Response to Peter Seitel

Abstract

Cantwell further asserts the magical nature of planners' thought by pointing to the disjuncture between planning and event. But there no measure of that disjuncture. His principal method of assertion the article's abstract. In this summary Cantwell talks of Festival visitors' and participants' reality (1991:148) as though the article contained evidence collected through interviews or some other systematic technique. But apart from his own brief, impressionistic glimpses of a few exhibit areas, the only other treatment of the planning-event connection the final reprise of his predication of magical thinking-a metaphorical conceit based on Copernican astronomy. Cantwell relies on the paradox created by complex levels of irony to constitute his magical connection between Festival and society. In doing so he avoids the responsibilities of honest discourse and also engages in some gratuitous name calling. Is to be imagined, Cantwell asksdeploying the first ironic frame (is to be imagined rather than simply does)-that success in the Festival will encourage a revival of Makah wood carving? ... Will displays of brilliant Mayan weaving . . . protect the lives of Mayan Indians? . . . The answer to all of these questions may be, in fact, yes. ... If this not the case, then the planning meeting, and the Festival itself, was an idle, myopic, self-indulgent exercise (1991:157). Does Cantwell believe in magic or doesn't he? His rhetoric allows him to have both ways. The ironic, indeterminant mode of this passage, like his other mannered devices, mocks the knowledge that informs scholarly exchange. But perhaps the piece intended (as with a literary piece) to bejudged by different standards of accuracy and ethics, in which case its worth to be found in its perspective or taste. Perhaps folklore performance really is a profound magic indeed, when the cultural garment, blown in the breeze that rises out of the ground of human generativity, reveals, with a thrilling intimation, the natural form of the life that animates it (1991:161). As literature, the article seems overwrought. As folklore scholarship, Cantwell's contrived and ironic rhetoric creates a distorted representation of Festival knowledge and prac-