Chapter 3 Festivals, Urbanity and the Public Sphere, reflections on European festivals
DOI: 10.23912/978-1-910158-15-9-2653 | ISBN: 978-1-910158-15-9 |
Published: January 2015 | Component type: chapter |
Published in: Focus On Festivals | Parent DOI: 10.23912/978-1-910158-15-9-2599 |
Abstract
“What is a festival?†is a deceptively simple question – but also a deceptively complex one. This is reflected by much of the literature on festivals, in which discussion of their multiplicity and heterogeneity, their complex etymologies and histories, as well as the expansion in the second half of the 20th century, and exponentially since the 1980s in Europe, has seen festivals transformed into one of the dominant formats in the current cultural realm. However, beneath the apparent multiplicity, one major feature helps to clarify the issues at stake when considering their cultural significance: festivals tend to be either “‘traditional’ moments of celebration or... highly orchestrated mega-events†(Waitt, 2008: 513). The first are supposed to be the organic expression of a community; the second, which we may call post-traditional (Giorgi and Sassatelli, 2011: 1-11), are instead mostly associated with the contemporary culture industry and its rationales, their recent exponential growth seen as proof that we are faced by a non-organic, commercially driven phenomenon. The distinction is relevant because, whilst traditional festivals have been studied, in particular within anthropology and folklore studies, as expressions of a given society and an entry point into its culture, values and identity, post-traditional festivals have been dismissed by some writers as banal, and banalizing ‘spectacles’ (Debord, 1994). Different approaches and literatures contribute to deepen this gulf, with contemporary festivals on the whole dismissed by mainstream social science and cultural theory and assessed in terms of their (economic) impact only. In this chapter, after a brief review of the dominant approach in urban festivals research, I try to uncouple these associations. That is, to explore the possibility that contemporary festivals, as expressions of the contemporary society in which they flourish, can provide a valuable analytical perspective on its public culture.
Sample content
Contributors
- Monica Sassatelli (Author)
For the source title:
- Chris Newbold, De Montfort University (Editor)
- Christopher Maughan, Freelance writer (Editor)
- Jennie Jordan, De Montfort University (Editor)
- Franco Bianchini, Leeds Beckett University (Editor)
Cite as
Sassatelli, 2015
Sassatelli, M. (2015) "Chapter 3 Festivals, Urbanity and the Public Sphere, reflections on European festivals" In: Newbold, C., Maughan, C., Jordan, J. & Bianchini, F. (ed) . Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers http://dx.doi.org/10.23912/978-1-910158-15-9-2653
Save, bookmark or recommend
 Save on Mendeley |  Share on Twitter |  Share on LinkedIn |  Share on Facebook |
References
Allen, K. and Shaw, P. (2000) Festivals mean Business. The shape of arts festivals in the UK, London: British Arts Festivals Association.
Azara, I. and Crouch, D. (2006) La cavalcata sarda: performing identities in a contemporary Sardinian festival, in D. Picard and M. Robinson (eds) Festivals, Tourism and Social Change, Clevedon: Channel View.
https://doi.org/10.21832/9781845410490-004
Bailey, C., Miles, S. and Stark, P. (2004) Culture-led urban regeneration and the revitalization of identities in Newcastle, Gateshead and the North East of England, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10 (1): 47-65.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1028663042000212328
Bonnemaison, S. (1990) City politics and cyclical events, Design Quarterly - Celebrations: Urban Spaces Transformed, 147, 24-32.
https://doi.org/10.2307/4091218
Bruce, G. (1975) Festivals in the North: Story of the Edinburgh Festival, London: Hale
Calhoun, C. (ed.) (1992) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Costa, X. (2002) Festive traditions in modernity: the public sphere of the Festival of the 'Fallas' in Valencia, Sociological Review, 50 (4): 482-504.
https://doi.org/10.1177/003802610205000402
Crespi-Valbona, M.,and Richards, G. (2007) The meaning of cultural festivals. Stakeholder perspectives in Catalunya, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 13 (1): 103-122.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10286630701201830
De Bres, K. and Davis, J. (2001) Celebrating group and place identity: a case study of a new regional festival, Tourism Geographies, 3 (3): 326-337.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616680110055439
Debord, G. (1994) The Society of the Spectacle, New York : Nicholson-Smith Zone Books. Durkheim, E. (1912 [1954]) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Glencoe: Free Press.
Evans, G. (2001) Cultural Planning: an Urban Renaissance, London: Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203459744
Falassi, A. (1987) Festival: definition and morphology, in A. Falassi (ed.) Time out of time: essays on the Festival, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Finkel, R. (2004) McFestivalisation? The Role of Combined Arts Festivals in the UK Cultural Economy. in Journeys of Expression Conference, published in Conference Proceedings, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, CD-ROM.
Giorgi, L. and Sassatelli, M. (2011) Introduction, in L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli and G. Delanty (eds) Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, London: Routledge, pp. 1-11.
Gold, J. R. and Gold, M. M. (2004) Cities of Culture: Staging International festivals and the Urban Agenda, 1851-2000, London: Ashgate.
Gotham, K F. (2005) Theorizing urban spectacle: festivals, tourism and the transformation of urban space, City, 9 (2): 225-242.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810500197020
Habermas, J. (1962 [1989]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere - An inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1992) Further reflections on the public sphere, in C. Calhoun (ed.) (1992) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 421-461.
Jones. P. (2007) Cultural sociology and an aesthetic public sphere, Cultural Sociology, 1(1) 73-95.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975507073921
Hauptfleisch, T. et al. (eds.) (2007) Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Iordanova, D. (ed.) (2009) Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies.
Iordanova, D. and Torchin, L. (eds.) (2012) Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism, St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies.
Jamieson, K. (2004) Edinburgh: the Festival gaze and its boundaries, Space and Culture, 7(1): 64-75.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331203256853
McGuigan, J. (2005) The cultural public sphere, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(4), 427-443.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549405057827
McGuigan, J. (2011) The cultural public sphere - A critical measure of public culture?, in L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli and G. Delanty (eds), Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, London: Routledge, pp. 79-91
Maughan, C. and Bianchini, F. (2003) Festivals and the Creative Region, Leicester: De Montfort University/Arts Council England.
Moffat, A. (1978) The Edinburgh Fringe, London: Johnston and Bacon
PAYE (Performing Arts Yearbook for Europe). (2008) Manchester: Impromptu Publishing.
Piette, A. (1992) Play, reality and fiction. Toward a theoretical and methodological approach to the festival framework, Qualitative Sociology, 15 (1): 37-52.
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00989712
Quinn, B. (2003) Symbols, practices and myth-making: cultural perspectives on the Wexford Festival Opera, Tourism Geographies, 5 (3): 329-349.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616680309710
Quinn, B. (2005a) Arts festivals and the city, Urban Studies, 42 (5/6): 927-43.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500107250
Quinn, B. (2005b) Changing festival places: insights from Galway, Social and Cultural Geography, 6 (2): 237-252.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500074667
Richards, G. and Wilson, J. (2004) The impact of cultural events on city image: Rotterdam, Cultural Capital of Europe 2001, Urban Studies, 41 (10): 1931-1951.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098042000256323
Roche, M. (2000) Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture, New York: Routledge.
Rolfe, H. (1992) Arts Festivals in the UK, London: Policy Studies Institute.
Rowe, D. and Stevenson, D. (1994) Provincial paradise: urban tourism and city imaging outside the metropolis, Journal of Sociology, 30 (2): 178-193.
https://doi.org/10.1177/144078339403000206
Schuster, J. M. (1995) Two urban festivals: La Mercè and Fir st Night, Planning Practice and Research, 10(2): 173-87.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459550036694
Stevenson, D. (2003) Cities and Urban Cultures, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Turner, V. (1982) Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Vogel, S. (2011) Biennials, Art on a Global Scale, Vienna: Springer.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0251-0
Waitt, G. (2008) Urban festivals; Geographies of hype, helplessness and hope, Geography Compass, 2 (2): 513-537.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00089.x
Waterman, S. (1998) Carnivals for elites? The cultural politics of arts festivals, Progress in Human Geography, 22 (1): 55-74.
https://doi.org/10.1191/030913298672233886
Willems-Braun, B. (1994) Situating cultural politics: fringe festivals and the production of spaces of intersubjectivity, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space ,12 (1): 75-104.
https://doi.org/10.1068/d120075