Linking Social Capital, Cultural Capital and Heterotopia at the Folk Festival

Abstract

IntroductionThis paper seeks to investigate the role of the folk festival in transforming interconnections between people, space and culture. It uses data collected at two longestablished folk festivals: Sidmouth Folk Week in southern England and Feakle Traditional Music Festival in western Ireland and draws on and interlinks three sets of theoretical ideas: social capital, cultural capital and heterotopia.First, it conceives of festivals as "other" places, in line with Foucault's 1967 (Foucault 1984, Foucault 2008) writings on the concept of heterotopia. It uses empirical evidence from two cases to investigate how different social relations are fostered within the festival place as heterotopia. Having used Foucault's concept of heterotopia to investigate how social relations become changed, this paper then draws on theories of social capital (Bourdieu 2002 [1986]; Putnam 2000) to deepen understanding of how these processes are facilitated through the workings of the festivals. It investigates the extent to which these changed social relations impact on bonding and bridging social capital; and the role played by cultural capital. The paper concludes by suggesting how these three sets of theoretical ideas could be combined into a useful conceptual framework which would enable others to further investigate these issues.Festivals as other placesFor Foucault, festivals constitute an example of what he termed heterotopia (Foucault 1984: 7). Heterotopic sites (Foucault 1984: 3) are defined as ones in which all the other real sites within a culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted: the relationship of the heterotopic site is to "suspect, neutralize or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect." Foucault went on to explain that six principles underpin the idea of heterotopia: (1) all cultures constitute heterotopias, although in varied forms, (2) their function can change over time, (3) they juxtapose several incompatible sites within a single real place, (4) they break or disrupt traditional concepts of time, (5) they may require certain acts, performances or rituals to gain entry to them, and (6) they exist only in relation to all other sites and spaces. Heterotopia is a wide-ranging but under-developed conceptual framework which includes both macro and micro elements. Foucault himself did not fully develop the concept, and he has been criticised accordingly (Johnson 2013). However, it has been widely used by researchers who, like Saldanha (2008: 20181), interpret heterotopias as "countersites," standing "in an ambivalent, though mostly oppositional, relation to society's mainstream." Saldanha goes on to explain that in contrast to utopias, heterotopias are located in real, physical, space-time, and serve to temporarily introduce different ways of ordering society and space into particular places, at particular times. For Hetherington (1997:40), meanwhile, heterotopias are spaces where "an alternative social ordering is performed," in contrast to "the taken-for-granted mundane idea of social order that exists within society."While all of the principles of heterotopia are of value in studying festivals, and indeed present much scope for further application in the area, this paper focuses on highlighting the particular promise shown by two of the principles. The first of these is that heterotopia can juxtapose several spaces within a single space: several emplacements that are in themselves incompatible. The term emplacement is, according to the notes in the Dehaene translation (Foucault 2008:23), a technical term denoting "discrete space," rather than an actual site or place, although Foucault does occasionally also use it to denote these latter two. Foucault uses the example of the theatre which stages a whole series of places, as well as the cinema, which allows the projection of a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional screen. The garden is a key example of a contradictory emplacement, according to Foucault. …