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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.
 
Registration for this event is free, but places are limited. Please contact Nicola Frost ([log in to unmask]) by 11 November.
 
Provisional Programme




9.15-9.45

Registration and coffee


9.45-10.00

Workshop Overview
Anthropology, Festivals and the World
Nicola Frost, SOAS


10.00-11.30

Theoretical Approaches
Exploring Festivals: Ritual, Play , Identity and Profit
Jeremy Boissevain, University of Amsterdam
 
Festivals, Group Making and Unmaking
João Leal, New University of Lisbon
 
Festivals, Tourism, Social Change
David Picard, New University of Lisbon


11.30-12.00

Coffee


12.00-1.00

Festivals and Cities
The performance of identity: a comparative perspective on three contemporary (folk) festivals in Portugal, Spain and Brazil
Maria Krom, New University of Lisbon
 
A Tale of Two Festivals
Jessica Symons, University of Manchester


1.00-2.00

Lunch


2.00-3.30

Performance, Appropriation and Tradition
Political Appropriation and Cultural Othering in a Heritage Festival
Lokesh Ohri, University of Heidelberg
 
Not all singing and dancing: serving folk festivals and tourism in Padstow
Helen Cornish, Goldsmiths
 
Celebrating Horses, Preserving Equestrian Heritage: Exploring Horse Festivals as an Exercise in Urgent Anthropology
Samantha Hurn, University of Wales Lampeter


3.30-4.00

Tea


4.00-5.30

Power and Resistance
Carnival: ‘The Experiential’ (The significance of the unvoiced experiences)
Réa da Matas, Manchester Metropolitan University
 
Dancing-line: negotiating women’s subjectivity in Trinidad Carnival
Valeria Sterzi, UCL
 
Human Rights Nights Festival in a global/local context: representations of human rights and diversity, advocacy and social justice through films and arts
Giulia Grassilli, SOAS


5.30-6.00

Summary
Mark Graham, Stockholm University
 
This event is presented by the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Food Studies Centre. It is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.
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