OPINION ARTICLES

Festivals or rituals?
Festival politics, religiosity and sociability,
or
The importance of the court jester.

Part IX – Rites and Rituals. Religion.

Festivals are made up of ritual acts, rites, since they take place in an exceptional framework of time and space, and their meaning is considered to go beyond literal and explicit aspects, examples of which are the framing ritual (or rite of opening, valorization, sacralization; which modifies the usual function and meaning of time and space, which introduces the concept of “time out of time” – a spatial temporal dimension devoted to special activities), rites of purification or safeguard, rites of passage, rites of reversal, rites of conspicuous display, rites of conspicuous consumption, ritual dramas, rituals of exchange, rites of competition, and rites of devalorization, although real-life events will not feature all of the listed component rituals.

Ritual (sacred) and festival (secular) are distinct. They have distinctive characteristics and opposite symbolic meanings, even though they both take place at highly charged moments in the life of the community.

Ritual arises from shared apprehensions in the face of individual and social changes; designed to deal with them, it gives names and boundaries to transitions and transformations; it underlines continuity and confirmation; it reinforces the harmony of society and intensifies authority; it is truly – an occasion whose transformations and consequences affect everyday life; it re-enacts, to some extent, the way the natural and social worlds are together; it takes the energy already accumulated in the social fabric and reinforces it regularly. Rituals are processes that “heal” a society around moments of “life crisis”.

The festival, on the other hand, goes against customary confirmation and pacification, with subversive disorder and dramatic juxtaposition; it questions authority and challenges social harmony; it’s for fun – it shouldn’t be taken seriously: its consequences should only affect the world of make-believe; it takes its meaning precisely from the opposition to everyday life and the working day, which it represents with symbolic inversion and the topsy-turvy in a game of distorting mirrors; it provides its own explosive energy and tears it to pieces periodically.

However, festivals and rites still seem to be part of the same human impulse to intensify time and space, and to reveal mysteries. While rituals alone are involved with developing our individual sense of the authoritative, both rituals and festivals enter into the process of self-authentication. In rituals, the transformations put into practice are responsible for maintaining the flow of life, while festivals generally operate in a way that confronts and compounds cultural norms, and therefore operates in a way antagonistic to costumary ritual confirmation. In ritual, the work of the gods is truly being carried out, inasmuch as personal and social transformations are made possible by being re-enacted according to the gods’ example, with motives of serious purpose, the formal and the ceremonial, in other words, highly sequenced, appearing at points of transition, even in the face of a crisis. Unlike festivals, which emerge in open areas of life, rituals emerge in impacted zones.

“[In] festivals, the transformations are for fun, to be maintained only within the special world. With rituals, transformations, if they occur, are carried into the everyday. Thus the power of the transforming performer is quite different in the two, for in ritual the role tends to be an intensification (or perhaps a reauthorization) of an everyday role, while in festival, the transforming figures tend to be clowns or magicians, performers not to be taken seriously.” (Abrahams, 1987, p.179)

Festivals must provide their own source of energy in the following ways:
– through enforced confrontation;
– by role play, involving dressing up or dressing in rags;
– by making a lot of unusual noise and large-scale movement, including singing and dancing;
– by engineering arguments and developing heightened contests and notions of chance taking;
– and by invoking the spirit of nonsense and the topsy-turvy.

Three phases are distinguished in a rite of passage: separation, transition and incorporation. The first phase is separation, the phase which clearly demarcates sacred space and time from profane or secular space and time. It must also be a rite that modifies the quality of time, or constructs a cultural realm that is defined as “out of time”, that is, beyond or outside the time which measures secular processes and routines. It includes symbolic behavior – especially symbols of reversal or inversion of secular things, relationships and processes – which represents the distancing of the ritual subjects (novices, candidates, neophytes or “initiands”) from their previous social statuses. During the intervening phase of the transition, ‘margin’ or ‘limen’ (meaning “threshold” in Latin), the ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo which has few (though sometimes these are more crucial) of the attributes of either the preceding or subsequent profane social statuses or cultural states. The third phase, of ‘re-aggregation’ or ‘incorporation’, includes symbolic phenomena and actions which represent the return of the subjects to their new, relatively stable, well-defined position in the total society.

A quality of cultural “flow” is associated with pre-industrial revolution rituals, later giving way to individualism and rationalism that pushed the experience of flow into art, sport and games, among others.

There are also anthropological approaches that codify ritual as an aspect of theater. Theatrical performances and dance are often connected to a given event and are particularly useful for teaching people religious, historical and moral values. As for Western religious and spiritual traditions, protective and healing forces can be evoked through theater and dance at festival events and are also used to confirm and acknowledge the existence of an intangible place between this and other worlds.

Festival culture should be seen in a contextual light, where even invisible receivers and spiritual artists are taken seriously. Transformation can be aided by carefully designed ceremonies that orchestrate the three stages of ritual passage. Entire communities can conspire towards transformation through public celebration, as it was understood by ancient civilizations, in resonance with cosmic and natural forces.

Bibliography:

ABRAHAMS, Roger D. (1987) “An American Vocabulary of Celebrations”, In Alessandro Falassi (ed.) Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp.173-183.

ADDO, Ping-Ann (2009) “Anthropology, Festival, and Spectacle”, Reviews in Anthropology, 38:3, pp.217-236.

FALASSI, Alessandro (1987) “Festival: Definition and Morphology”, In Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp.1-10.

HASTINGS, Kathy A. (2015) Communitas, Civitas, Humanitas: The Art of Creating Authentic Sense of Community and Spirit of Place, Tese de Doutoramento: Holos University.

NYGREN, Christina (2007) “Festivals in Religious or Spiritual Contexts: Examples from Japan, China, India and Bangladesh”, In Hauptfleisch, Temple et al. (eds.) Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, Amesterdão – Nova Iorque: Rodopi, pp.261-280.

TURNER, Victor (1974) Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: an Essay in Comparative Symbology, Rice Institute Pamphlet-Rice University Studies, 60:3, pp.53-92.

Authorship: João Carvalho [1].

Based on the project work “Business plan. Cosmic Festival. Transformational Festival”, authored by João Carvalho, under the supervision of Specialist Professor Victor Afonso and co-supervision of PhD Professor Nuno Gustavo, for completion of the Master’s Degree in Tourism, with a specialisation in Strategic Event Management, at the Estoril Higher Institute for Hospitality and Tourism Studies. Presented and defended on December 27th, 2019.

May, 2020.

[1] Master’s Degree in Tourism, with specialisation in Strategic Event Management, by Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies; Beach Break®.