Public Festivals Research Articles

The Politics of Wedding Poetry under the Cromwellian Protectorate: Sir William Davenant and “Hymen’s Policy”

Abstract: This essay presents a reading of Sir William Davenant’s previously unstudied poem “Epithalamium. The Morning after the Marriage of the Earl of Barymore with Mrs. Martha Laurence,” written in October 1656. The poem offers a significant comparison to Andrew Marvell’s near-contemporary wedding song for the marriage of Oliver Cromwell’s daughter Mary. It thereby sheds light on Cromwellian poets’ efforts to formulate a poetic language in which to address the Protectoral court. The essay contextualizes the poem in the political realignment of the Cromwellian regime in 1656–1657. It suggests that Davenant’s paradoxical style attempts to adapt the courtly epithalamium to the minimalistic religious settlement and the principle of toleration for Protestants that underpinned the Cromwellian coalition. In this way, the poem illustrates how the 1650s Davenant can be read as a Cromwellian poet, alongside Marvell, Edmund Waller, and even John Milton, developing his ambitious and idiosyncratic ideas about public festivity and civil religion.

Producing a Filipino American Identity in the Sunbelt South

Abstract: In the 1970s and 1980s, professional Filipino Americans constructed their community identity in public festivals and spectacles that proclaimed the international status of Atlanta. They established an ethnic association and marched in the WSB Salute 2 America Fourth of July Parade. Parade organizers and city boosters declared that Atlanta was an international hub, a proclamation that entailed distancing itself from images of the Confederacy and racial hatred. To contest their racialization, Filipino Americans presented the complexity of their emerging ethnic identity in celebrations that professed Atlanta’s racial and economic progressiveness and putative status as the “world’s next great city.”

The Management of a Government-Hosted Festival from Stakeholders’ Perspectives: International Manisa Mesir Paste Festival

The purpose of this study is to determine how a local government hosts and manages a large-scale festival from the perspectives of stakeholders, including the organizing committee members, government entities, academics, businesses, tourists, and residents. The study investigates the way International Manisa Mesir Paste Festival (hereafter Mesir Festival) is managed and detects how different entities explain the reasons of the success or failure of the public festival as well as providing recommendations to increase success. The research applies a qualitative method to explore the determinants of the success of this festival organization. In this study, researchers conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders. The findings reveal that public administration is prevalent and dominant in deciding the content and administration of the Mesir Festival. Three significant main themes were determined: shortcomings, benefits or contributions, and recommendations. The results indicate that the festival did not achieve any notable economic, social, or cultural gains, thus, shortcomings of the festival exceed its benefits. This research provides valuable insights into the study of festival management by extending our understandings of government-hosted and managed festivals.

Armelle Faure. Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso.

Reviewed by: Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso by Armelle Faure Marcia Tiede Armelle Faure. Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso. Afterword by Lazare Ki-Zerbo. Bordeaux: Elytis, 2020. 224 pp. $31.45 (paper). ISBN: 978-2356393005. In this sometimes pungent memoir, Armelle Faure traces her experiences as a young ethnologist in the Bissa region of southern Burkina Faso during the turbulent years of the Sankara administration (1983–1987), from which emerged her doctoral dissertation (1990). Her publications have concerned rural land tenure and displacement, oral histories of place, and sustainable/participatory development. They include a contribution to this journal on Mossi-Bissa relations in the nineteenth century (2002). She published a monograph (1996) on the Bissa region before construction of the Bagré dam on the Nakambe (White Volta) river in the early 1990s—a development which hovers in the background of her fieldwork there. Révolution et sorcellerie is the author’s recollections of her seemingly fearless younger self in the presence of an idealistic revolution, which she was eager to witness and support. (She dedicates the book to “all the humanist and romantic utopians who have died with their ideas and their dreams.”1) As a young person of that era, Faure recalls, “I like the idea of revolution. The youth, all the young people of my age, aspire to a collective energy that could permit transcending, acting collectively to transform society” (2020, 42). Despite her ardent sympathies, she was obliged to reckon with the notion of “vous les Blancs” being viewed as “a foreign enemy” (2020, 50). An article written just days after Faure’s return to France and before completion of her dissertation (Faure 1988) provides an enlightening counterpoint to this book. It preserves more of the precariousness of those years, both in navigating the academic channels in Paris, and in finding her way in Burkina Faso on slim resources, when “the mere sight of a piece of bread would cheer me up,” and she was still limited in language and means of transport: “I had not yet found my research topic, persuaded that it would come to me in the field one fine day, perhaps after some calabashes-ful of dolo [millet beer]. Moreover, I had had enough of preserving the state of mind of a Parisian student who was half on holiday and always a stranger. The word went out: I wanted to be part of the village conflicts.” (1988, 10) [End Page 217] Faure had an earlier degree (DEA) in film. In preparation for the Festival panafricain de cinéma (FESPACO) in February 1985, she describes the transformation of Ouagadougou’s most notorious slum into new residential quarters, the Cité de l’an III, in this third year of the revolution. Representatives from Jerry Rawlings’ Ghana would join the festivities, and pop-culture reference was made to “Tom and Jerry, two great revolutionaries changing Africa in the face of history.” She and her fellow film enthusiasts reveled in the ambience of authors and filmmakers such as Wole Soyinka, Souleymane Cissé, and Ousmane Sembène. She noted the number of films portraying confrontations between “the young rural generations, who hope for change and greater freedom, and the village elders, jealous guardians of their privileges” (2020, 93). Faure saw FESPACO as an example of how the charisma of Thomas Sankara was making Burkina Faso a magnet for creative forces and for young people like herself, ready to help bring about change (2020, 92–93). She came to appreciate a central tenet of Sankarisme being to build Burkina Faso up from its own resources—rather than exporting its labor to help build Côte d’Ivoire, as had been the case for generations—and without depending on the Soviet Union or former colonial powers. This was to be a largely voluntary effort, sustained by “effervescence and hope”—strengthened by public festival and spectacle—in order to develop a national culture, with the aim of attracting foreign support and providing more economic possibilities for the Burkinabé people (2020, 104). While visiting with various NGOs at FESPACO, Faure connected with an OXFAM representative, a Bissa woman, and found “a new team with...

FIGHT FOR PUBLIC CATERING: THE ROLE OF THE PROPAGANDA SYSTEM IN CREATING A NEW WAY OF LIFE DURING THE FIRST FIVE-YEAR PLAN

The paper analyses propaganda materials which were published in the periodical press during the first five-year plan period and promoted public catering as an alternative to oldfashioned household routines. The author underlines that the Soviet government treated household routine transformation as a prerequisite to women’s industrial involvement. The Soviet government promoted communal living, popularized communal laundry facilities and public catering system. The promotion and popularization of public catering was intertwined with an anti-alcohol campaign and the promotion of cultured leisure. The author analyzes articles published by the Culture and Routine magazine and provincial newspapers. The author investigates the mechanisms of public consciousness transformation via public festivals and “ours vs. theirs” dichotomy. The analysis of the aforementioned articles shows that propagandists tried to equate women’s oldfashioned household routines with hard everyday labour (cooking, cleaning, laundry, child care). Newspaper articles attempted to persuade readers that having individual kitchens was a waste of living space. Newspaper articles promoted public catering, praised well-functioning public canteens and tea houses and censured mal-functioning ones. However, the author maintains that is difficult to objectively assess the effects of the Soviet propaganda, for the Soviet government soon realised that public catering was economically unprofitable and unfeasible.

We, the disturbing animal: effects of anthropogenic noise in a Brazilian zoo

The negative effects of loud anthropic sounds on non-human health and welfare urges attention. We report here the results of a technical study we conducted attending a Public Prosecutor’s request at Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil. A Civil Inquiry informed against nocive effects of human concentration on captive and free-living animals around the municipal zoo. The zoo is part of a natural protected area that paradoxically was used as a locale for public festivities. We aimed to compare two weekends, one of a traditional Italian event (EV) and another with no event (NE), and check sound level and behavioral changes in a sample of captive animals and in the soundscape. We employed three procedures: (1) Sound Pressure level (SPL) assessment at different localities; (2) Comparative behavior analysis; and (3) Soundscape description. Our results provided cues of how the festivities may be affecting free-living animals in the APA Morro do São Bento and captive ones. Peak SPL exposure was higher in EV in almost all the localities of the zoo; the six monitored individuals (two ocelots, two crassow, the European cervid and the maned-wolf) changed their activity and resting patterns and the soundscape was more diverse and intense in vocal activity than in NE.

“The Walls Have Fallen”

In 2021, June 19 (Juneteenth) became a federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people of African descent in the United States. Prior to Juneteenth gaining official status, January 1 (Emancipation Day) was the de facto national holiday on which African Americans celebrated the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery. From 1863 until the late twentieth century, African Americans throughout the nation celebrated what the black-owned journal The Elevator called “the greatest event in the history of the Colored people of America.” While several scholarly works focus on Emancipation Day celebrations throughout the United States, these studies have largely ignored how black westerners celebrated what was essentially “independence day” for African Americans. This essay examines Emancipation Day celebrations in the African American communities of San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. Emancipation Day celebrations illustrate how black Californians in the state’s largest African American communities used ritualized celebration and public dialogue to construct their new civic identities as free black men and women. Emancipation Day celebrations provided black Californians opportunities to testify to their aspirations as members of the American polity, and to their vision of themselves as upholders of liberty and beacons of freedom in post–Civil War America. Black Californians forthrightly used public commemorations of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to illustrate black community consciousness through the spirit of public festivals and civic celebrations, otherwise known as “public festive culture.” These public rituals did more than celebrate liberty: they legitimated black freedom and citizenship, honored the memory of Abraham Lincoln as God’s servant, and elaborated a political ethos powerful enough to unify African Americans as members of the American polity.

The Re-invention of the Kalends of January in Late Antiquity: A Public Festival Between "Pagans" and Christians

The Re-invention of the Kalends of January in Late Antiquity: A Public Festival Between "Pagans" and Christians

Lampreys in Human Life, Their Cultural and Folklore Importance

This contribution provides summary information on the historical and contemporary significance of lampreys for human life. The unusual to bizarre appearance of lampreys initially posed a problem for zoologists to correctly classify lampreys in the zoological system. In certain places, lampreys are used as bait in sport fishing, and a total of seven species are fished extensively for gastronomic purposes in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. New information about role of lampreys in human gastronomy was obtained by studying historical sources from Central Europe, especially from the region of Bohemia. The first specific cooking recipes have been preserved from the turn of the 15^th and 16^th Centuries. Instructions for cooking lampreys were mentioned by Georg Handsch von Limus, Paulus de Praga, Jan Severin the Younger and Pavel Severin of Kapí mountain. The quality of their meat is excellent, however, the slime and serum are poisonous, so there are known historical data about probable poisoning after their consumption. At present, lampreys are routinely available fresh, fried, smoked, marinated, canned or in vinegar. Lampreys play an important role in the culture and folklore of some nations. For example, lampreys are ecologically and culturally important for the North American Indian tribes of Yurok and Karuk.. The Pacific lamprey is also of spiritual significance for these tribes. The enormous esteem people have for lampreys is also reflected in the various coats of arms, in which the lamprey appears. Cooking skills and traditions are practiced at various public festivals where lampreys are caught and immediately consumed after cooking (e.g., Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain). Lampreys have become an important model group in evolutionary studies of vertebrate development, and due to their remarkable properties, they are also used in biomedical research. Lampreys can be used for long-term bioindication of water environment, but their larvae are not a suitable bioindicator of short-term water quality worsening (see research results from the Czech Republic). Based on the analysis of the lamprey’s specific method of swimming, biologists and engineers created a biomimetic robot with an electronic nervous system that imitated the movement and orientation of lampreys in the water. Nevertheless, there is also an example of the harmful effect of lampreys, namely the parasitic sea lamprey, which causes significant damage to economically important fish in the Great Lakes, requiring a yearly implementation of financially expensive measures to eliminate the lamprey.

Figuras de movimento na tragédia ateniense do século V a.C.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to place dance at the center of the historical analysis of Athenian tragedy of the 5th century BC. To do so, a trajectory is proposed that begins with the culture of performance, passes through the culture of festivals, the dance of the chorus and the teaching of the old drunken satyr, and then reviews the concepts of opsis and psuchagôgia in Aristotle's Poetics. Thus, the objective is to understand how the ritual-civic performance of the ancient Greek actors-singers-dancers, based on the creation of figures of movement, was also an act of evoking souls in the context of a public festivity.

The characteristics, value, and transformation of the calendrical and public festivals of the ethnic Chinese community in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

The characteristics, value, and transformation of the calendrical and public festivals of the ethnic Chinese community in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

Segmenting urban festival visitors’ employing expectation : Comparing between planned and unplanned festivalgoers

Though planned visitors have historically been shown to be attracted to urban public festivals due to their proximity to the area and to the attractions, unplanned visitors have not been investigated in the festival context. This paper attempted market segmentation based on two classifications of previous planning: before visit and expectation of festival experiences. Survey respondents were divided into two groups of unplanned and planned festivalgoers, and factor analysis was employed to identify festivalgoers’ expectation factors of the festival experience. Utilizing a K-means cluster analysis, a total of six segments were obtained. Each group showed a different combination of festival expectation styles. ANOVA results presented distinct demographics between the festivalgoer cluster groups and confirmed different levels of festivalgoers’ satisfaction and inclination to recommend. The results suggest that festival organizers should comprehend the characteristics of their target market and implement appropriate marketing strategies to enhance festivalgoers’ satisfaction and to improve their likelihood to recommend such events.

The festival as constitutional event and as jurisdictional encounter: colonial Victoria and the Independent Order of Black Fellows

ABSTRACT The year 2020 marked the first meeting between an Australian government – the Government of Victoria – and First Nations in a treaty-making process. Given the importance of this, it is timely to recall a moment when another opportunity to meet was missed. That moment was a foundational one for the nascent colonial state: a public festival held in 1850 to celebrate the inauguration of the Colony of Victoria. There are two aspects to this festival that are of interest here. The first is how it was a ‘constitutional’ event involving an act of jurisdiction that gave shape to the lawful authority of the colonists, to the legal subjectivity of Aboriginal peoples, and to legal relations between the Colony and First Nations. The second aspect, implicit in the first, is how the festival was also an ‘international’ meeting, which the colonists failed to attend. As the article shows, these two aspects – the festival as constitutional event and as jurisdictional encounter – are inseparable, the success of the former being integral to the failure of the latter. And it is this failure that the colonial state must still contend with as it begins treaty negotiations almost two centuries later.

All the World on Stage: Performance and Global Knowledge in Early Modern Portuguese Festivals

Public festivals in early modern Portugal, such as royal entry of Philip III into Lisbon in 1619, were one way in which global geography of Portuguese imperial expansion was communicated to a wide audience at home. This article examines representation of non-European peoples in Real tragicomedia del descubrimiento y conquista del Oriente, a play performed for Philip III's entry at Jesuit college in Lisbon. A published account of this theatrical performance, Joao Sardinha Mimoso's Relacion de la real tragicomedia (1620), offers a glimpse of not only play's exoticized representations of the Orient and Brazil, but also of a dark-skinned student-actor who infuses his performance of a Brazilian King with his own African-derived cultural knowledge and traditions. By focusing on Mimoso's references to actor and his performance rather than on foreign land he is supposed to represent, we can consider participation of non-European subjects in production and circulation of global knowledge.

The yuraq haku, or plain mantle: A long tradition of north-central Perú

The haku is a shawl indispensable for depicting the lives of women and men in several districts of the department of Hunuco, in north central Peru. It is used daily in rural tasks and domestic life, and it shines during public festivals as a clear representation of local identity. The skill of the spinners in achieving an exceptionally fine yarn makes the serene beauty of these handsome cloths of a single, even color stand out. Almost transparent, the four-selvage cloth is woven on a backstrap loom of native cotton or of sheep’s wool diverse in hue. The mark of the presence of Spanish obrajes in this region can be observed in tools and practices which, however, do not discard older technological traditions based in ancestral logics. The long history of textile production in the Andes still poses interesting questions. We look more closely to discern aspects of technological knowledge and design. In addition, we examine the significance of practices and functions of contemporary rituality, which provide rich information regarding the modification of socio-cultural contexts. Today, the weaving community is experiencing new demands which give a new life to the mantle, symbolizing their identity to an outside consumer. This contributes to both spiritual and material satisfaction, confirming the space of their cultural values as a fundamental resource.

Obilježja multikulturalizma i sekularizma u indijskom društvu

Obilježja multikulturalizma i sekularizma u indijskom društvu

Venice Carnival from the Middle Ages to the Twenty- First Century

As with other carnivals around the world, the history of the Venetian Carnival sheds light on the complex dialectic between festivity and politics and more particularly on the growing need for political authorities to control the urban environment. This article provides a longue durée approach to carnival in Venice and unpacks the meaning of its successive metamorphoses. During the Middle Ages, Venetians used carnival as a defense strategy for their city, intended to ensure the cohesion of its various neighborhoods around a common destiny. In the fifteenth century, the legacy of public festivals for both rich and poor gave way to a more official celebration, which allowed Venice to outdo its European rivals. The civilized and policed expressions that were elaborated from the Renaissance until the eighteenth century gradually set Venetian Carnival apart from the exuberance and invertibility displayed by rustic carnivals in other parts of Europe. However watered-down and commodified present-day Venetian Carnival may seem, it continues to raise eminently political issues, most of which have to do with the appropriation of public space by private interests and the recreation of traditions for mass consumption.

Carnival against the Capital of Capital

The medieval carnival, according to Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, was a public festivity of excess in which people were free to violate social norms and subvert prevailing authority. Recent analysts have applied Bakhtin’s concept of carnival to contemporary political protests that incorporate a playful, culture-defying element. But the term has been used in multiple and contradictory ways. For Bakhtin, carnival is an expressive pattern pervasive in a culture and has no instrumental purpose (what I call “communal carnival”), while carnivalesque protest consists of specific practices with an explicit political agenda (“intentional carnival”). The Occupy Wall Street movement can be analyzed as both communal and intentional carnival. Protest movements use humor to subvert received doctrines; humorous performances are addressed to participants, the public, and repressive forces. Some critics regard carnivalesque performances as frivolous and demeaning of serious political causes. I conclude by discussing the effect of carnival on the Occupy movement.

The Politics of Commemoration: Britain and D-Day, 1984-1994

Commemorations are about the present more than the past, as they reveal how different groups of people believed historical events should be understood within their own modern context. Both Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and John Major in 1994 were aware of the complicated political implications of British commemorations of D-Day. While Thatcher managed the potential international diplomatic traps that were thrust upon her in 1984, Major’s intentional efforts to use public festivities to boost domestic political support in1994 were far less successful.

Eloquent Plasticity

Abstract This paper explores Namahage of Akita Prefecture as it assumes three different instantiations: 1) enactment as a private ritual within individual households on New Year’s Eve; 2) performance as a public festival at a shrine in mid-February; and 3) celebration as an “element” inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. I argue that in the first instance, Namahage is part of a vernacular religious “structure of feeling” in which religious elements are inseparable from community life; in the second instantiation, religion is more explicit and codified; and in the third iteration, religion is only vaguely articulated. Tracing the “same” tradition through different forms provides insight into the changing needs of communities and into the dynamics of change itself. With this in mind, I propose a model called hrönirism through which to broadly conceptualize notions of change and difference within traditions such as matsuri.