Festival, Anti Festival, Counter Festival, Non-Festival

Abstract

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 to generation (Scupin and Decorse 2001: 599).(2) 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, 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. …