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If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the "uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive," and The Festive State is an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates "the ideology of tradition," combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Andrew Halsey
reviewed The festive state on June 11, 2008
The festive state
Dear Mr. Amos Tutuola,
When I was a small boy I was told the story of a perfect gentleman who went to a market and returned from it with a girl that followed him. As he went back home, he kept giving back the pieces of him that were borrowed, so that by the time he got to his home, he was only a skull. And the girl deceived by his beauty now only a slave.
Well, Mr. Tatuola, thank you very much for taking me through many indescribable adventures and many incomprehensible mysteries. I enjoyed them well, as a child should. But they reminded me of those days, when I was a small boy. Of the time I got scared when the lamp was taken away, and my fear disappeared when the light was restored. Of when I did not know how to be afraid when there was light, and when there were people around me. Now, I remember those days and I wonder why fear will be here beside me even when the sun shines, and people around me smile. Those days I was only worried about tomorrow if I hadn't talked my homework, because mother would scold me and my teacher would cane me. Mother won't ask me now whether I have done what I have to do, she'll ask me where is the result of what I have done. If I meet her by the road, - my childhood teacher, she'll be looking to see whether I have a suit and a tie, whether my smile says that I have seen and conquered. And my fear may be that she will only wave, and ask what art has done to me. Not what I have done to art.
I want to go back to one of those days, when laughter was laughter and not the superfluous hiding of what lies beneath. When stories genuinely scared or made me genuinely happy, whether the next day I had forgotten them or not. When I knew that tomorrow will come, and apart from its simple fears, it will come and go. When I knew there was a man up there, beyond the infinite skies, that said son, I hold the universe together, in perfection, and if you only believe this, everything will unfold as it should. I want a tiny bit of those days.
And to meet men like you -in person or in the pages of a book, -who will leave a legacy, who craft stories that will once in a while, remind us of what it was to be a child.
For looking beyond your limited self and leaving us this enduring story, may immortality always be your share.
Faithfully,
Reader in crisis, etc.
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