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Anthropology Revisits the Festival
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Saturday 26 November 2011
Festivals and carnivals are significant contemporary phenomena in societies across the world. In many of these contexts, including the UK, the numbers of events calling themselves festivals is growing. They range from expositions of high culture, to large-scale popular music extravaganzas, to religious commemorations or thanksgivings, to neighbourhood celebrations of a migrant presence, to statements of alternative sexuality or national pride. They can make headlines, they can make money, and they can stimulate discussions of identity, politics, art, and more. As sites of cultural practice and experience they are complex, multiple, and dynamic.
Recently, festivals and carnivals have been the focus of considerable attention from policymakers, in the UK and beyond. Recast in the age of instrumental art as agents for social cohesion and neighbourhood economic regeneration, festivals are seen to earn their keep, and merit a slice of increasingly scarce public resources, apparently providing colourful evidence of diversity in the inner-city, alongside quantifiable economic impact.
Academic responses to this recent enthusiasm for all things festival has come largely from the events management and tourism areas, where a new subfield of ‘festival studies’ is rapidly gaining credence. Anthropology has so far failed to provide a substantive alternative. Anthropological approaches to the analysis of festivals are at best seen to be limited to the areas of ritual and cultural tradition, at worst dismissed as historical background.
This workshop is imagined as a dialogue with or response to these partners from other disciplines. It seeks to reinvigorate the anthropological exploration of festivals and carnivals, in the light of their renewed significance in the contemporary world. It recognises the need for engaged critical analysis of festivals as complex social and cultural phenomena, but also as political and economic actors. It aims to being together anthropologists working on festivals around the world from the widest range of perspectives. In particular, but not exclusively, it hopes to develop anthropological thinking on the following topics:
· Festival economies
· Festival methodologies
· Festivals and marginality
· Comparative festival studies
· Festivals, politics and policy
· Theoretical frameworks
Abstracts of not more than 250 words should be sent to Nicola Frost ([log in to unmask]) by 1 August 2011.
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