Time out of time: Essays on the festival

Abstract

Festival is an indigenous event in virtually all human cultures. So argues Alessandro Falassi in anthologizing these twenty-five wide-ranging essays aimed at capturing and dissecting the special reality of the festival. Individually, each piece offers a detailed, ethnographic view of one or more such events and the cultural ethos which engendered them. In sum, the collection amounts to a dizzying 'round-the-world tour of festival, zigzagging from Carnival in Rome to Carnaval in Rio; from the rite of female circumcision among the Guer6 of the Ivory Coast to the Nazi of the 1936 Berlin Olympics; from the pilgrimage of the Raab in desert Algeria to the Doo Dah Parade in rosy Pasadena. In their variety alone, the essays provide convincing evidence of the limitlessness of festival, even as they raise concerns about its survival in the emerging global village. In casting such a wide net, Falassi faces the familiar editorial challenge of organizing his diverse materials in a meaningful, or at least coherent, fashion. He divides the book into four parts: 1) Men of Letters and Scientists Reporting from the Scene of the Festival, featuring excerpts from Goethe, Huxley, and Hemingway; 2) Continuity and Change: The Emergence of New Festivals, containing reports on seven attempts to create tradition; 3) Signs and Symbols of the Festival, offering poststructuralist theoretical speculations; and 4) Social Functions and Ritual Meanings of the Festival, presenting another set of reports from the field, this time by less eminent, more academic writers. Falassi's compendious introduction helps to unify the book and will no doubt become a much-used reference in itself. After stipulating a scholarly definition of festival, he enumerates the four cardinal points of festive behavior: rehearsal, intensification, tresspassing, and abstinence. At festive times, Falassi argues, people do something they normally do not; they abstain from something they normally do; they carry to extremes behaviors that are usually regulated by measure; they invert patterns of daily social life. Falassi then sketches a morphology of festival, analogous to Vladimir Propp's work on the folktale. This list of festival's building blocks includes rites of purification, of passage, of reversal, of conspicuous display and consumption, of exchange, and of competition. A framing ritual, such as a parade, often opens and closes a as a way of marking the transition in and out of festival time, an autonomous temporal zone which divides time on its own terms rather than by those of a clockbound world-hence a

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