Public Celebrations Research Articles

BOOK REVIEW: Paula Krebs.GENDER, RACE, AND THE WRITING OF EMPIRE: PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND THE BOER WAR. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

That Paula Krebs begins her valuable study with a narrative of the relief of Mafeking is apt. Faded now from English slang as the origin of a phrase to suggest interminable waiting, the lifting of the siege in May 1900 of the South African town that had been encircled by Boer troops for seven months became spectacular, popular news. "Mafeking Night" in the West End of London was an occasion for public celebration—fireworks, singing, brass bands, and much drinking contained by well-ingrained codes of permissible public rowdiness. As Krebs persuasively demonstrates, "Mafeking Night" was created by the newspapers, an event anticipated, and then to be experienced, by a group representing public opinion; it was an "example of the effectiveness of the press, in consultation with the military and the Colonial Office, in the creation of that public out of many separate and distinct publics" (5). One of the several strengths of Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire is its solid analysis of the role of popular journalism in the construction of imperialist ideology.

Sport, health, and the Iranian middle class in the 1920s and 1930s

In the spring of 1939, Tehran's recently Constructed Amjadieh stadium hosted a part of the public celebration of the wedding ceremony of crown prince Mohammad Reza and Princess Fawzieh of Egypt. Several thousand spectators, mostly men and women well-clad in ‘international’ dress, enjoyed a spectacle featuring short presentations of over a dozen so-called ‘new’ and ‘old’ sports such as soccer, acrobatics, andzūrkhānahexercises. Wearing his Boy Scout uniform, Mohammad Reza was present(ed) as the energetic leader of these sportsmen and women and reflectedin personathe hope for a healthy productive nation, while the athletes on the ground below were proving to the Egyptian guests that not only the husband-to-be of Fawzieh, but also many of his countrymen were imbued with the spirit of modern sport and a healthy life.It was not the first time that the Pahlavis had placed sport at the center of a public celebration. After the crown prince's return from schooling in Switzerland, similar spectacles—although on a smaller scale—had been organized on his birthdays, and he often appeared in public as the leader of the Boy Scout movement, too.

The turning of the modern

Abstract“Modernity” is a term understood to mean the secularisation of space, in particular, it means the replacement of the sacred by the social and the political. “Sacred” spaces since the 19th century are the geographic memory of the formation of national identity. Nevertheless, the “sacred” as the timeless encounter with the divine remains a possibility. Modernity's reduction of faith to personal experience is the product of secularisation. But the “personal” is too narrow a cage (in Weber's sense) and, given the foundation of the modern on doubt (in Descartes' sense), the original modern rational project begins to break up. The sacred is found in the rupture created by modernity's critical failure to ground itself in certainty. The sacred also shows up as redemption through resistance to the world as commodity. The fragmentation and loss of modernity becomes the condition for the re‐emergence of the sacred as an opening for its public celebration. Copyright © 2002 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Becoming an Islander through Action in The Scottish Hebrides

This article explores the way in which community belonging may be imagined and enacted. It begins with an introduction to a small Inner Hebridean island community and a discussion of the invisibility of incomers in representations of Scotland’s past and present. It describes how the island came to be populated as it is today with people of diverse backgrounds. Drawing on three years of fieldwork, it shows how progression along an ‘incomer/islander continuum’ may be demonstrated through social action in the present. It suggests that while such everyday action may not be consciously equated with ethnic or ‘island’ identity, it is often a more revealing and lasting marker of local identity than overtly constructed symbolic markers of ancestry, locality, or blood relationship. Consciously waved ‘flags’ of island (or national or class) belonging which include, sometimes, the wearing of kilts, recounting of local history, or public celebration of local event/ritual, have been fairly common focal points in anthropological description. While these displays of identity are telling, the evidence in this article suggests that people who manipulate such symbols remain outside the living and changing community unless they also engage in appropriate everyday social action. This raises critical issues about methodology and focus in the social anthropology of identity and change.

The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power on Parade, 1877-1995

Veiled Prophet organization has been a vital institution in St. Louis for more than a century. Founded in March 1878 by a group of prominent St. Louis businessmen, the organization was fashioned after the New Orleans Carnival society the Mystick Krewe of Comus. In The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration, Thomas Spencer explores the social and cultural functions of the organization's annual celebration the Veiled Prophet parade and ball and traces the shifts that occurred over the years in its cultural meaning and importance. Although scholars have researched the more pluralistic parades of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, very little has been done to examine the elite-dominated parades of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study shows how pluralistic parades ceased to exist in St. Louis and why the upper echelon felt it was so important to end them. Spencer shows that the celebration originated as the business elite's response to the St. Louis general strike of 1877. Symbolically gaining control of the streets, the elites presented St. Louis history and American history by tracing the triumphs of great men men who happened to be the Veiled Prophet members' ancestors. parade, therefore, was intended to awe the masses toward passivity with its symbolic show of power. members believed that they were helping to boost St. Louis economically and culturally by enticing visitors from the surrounding communities. They also felt that the parades provided the spectators with advice on morals and social issues and distracted them from less desirable behavior like drinking and carousing. From 1900 to 1965 the celebration continued to include educational and historical elements; thereafter, it began to resemble the commercialized leisure that was increasingly becoming a part of everyday life. biggest change occurred in the period from 1965 to 1980, when the protests of civil rights groups led many St. Louisans to view the parade and ball as wasteful conspicuous consumption that was often subsidized with taxpayers' money. With membership dropping and the news media giving the organization little notice, it soon began to wither. In response, the leaders of the Veiled Prophet organization decided to have a VP Fair over the Fourth of July weekend. 1990s brought even more changes, and the members began to view the celebration as a way to unite the St. Louis community, with all of its diversity, rather than as a chance to boost the city or teach cultural values. The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration is a valuable addition not only to the cultural history of Missouri and St. Louis but also to recent scholarship on urban culture, city politics, and the history of public celebrations in America.

Viva Mexico! Viva la Independencia!: Celebrations of September 16. WILLIAM H. BEEZLEY and DAVID E. LOREY (eds.): Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2001.

Within the rapidly expanding historiography on the "invented traditions," "imagined communities," and "hegemonic" state- and nation-building projects of modern polities, a growing number of scholars have looked at public celebratory life in Mexico from the colonial period to the present. The public panoply of patriotic and religious ritual has been richly reconstructed empirically, and analyzed as state pedagogy, an appropriated festal vehicle for popular protest, a juggernaut of social and political control, deep cultural text, and so forth. Both co-editors of the anthology under review have made significant contributions to this virtual sub-genre in recent years, David Lorey with an ongoing project on secular political holidays in the twentieth century, William Beezley with similar work of his own on the nineteenth century and as co-editor of an earlier, foundational collection of essays on cognate themes, Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (1994). Beezley and Lorey have produced a fascinating volume here on public observances of Mexico's Independence day, 16 September, since the years immediately following the Mexican colony's separation from Spain in 1821. The essays are for the most part empirically rich, evocative of the eras they portray, and of more than sufficient sophisticated conceptualization to speak to ongoing debates in political and cultural history about the function of public rituals not only as instruments of elite hegemonic projects, and as venues for struggle over public memory and national identity, but also as opportunities for the expression of more exuberant popular ideas and forms of subaltern resistance.

The History of Morris Dancing, 1458-1750

Morris dancing, one of the more peculiar of the English folk customs, has been greatly misunderstood. Traditional scholarship on this custom has been based on the assumption that morris dancing is one of the pagan calendar rituals, a preconception held by many folklorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now, building upon his previous work with Michael Heaney of the Bodleian Library in Annals of Early Morris, John Forrest carefully analyses a wealth of evidence to show that morris dancing does not, in fact have pagan or ancient origins. His examination of early documentation draws morris traditions into the wider area of communal customs and public celebrations, showing the passage of dance ideas between groups of people who until now have been considered folklorically distinct. Careful, detailed, and encyclopedic, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458-1750 is an essential reference work for specialists in English drama and social historians of the period.

Detroit and the Legacy of Vincent Chin

While the narrative of Chin's murder and the subsequent miscarriage of justice which followed are well-known within American Studies circles, working on the Detroit remembrance challenged me to explore the intersection of this narrative with local urban history. For instance, study of the Chin case was central to the curriculum of a first-year seminar entitled Asian Americans and the Civil Rights Movement, which I taught at the University of Michigan during the Winter 2002 semester. Most of the students, the majority of whom had grown up in Michigan, knew something about the African American struggle for civil rights but had never heard of Vincent Chin. On the other hand, when the 300th anniversary of the City of Detroit was celebrated in 2001, little or no attention in the mass public celebration was devoted to the history of Asian/Pacific Americans in the region or the potential role of APAs in re-envisioning and revitalizing our troubled city.

The Salic Law and the Valois Succession to the French Crown

The entry of Charles Vm into Reims in 1484 for his royal coronation was accompanied by a number of historical and allegorical tableaux vivants. Amongst these was a scene where Clovis received the holy balm used to anoint all French monarchs, an appropriate illustration of the mystical and liturgical nature of French kingship. Just before this there was another dramatic performance in which the first king of France, Pharamond, commissioned and received the Salic Law from four wise men; this celebrated the historical origins of the monarchy, the role of the king as law-giver and most famously the exclusion of women from the royal succession.1 This public celebration of the importance of the Salic Law in the fabric of the French constitution demonstrated the success of Valois writers such as Jean de Montreuil and Jean Juvenal des Ursins who had championed the authority of the Salic Law in the debate over female succession to the throne for over eighty years. In the following century this famous authority was upheld by eminent scholars including Claude de Seyssel, Charles de Grassaille, Barthelemi de Chasseneuz, Jean d'Angleberme and Charles Du Moulin, and thereby was established as a central pillar of French public law and a cornerstone of the constitution.

The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (review)

212 Reviews Other essays examine the idea that medieval art functioned as argument; a miniature of the Parousia in a ninth-century manuscript of the Christian Topography held in the Vatican, and Abbot Suger's project in the 1140s to furnish the choir of Saint-Denis with stained glass windows. The arguments throughout are illustrated with a plethora of well-chosen, well-reproduced plates and figures. Kessler's style is readable and enthusiastic, and there are extensive notes and a good index, though no bibliography. This volume is recommended for art historians and ecclesiastical historians alike, as it contains much interesting material. The style and illustrations are such that it could profitably be read by an interested layperson or relatively junior student. It is a good addition to any library or bookshelf. Carole M. Cusack Studies in Religion University ofSydney King, Ros, The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (The Revels Plays Companion Library), Manchester and N e w York, Manchester University Press, 2001; cloth; pp. xiv, 269; R.R.P. £45.00; ISBN 0719052998 Ros King's study is a welcome contribution to a decidedly modest field of wo on the sixteenth-century dramatist, poet and musician Richard Edwards. This latest addition to the excellent Revels Plays Companion Library series offers a rare look into the dynamics of Court drama and public spectacle in the turbulent early years of the Reformation, prior to the advent of the commercial public theatres. King's book is both comprehensive and ambitious with two distinct parts. The first, a lengthy Introduction to Edwards, includes a biography, a critical analysis ofhis surviving works and an extensive, well-researched supply ofhistorical context . The second section includes the text ofEdwards' only surviving play, Damon and Pythias (1564?), his dramatic poetry and accompanying musical scores. The Introduction is also something of a self-defence, designed to offset the lack of concrete evidence available to reconstruct a study of Edwards' life and work. King begins her commentary with the statement 'Richard Edwards is something of an enigma' (p. 1). This is true of the man himself, but also of his work, very little of which has survived. This is despite the popularity Edwards enjoyed during his own lifetime and the high esteem in which he was held in Reviews 213 the decade or two following his death in 1566. The Introduction is perhaps at its most engaging when King traces the complications associated with recovering the career of a 'lost' dramatist such as Edwards. Principally, Edwards wrote for the Court. As King observes, 'the history ofsixteenth-century drama relies almost entirely on records of payment' (p. 5). This means that, in the case of someone like Edwards, it is difficult to recover his career as most of what he wrote was produced as a service to the Court and would have been paid for, if at all, as part ofa more general commission, rather than on a recorded 'case by case' basis. King then embarks on an overview of the various sources through which she has compiled this study of Edwards, his works and the Tudor Court environment in which they were performed. What is striking here is the diversity of materials on which King has drawn. This account of her research offers the equivalent of a step-by-step guide to recovering a 'lost' literary figure which should be of interest to any humanities researcher. The earliest traces of Edwards' writing career appear in the context of public entertainments such as Mary's coronation play and Edward VI's Christmas entertainments, which have a strong political and religious edge to them. While evidence of Edwards' participation in these events is scratchy, they do provide a viable context for the emergence ofEdwards as an important dramatist and later participant in the staging of largescale public celebrations such as Elizabeth I's coronation. An interesting commentary on antitheatricalism precedes a very brief (two page) reading of Damon and Pythias as a defence of theatre. The connection of the antitheatricalism to Edwards' play, however, is not made entirely clear. Equally challenging is King's suggestion that Edwards' work contains a defence ofmusic and poetry...

Resignifying Space and Time in Hungarian Historical Memory: A Discussion of Public Celebrations and Reburial Practices

Resignifying Space and Time in Hungarian Historical Memory: A Discussion of Public Celebrations and Reburial Practices

‘A Joy Unknown for Years Past’: The American War, Britishness and the Celebration of Rodney’s Victory at the Saints

In April 1782 Admiral Rodney won a notable victory over the French fleet at the battle of the Saints in the West Indies. The ensuing enthusiastic public celebrations can be understood only when proper account is taken not just of the war situation and the politics of the moment, but also of the ways in which the American conflict stimulated and redefined a popular sense of Britishness.

Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials

Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials

Popular song for public celebration in federal Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Popular song for public celebration in federal Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Poverty and Public Celebrations in Rural India

Very poor households spend large sums on celebrations. To the extent that these expenditures are central to maintaining the networks essential for social relationships and coping with poverty, these are reasonable expenses. To the extent that they are status competitions, they may merely increase conspicuous consumption. Rao examines the paradox of very poor households spending large sums on celebrations. Using qualitative and quantitative data from South India, Rao demonstrates that spending on weddings and festivals can be explained by integrating an anthropological understanding of how identity is shaped in Indian society with an economic analysis of decisionmaking under conditions of extreme poverty and risk. Rao argues that publicly observable celebrations have two functions: they provide a space for maintaining social reputations and webs of obligation, and they serve as arenas for status-making competitions. The first role is central to maintaining the networks essential for social relationships and coping with poverty. The second is a correlate of mobility that may become more prevalent as incomes rise. Development policies that favor individual over collective action reduce the incentives for the networking function and increase the incentives for status- enhancing functions - thus reducing social cohesion and increasing conspicuous consumption. Market-driven improvements in urban employment, for example, could reduce a family's dependence on its traditional networks, could reduce incentives to maintain these networks, and could reduce social cohesion within a village and thus its capacity for collective action. In contrast, microfinance programs and social funds try to retain and even build a community's capacity for collective action. This paper - a product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study the relationship between poverty and collective action. The author may be contacted at vrao@worldbank.org.

Poverty and Public Celebrations in Rural India

This article examines the paradox that very poor households spend large sums of money on celebrations. Using qualitative and quantitative data from South India, it demonstrates that expenditures on weddings and festivals can be explained by integrating an understanding of how identity is shaped in the Indian context with an economic analysis of decision making under conditions of extreme poverty and risk. It argues that publicly observable celebrations have two functions: they provide a space for maintaining social reputations and webs of obligation, and they serve as arenas for status-enhancing competitions. The first role is central to maintaining the networks essential for social relationships and coping with poverty, while the second is a correlate of mobility that may become more prevalent as incomes rise. Development policies that privilege individual over collective action reduce the incentives for the former while increasing them for the latter, thus reducing social cohesion while increasing conspicuous consumption.

The Politics of Sectional Memory: Theodore Parker and the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review", 1847-1850

On December 22, 1845, Rev. Theodore Parker of West Roxbury went to Plymouth, Massachusetts, to observe Forefathers' Day, a day-long public celebration that commemorated Pilgrims' landing in North America in 1620. Beyond feasts and parades that were traditional on these occasions, Parker took special pains to hear orators Edward Everett and Rufus Choate expound upon virtues, sufferings and sacrifices of New England's founding generation. By time he reached his West Roxbury home that evening, though, joy of occasion had worn off, and sober reflections inspired his nightly journal entry. It was joyous, he wrote, yet sad in recollection. Troubling his thoughts that night were recent political events surrounding annexation of Texas and growing power of southern slave interest in national government. Even more than these incidents themselves, however, Parker was disturbed by lack of any discussion of them in day's ceremonial pageantry. hate to judge men by one thing, he complained, in all day there was but one allusion, I think, to Freezing lessons of history into attractive but meaningless tableaus, brilliant but conservative orators at Plymouth threatened to sever moral link between New England's past glory and its present responsibilities in nation's crisis. Such a detachment of culture from life robbed New Englanders of their most important wellsprings of action, and Parker ultimately felt compelled to conclude that the Spirit of Pilgrims rests no longer in sons.2 Less than two years later, Parker joined Ralph Waldo Emerson and several other Massachusetts scholars, reformers, and politicians in founding Massachusetts Quarterly Review, a journal devoted to literature, politics, religion and humanity. Though initially sharing editorial duties with Emerson and James E. Cabot, Parker took sole custody of journal within a year and became dominant architect of its message. During his three years as editor, Parker used Review both to reinvigorate and to reinvent politics and culture of New England as larger nation struggled with issues of war, expansion, and slavery. Beyond his role as editor, Parker was also journal's most important contributor, and he used it as a platform from which to contest dominance of older, established Massachusetts periodicals whose political and cultural conservatism he saw as dangerous in context of a national crisis. Without fully embracing radical abolitionist ideology, he attempted to reestablish a bridge between his understanding of New England's place in America's republican past, and its crucial role in transforming American present. Reworking old symbols of Puritanism and Revolution, Parker also derived new sectional meaning from materials as diverse as abolitionism, Free Soil politics, and life of John Quincy Adams. Both selective and strikingly opportunistic in his use of sectional history, Parker clung tenaciously to New England's past while confidently rearranging it in search of present meaning. Groping toward more democratic modes of expression and appealing to broadly held sectional values, moreover, Parker also hoped to establish a New England antislavery culture that would transcend movement's ideological divisions.3 As an avenue for expression of New England's special place in American life, Massachusetts Quarterly Review was certainly not alone. Over past several decades, students of New England history have amply documented extraordinary sense of sectional pride and uniqueness that swept across region during early national and antebellum periods. By attending public festivals, creating historical societies, erecting monuments, and consecrating cemeteries, New Englanders not only reinforced a sense of corporate identity, but they also constructed a distinctive and normative image of their history and traditions. …

The Hong Kong Handover

This paper investigates the efforts to exteriorise and communalise Hong Kong in the public celebrations marking the 1997 ‘handover' from British to Chinese rule. Using Bhabha's notion of the colonial stereotype, I document the importance of commodifying history and the fusion of both epitaphs to Empire and invocations of Chinese nationalism as twin forms of colonialism. The repetition of stereotypes is traced to a transnational logic aimed at marketing events to a global television audience. I conclude that the dominant representational reliance on repetition functioned to prolong the constitutive anxieties provoked by the handover, preserving them in the public domain.

The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec's Tercentenary

In 1908 Canada celebrated its 300th anniversary - the tercentenary of Champlain's founding of Quebec City. In two glorious weeks of parades, ceremonies, balls, and festivities, Canadians commemorated their history in a spectacle that would not be surpassed until the centennial of 1967. The climax of the 1908 celebration was an historical pageant in which 4000 sumptuously costumed citizens re-enacted classic events in Canada's history. Canada's leading painters were also there to capture these memorable scenes for posterity. The past was being celebrated, but with the present and the future in mind. In The Art of Nation-Building, H.V. Nelles uses contemporary literary techniques to convey the scope, colour, and intensity of the tercentenary from various perspectives. Drawing on the intimate diaries and letters of leading social and political figures, he leads us behind the scenes, disclosing the politics of memory, the theatrics of history, and the making of a modern monarchy. Nelles reveals what we actually do when we commemorate, how we use the past, and the multivocal character of mass celebration This richly illustrated, thought-provoking interpretation of public celebrations offers a novel perspective on Quebec and on the upcoming celebration of the millennium. Winner of two prestigious prizes: the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize (CHA) and the Prix Lionel-Groulx (IHAF).

V. Rituals

Nobody can doubt that rituals of various kinds were a crucial part of the interactions between men and women and gods and goddesses in the religion of Rome. Rituals marked all public events and celebrations: some of these we would classify as religious occasions – annual festivals, the taking and fulfilling of vows, the anniversaries of temple foundations; others as secular – elections, the assembly of legions for warfare, the census of Roman citizens; still others challenge our own criteria – the games, or dramatic performances, which certainly had ritual elements in the programme, even though we are inclined to regard entertainment as their primary purpose. It is important to see that these are our problems of interpretation: we have no reason to believe that the Romans made such distinctions or found the existence of different types of ritual in itself problematic.