impel variable festival experiences. When culture is defined in male-dominant terms, the real alternatives offered by women participants and feminised aspects of culture can surface only periodically, often only to be obscured again. But resistance remains even within a highly patriarchal event. The experiences of individual female participants -- whether ethnomusicologist or bandura performer -- engender spontaneous festival in the midst of everyday moments, or counter the discipline of festival structures. Festival and non-festival alternate constantly in these women's practices.

Anti-Festival/Counter-Festival (Tourist Identities)

Some festival research (e.g. Stoeltje 1992) maintains a fundamental separation between the events that are created for tourists and those which are made by a community for their own (though as the first set of works in this special issue indicate, the question of who is the community and how many ethnic, gender, social, class, sexual, and other identities it can comprise and/or incorporate is by no means always clear). The often explicit assumption is that tourist events are spurious, inauthentic events, created not to engender a true experience of liminality and communitas, but to simulate it for fun and profit. The works in this section show that there can be a kind of movement between authenticity and inauthenticity, if you will, as the cycles of festival presentation and representation unfold. Anti-festival and counter-festival alternate, or present dialogue between social and cultural positionings.

Andrew Rouse and Sabina Magliocco indicate just such a cyclical element in the festivals they discuss. Though Folkest in Pecs, and Sardinian tourist events may be created and/or appropriated by business interests, these celebrations can then be recreated and/or reappropriated by the people. Sometimes the newly arising event is squelched and appropriated once again by business, but one could anticipate another phase of resistance from communities, and so on. Many festivals seem to constantly undergo this kind of push-pull between capital and communitas.

Rouse also indicates that changing times can involve the rewriting of history, and memories of events of previous festivals are repositioned not only through but also by the discourse of the present. Different organisers, different sponsors, and even different performers can nevertheless substantially reproduce the same festival; conversely, as particular organisers, sponsors, and performers change with the times, so does the festival event in which they participate. At any given moment, the political context re-situates the festival and can engender wildly dissonant connotations.

Indeed, what appears to be the same festival event can, from different perspectives, manifest considerable variation. Thoroski and Greenhill's examination of Folklorama shows what may originally have been a community event being twisted and perverted as it is marketed to needs beyond the community. This critical perspective is countered by Paul Bramadat's very different take on one particular Folklorama pavilion, which shows how community members appropriate the event to their own needs, working creatively within the structural confines imposed from outside. Donna Haraway's concept of partial knowledges suggests that readers should not be trying to discern who is right and who is wrong about Folklorama; each perspective gives useful insights into the event as a whole.

Magliocco focuses on the potentially most alienated constructions, deliberately created for tourist consumption, yet both her work and Bramadat's show how individuals and groups can take back those alienated constructions and rework them to local needs. What Magliocco calls "the rebellion of the object" leads to a reclamation of the festival; a similar kind of recycling of concepts that is evident in the Israeli pavilion's purported lack of emphasis on religion. The price of culture can change from moment to moment, year to year.

Finally, Timothy J. Cooley reminds fieldworkers that their own experiences of festival can also have stages, internal variation, and profoundly different experiential dimensions. Like others who attend festivals for a variety of reasons, the intellectual baggage fieldworkers bring to the event can have profound effects on what the festival turns out to be (for, again, remembering Donna Haraway, our experiences are partial). For Cooley, partiality (or lack thereof!) was evident not only in his boredom (certainly shared by all who conduct participant observation, even if we are not always brave enough to admit it), but also in the ways he initially interpreted different parts of a festival event as authentic, and others as false.

Festivals are in the head as much as -- or perhaps even more than -- they are on the ground. They are Marxian superstructure, pertaining to ideas, concepts, issues, ideology; but Marxian structure is also there, with economic implications and the social structural constraints of law and politics. Sometimes the material and the psychological strike harmony in festivals; and sometimes their dissonance is painful, almost unbearable. And, of course, some aspects of festival are the quintessence of collective activity; while their converse, the solitary and reflective, offer scope for imagination and possibility, which are equally immanent in these events.

I do not want to suggest that it is only in festivals that these multiple qualities are found. Natalka Husar's "Mama's Boy," the cover of this issue, exhibits a profound ambivalence about the social as well as the personal. The festival, counter-festival, anti-festival, and non-festival perspectives are disturbingly and enigmatically depicted. The painting's magic realist style raises the same questions so many of the writers here address or allude to. When the everyday is just as weird, wonderful, and constructed as the festival proper, where is culture? But Husar's work speaks the festival improper -- ethnicity and display as a series of masks against identity as well as expressions of power. Meaning, ultimately, becomes elusive and personal rather than collective and social ....

(1.) I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a Regular Research Grant which funded my research on festivals.

(2.) The transmission of culture also makes its way into general introductory works in Folklore (e.g. Briggs 1992: 3-5).

(3.) This is a perspective seriously presented, and stubbornly maintained in the face of eloquent and well-founded arguments to the contrary, by a former colleague in the Anthropology Department at the University of Winnipeg. His own fieldwork had been conducted in Northern Manitoba. He saw no contradiction here, despite the fact that more recent formulations of development theory make a distinction between Third World peoples, those historically colonised by Europeans in their own domains of Africa, Asia, and so on; and Fourth World peoples, the indigenous folks of the so-called New World.

(4.) And I credit conversations with my colleague Tracy Whalen for leading me in this very fruitful direction.

(5.) For a consideration of just this very idea, see Greenhill 1994.

References

Abrahams, Roger. 1981. Shouting Matches at the Border: The Folklore of Display Events. In "And Other Neighborly Names:" Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, eds. Richard Bauman and Roger Abrahams. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities : reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, revised edition. New York: Verso.

Bauman, Richard. 1992. Folklore. In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook, ed. Richard Bauman: 33. New York: Oxford University Press.

bell hooks. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Briggs, Asa. 1992. Culture. In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook, ed. Richard Bauman: 3-5. New York: Oxford University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Doty, Alexander. 1993. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Cultures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Falassi, Alessandro. 1987. Festival: Definition and Morphology. In Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, ed. Alessandro Falassi: 1-10. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York : Pantheon Books.

Greenhill, Pauline. 1994. Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575-599.

Scupin, Raymond and Christopher R. Decorse. 2001. Anthropology: A Global Perspective, fourth edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Stoeltje, Beverly. 1992. Festival. In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook, ed. Richard Bauman: 261-271. New York: Oxford University Press.

Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.