Festival as communicative performance and celebration of ethnicity

Abstract

Ethnicity is an observable and instrumental element of cultural communication. The modern age continues to witness a growing desire for ethnic recognition in individuals and groups, a search for ethnic identity, and a conscious exhibition of distinctive ethnic traits (Degh 1978:36). The current article attempts to describe festivals and ethnic expressions occurring in that context. A festival prepares a communicative scenery for manifestations of ethnicity and cultural unity with the special objective to demonstrate and experience a particular identity. Festival is discussed here as a cultural performance which is scheduled, temporally and spatially bounded, programmed, characterized by co-ordinated public occasions and heightened occasions of aesthetic expression (see Stoeltje 1992). A festival provides opportunities to observe the communicative system of the culture, conveyed through semiotically complex performance events. Although a festival enfolds large-scale social units, there obviously occurs small-scale social interactional communication, performance which constitutes face-to-face interaction. According to Beverly J. Stoeltje, festivals occur at calendrically regulated intervals, are public in nature, participatory in ethos, complex in structure, and multiple in voice, scene, and purpose. Festivals are collective phenomena and serve purposes rooted in group life. Systems of reciprocity and of shared responsibility ensure the continuity of and participation in the festival through the distribution of prestige and production. (Stoeltje 1992:261) A festival performance serves the purpose of the articulation of the group's heritage, it is a communicative situation actively engaging participants, presenting a combination of participation and performance in a public context. Motivation for participation in festivals includes social interaction that allows for the exploration and negotiation of many kinds of relationships. Activities available in a given festival reflect the concerns of the community, thus providing scenery for expressing particular ethnicity while suggesting personal affirmation, political action, social revitalization. Festival facilitates regeneration and enacts social life, it strengthens the identity of the group and its power to act in its own interest, it contributes to the articulation of social issues. The messages of festival concern the shared experience of the group and multiple interpretations of that experience. Festival brings the group together and communicates about the society itself and the role of the individual in it. In the context of modernity there are two other concepts closely related to festival, these are ritual and spectacle. Ritual is defined as the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not encoded by the performers (Rappaport 1992:249). Ritual is usually regarded as a mode of communication associated with the concerns and practice of religion, but relevant symbolic enactment occur outside religious contexts. Ritual and festival appear in modern cultures and particularly in modern religions as separate events, but older religions integrate the calendrical rites which might be labelled as festival into larger ritual cycle.