Festival Cultures: Mapping New Fields in the Arts and Social Sciences 3030883914, 9783030883911

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Festival Cultures Mapping New Fields in the Arts and Social Sciences Edited by Maria Nita Jeremy H. Kidwell

Festival Cultures

Maria Nita  •  Jeremy H. Kidwell Editors

Festival Cultures Mapping New Fields in the Arts and Social Sciences

Editors Maria Nita The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

Jeremy H. Kidwell University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-88391-1    ISBN 978-3-030-88392-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Editors’ Introduction  1 Maria Nita and Jeremy H. Kidwell 2 The Naturalization of the Alternatives in 1970s Britain Through a 2020 XR Lens 15 Maria Nita 3 The Case for a Free Festival (1969–1974) Hippy Culture and Pop Festivals 45 Sharif Gemie 4 “Come, Look and Hear How the Past Has Been and the Future Will Be!” Festival Culture and Neo-Nationalism in Hungary 65 István Povedák 5 Burning Man in Europe: Burns, Culture and Transformation 87 Botond Vitos, Graham St John, and François Gauthier 6 Ritualized Art: Cultural Innovation and Greening at Festivals and Protestivals115 Zsófia Szonja Illés and Maria Nita

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Contents

7 Festivals: Monument Making, Mythologies and Memory141 Barbara Brayshay and Jacqui Mulville 8 Sherpagate: Tourists and Cultural Drama at Burning Man169 Graham St John 9 Festival Co-Creation and Transformation: The Case of Tribal Gathering in Panama195 Leonore van den Ende 10 The Renewal of Festive Traditions in Mallorca: Ludic Empowerment and Cultural Transgressions227 Pau Obrador, Antoni Vives-Riera, and Marcel Pich-Esteve  orrection to: Burning Man in Europe: Burns, C Culture and Transformation C1 Botond Vitos, Graham St John, and François Gauthier Index249

Notes on Contributors

Barbara Brayshay, PhD,  is Director of Livingmaps Network, a network of researchers, artists and activists using participatory counter-mapping to drive social change, and a member of Guerilla Archaeology, an outreach initiative based at the University of Cardiff, delivering creative events and research into the cultural significance of UK music festivals. François Gauthier, PhD,  is a professor in the Social Sciences Department of the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland. His research interests and fieldwork include ‘new spiritualities’, subcultures and the Burning Man festival. He is the author of Religion, Modernity, Globalisation: NationState to Market (2020), and has co-edited the Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society (2021). Sharif Gemie, PhD,  is a happily retired History professor. He has written eight books and countless academic articles. The main topics of his research were marginalized and minority groups in modern Europe. Zsófia Szonja Illés  is a multidisciplinary artist and designer with a socially engaged practice. She is a lecturer on Landscape Democracy at the LED2LEAP Living Labs and a collaborating artist at the Centre of Contemporary Art: Glasgow as part of their ‘School for Civic Imagination’ public engagement programme. Her practice-led research looks at creating accessible and democratic engagement processes and toolkits for land research, in order to mobilize alternative voices and experiences of the landscape.

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Jeremy H. Kidwell, PhD,  is an interdisciplinary scholar, trained in ethics and constructive theology, with a background in the humanities, particularly literature and music. His current research includes an ethnographic investigation of the Extinction Rebellion movement. Jacqui Mulville, PhD,  has experience in professional, field and academic archaeology. She created Guerilla Archaeology to share her passion for the past with the public, and combines her specialist knowledge of archaeology with her love of the creative arts in festival outreach. She founded the Cardiff University Festivals Research Group. Maria Nita, PhD,  is a lecturer in Religious Studies, in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The Open University. Her research interests encompass cultural theoretical approaches to religion and climate activism, with a particular focus on rituals and protest actions. Pau Obrador, PhD,  is a senior lecturer in tourism and events management at Northumbria University. Pau’s research interests lie at the intersection of tourism, place, culture, body and management. He has published on mass tourism, the beach, dwelling-in-mobilities, family tourism, place identities and cultural festivals and critical pedagogy. Marcel  Pich-Esteve  is a cultural anthropologist. His research interests are in the cultural politics of traditional festivals. He has published a monograph on recently invented festive traditions in Mallorca. He was a visiting researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales of Bolivia, working on mobility issues. István Povedák, PhD,  is a researcher in the Re-Enchantment of Central-­ Eastern Europe Research Group of Charles University, Prague, and an associate professor at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest. He has an MA in European Ethnology, History and Religious Studies (University of Szeged) and a PhD in Folklore and Cultural Anthropology (ELTE, Budapest). He has published books and articles on modern mythologies, celebrity culture, conspiracy theories, UFO culture, religious neo-nationalism, ethnic paganism and Romani culture. Povedák is the president of the Hungarian Cultural Anthropology Association. Graham St John, PhD,  is a cultural anthropologist and current recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship forthcoming at the University of Huddersfield (Event Horizon: An Audiography of Transformation). Among his nine books is an intellectual biography of

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Terence McKenna (forthcoming). Graham is Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. His website is: edgecentral.net. Leonore van den Ende, PhD,  is an assistant professor in the Department of Organization Sciences at the VU University of Amsterdam. She is an organization anthropologist conducting qualitative-ethnographic research on rituals, festivals, events and projects as temporary organizational forms, with a theoretical focus on co-creation, ritualization and transformation. Botond  Vitos, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist who was recently involved in the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) project ‘Burning Progeny: The European Efflorescence of Burning Man’ at the Université de Fribourg. His research interests include event-cultures, popular music studies, electronic dance music culture and the mediations of aesthetic experiences. He is part of the editorial team at Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. Antoni Vives-Riera, PhD,  is an associate professor of contemporary history at the University of Barcelona. His research interests focus on the historical construction of national and regional identities and their everyday reproduction through tourist practice. He is also interested in the production of local identities through festive rituals.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6

XR Red Brigade Supporting Youth Strike 4 Climate 20 September 2019, Bath, UK Die-in, XR, Bristol 2019, UK Busy festival marketplace Shaman drum for sale at MOGY festival ‘Kézikönyv városból menekülőknek’/‘Handbook for Refugees from Cities’ Holy tent at MOGY festival Parade in traditional dress at MOGY festival Healers and festival goers in a healing tent Burning Man’s Global Regional Network (Courtesy of Burning Man and Google Maps) Word Cloud (S1 and S2 Aggregate): “Motivations to Participate in European Events” Intergalactic Arbeitsamt. (Photo by Botond Vitos) Erecting the Tripod. (Photo by Botond Vitos) Green Christian altar, Annual Retreat, 2010 Green Christians praying through painting, Annual Retreat, 2012 ‘Locked up’ Greenbelt Festival Art, 2018 XR activists raising awareness about Carbon and pollution, in Bath and Bristol, UK, 2019 Lengyeltóti ‘Youth Building Camp’, Hungary, 1974, Courtesy of Tamás Urbán/ Fortepan ‘Tea Totem’ installation, Hello Wood festival, 2015 (with Moomoo Architects)

40 41 72 73 74 76 77 80 92 95 103 106 118 119 120 121 123 126

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10 Fig. 6.11 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3

The performative ‘Carnival Table’ installation, Hello Wood, 2019 (with architects Lemonot and Space Saloon) 128 ‘Fire Table’ installation, 2017 (with AU Workshop and Simon Platter)129 ‘Forest’ installation, Platan Gallery, 2016 (with Moomoo Architects)130 ‘Bees/Wax’ performance lecture and soirée, Design Week Budapest, 2018 (with AU Workshop) 132 ‘Smoke’ installation, Taste Modern Gallery, 2016 (with AU Workshop) 133 The Swan Circle Glastonbury Festival 2017 148 The Swan Circle—Archaeological Site Plan 154 Swan Circle drone survey (Ariel Cam 2017) 155 XR Human sculpture at the Swan Circle 2019. (Photo by Andre Pattenden) 161 Aztec dance ceremony (Photo: Leonore van den Ende (2020)) 208 Volunteer booth. (Photo: Leonore van den Ende (2020)) 212 Attendees building a wall during a permaculture workshop. (Photo: Leonore van den Ende (2020)) 214 Invitation leaflet to a meeting for uniting the tribes 217 A large straw bale in l’Embalat, the Threshing Festival in Sencelles. (Photo: Marcel Pich) 232 The symbolic burial of a chicken in El Cosso in Felanitx. (Photo: Marcel Pich) 233 Much entering the village square in La Mucada in Sineu. (Photo: Marcel Pich) 240

CHAPTER 1

Editors’ Introduction Maria Nita and Jeremy H. Kidwell

Although we still find ourselves in ‘Corona limbo’ as we conclude this introduction in May 2021, not entirely sure if art and performance festivals will fully recover, or the new hybrid blended, face-to-face and virtual, forms they will take, after the 2020–2021 lockdowns, the pause button hit by Covid-19 makes it possible for us to look at the last half-century of modern arts and performance festivals and take stock of this phenomenon. Modern festivals, by which we mean the arts and performance festivals that started in the 1960s, are intricately connected to the new forms of global pilgrimage that had emerged with the hippie trail a decade earlier (Gemie and Ireland 2017; Nita and Gemie 2020). As new global cultural forms of travel, dwelling and festivity, festivals have transformed contemporary cultures, representing the most important type of cultural event of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With huge festivals like Burning Man spreading outside of their fields—or in this case an

M. Nita (*) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. H. Kidwell University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_1

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enormous playa—and taking root across the globe—through offspring festivals and new social media festival communities, it appears that festivals have already moved on from their original festival-pilgrimage model, to novel cultural forms. Rooted in the more territorialised 1960s communes and intentional communities, festivals are becoming new communal forms of communication and organisation, where people experiment with different models of communication, during workshops, retreats and, increasingly post-Covid, online groups. Present-day festivals are no longer just annual events rooted in place like Glastonbury Festival, they are new global forms of social organisation that are transforming local cultures, being part of both local and global economies and politics Bowman (2009; 2016), Nita (2017), Szmigin et al. (2017). This volume brings together scholarship from Anthropology, Cultural Geography, Archaeology, Religious Studies, History and Contemporary Art, aiming to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and bring together new research perspectives in the study of contemporary festival cultures. Despite a growing scholarship concerned with festival research, the academic sectors engaged with this growing field, such as tourism and events studies or music and performance studies, have not yet managed to cross over and forge a transdisciplinary field, although such a new area of study is understood as important from all sides (see Mair and Weber 2019). Furthermore, although recent approaches propose that we should study festivals within a specialised field (Giorgi et al. 2011), in relation to issues intersecting community, communication and politics, the inter-­discursivity of these events and their post-1960s diachronic development in the context of growing globalisation is not sufficiently stressed. Ultimately, this volume shows that by studying festival cultures, we can start to study the vicinities and intersections within our respective disciplinary boundaries, as we engage with contemporary cultures. Festivals have been seen in recent times as forms of contemporary spirituality or ‘spiritual tourism’ (Norman 2011), or even as ‘post-secular tourism’, whereby in the absence of both faith and religious authority festivals and pilgrimages are constructed by the experiences of ‘post-secular tourists’ (Nilsson and Tesfahuney 2016). We are not so much concerned in this volume with defining what festivals are, or with differentiating them from other cultural forms—we are particularly interested in advancing a diachronic, historical and geo-political perspective for examining the cultural processes involved in modern festival cultures. In our contemporary glocal cultures, modern festivals, their satellites and progenies—pilgrimages, retreats, conferences, protestivals, art workshops—and growing

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forms of online gatherings, post Covid 19—facilitate dynamic cultural exchanges between ‘cultures in motion’ (Coleman and Eade 2004) engaged in processes of (re-)negotiation of twenty-first-century global identities. The cultural impact of these new forms of communal dwelling needs to be examined against the backdrop of other current trends that are impacting ethno-religious identities, which, at least in a Western European context, are understood to move towards secularisation, individualisation and pluralisation (Müller 2012). The chapters we have gathered here show that contemporary festivals—Burning Man and contemporary Burner culture in Europe—need to be seen in a historical perspective as ‘festival cultures’, since they were formed, shaped or at the very least hybridised by the transatlantic counter-culture of the 1960s, and thus they can provide a north pole for a study of culture in our contemporary society, or a means of cultural mapping. An overarching question about modern festivals posed by this volume is whether modern festivals are sites for the liberal, rational, self-expressive values which Ronald Inglehart et  al. (see Inglehart 1977; WVS 2019) claim to represent postmaterial values, like universalism and environmentalism. Are these sites for self-expression hubs of departure from preceding traditional and survival-oriented values? The chapters in this volume show that whilst festivals can certainly be sites where values are ‘at play’, these conflicting value axes are far more curbed and complex inside the festival field. Thus, festivals appear to create sites of convergence for both local and global, nationalism and universalism, secular and religious, self-­ expression and survival, individualism and communalism. Modern festivals themselves have created new global identities and contributed to a change and transformation of the very notion of locality, by creating new urban—rural dynamics. Thus, Burning Man festivalgoers in the Nevada desert have become global ‘burners’, whilst the town of Glastonbury has become the ‘heart chakra’ of the world (Bowman 2005). Yet, whilst Glastonbury remains a local town, Glastonbury Festival is a yearly hub that connects it to a web of networks, beyond its expected organic links and routes. Pilton village does not just become a city overnight and then goes back to being a village, but in fact it must be expected that this exposure to a global network and an urban environment would disrupt important cultural boundaries. This yearly fracturing of the norm creates an interruption in local rural identities and at the same time gives the festivalgoers a special ephemeral local identity, as they become part of the Glastonbury scene.

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Festivals, Globalisation, Tradition and Change The notion of festivals as cultural laboratories is particularly important when considering their role in cultural innovation and value change in the context of important contemporary global challenges (Nita, 2016, 2017, 2018). Ecocritics have long urged ‘a re-imagining’ of humans’ relationships with other species and an engagement of the ‘sociological imagination’ with the climate crisis (Norgaard 2018). It is this task—of enabling new ecological understanding—which is understood as a key ingredient in addressing our ecological crisis. Kari Marie Norgaard (2018) argues that the social sciences need to provide a better understanding of this crisis, not only by reflecting on how society is responding or not responding to it, but also by deploying the ‘sociological imagination’ to reflect on how humans might be able to respond. Festivals have been sites for countercultural experiments with deep ecology for over five decades, the green futures fields at Glastonbury Festival being perhaps a fitting epitome of this. Festivals’ proliferation after 1960s, although complex, is recognised by scholarship as relating ‘to a response from communities seeking to re-­ assert their identities in the face of a feeling of cultural dislocation brought about by rapid structural change, social mobility and globalisation processes’ (Picard and Robinson 2006, 2). Globalisation is of course an important factor in the growth of festival cultures, but we need to consider a full spectrum of responses to globalisation processes. Festivals can indeed help communities re-assert their identities, but they can also help dissolve local identities, by building temporary global communities. They can respond to local and global political, economic and environmental changes. And they do not do this with ‘one voice’, but naturally within their own dominant and marginal discourses. Moreover, in tandem with increased globalisation, the post-1960s era of late modernity or postmodernity was marked by important technological, cultural, social and environmental changes, most importantly the environmental and societal effects of anthropogenic climate change. Modern festivals have to be considered in conjunction with these developments. Hence the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert is seen by some scholars as an experiment in community resilience in response to climate change, whereby the arid climate of the desert represents a projection of the future of mankind (Pike 2005, 247). Thus we need to investigate festivals against the backdrop of significant global trends, such as the decline of institutionalised religious traditions as well as political, economic and socio-cultural and

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environmental changes. This in turn can shine a light on the role of festivals in the development and transmission of tradition/s on one hand and the roles festivals play in showcasing innovation and experimentation with cultural change on the other. Many scholars have argued that increased mobility and globalisation in our contemporary world is impacting the established channels for cultural transmission, thus leading to increased secularisation and a loss of traditional cultural values (Voas 2005; Bruce 2002). Others have shown that the transmission of religious and other cultural elements may continue despite decline or disruptions in such institutions as the church, communities of place and the traditional family (Davies 1994). At the same time, we increasingly live in a world dominated by change, uncertainty and risk, and scholars have recognised that the implications of living with unprecedented global risk in a detraditionalised society involve the development of new types of subversive social movements (Macnaughton and Urry 1998, 70). Festivals appear to have developed in this context and against such global trends, yet during the past five decades they have themselves changed significantly, with some public and academic voices deploring their descent into an increasingly corporate ethos (Flinn and Frew 2014). An important contribution our book is making to the field is the attention the authors have given to the treatment of traditional cultural practices, suggesting a role for festivals as acculturative hubs, assisting society to make sense of change. Whilst it is tempting to see modern festivals as either acculturative hubs or laboratories for cultural change, the chapters in this volume clearly show that festivals have a complex relationship with tradition, cultural change and cultural innovation, whereby they can act as sites of both commemoration and re-imagining of the past, whilst experimenting with new alternative futures, and do so on a wide dystopian vs. utopian spectrum of possibilities. In the West, festivals enabled syncretic cultural processes that allowed for the integration of countercultural values and discourses into the more mainstream social landscape (Nita and Gemie 2020). In Britain an acceptance of the hippies’ countercultural lifestyles and identities was aided by the Christian clergy, who were able to recognise the Christian roots and values of the counterculture (ibid.). For Nita, who grew up in the 1980s in communist Romania, in Eastern Europe, the equivalent of modern festivals were Ceausescu’s Homage Shows—large-scale festivities that included art and performance in a carefully orchestrated spectacle, which became equivalent to ‘the Ceausescu’ personality cult. The Shows were

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engaged in constructing a microcosmos of an ‘ideal’ Romanian society, with farmers, factory workers, historical figures and school children coming together to be paraded on huge stages. The Shows constructed a Romanian nationalistic culture, by excluding minorities and countercultural tendencies. For example, such groups as the Roma and the Tatar people in Romania—two ethnic groups with distinct cultural roots—were never showcased in the historical and cultural parade of Romanian nationalism during the Homage Shows. Moreover, Roma celebrations and festivities were seen as disruptive, destructive or simply offensive in everyday Romanian discourse. For example, the word ‘tiganie’—in Romanian meaning anything from a dirty affair to a chaotic event—is etymologically derived from the word ‘tigan’—‘gypsy’ in Romanian. Like the early hippies, the Roma were demonised and vilified, yet unlike the Christian clergy in Britain, in the case of the British hippies the Romanian Orthodox church did not stand for Roma rights—at least not in any collective and outspoken way. Festivals are therefore sites where individual and community identities, rights and relationships, can be negotiated, contested, invented, ignored or excluded. The book’s nine chapters bring together different interdisciplinary perspectives, and methodological and theoretical approaches from History, Religious Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, and Contemporary Art. These perspectives demonstrate that such a rich cross-section of the festival studies field is not only possible, but very much needed and that a new transdisciplinary field of studies looking at Festival Cultures can help us make sense of wider global developments. Among all these perspectives, a diachronic outlook is evident, whether we are looking at historical or contemporary developments, or both. We cannot understand how cultural elements settle on old terrains unless we look at that landscape and its sediment. In this diachronic and transdisciplinary perspective, we can more clearly see how festivals, as global forms, are collectively assembling an inter-discursivity which can provide a lens through which personal narratives from festivalgoers or festival organisers can be framed and understood. In Chap. 2, Nita looks at the connections between the free festival culture in 1970s Britain, and the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protestivals of the last couple of years (2018–2020). This chapter attempts to trace the relationships between a process of ‘naturalisation’ of the hippie culture in the 1970s and the ways in which the Extinction Rebellion movement is understood in the public sphere. Whilst festivals offered a main window into the hippies and alternative lifestyles in 1970s Britain, their public

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image was shaped by some key groups that had various degrees of influence in largely integrating or naturalising the hippies. Nita talks here about the liberal and conservative broadsheet and tabloid media, the Christian clergy, and the public officials who spoke about or on behalf of the hippies. Certainly, the echo of the vilifying voices still resounds, and my chapter discusses how these anti-hippie discourses were revived with Extinction Rebellion’s arrival on the public stage. What is notable is XR’s more mainstream outreach, which suggests that the alternative—mainstream boundary of the 1970s has morphed into a liberal/conservative value schism. Nita examines in her chapter the processes of ‘naturalisation’ of the alternatives in British culture, by which she means ‘the negotiations of their status, rights and identities in relation to broader cultural forms and values’. Nita discusses festivals as one mode of alternative dwelling, alongside other alternative living arrangements, such as hippies living in remote country areas (off-grid), which become windows into their intentional countercultural lifestyles. It is in the context of these alternative dwellings, Nita argues, that both alternatives and their supporters depict, present and demonstrate the semiotic equivalence between new postmaterial values and Christian values. In Chap. 3, Sharif Gemie continues this historical outlook, and investigates the relationships between hippie culture and modern festival culture, as he argues that the hippie culture defined what a pop festival ought to be in the early 1970s. Gemie considers here the biggest pop festival in British history: the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970, which he claims became the ‘anti-model’ for counter-cultural activists. The reaction to Isle of Wight 1970 was evident in the free festivals that followed, Glastonbury 1971 and Windsor 1972–1974. Gemie brings to light personal accounts from festivalgoers and festival organisers, attendees and participants, as he looks at how these testimonies fit into what became the modern festival. Gemie’s analysis shows how this new model of a ‘small is beautiful’ festival, with its fields for art, crafts, performance, ‘alternative technologies and experimental architecture’, gained new dimensions by advertising itself as participatory, welcoming and inviting: a pastoral tone, a ‘back to nature ethos’, a connection to place, locality and history, like Stonehenge and Glastonbury. This participatory aspect of the modern festival can be understood—according to Gemie—to have survived the growth of the festival: although Glastonbury is no longer a country fayre, it offers a continuity to this alternative model through its ‘semi-spontaneous’ culture.

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Chapter 4, by István Povedák, presents material from a multi-sited ethnography of Hungarian festivals as he examines the ‘heritage-preserving festival’ against the backdrop of festival culture as a global movement. Povedák provides a detailed analysis of the material culture in this field, depicting a New Age cum Contemporary Paganism in Hungary, where ancient Hungarian mythology, esotericism, alternative history, Hungarian eco-villages, folk music performances and patriotic rock concerts come together. Povedák shows that in the last two decades a movement of ‘heritage-­preserving’ festivals has gained increasing popularity and political support, ranging from small gatherings to big ones like Kurultaj, attracting 150–250,000 people a year. These occasions stand out for their distinctive ‘Hungarian neo-nationalist festival brand’, and considering the Capital Hill riots in the United States in January 2021, this milieu of pseudo-scientific, radically right-wing beliefs and practices gains new significance and importance. Povedák’s examination of neo-nationalist Hungarian festival culture demonstrates that neo-nationalist festivals construct a symbolic dimension of an imagined Hungarian identity and tradition. Povedák’s insights throw light on understanding neo-nationalism as a global movement that relies on similar cultural strategies (i.e. esotericism) for propagation and development, and suggest that we can better understand this construction of a political identity by examining the material culture of these festivals. In Chap. 5, Botond Vitos, Graham St John and François Gauthier present qualitative findings from a multi-methodological project comprising ethnographic research in Germany and surveys targeted at European Burning Man participants (or ‘Burners’). The authors understand ‘burns— Black Rock City and its worldwide progeny events—as experimental heterotopia, or “counter spaces,” that enable a proliferation of ritualesque and carnivalesque performance modes’. This is a fascinating look at Burner culture and its mechanisms of cultural change, through the way in which ‘progeny’ events are committed to key principles (‘the 10 principles’), whilst also enabling freedom of expression and innovation. Vitos, St John and Gauthier focus on the Burner principles of ‘Gifting’ and ‘Leaving No Trace’, which are highlighted in German Burner initiatives. These principles are reflected in a multitude of cultural contexts, and are not confined to festival sites, because, as we have argued in this Introduction, festivals are spilling out of their fields and are becoming year-round events, as Vitos, St John and Gauthier show, via workshops, lectures, beach clean-­ ups and picnics in the park. The significance of understanding European

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Burners in the context of this growing transatlantic culture is hugely important. Burning Man’s European Leadership Summit, mounted annually in different European cities since 2014 as well as in Israel, suggests perhaps that we can look for the Judeo-Christian cultural roots of Gifting. By investigating Burner culture in Europe, Vitos, St John and Gauthier show that to understand its acculturative mechanisms, we must examine its cultural sediments, not only in ‘the principles’ but also in their specific cultural appropriation. Chapter 6 is a less conventional academic article, being written as an interview or discussion between artist and research designer Zsófia Szonja Illés and an academic, Maria Nita, who talk about artistic engagement through curating new practices of imagination and design at festivals. Illés discusses the creation of her artistic installations through unique collaborations and experiments, showing that the design process in this context is fully mediated by festival processes, and that this offers an opportunity to investigate new practices of imagination, creativity and cultural innovation. The chapter offers an epistemological discussion of art and imagination, asking how imagination and art engage the public, the audience, the festivalgoers. Illés and Nita reflect on the relationships and exchanges between the artist and the temporary communities made up of festival publics and built around artistic structures. Illés and Nita discuss the implications of practices of cooperative and collaborative artistic engagement at festivals, developed as a way to provoke, challenge and involve the festival public with issues of social and environmental justice. They ask if the festival becomes a site for public pedagogy within a distinct cultural and political context. In Chap. 7, Barbara Brayshay and Jacqui Mulville explore a unique feature of Glastonbury Festival, its stone circle, which was created for the event, in 1992, and known as the Swan Circle. This monument was built in the style of a megalithic stone circle, which the authors argue should be analysed through the lens of contemporary archaeology. Brayshay and Mulville use the concept of place as lens for examining the festival site, whilst using tools from cultural archeology. This involves not only considering the relationship between festival and place, but also considering the making and memorialisation of place as ‘monument’, as well as their implied ‘inter-­monumentality’—that is, the Swan Circle’s relationship to Stonehenge. The questions that arise from their investigation address fundamental issues in understanding festival cultures linked to the

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ephemeral material existence of the festivals, the perceptions and interactions between people, monuments and festival sites. Brayshay and Mulville show that festivalgoers’ accounts of their interactions with the site and its monuments are often ‘a complex and intertwined account of myth, reality, pilgrimage, procession and memorialisation’, and that tracing the relationships between these narratives ‘exposes undocumented aspects of festival culture and reveals how festivals create new worlds and new realities for participants’. In Chap. 8, Graham St John draws on his longitudinal festival research as he examines Burning Man as a participatory arts event that has grown into a global Burner community. He interrogates how the cultural aesthetic of Black Rock City enables ‘its populace to navigate their own existential concerns’ and acculturative processes that enable the propagation of Burner culture. St John draws on Victor Turner’s ‘social drama’ model to examine ‘the role of redressive art in cultural transmission in Black Rock City during a period of crisis’. He investigates how the values of the 10 Principles are upheld by this community where freedom of artistic expression is paramount. He examines the 2016 art-themed Da Vinci’s Workshop, ‘in which a culture of convenience threatened to undermine the Burner ethos’. St John examines what he claims represents a ‘reflexive superliminal framework in which aesthetics across a spectrum of media reaffirm the value of beleaguered principles’. The implications of St John’s work are equally relevant for scholars of contemporary cultures as they are for art historians studying medieval iconoclasm. His findings bear important implications for the role of art in cultural change, as well as its limits and conditions. In Chap. 9, Leonore van den Ende investigates Tribal Gathering in Panama against the backdrop of other transformational festivals, such as Burning Man, Boom (Portugal) and Envision (Costa Rica)—where participants strive to ‘to co-create a better world’. Here van den Ende examines the processes of cultural innovation, or rather cultural ‘intervention’, provoked by an agential community likely to promote an ethos of community building, sustainable living and creative expression, and guided by principles such as inclusion and leave-no-trace. Moreover, she examines not only festivals as transformational experiences, but the processes that enable individuals to co-create them as ‘productive agents’ motivated by a ‘desire for self-expression’. van den Ende proposes here that to understand these events we must employ ‘a practice-based approach focusing on the activities which co-create a festival’. She utilises practice-based concepts

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like ‘ritualization’ and ‘tribal aestheticization’, to investigate the processes of festival co-creation. Her concept of aestheticisation covers the ‘diverse practices through which the body and the senses are engaged to construct a unique participatory experience and transitional environment’, as well as ‘the event’s spatial setting and design’. Aestheticisation is understood by van den Ende as a practice of creating a harmonious link between body, senses, place and décor, with a role in this deliberate process of cultural change or cultural intervention. Finally, in Chap. 10, Pau Obrador, Antoni Vives-Riera and Marcel Pich-Esteve look at the cultural politics of new ‘invented festive traditions in Mallorca’, described by the local media as Neofestes, meaning new festivals in Catalan. As twenty-first-century festivals, the Neofestes can be seen in relation to the ‘heritage-preserving’ festivals in Hungary we encountered in Chap. 4, yet the politics and values of these events are plainly at a different end of the spectrum. Instead of preserving a national heritage, these invented festive traditions are ‘worldmaking’ rituals that provide ‘evidence of how local cultures and place identities can be transformed through festive play’. Whilst the Neofestes draw on material from folklore and history, their manipulation of the past is accompanied by a deliberate and self-aware cultural creativity, as they ‘disrupt static and timeless romantic narratives of place’. Obrador, Vives-Riera and Pich-Esteve argue that we see in the Neofestes ‘a bold attempt to decolonise and de-exoticize local identities, while reclaiming a global sense of the local that is autonomous from tourism’. The authors masterfully show that modern festival cultures can serve as a site of political analysis for local and global dynamics that are relevant to both local communities and translocal networks. To conclude, the present volume takes a historical, geo-political and socio-­cultural perspective to examine the inter-cultural processes that are at work in this very public and visible, and increasingly digital, sphere of our contemporary culture. Recent global reports on festivals from UNESCO, OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and Salzburg Global Festival show that these festivals are gathering support from across the creative, academic and private sectors, from around the world, in order to emerge from the Covid-19 crisis. As they emerge, they will undoubtedly be hybridised in unprecedented ways by accelerated digitalisation and the development of virtual and augmented realities, to create new possibilities for contemporary festive and cultural experiences. The collection of essays in this volume shows that to understand global cultures we need to pay special attention to cultural

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transmission and the transmission of values (Tranter and Western 2010), as well as cultural innovation and cultural change taking place within these diverse mobile global (and virtual) communities. As we will see in the chapters that follow, modern festivals represent key cultural events-communities-forms in the construction of discourses surrounding national, transnational and global identities, collective histories and local-global dynamics. Therefore, it is our contention that Festival Cultures can be a site for transdisciplinary research that can achieve what Cultural Studies as an incommensurate disciplinary field could not: it can help us understand key cultural and political processes in our contemporary world.

References Bowman, Marion. 2005. Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: the Local and the Global in Glastonbury. Numen 52 (2): 157–190. https://doi.org/10.1163/1568527054024722. ———. 2009. Glastonbury Festival and the Performance of Remembrance. DISKUS 10. Accessed March 10, 2011. http://www.basr.ac.uk/diskus/diskus10/bowman.htm. ———. 2016. From Free Festival to Agoratopia: Glastonbury Festival and the Performance of Space & Spirituality. In Festivals, Performing Arts and the Sacred in History and Culture. Trefforest: University of South Wales. Bruce, Steve. 2002. God is Dead: Secularisation in the West. Oxford: Blackwell. Coleman, Simon, and John Eade, eds. 2004. Reframing Pilgrimage. Cultures in Motion. London: Routledge. Davies, Grace. 1994. Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging. Oxford: Blackwell. Flinn, Jenny, and Matt Frew. 2014. Glastonbury: Managing the Mystification of Festivity. Leisure Studies 33 (4): 418–433. Gemie, Sharif, and Brian Ireland. 2017. A History of the Hippy Trail, 1957–78. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Giorgi, Liana, Monica Sassatelli and Gerald Delanty. 2011. Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9780203818787. Inglehart, Ronald. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ireland, Brian, and Sharif Gemie. 2015. From Kerouac to the Hippy Trail: Some Notes on the Attraction of “On the Road” to British Hippies. Studies in Travel Writing 19 (1): 66–82. Macnaughton, Phil, and John Urry. 1998. Contested Natures. London: Sage.

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Mair, Judith, and Karin Weber. 2019. Event and Festival Research: a Review and Research Directions. International Journal of Event and Festival Management 10 (3): 209–216. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEFM-­10-­2019-­080. Müller, Olaf. 2012. The Social Significance of Religion in the Enlarged Europe: Secularization, Individualization and Pluralization. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315552743. Nilsson, Mats, and Mekonnen Tesfahuney. 2016. Performing the “post-secular” in Santiago de Compostela. Annals of Tourism Research 57 (1): 18–30. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2015.11.001. Nita, Maria. 2016. Praying and Campaigning with Environmental Christians: Green Religion and the Climate Movement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. “An Altar Inside a Circle”: A Relational Model for Investigating Green Christians’ Experiments with Sacred Space. In Material Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred, ed. Tim Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie, 133–151. London: Routledge. ———. 2018. Christian Discourses and Cultural Change: The Greenbelt Art and Performance Festival as an Alternative Community for Green and Liberal Christians. Implicit Religion. 21 (1): 44–69. https://doi.org/10.1558/ imre.37354. Nita, Maria and Sharif Gemie. 2020. ‘Counterculture, Local Authorities and British Christianity at the Windsor and Watchfield Free Festivals (1972–5)’, Twentieth Century British History. 31 (1): 51–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/ tcbh/hwy053. Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2018. ‘The Sociological Imagination in a Time of Climate Change.’G lobal and Planetary Change 163 (1): 171–76. Norman, Alex. 2011. Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society. Advances in Religious Studies. London: Continuum. Picard, David, and Mike Robinson, eds. 2006. Festivals, Tourism and Social Change: Remaking Worlds. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Pike, Sarah. 2005. Burning Man. In The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum. Szmigin, Isabelle, Andrew Bengry-Howell, Yvette Morey, Christine Griffin, and Sarah Riley. 2017. Socio-spatial Authenticity at Co-created Music Festivals. Annals of Tourism Research 63 (1): 1–11. Tranter, Bruce, and Mark Western. 2010. Overstating Value Change: Question Ordering in the Postmaterial Values Index. European Sociological Review 26 (5): 571–583. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcp040. Voas, David. 2005. Religion in Britain: Neither Believing nor Belonging. Sociology 39 (1): 11–28. WVS. 2019. Findings and Insights. World Value Survey. Accessed August 5, 2020. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp.

CHAPTER 2

The Naturalization of the Alternatives in 1970s Britain Through a 2020 XR Lens Maria Nita

There are clear links between present-day environmental activism represented by XR—the environmental protest movement which became rejuvenated in 2018 and redefined itself as ‘Extinction Rebellion’ movement—and the transatlantic 1960s communes and free festival counterculture: the communes and free festivals had a similar mix of civil disobedience, ‘artivism’—or artistic activism—cooperative ethos and communalism, anticipating a future world in deep crisis, which the communes could withstand (Miller 1999). As a type of protest action, the ‘protestival’, or protest festival, is rooted in the 1960s counterculture and has been central to movements of artistic social reform and the alter-­ globalization movements that have begun to develop since the 1980s (St John 2008). The mainstream and counterculture boundaries are not as clearly apparent today, but alternative globalization movements continue to use festivals to imagine another world. The Black Lives Matter movement, Extinction Rebellion and The Occupy movement are for the most part in opposition not with the majority of people in the US or the UK,

M. Nita (*) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_2

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but with the business-as-usual conservative politics as well as rising nationalism we have seen (re-)gaining territory in the last decade, culminating with the Trump presidency in the US and Brexit in the UK. In our recent article (Nita and Gemie 2020), Sharif Gemie and I claimed that the modern, post late 1960s/early 1970s arts and performance festivals represent a specific cultural model—a ‘festival-­pilgrimage’— which was created from the interaction of key publics and discursive actions beginning with the 1960s and even earlier, with the 1950s hippie trail, which initiated new forms of pilgrimage experiences Moreover we argued that this festival-pilgrimage cultural model needs to be understood on the backdrop of the changes to religious and public life in Britain, in the 1960s: increased secularization concomitant with revival movements, such as Celtic Christianity, which promoted a return to nature. We showed that the early festivals displayed important elements that evoked a pilgrimage experience: a separation from the world coupled with endurance, letting go of material possessions and even a promise of transformation. Paradoxically as modern arts and performance festivals transitioned at this time from a ‘carnival’ to a ‘pilgrimage’ model, their protest status became a more interiorized, memorialized, dormant, protest ethos, expressed through the medium of arts and performance. We identified the media, various local authorities, including concerned or affected groups of villagers, the clergy and of course the festival goers as key actants in this molding conversation. Importantly, we identified a discourse of hostility toward the hippies—who were stereotypically vilified as drug takers, lazy, destructive, smelly and not contributing to society. Half of century later, in contemporary Britain, it seems like the alternatives have, for the most part, been accepted, assimilated or ‘naturalized’ in the British cultural landscape via a thriving, ‘gone mainstream’, festival culture that celebrates and commemorates the hippie counterculture (Nita and Gemie 2020). However, when in 2019 politicians and the press in the UK started reporting on Extinction Rebellion activists in a similar tone to that which I had encountered in my archival research on the early 1970s free festivals—with public figures calling XR protesters, for example, ‘uncooperative crusties’ in their ‘heaving hemp-smelling bivouacs’ (Rawlinson 2019)—I realized that such discourses of hostility in the public domain can (unfortunately) be revived—even though they might appear to belong to the past. A long-standing interest for me has been to understand how this assimilation of and the development of acceptance for these countercultural

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alternatives had been at all possible in the UK and other Western countries. Having grown up in Romania during the communist and post-­ communist regimes in the 1980s and 1990s, I experienced firsthand the oppressive power of monocultures and repressive language toward minorities and alternatives—be it based on ethnicity, sexuality, religion or lifestyle. As an immigrant in the UK I was myself naturalized British in 2007—yet I use the term ‘naturalization’ here not by its legal definition, that of becoming a citizen of a country—but as a helpful term that intersects issues of cultural assimilation and the complex negotiations and transformations in status, rights and identities of marginalized people. In this chapter, I explore further a key claim Gemie and I made in our recent article (Nita and Gemie 2020), namely, that the acceptance of the alternatives was rather unpredictably helped by the Christian clergy—who recognized the Christian values in the hippie movement, as well as the need for the early festivals as new, quasi sacred sites of a new type of pilgrimage or ‘festival-pilgrimage’. However, this chapter aims to more thoroughly examine the public reception of the alternatives in the context of the early festival culture, as well as the other living and dwelling arrangements that invisibly accompanied the early festivals, such as temporary communes or the remote homes of the isolated returning hippies, like those who took refuge in the British countryside, in the 1970s. Thus, I show here that we must see the early festivals as a type of summer dwelling connected with other temporary dwelling arrangements for many participants—which helped introduce hippie values to a broader audience, in spite of the sensationalist tone of the broadsheet media and other hostile voices. Apart from my main archival sources from the 1970s, I will draw on my ethnographic research inside the contemporary Extinction Rebellion Movement to provide contrast. Finally, I look at what I claim to be the Christian semiotics of protest actions in the XR movement and ask how this may be decoded by a post-Christian audience in Britain today. Moreover, I ask what can be learned from this centrality of a Christian semiotics in climate protest, particularly in light of research suggesting that faith communities offer key stages of involvement in environmental actions and assist in the construction of an ecological citizenship (Kidwell et al. 2018).

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Methods My historical research into the early festivals was carried out at the National Archives in London,1 and the Bath Archive for Contemporary Religion at Bath Spa University, between 2016 and 2019. The ethnographic research comes from my longitudinal research (2008–present) into protestivals and climate activism, which since 2018 has taken the form of the Extinction Rebellion movement. My intention is to analyze primary, historical sources, such as letters, reports and press cuttings—as well as participant observation data from my recent ethnographic research—to examine how the green alternatives represented themselves and also how the ‘general public’ or the mainstream, viewed, talked about and received the ‘alternatives’. The archival sources I have analyzed for the purpose of this chapter can be divided into three categories: (1) official reports from policy makers, (2) press cuttings accounting for media representations of the festival goers and (3) finally, correspondence between local authorities officials either about or with those with alternative lifestyles making benefit claims across the country—naturally involving the topic of festival and alternative lifestyles. The largest data set from the National Archives consisted of correspondence from the Department of the Environment (DOE) working group drafting the Lord Melchett’s report on Free Festivals (spring of 1976). The correspondence consisted of letters between officials from two key national departments: The Department of Education and the Home Office, as well as regional authorities (Hampshire Constabulary and the Welsh Office for DOE). A second data set consisted of press cuttings depicting the media reaction to Free Festivals, in particular reactions to the June 1976 Exmoor National Park and the Melchett report also published in June 1976. The newspapers sources included Broadsheet newspapers, namely, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Sunday Telegraph and The Times; tabloids, such as The Daily Mirror and 1  The following folders at the National Archives constitute the historical data for the present article: (1) POL 75 0455/0001/051/ Title: Control of Crowds: Popular Festivals/ Lord Melchett Committee—Pop Festivals: Review of Policy/ Date on the folder: 29 January 1976, National Archives, Kew Gardens, London [accessed 29/03/2016]; (2) WORK 16 2392; File Number: AL 79/ 13; Title: Royal Parks. Entertainments. Correspondence ETC. Relating to Unofficial pop festivals at Windsor and elsewhere. Date on the folder: 1975 Press cuttings; National Archives, Kew Gardens, London [accessed 30/03/2016]; (3) PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23, Dates: Nov 71 to May 80, (Official) Correspondence on Free Festivals, National Archives, Kew Gardens, London [accessed 17/04/2016].

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The Morning Star; as well as the following regional newspapers: Brighton Evening Argus, Brighton Evening Argus, Bristol Evening Post, Durham’s Chronicle, Evening News (London), Liverpool Daily Post, London Evening Standard, Southern Evening Echo, Western Mail and Western Morning News. Finally, the correspondence dealing with benefit claims is rich in portrayals of alternative lifestyles, including self-understandings from those hippies and alternatives who were having to write to local authorities and defend their right to refuse certain jobs (on ethical grounds for example) or their right to live in isolated areas (where work was scarce) or claim benefit during the time they attended festivals. The ethnographic data consists mainly of my participant observation notes and over 2000 digital images of protest actions inside XR. The ethics clearance I worked under was Bath Spa University L1–1777. To analyze the data, I used coding practices from Grounded Theory (Charmaz 2006), by developing conceptual codes which helped me break up the data, with the aim of constructing new theories. Grounded Theory asks that we notice connections between the concepts we have identified as we look for overarching concepts, those concepts that connect groups of issues together. In this context I started by coding the data into coding books, which became ‘the bones of my analysis’, and I worked on the ‘theoretical integration [that] can assemble these into a working skeleton’ (Charmaz 2006: 61). I wished to understand what Charmaz calls ‘the main concerns’ in the data. I also looked specifically at how festival goers were either portrayed or self-identified in archival records, either in relation to or by the media and officialdom. Previously Sharif Gemie and I had read hundreds of letters written by local people to either their local authorities or various government officials, about their experience of festivals, often to complain about the noise, but sometimes in defense of the festival goers and at times even to remonstrate the police for how festival goers had been treated (Nita and Gemie 2020). I am therefore building on my previous findings here, looking at another level of dialogue with a different gravity center: the way in which alternative lifestyles and ideas are presented to the public by the media on one hand and the material repercussions of these portrayals. Finally, my approach to analyzing language is represented by discourse and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003, 2013). I am chiefly interested in the instrumental role of language in pursuing empowerment and constructing empowered identities through relationships—including non-­ humans and the landscape (Nita 2019). Thus, my own biosemiotics and

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relational approach to analyzing prayers, stories and myth as ‘narratives of empowerment’ suggests that whereas traditionally empowered identities are constructed by relating to imagined and remembered landscapes on a vertical axis of power, we can observe in many green discourses what I called a democratization of the sacred, with ‘community’ and ‘creativity’ gaining the ‘highest’ value status (ibid.). The art and performance festival might be considered an embodiment of such an alternative cosmology, with its apex of ‘community’ and ‘creativity’.

Festivals on a Continuum of Cultural Practices and Value Change As a growing area of interdisciplinary research (Webster and McKay 2016; McKay 2015), modern festival studies present an opportunity for investigating cross-cultural and trans-national contemporary cultural practices, modes of living or dwelling. As I am writing this through the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown lens, it is worth mentioning that before the lockdown festivals had had a half of century continuous existence in the UK, they had become part of the social gathering year—from June to September. Although we now have a well-established festival model, the early festivals were part of a different mix of alternative dwellings, often providing respite for the isolated hippies and communards, during temporary summer communities. Scholars suggest that hippie communes in the US and Europe were somewhat failed experiments, even though communards reported that they benefited from these and experienced personal growth (Willins 2016; Mathews 2010; Babiak 2002; Speck 1972). There were many stories of a hard life, drugs and personal tragedies, and similarly the early festivals were often reported as trials for the ‘unprepared pilgrims’ (Nita and Gemie 2020). Early modern festivals—by which I mean the 1960s and 1970s festivals—although a couple of decades apart from the celebratory Festival of Britain2 of 1951 which was a celebration of British science and industry— do seem to preserve a base note of ‘postbellum celebration’ of a national identity. Yet despite their association with place, locality and national identity (i.e. Stonehenge), early modern festivals were also intricately 2  The Festival of Britain in 1951 celebrated national achievements and an end of the austerity caused by war. Despite the fact that this was not one of the festivals of the late 1960s, it is a significant event, a new type of cultural and social enterprise.

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connected with global trends and events and universalist values—having their roots in the 1950s hippie trail and belonging to a new post-World War II global era. Therefore, festivals contribute now to a change and transformation to the very notion of local and national identities—through their temporal and global dimensions. For example, the Glastonbury festival becomes over the five decades of its existence (1970/1971–2020) a yearly ‘end of June’ hub that connects a web of global networks. Burning Man is perhaps a more apt example of a global network that has created unprecedented global proximity through its reverberating burning ethos (see Graham St John in this volume). This national versus global dynamic is there in early festivals, as well as other modalities of journeying and dwelling: new pilgrimage routes and religious communities that become established around this time, such as Iona in Scotland or the Taizé Community in France. Naturally early modern festivals are part of a tremendous growth in global mobility and communication, which culminated in the late 1980s with the Information Age. The festival culture that took shape in the 1960s and early 1970s was building on the hippie trail of the 1950s (Ireland and Gemie 2015) and the new spiritual freedom of the 1960s (Wuthnow 2003). As Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland have suggested in their history of the Hippie Trail (Gemie and Ireland 2017), in the late 1950s this phenomenon initiated new forms of travel and pilgrimage. Thus, festivals should be considered part of a continuum of alternative dwellings, particularly in the context of today’s alternative culture—where the year features annual retreats, festivals and pilgrimages, alongside many other forms of religious and spiritual local and global tourism. Although large music and performing arts festivals may appear to constitute very different experiences in both aims and means of engagement to the social isolation implied by retreats and to some extent pilgrimages as well, by examining festivals as modes of dwelling and journeying in relation with these other practices, we can better understand the intertextuality of practices that developed through the broader festivals culture. Values and Cultural Change Values such as ‘environmentalism’ and ‘universalism’ are understood by many scholars to represent post-material values, as first defined by the political scientist Ronald Inglehart (1977), and hence harder to ‘translate’, communicate or make explicit across a range of cultural, social or

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economic backgrounds. According to Ronald Inglehart’s (1977) thesis in ‘The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics’, Maslow’s pyramid of needs operates at the larger, societal scale too. Collective material security—as primary security and material needs were gradually met—led in the West to a re-orientation of values toward post-material concerns, such as ‘self-expression’. Since the publication of Inglehart’s famous thesis (1977), social scientists across the globe have been studying global value change, particularly in the context of such longitudinal studies as The World Values Survey (WVS) (1981–2019), which has been looking at changing values in 100 societies representing 90% of the world’s population and the impact of these changes on social and political life. The comprehensive data gathered by the WVS (WVS 2019), of which Ronald Inglehart is President, highlights two central and interdependent value change axes: (1) from traditional to secular-rational values and (2) from survival to self-expression. Secular-rational values do not equate secularization in the traditional sense this was understood—as the progressive disappearing of religion from public life—but an increased ‘individualism’ in how religion is perceived. This way ‘religion’ becomes oriented toward cultural diversity and openness, as opposed to it being a springboard for nationalistic sentiments, which are in turn associated with traditional values (ibid.). According to the broadest WVS interpretation (WVS 2019), these two cultural conflicting dimensions or value poles, nationalism (boundaries are important) versus universalism (boundaries are not important), are therefore key markers on the (changing) global cultural map. The emphasis on ‘values’ rather than ‘beliefs’ is crucial when it comes to religion given that societies near the traditional value pole, who have a nationalistic outlook or high levels of national pride, also emphasize the importance of traditional family values, deference to authority, while rejecting divorce, abortion and euthanasia. ‘Secular-rational values’ coincide therefore with the opposite pole or value cluster: universalism, individualism and openness to cultural diversity—without necessarily coinciding with a decrease in religiosity. Similarly, on the security—self-expression axis—self-expression values give priority to tolerance, imagination, environmental protection, gender equality and increasing political participation or activism. Certainly—albeit tarred with a very broad brush—this seems like a recognizable paradigm in light of the recent rise of nationalistic politics in Europe and the US, in contrast with the global growth of non-violent resistance movements (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011).

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In a British context, modern arts and performance festivals—that prioritize self-expression—played a key role in changing values, politics and religious attitudes in Britain (Nita and Gemie 2020). Two decades after the advent of modern festivals, Paul Heelas notes that, by the early 1990s, ‘expressivism’ had become embedded in British culture. Like Inglehart, Heelas recognized this change of values as a leap from security to ‘quality of life’, with an emphasis on ‘the cultivation of personal inner-riches’, ‘self-­ expression and self-realisation’ (Heelas 1992: 14). Mika Lassander’s research on post-material value change in Britain and Finland shows that environmentalism and universalism correlate with other attitudes and preferences, including religious behavior, representing ‘a post-materialist religion’ which is particularly prevalent in Contemporary Paganism (Lassander 2014). My own research among Green and Liberal Christians (Nita 2018) suggests that class, politics and values put these groups in line with other so-called post-materialist religionists and sometimes at odds with their own Christian communities: The Forest Church in the UK is a good example of this intersection between Green Christians and Contemporary Paganism, even though the latter can be understood through its own countercultural reformulations as a (post-)Christian movement. It was however a Christian arts and performance festival— Greenbelt in the UK (1974–present)—that helped bring issues of environmental and social justice into the British Christian fold. Greenbelt provided an important central hub for Green and Liberal Christians and a scene where activism, alternative politics and new religious movements— such as the Forest Church—could be nurtured (ibid.). I do not want to suggest however that because arts and performance festivals (appear to) privilege self-expression, they can be un-­problematically placed on the WVS cultural values map. Festivals in the UK have been subject to the same value split that has been making itself evident during the Brexit years (2016–2019), with particular focus on the nationalism versus universalism divide. Certainly, modern arts and performance festivals are politically oriented toward the Left—having been connected to the New Left since the 1960s (McKay 2015). However, Brexit itself revealed a (new) multi-layered and complex political spectrum polarizing the Left alongside the Brexit-Remain divide which made itself felt during festivals as well. For instance, in 2017, the Sunday mass at the Greenbelt Festival provided a stage for some performative anti-Brexit campaigning

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by hinting at building relationships with Eastern Europeans3 (Nita 2018: 58). Bringing to light marginalized issues in a humorous, yet politicized protestival tone has been the norm during the Greenbelt Mass. However, during the 2018 Greenbelt Mass—taking place two long ‘Brexit-­ dominated’ years after the 2016 Brexit referendum and in the midst of an accelerated divisive Brexit campaign—the word ‘Brexit’ was not even mentioned once, as the entire service focused exclusively on racial equality and the Windrush4 scandal. Race is of course a crucially important issue—especially in light of the new 2020 expression of the Black Lives Matter global movement—but we do have to interrogate how such key issues as race and poverty can be redeployed and misused as what I would like to propose we can understand as ‘discourses of saturation’—discourses that can simply drown out even the loudest political conflicts, by urgently and insistently focusing attention elsewhere. Religious traditions are of course skilled at using such discourses of saturation: ritual is after all ‘a mode of paying attention’ (Smith 2005 [1987]). Yet ‘paying attention’ can always become a way of not paying attention, by distracting from divisive issues and by focusing everyone’s attention on those issues that can be collectively agreed upon. An unspoken discrimination, othering and racism5 in contemporary Britain—inflamed by Brexit and creating a division that was much too raw to be brought up during the aforementioned event that was concerned after all with equality—is that directed against Eastern European immigrants (Moore 2019; Fox 2013). This is an othering that has deeper roots in British culture and its own flavor of Balkan Orientalism (Korte et al. 2010: 7). We must therefore pay attention to ways in which rituals and festivals can obscure current conflicts via discourses of saturation, even despite their declared intentions to bring to light issues from the margins. In the next section, I will endeavor to look at the representation of alternative subcultures, lifestyles, values and politics in the early 1970s as well as what I claim to be their later ‘naturalization’ through a growing festival 3  The cantor was talking about the British relationships with Europeans in the context of the relationship between Americans and Mexicans: ‘One day the people of America will embrace the people of Mexico and the people of Britain will exchange recipes with the people of Europe’ (Nita 2018:58). 4  Windrush was a 2018 British political scandal concerning people wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. 5  Eastern European migrants’ ‘white other’ identity or ‘putative whiteness’ has not exempted them from racism (Fox 2013: 1871).

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culture. The alternatives were configured as countercultural through conversations and observations in the media and public domain—both with them and about them, by ‘reporting’ their (unusual) behavior that sets them in contrast with ‘the norm’, their (unusual) lifestyles, employment, food, work, dress, family lives, humor and language. Festivals in particular provided opportunities for ‘the alternatives’ to speak for themselves.

In the Words of the Media: The Naturalization of the 1970s Alternatives The term ‘naturalization’ might suggest a full and final acceptance by the granting of citizenship. Yet the process involves a transformation of status, rights and identity (Joppke 2007). The central role of media in shaping contemporary society and religion has been covered by scholarship (Hjarvard 2013; Lövheim and Lynch 2011). However, I want to make two key claims—which I will take turns to discuss in this section—about the role of the media in what I call here the naturalization of the 1970s alternatives: the processes of negotiations in establishing their status, rights (to claim benefit for instance—as we will see in the next section) and identity. My first claim is that newspaper articles, films or documentaries about the early arts and performance festivals did not only provide a window into their aesthetic and performative habitus but indeed they helped create this. The media helped corporatize the hippies into a festival style. The second claim I would like to make here is that the media—in this case British media—ultimately brokered the acceptance of the arts and performance festivals in the British cultural landscape by taking a variety of (uncoordinated) approaches: (a) scapegoating the hippies for the nuisance caused by festivals, (b) introducing a more diverse scene of alternative subcultures to the British public and (c) redefining/identifying the hippies as a marginal and harmless part of the bigger crowd. First film media was central in the propagation of arts and performance festivals. After the iconic Woodstock festival in 1969 and the wide distribution of ‘Woodstock’,6 the documentary film, one year later, festivals were spawned on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, ‘Glastonbury

6  ‘Woodstock’ (1970) was a documentary film of the Woodstock Festival (1969), directed by Michael Wadleigh.

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Fayre’ (1972),7 the movie about the second Glasto festival, ‘Glastonbury 1971’, made a strong impression in the development of the festival model. Anyone watching these films, ‘Woodstock’ (1970) and ‘Glastonbury Fayre’ (1972), can see how the nascent aesthetics of the early festival cultures, from nudity to movement, is visible with the naked eye so to speak. In Glastonbury Fayre, women (in particular) perform their freedom from social bonds by peculiarly moving their bodies in waves. This is not just a popular dance move, but every now and again people start ‘doing the wave’, moving their bodies and arms in a most conspicuous way. This is how freedom is imagined and performed, as if participants are experimenting with what bodies would/could do when/if they finally became free from the constrictions placed on us/them by society. Second, in the UK, the media played a key role in integrating the arts and performance festival as a cultural event in the British cultural landscape and to some degree what I call here ‘the naturalization’ of the alternatives by providing a more ‘manageable’ image for the hippies and alternatives. Thus, this ‘naturalization’ of the alternatives can serve both those who genuinely want to ‘help’ them become better integrated in the cultural landscape as well as those who find them a cultural threat. In my analysis of Press Cuttings on Free Festivals8 in the early 1970s, I identified a clear pattern of print materials which reported the problems caused by festivals in an aggravated tone, pointing a finger at the hippies: festivals were unexpected ‘invasions’ of ‘hairy types’ bringing noise, rubbish, pollution, conflict, violence, nudity, drugs, and urban traffic to quiet villages and remote areas. The archival evidence shows that many newspaper articles are reporting the existing conflicts and concerns of those involved (angry villagers, police constables, local authorities)—yet the predominant tone pendulated between one of restrained irony that seems to remind the public that the hippies are relatively harmless after all, and a more caustic sarcasm that tended to ‘other’ the hippies by not giving them a voice and simply not reporting on what they said or how they reacted. The broadsheet media is

7  ‘Glastonbury Fayre’ (1972) was a documentary film of the 1971 Glastonbury Festival (known then as the Glastonbury Fair), directed by Nicolas Roeg and Peter Neal. 8  WORK 16 2392, File Number: AL 79/ 13. Title: Royal Parks. Entertainments. Correspondence ETC. Relating to Unofficial pop festivals at Windsor and elsewhere. Date on the folder: 1975.

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also often introducing the alternatives to their mainstream readers, showing their detachment by reporting from a distance: Many of these arriving yesterday [at Stonehenge] had come from last week’s festival on Exmoor, where they pointed out, there had been no trouble at all. One man with a pink cloth tied stylishly around his head [gender and colour clash] said it was really only a form of Boy Scouting. It was time he said that the Baden Powell image underwent a change [partly reporting alternative humor and (only) partly giving ‘the other’ a voice]. (‘Solar Ben rocks Birk’s law’, Guardian, 18 June 1976)

Some traditionally Conservative newspapers tend to be—as it may be expected—more virulently opposed to the hippies; thus, they still use sarcasm in their descriptions of the hippies, but this time the humor is less ‘friendly’ and more derisive—like I mentioned earlier, the festival goers are not given a voice, they are simply represented through stereotypes: The great Stonehenge Strip got under the way yesterday strictly against Whitehall regulations. […] [T]he hippies ignored the ban and rolled up to pitch their tents near the ancient stones above. As you can see [referring to a picture of a naked young woman] many didn’t wait for Sunday morning’s druid ceremonies to get in a bit of sun worshiping [the sarcastic tone undermines spiritual claims/the hippies do not have a voice]. (‘Rock Bottom!’ Daily Mirror, 19 June 1976, by Sydney Young)

Sometimes if the festival goers are given a voice, what they say is presented as questionable by intercalating details about their age, appearance and gender—such as young, naked, girls: But the hippies who spent the day basking in the sun—some of the girls topless or even nude—insist that the show did go on […] The hippies claim that the ancient stones and the sun are of spiritual significance to them and that the midsummer solstice is a holy date to them’ (my emp.). (‘Festival goes pop—but quietly’ Southern Evening Echo, 19 June 76)

We can observe in the data from this point in time—mid-1970s—a dynamic oscillation in the way the fringe identity of the festival goer is either conflated with that of a hippy or distinguished from it. Increasingly, as festivals are becoming bigger events, hippies are no longer the only type of people expected at festivals and so the media wishes to either notice this

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(‘not hippies’) or reinforce the well-known image, by pointing to their dress, hair and language. However, in many cases it is not sufficient to provide a two-dimensional portrait for the hippies, ‘hairy types’ with ‘a glitter in the eye’, since increasingly the media has to recognize the diverse alternative subculture connected with the hippies—druids, communards (re-)claiming an indigenous Celtic identity, global travelers and so on. At one extreme of the spectrum, festivals are described as an invasion, invading or descending upon quiet and remote villages, disrupting the status quo in a very literal way through loud music and a heavy influx, provoking an accelerated change of scenery, whereby the landscape is simply changed overnight. Often the media reminds the readers about what could happen by talking about past festivals that led to violent encounters with the police—such as Windsor 1974—as cautionary tales: ‘bloody confrontation with police’ or ‘violent battle between police and fans’. It is truly surprising to read such titles as ‘Free pop festival picks on the Spitfire village: gun the whole lot down says angry resident’ [my emp.] (Evening Standard, 30 June 1976). The locals are described as ‘a local vicar’, ‘angry and horrified villagers’, and one farmer who didn’t want to be named but said: ‘If I had my way I’d machine-gun the whole bloody lot down’ […] ‘it’s a disgrace that thousands of long haired types can just descend on a peaceful place like this and take it over’. (‘Farmer wants to stop festival’, Daily Telegraph, 30 June 1976) [my emp.]

When the media storm takes over, we notice how subsequent articles continue to take forward the violent language in metaphoric ways as indicated in the headline of one article: ‘Angry villagers aim to shoot down plans for a pop festival at the Wartime Battle of Britain fighter in Tangmere’ (‘Dogfight over pop festival’, 1 July 1976, Daily Mail). A reportedly ‘disruptive’ free festival that created a media storm was The Exmoor Festival in 1976, also known as the Earth Fayre, which started on 8 June 1976. The festival coincided with the publication of a governmental report which controversially took a favorable view of free festivals (Nita and Gemie 2020). The Bristol Evening Post (as the newspaper was called then) reports: Thousands of pop fans were starting to arrive today for a five-day free festival in the centre of Exmoor National Park. And the organisers have been

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attacked for not warning local authority in time. […] This was a last-minute switch from Trempishoe, North Devon, which had put on a free festival 2 years ago in 1974. (‘“No Warning” Row over Pop Festival’, Bristol Evening Post, 8 June 1976)

Despite presenting the festival as somewhat of an inconvenience to the local authority, the police and emergency services, the article ends in a reassuring tone, claiming that ‘few people’ near the Devon border were in fact worried and this is illustrated with a quote from a local hotelier who said ‘We have had a few of them in the bar already. They seem to be perfectly nice people’. Perhaps given that The Bristol Evening Post had been Bristol’s only newspaper since the early 1960s at this point, the article tried to reflect the spectrum of liberal and conservative opinions that were out there on the streets. More virulent language sticks to some well-­ known tropes: ‘invasion’, for instance, belongs to a connotative field, whereby the hippies being described as ‘colonies’ leaving behind ‘locust-­ like destruction’ (Nita and Gemie 2020). Even articles that present the festival as out of the way and not too much trouble maintain a sarcastic tone: ‘Exmoore the right place for vibrations’ (Evening News, 10 June 1976). The participants are described here either in shorthand as ‘hippies, hairies and painted people’ or through two-dimensional, individual caricatured sketches: Harold Thornton, an Australian artist and bicycle freak who calls himself Harold the Kangaroo, is there with his dog captain Beefheart. He heard about the festival at the Round House in London and came. Others have turned up from Dublin, from Scotland and from abroad [festivals are beginning to attract global networks]. Just spaced out, said one man with wild hair and glittering eyes. (‘Spaced Out on Exmoor’, Observer, 13 June 1976)

However, we can also see at this time that progressively the alternative festival goer is no longer just a long hair type. The media in the mid-1970s attempts almost an anthropological study of the alternatives: they are presented as if they are a foreign tribe. Admittedly the self-representation of the alternatives as indigenous people is understood by some historians as ‘ethno-envy’ (Dietler 1994)—although I would suggest ‘ethno-sympathy’, we do recognize here a postmodern construction of an ‘indigenous’ Celtic identity:

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He [Chris—a festival goer at Stonehenge festival] lives for most of the time [suggesting different family values, possibly unstable/unconventional/ unreliable] with his wife Jill, and daughter Alice, aged three, with other Tipi people [an attempt at a cultural marker] on a 40 acres farm in South Wales, owned by one of their number. They feed themselves as far as possible from the produce of the farm, make their own clothes, get light from candles and heat from logs built in the middle of the tent, which is so constructed that currents of air carry the smoke out through the top. “I am here for the solstice sun dance” he said. “Stonehenge is a very powerful spiritual centre.” (‘Warning fails to deter pop enthusiasts at Stonehenge’ in Times, 19 June 1976)

Alternative Lifestyles in the Public Eye in the 1970s A distinct data set in my investigation of the 1970s portrayals of the alternatives was represented by official correspondence9[viii] between local authorities and various governmental departments dealing with issues of unemployment and benefits.10 The data shows how festivals are part of a great variety of alternative living arrangements. Officials are presented with unprecedented situations, for example, ‘should festival goers be allowed to claim benefit?’ Since some festival goers would be spending the best part of their summer travelling from one free festival to another, some officials suggest that new legislation preventing them to claim benefit would go some way toward resolving ‘the problem’ caused by festivals. Similarly, should people living in isolated areas—by choice rather than circumstance—be allowed to claim benefit? Some stay-at-home or returning hippies appear to have isolated themselves in the countryside and areas where they cannot find work—or at least are perceived by authorities as refusing to find work and are openly referred to as ‘dropouts’. The lifestyles of the lonely and isolated ‘dropouts’ are important for filling the gaps in research about the hippie trail (Gemie and Ireland 2017) and that on hippie communes mentioned above. It is important to understand what happened with the returning hippies and those who stayed 9  PIN 7/ 589 File ref.: U101425/23 From Nov 71 to May 80 (Official) Correspondence on Free Festivals. National Archives, Kew Gardens, London [accessed 30/05/2016]. 10  Catherine Ellis (2002, 2005) looks at how the major political parties of the period approached the issue of unemployment in ‘No Hammock for the Idle: The Conservative Party, “Youth” and the Welfare State in the 1960s’, Twentieth Century British History, 16 (2005), 441–70 and ‘The Younger Generation: The Labour Party and the 1959 Youth Commission’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002), 199–231.

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home. It is these different types of alternative dwellings that give hippies new identities—such as ‘Tippi people’—making them more difficult to classify. The hippies are beginning to diversify their activities; they are at (free) festivals, in green communes, ‘seasonal migrants’, ‘young men at the seaside’, ‘dropping out’ in the country or establishing ‘colonies of hippies’ as one report claims—living in the village during the winter and at festivals during the summer.11 On this continuum, the summer festivals appear as a mode of seasonal living in the UK that breaks away with a four-­ season culture. We can speculate perhaps that recent climate change in the 50  years of British festival (1970–2020) might have helped this trend, since hotter weather in the UK made it possible for festivals to grow and develop. Big festivals have of course a long history in India where the climate affords these sorts of gatherings. The prevailing position from the 1970s official correspondence I investigated suggests that local authorities had to support the hippies in the wake of their declining status in the public eye. Government officials do not hesitate to take a stand12 against the media and even the police—which as I admit in my conclusion—feels distinctly foreign to me as an immigrant in the UK and now a British-Romanian anthropologist/historian: It would not however be fair to blame the press alone for the creation of an artificial atmosphere of crisis which undoubtedly existed for a short time before the festival. We believe that all those concerned have a responsibility to avoid unnecessary inflaming public opinion; in particular we feel that some of the statements made by the chief constable of Thames Valley Police have been notably unhelpful.13

 Document 10A in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23.  Document 44A in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. Please see Mrs. Sirley Littler’s comments to Mr. Robert Armstrong, dated 21 April 1976: ‘my professional pride is outraged […] [t]his primarily concerns the DOE (Department for the Environment) if they are prepared to sign it, there is no great need for the Home Office to worry…’. There is confusion about whose jurisdiction free festivals fall under. 13  Document 46  in POL 75 0455/0001/051. Margaret Evans from the Welsh Office (Whitehall, London SW1) comments for the Festivals Working Group: ‘I suggest that the references to Glastonbury, Trentishoe and Meigan be slightly recast. We seem to be categorising them as all of one type, yet it seems to me that the Trentishoe with an average daily attendance of 2000 was a very different event from Glastonbury, where 10,000 attended daily. 22 April 1976. Para 3.6. 11 12

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In some cases, it is high government officials and clergy who are called to negotiate between these opposing factions: angry villages, police, media and festival goers. Famously Lord Melchett chaired in 197614 a working group that produced a very favorable report for festivals and festival goers. In a letter that becomes part of his report,15 the Bishop of Reading recognized that if the government was to step in and provide a site and financial support for festivals, these would become less independent and lose their autonomy and ‘protest’ status. The fact that mainstream and official institutions are supportive of the festivals and their countercultural expressions is however not necessarily proof of support for alternative values and lifestyles: festivals could also provide a pressure valve for these new cultural repertoires. In contrast with the tone of the media, the official correspondence is predominantly on the side of the alternatives, often taking defensive stances and ruling ‘in their favour’: ‘it would be socially unacceptable’ to single them out, ask them to move, relocate them and so on.16 When some constituencies propose taking ‘a hard line’,17 the response from higher authorities and governmental officials responds with a clear refusal to take such a hard line and an (appropriate) desire to reject the pejorative stereotypes in the media. In one example of official correspondence about a handful of people who live in an isolated ‘circumstance’ in Papa Stour, one of the Shetland Islands in Scotland, the officials struggle to decide whether they are entitled to unemployment benefit. They need to offer explanations for the difficulty of obtaining hard evidence that these people are available for employment.18 There are of course a range of attitudes toward small isolated off grid green communes or local hippies living in isolated areas. There are voices who suggest a hard line, but these represent the minority views:

 POL 75 0455/0001/051.  See Chapter 6 in Document 41 in POL 75 0455/0001/051. Free Festivals Report from the Working Group on Pop Festivals; Department of Environment; HMSO 75p. Written by: Working Group on Pop Festivals (Report of the Working Group Presented to the Secretary of State for the Environment on May 1976). 16  Doc 17A in POL 75 0455/0001/051. 17  Document 12A in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. John Pardoe of the Employment service Agency regarding ‘the abuse of supplementary benefit’ in Cornwall in 1976. 18  Document 16 in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. A letter from J. Vine addressed to Miss Lavery, dated 19 October 1973. 14 15

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Mr H. [suggested that we] should ‘bring pressure’ on unemployed ‘dropouts’ in Cornwall to move to where jobs are more likely to be available.19

However, when members of the public write to express concern that people who attend pop festivals are getting unemployment and supplementary benefit, official letters respond by explaining that regulations about summer festivals neither exist nor are they planned: Unemployed people who attend festivals are treated just like those who go on holiday.20

Strangely there are even suggestions about being able to ‘sign on’ at festivals.21 The dialogue between official authorities, concerned citizens, festival goers who have alternative lifestyles and the media writing about them indicates that British officialdom deliberately investigate and debunk media claims: We spoke about certain articles that appeared in the press recently which it had been pointed out to you showed the adoption of a more rigorous attitude on the part of this Department towards those young unemployed people who gravitated towards seaside resorts in the summer. The only articles we were able to trace were those which featured in the Daily Express ‘Get Up and Dig Spuds’ and the Daily Mirror ‘Idlers get a Bashing’ of 5th July and in the London Evening News ‘Goodbye to the seaside spongers’ of 18 September. All these articles however…22

19  Document 17 in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. This is a letter from Marcia Fry addressed to Mr. J. Vine (17 May). No year is given but correspondence records suggest this is sometimes between 1973 and 1976. 20  Document 18 in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. John Vine writing to Miss Lavery, discussing legislation in South Wales around benefit and unemployment. This demonstrates that this continues to be an issue for some time (73–76) (Dated 24 May 1976). See also Document: 20 A. Letter from Department of Health and Social Security, London. Letter from S. Rhodes Secretary Association of District Councils, London. Date: 14 May 1980. 21  Document 19 in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. From the Association of District Councils, London. Letter addressed to Mr. McGinnies (Department of Health and Social Security). Undated. 22  Document 19A in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. From Dep of Health and Social Security, addressed to Sue Robertson (unclear if she is member of the public or official). From M Bailey (Dated: 29 October 1979).

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The bottom line is that we find a defensive and conciliatory tone in official correspondence concerned with alternatives or hippies, often in contrast with public, media and police statements. Alternative Portraits [Mr C.L.] is available for work and generally seeking employment. Mr C.L. has obtained a home knitting machine on which he is currently practicing after a two-week course on machine knitting. I’m told that home knitting is Class 1 employment in Shetland … […] I also understand the Mr C.L. is not locally regarded as a ‘hippy’. He is a married man with 2 children who has opted out of the ‘rat race’. He is simply an ‘in-comer’ to the Islands and as such is treated in exactly the same way as any other in-comer or, for that matter, any local resident. […]23

Later correspondence showed that Mr. C.L. did get help from the local authority with his machine-knitting course but remained unemployed. Local authorities do show support for alternative lifestyle: machine knitting is linked with Mr. C.L.’s preference for working from home, and there seems to be sympathy for non-traditional gender roles in green communes, that is, the local authority is supporting unemployed men by providing knitting courses. Many examples from the official correspondence relating to benefit claims show that the officials plead on behalf of the hippies to other higher officials and tribunals, asking them to take a sympathetic view of their circumstances. There is a concern with ensuring that the hippies are not treated differently and discriminated. However, that line is treaded carefully: in the above example the defense points out that the claimant, Mr. C.L., fits in with mainstream values—he is a married man with two children, and he is not regarded as a hippie by locals. The local authority official is also attempting a convergence with C.L.’s view: ‘he has opted out of the rat-­race’—rather than calling C.L. ‘a dropout’, for instance. This is a particularly strange statement coming from a functionary who is still in that ‘race’. Thus, the official correspondence shows a degree of personal—almost parental—concern with those who have alternative lifestyles:

23  Document 3A in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. Letter addressed to Mr. Guiler DHSS (Department of Housing and Social Support, Scotland) (Dated 19 January 1973).

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Concerning A.W, please let us have some background info about his case? Among other things, why is he non-mobile? … Has he actually worked as gardener labourer? … Is there a possibility of other work for him? Does he intend to continue his bothy-lifestyle indefinitely or has he some purpose?24 AW was interviewed again today regarding his employment position. He is immobile as his wife is pregnant and they would have difficulty getting accommodation. He had hoped to acquire some ground in the area to start market gardening. […] He was a student at St Andrews University until June 69.25

Hippies and communards are spoken not only as individuals but also in more communal terms: ‘this colony does intend to support itself’. The hippie settlers in the UK are assisted not only financially, by being offered supplementary benefits when dropping out of schools or ‘the rat race’, but also by speaking on their behalf, showing that they are good and trusted members of the community: JK [a benefit claimant] is working as a share fisherman with another member of the commune. He is working hard and doing very well. D.T. [another benefit claimant] is known to be working as a share fisherman for a local skipper who speaks very highly of him.26

Some portraits for those who have alternative lifestyles in the early 1970s, living in communes or with their own families, are not as sympathetic as they are made responsible for their prospects of employment being so poor—yet there is often an effort to recognize the motifs for their refusal to find employment: R.  S. left employment repeatedly because the work/trade was against his principles. He [A.W.] walks four miles each week to claim his benefit and appeared last week freakishly dressed with bare feet and wearing a band round his long hair with a feather fixed in the band. […] Although he states he is avail-

 Document 1A in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23.1 (1972—undated).  Document 1A.2 in PIN 7/ 589, File ref.: U101425/23. (Dated 14 April 1972) 26  Document 1A in File ref. SHQB3. ‘Supplementary benefit claim for members of communes’ (Dated: 6 July 1972). 24 25

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able for work his geographical position and his “way-out” appearance restrict submissions and his availability is always in doubt.27

When looking at letters from alternatives and hippies communicating with those from functionaries from the local authority, we can see how they attempt to communicate their values, particularly environmentalism and being quite open in explaining how their lifestyles are different and how that makes them feel, such as being vegetarian and not wanting to be a burden. We can discern an attempt to communicate and transmit these values by being open and vulnerable: Dear Mr. S. I do not want to be considered for this vacancy because it would mean leaving my home. My aim is to live in S. in this croft and to become self-sufficient i.e. to grow my own food and to buy all other necessities from money acquired by being a self-employed craftsman.28

Before concluding, I will skip ahead some 50 years and look at XR in my final section.

A 2020 XR Lens I have been researching the climate movement since 2008, and 10 years later, in 2018, the Climate Movement reinvented itself as XR Extinction Rebellion—I could see it readjust its focus in a way that was reminiscent of the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s. Earlier central engine campaigns (see Nita 2016) inside the climate movement—such as ‘Rising Tide’ or ‘Rising Up!’—failed to get the attention and broad involvement they aimed for. XR was founded by two environmental activists Julian Roger Hallam (1966–) and Gail Marie Bradbrook (1972–). Hallam has a PhD from King’s College London where he researched how to achieve social change through civil disobedience. His research on radical movements is part of the main XR talk ‘Heading for Extinction and what to do about it’, which activists train to give in public contexts as an invitation to join the movement. Bradbrook is particularly known in activist circles for receiving

27  Document 1A in File ref. SHQB3. Letter from the Department of Employment (Dated 4 July 1972). 28  Document 4A in PIN 7/ 589. Letter from Roger Rhodes-Schofield. To: JY Strang Manager (Ministry of Labour) (Dated 3 December 1971).

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the inspiration for the Extinction Rebellion movement after a psychedelic retreat in Costa Rica (Knight 2019). I had maintained that after their early days in the 1960s and 1970s festivals had maintained a memorialized protest ethos, almost commemorated through art and performance, and identification with the hippie culture (Nita and Gemie 2020). I also suggested in this chapter that this tradeoff between the protest status of the early festivals becoming dormant or toned down and the hippies becoming a memorialized ‘style’ was brokered by the media. What is surprising is that XR managed to rekindle this dormant protest spirit, not only through ‘protestivals’ but a far more serious and present-day focus. With XR the spotlight of the climate movement shifted from the past or future to the present and very immediate future: the next 12 years. The driver for this renewal and growth in the movement was the last IPCC International Panel for Climate Change report—stating that carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall dramatically by 2030, so in 12 years from 2018 when the report was published—to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Past this threshold, the changes will be catastrophic, with loss of many ecosystems. According to the report we are predicted to lose 70% of coral reef at 1.5 degrees, yet we lose all coral reef at 2 degrees warming. We can see an emphasis on extinction on the new colors of the movement: with themes of blood, death and grief in many of its performative actions. XR has many different means of getting activists together at local, national and global levels—it hosts weekly meetings, marches, protest actions, pilgrimages and protestivals—these last being some of the most important events for getting lots of media and public attention. Of course, particularly after COVID-19, the movement has gained a massive online presence and it makes use of social media and lots of online platforms. We can recognize a festival organization in many of its weekly forums and meetings, including digital and online events. New indoor and digital festivals and workshop events demonstrate that the early festivals have gestated new global forms of social organization that combine art and performance with an experimental, digital, dialogical, social media praxis. The communication between XR and the public is done through art and performance as well, via art, banners, costumes and posters. The messages have a direct, imperative, urgent tone: ‘Act Now!’, ‘Do what’s right!’ They address the interlocutor directly, often through songs that have been stripped bare of both metaphor and melody to reveal the truth:

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I am sorry my friends I didn’t want to stop you When you were having such a fine time But this is an emergency Your house is all on fire And if we do not rise up now All this will turn to ashes. (‘I am sorry my friends’, 2019)

During my participatory, ethnographic research inside the movement, I have witnessed some aggressive reactions from the public and passers-by. For example, in one instance I heard a father ask his teenage son, as he pointed to protestors who were drumming in a square: ‘Can you smell them?’ [Yov., 22 Jan 2019]. This really took me back to the archival data I presented in the previous sections, when the media and in some cases the public were vehemently opposed to the free festivals, and the hippies were vilified as smelly, colonies of locusts, long hair types, a lunatic fringe, drug pushers, addicts and so on. Surprisingly Gemie and I (Nita and Gemie 2020) found that the Christian clergy had a conciliatory tone and an important role in recognizing the Christian values in this movement— which in time helped legitimize the early festivals and the larger festival culture. On the other hand I was surprised to hear a small number of (more straight-laced) climate activists and XR protestors also dissociating themselves from the hippies, saying, for instance, ‘there are actually not too many hippies here’ [Ken., 11 August 2009; WinB.12 Oct. 2019], but for the most part XR is keen to promote a message of radical inclusivity which seems to be working: there seems to be a new alliance between alternatives and more mainstream, middle-class, liberal greens who are joining the movement. This new alliance is based on a convergence of values—the post-material values of environmentalism and universalism have become core values of the alter-globalization movements that started in the 1980s (St John 2008) and contemporary non-violent resistance movements (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011)—and as I argued above they are part of the nationalism versus universalism value split investigated by the WVS. It is therefore these core values that now ‘separate’ Green and Liberal Christians not only from Christians that are far on the other side of the political spectrum, like President Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters in the US, but even from those Brexiteers who are not concerned with the environment, in their own congregations in the UK (Nita 2018).

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My own research (Nita 2018, 2019) indicates that cultural and value change in our post-Christian society is often still accompanied by acculturative mechanisms that can be traced to Christian discourses and models. The Green Christian Prayers and Rituals I investigated—similarly to some other creative actions in XR—were chiefly concerned with re-­ negotiating empowered identities—often for other than humans or on behalf of the Earth—by establishing new relationships and by relating to imagined and remembered landscapes. When looking at prayers as narratives of empowerment in a Green Christian context, these reflected a transformed cosmology, with ‘community’ and ‘creativity’ leading to ‘salvation’ (as opposed to pursuing empowerment by relating to the s­ky/ God/the heavens) or by accessing the vertical axis of power that permeates the western cultural tradition. I have argued that we can identify certain Christian discourses that support acculturative processes, such as a discourse of vulnerability leading to empowerment. This was enacted sometimes by identifying with Jesus on an emotional level or by having a secret Christian identity—just like Jesus had to conceal his own secret powerful messianic identity. Thus, an important acculturative mechanism is empowerment through vulnerability; we can find this Christian-inspired countercultural model of re-positioning the performer and the audience in XR (see Fig. 2.2). XR occupies a somewhat uncertain status between the religious and secular, much like the hippies, the 1960s Communes, the Early Festival Movement in the late 1960s, early 1970s, with pilgrimage representing a key aspect (Nita and Gemie 2020). XR is taking some of its protest to small towns and villages, bringing its loud Samba bands and chants and literally infiltrating and spilling through quiet narrow high streets, in a way that is somehow reflective of the early festivals. XR is no longer just performing the ecological crisis to the public in the designated space of the climate camp or in public contexts that are being arbitrated by the media, but it is meeting the public ‘in person’, by penetrating these villages and public spaces of towns and cities (Fig. 2.1). The intersection between religion and protest in Extinction Rebellion (Nita 2019; Skrimshire 2019) has been noted by scholars. There is a performative dimension that is apparent in this process of doing a ‘die-in’29 (Fig. 2.2) or being arrested, which can also become a public ritual that 29  Die-ins—previously ‘sit-ins’—have now become popular in other political protests, although interestingly the 2020 expression of the Black Lives Matter movement has not

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Fig. 2.1  XR Red Brigade Supporting Youth Strike 4 Climate 20 September 2019, Bath, UK

implicitly changes the position of the audience as well: the media, the public and the police. I have argued that certain Christian discourses (Nita 2018) can support these acculturative processes—such as a discourse of vulnerability leading to empowerment, sometimes of identifying with Jesus on an emotional level—for example, by having a secret Christian identity—just like Jesus had to conceal his own secret powerful messianic identity. We find this Christian-inspired countercultural model of changing values by re-positioning the performer and the audience in XR, as much as we find it in countercultural art and creative actions more broadly. Journeys from vulnerability to empowerment are obvious in die-ins that challenge the onlooker/audience, making them uncomfortable and asking them to reflect on their role and responsibility as upright humans. adopted die-ins but developed their own protest performance style whereby protestors are kneeling on one knee with a raised fist.

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Fig. 2.2  Die-in, XR, Bristol 2019, UK

Conclusions My analysis suggests that the alternatives were ‘naturalized’ in 1970s Britain—by which I wished to describe a complex process during which their status, rights and identities were (re-)negotiated. We might examine this process/processes by examining how a performative and memorialized activism came to represent the hippies inside modern arts and performance festivals. I showed above that the naturalization of the alternatives—which was partly brokered by the media—also involved making them ‘manageable’, ridiculing them, presenting them as harmless and dis-empowered. On the other hand people living alternative lifestyles in the 1970s had help from influential voices in their communities—in this case the local officials who used their voices to speak on their behalf. I had shown elsewhere that the Christian clergy had a similar role of negotiating the acceptance of the alternatives (Nita and Gemie 2020). The data I presented here deserves attention because its perusal shows that this is not simply an example of political correctness. It is fascinating for me, as a

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British-Romanian and as an immigrant to the UK, to see how the British officialdom could stand up to the media and even the police, to protect and help the alternatives. The protection of the stay-at-home and returning hippies is sometimes done by appealing to family values, personal stories and reports from the community. Material help from the British officialdom, through such measures as supplementary benefits, helped redress the power dynamics in the public domain, allowing the alternatives to keep experimenting. Although increasingly secular, global and multicultural, Britain is still a post-Christian society and thus the Christian semiotics of the British counterculture and the climate movement may prove an important acculturative strategy. As the post-material values promoted by the 1970s alternatives—chiefly environmentalism and universalism—were increasingly assimilated by the green and liberal political spectrum, the lines of divisions have shifted. We see the effects of this process of value change in the political orientation of green and liberal Christians who are less at home in their home churches and increasingly drawn inside new arts and performance festival communities’ continuum: festivals, retreats, virtual networks and pilgrimages. Much like the early alternatives’ experiments, XR activists are challenging the British and global public with their art and performance actions. The early alternatives and festivals have now gestated into new forms of digital and hybrid XR art and performance green communities, whose impact—framed within a familiar Christian semiotics and structure of feelings—we hope to witness in the next decade.

References Babiak, Todd. 2002. So Hippie Together: Chaos in the Commune. Edmonton: Alta. Charmaz, Kathy. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. London: Sage. Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. 2011. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press. Dietler, Michael. 1994. “Our Ancestors the Gauls”: Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe. American Anthropologist 96 (3): 584–605. Ellis, Catherine. 2002. The Younger Generation: The Labour Party and the 1959 Youth Commission. Journal of British Studies 41 (1): 199–231. ———. 2005. No Hammock for the Idle: The Conservative Party, “Youth” and the Welfare State in the 1960s. Twentieth Century British History 16 (1): 441–470.

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Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Policy Studies. Critical Policy Studies 7 (2): 177–197. Fox, Jon. 2013. The Uses of Racism: Whitewashing New Europeans in the UK. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 36 (11): 1871–1889. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01419870.2012.692802. Gemie, Sharif, and Brian Ireland. 2017. The Hippie Trail: A History, 1957–1978. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heelas, Paul. 1992. Enterprising Culture: Its Values and Value. In The Values of the Enterprise Culture. The Moral Debate, ed. Paul Heelas and Paul Morris, 1–15. London: Routledge. Hjarvard, Stig. 2013. The Mediatization of Culture and Society. New  York: Routledge. Inglehart, Ronald. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ireland, Brian, and Sharif Gemie. 2015. From Kerouac to the Hippy Trail: Some Notes on the Attraction of On the Road to British Hippies. Studies in Travel Writing 19 (1): 66–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2014.994926. Joppke, Christian. 2007. Transformation of Citizenship: Status, Rights, Identity. Citizenship studies 11 (1): 37–48. Kidwell, Jeremy, Franklin Ginn, Michael Northcott, Elizabeth Bomberg, and Alice Hague. 2018. Christian Climate Care: Slow Change, Modesty and Eco-theo-­ citizenship. Geo: Geography and Environment 5 (2): e00059. Knight, Sam. 2019. Does Extinction Rebellion Have the Solution to the Climate Crisis? The New  Yorker. July 21. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-­ from-­t he-­u k/does-­e xtinction-­r ebellion-­h ave-­t he-­s olution-­t o-­t he-­c limate-­ crisis. Accessed 5 Aug 2020. Korte, Barbara, U. Eva Pirker, and Sissy Helff. 2010. Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture. Amsterdam: BRILL. Lassander, Mika. 2014. Post-Materialist Religion: Pagan Identities and Value Change in Modern Europe. Beaverton: Ringgold. Lövheim, Mia, and Gordon Lynch. 2011. The Mediatisation of Religion Debate: An Introduction. Culture and Religion: The Mediatization of Religion 12 (2): 111–117. Mathews, Mark. 2010. Droppers: America’s First Hippie Commune, Drop City. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. McKay, George. 2015. “The Pose … is a Stance”: Popular Music and the Cultural Politics of Festival in 1950s Britain. In The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture, ed. George McKay. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Miller, Timothy. 1999. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Moore, Helen. 2019. Perceptions of Eastern European Migrants in an English Village: The Role of the Rural Place Image. Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1623016. Nita, Maria. 2016. Praying and Campaigning with Environmental Christians: Green Religion and the Climate Movement. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-­1-­137-­60035-­6. ———. 2018. Christian Discourses and Cultural Change: The Greenbelt Art and Performance Festival as an Alternative Community for Green and Liberal Christians. Implicit Religion 21 (1): 44–69. https://doi.org/10.1558/ imre.37354. ———. 2019. Where are Extinction Rebellion’s Cultural Roots? Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective, The Open University. http://www.open. ac.uk/blogs/religious-­studies/?p=980. Accessed 5 Aug 2020. Nita, Maria, and Sharif Gemie. 2020. Counterculture, Local Authorities and British Christianity at the Windsor and Watchfield Free Festivals (1972–5). Twentieth Century British History 31 (1): 51–78. https://doi.org/10.1093/ tcbh/hwy053. Rawlinson, Kevin. 2019. Extinction Rebellion. The Guardian, October 8. http:// bit.ly/GuardianExtinctionRebellion. Accessed 24 Nov 2019. Skrimshire, Stefan. 2019. Extinction Rebellion and the New Visibility of Religious Protest. Open Democracy, May 12. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ transformation/extinction-­r ebellion-­and-­new-­visibility-­r eligious-­protest/. Accessed 5 Aug 2020. Smith, Jonathan Z. 2005 [1987]. To Take Place. In Ritual and Religious Belief: A Reader, ed. Graham Harvey, 26–52. London: Equinox. Speck, Ross V. 1972. The New Families: Youth, Communes and the Politics of Drugs. London: Tavistock Publications. St John, Graham. 2008. Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present. Social Movement Studies 7 (2): 167–190. Tranter, Bruce, and Mark Western. 2010. Overstating Value Change: Question Ordering in the Postmaterial Values Index. European Sociological Review 26 (5): 571–583. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcp040. Webster, Emma, and George McKay. 2016. From Glyndebourne to Glastonbury: The Impact of British Music Festivals. Norwich: University of East Anglia. Willins, Kathleen. 2016. Naked in the Woods: My Unexpected Years in a Hippie Commune. Amana: Communal Studies Association. Wuthnow, Robert. 2003. The New Spiritual Freedom. In Cults and New Religious Movements, ed. Lorne L.  Dawson, 89–111. Oxford: Oxford Blackwell Publishing. WVS. 2019. Findings and Insights. World Value Survey. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp. Accessed 5 Aug 2020.

CHAPTER 3

The Case for a Free Festival (1969–1974) Hippy Culture and Pop Festivals Sharif Gemie

Introduction: Hippy Culture and Festivals This paper will discuss the contribution of hippy culture to modern festival culture: more specifically, I will argue that hippy culture suggested a new understanding of what a pop festival could be and how a particular form of festival—the free festival—emerged in the early 1970s as the most accurate representation of the hippy pop festival.1 I will address these questions by first considering what was probably the biggest pop festival in British history: the Isle of Wight festival of 1970, which became an anti-model for counter-cultural activists. I will then turn to consider some of the free festivals which were held in the early 1970s as a reaction against the Isle of Wight model. Finally, I will explore the differences between the mass festival (represented by the Isle of Wight) and the free festival (represented by Glastonbury 1971 and the various Windsor festivals, 1972–1974). 1

 In this paper I will not distinguish between pop and rock festivals.

S. Gemie (*) University of South Wales, Newport, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_3

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Throughout this chapter, I will focus more on festival-goers than festival organisers and, where possible, I will refer to first-hand accounts from attendees and participants. Unfortunately, these topics immediately lead to a difficult question: what is hippy culture? Even: what is a hippy? Astonishingly, this topic is practically unresearched. There was a brief spurt of quasi- and sub-­ anthropological works about hippy communities in the late 1960s, which—while they contain some interesting and valuable first-hand observations—now seem naïve and self-referential (e.g., Mills 1973; Surawicz 1968; Yablonsky 1973). The Birmingham-based Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) only showed a cursory interest in this topic (Willis 1978). It quickly arrived at a series of value judgements: hippies were middle class and therefore of less interest to the Centre then apparently more authentic working-class sub-cultures such as mods (Hall and Jefferson 1993). In fact, the only text by the CCCS that directly addressed the topics of hippies was an unusually weak and rambling work by Stuart Hall (2007 [originally published in 1969]). One problem in these early analyses of hippy culture was their assumption that hippies were real: they could be identified as a distinct sub-­species of humanity. This conceptual error was then compounded by a second assumption that the characteristics of this new sub-species were obvious; indeed, so obvious that they barely needed to be noted. In this paper, I will base my understanding of hippy culture on its first modern characterisation. Hippy culture was first identified in Warren Hinckle’s article ‘A Social History of the Hippies’, published in March 1967, and based on close observation of the Haight-Ashbury quarter of San Francisco. ‘There, in a daily street-fair atmosphere, upwards of 15,000 unbonded girls and boys interact in a tribal, love-seeking, free-swinging, acid-based type of society’ (p. 9). Hinckle did not refer to what became a frequently cited sign of hippy identity: long hair (or any other form of appearance or dress) and—unlike later commentators—he did not argue that drugs were central to hippy culture. Instead, he stressed inner, cultural qualities. ‘Hippies do not share our written, linear society—they like textures better than surfaces, prefer the electronic to the mechanical, like group, tribal activities. Theirs is an ecstatic, do-it-now culture, and rock and roll is their art form’ (p. 19). In his article, Hinckle also suggested a type of pseudo-Darwinistic evolutionary schema, with beatniks leading to hippies. These types of characterisations of hippies as a form of culture informed some of earliest understandings of hippies: a point nicely

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illustrated by the 1970 choice for the Sikkens Art prize, the oldest independent art prize awarded in the Netherlands. In that year it was awarded to ‘The hippies’: ‘for their colourful contribution to society. Specifically for their exuberant use of colour as a playful aspect in human society, making a real contribution to the integration of colour and space’ (Anonymous n.d.). The term ‘hippy’ quickly became controversial. In October 1967, inhabitants of Haight-Ashbury staged a ‘Death of Hippie’ mock-funeral. In part, this was a protest against a sudden influx of newcomers with no incomes and no means of support, and the associated problems of over-­ crowding, homelessness and drug addiction. But the mock-funeral was also a protest against the very concept of ‘hippy’, which some clearly felt had been foisted on them (Hill 2016: 163–167). The term remains contentious, even today. Informants I talked to in the course of researching this paper remembered that they were often reluctant to apply the H-word to themselves. EP told me ‘I spent my whole life avoiding the word “hippy”’ (EP 2017), while R remembered that in 1973 ‘I knew fine and well that I was not a hippy!’ (R 2017). J suggested a more nuanced approach: he rejected the term ‘hippy’ as a means to identify himself, but remembered that the agit-prop theatre group of which he was a member used it in their street performances (J 2016). Recent scholars have initiated a more careful use of the term. Nicholas Campion sounds a note of caution: ‘[Hippy] is a loose term and there was no official definition and no organised movement’ (2016: 101). Hill, in her carefully researched study of Haight-Ashbury, refrains from providing a clear identification and instead stresses the open-ended nature of the hippies’ presence, based on a scene or a culture (Hill 2016: 151). Dominic Sandbrook contributes an interesting and genuinely provocative observation: ‘[Hippy] was a label adopted by young people for leisure purposes, denoting a certain style of dress, vocabulary and behaviour at evenings and weekends’ (Sandbrook 2012: 441). In order to find some clarity on this unexpectedly complicated topic, I have chosen to return to the observations by Hinckle in his 1967 article, and I will stress the inner, cultural or spiritual aspirations of hippies, rather than focusing on ethnological or exterior signs. Furthermore, instead of seeing hippies in pseudo-anthropological terms as a tribe, it is more useful to think of hippy culture as a new zone, marked by a search for authenticity and intensity. (In this sense, the hippy scene overlapped with two other

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frequently invoked zones: the counter-culture and the Underground.) People dropped in and out of this new zone, sometimes loitered on the edges, sometimes swum right into the centre. None of them were ‘hippies’, in the sense that they had transmuted themselves into a new species, but all of them were participants in the rituals and practices of the zone. Diverse methods were used to animate this zone: they could include drug-­ taking, meditation and the collective listening to electronically amplified music. The argument to be developed in this paper is that this hippy culture transformed concerts and festivals into mass gatherings which celebrated new values in a more memorable and intensive manner than previous, sometimes outwardly similar, events. How should these new festivals be studied? One frequent approach is an institutional one, neatly summed up by Brian Ireland as ‘ask the organisers’ (Ireland 2019: 16). Flicking through Ray Foulk’s two-volume history of the three Isle of Wight festivals held in 1968, 1969 and 1970, one can see the weaknesses of this approach. Foulk’s focus is solidly and consistently on the stars. The first volume is entitled Stealing Dylan from Woodstock. It includes mini-biographical notes of topics such as Dylan’s difficult months after his motorbike accident of July 1966. There are detailed accounts of the stresses and strains of being a festival organiser, evocative accounts of individual singers’ performances on the stage and useful summaries of the press treatment of the three mass festivals. There are amusing anecdotes, some of which have a charm of their own: there’s a lovely account of an awkward, improvised four-partner tennis game played by Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon in 1969 at the Isle of Wight, in which Lennon only agreed to play ‘on condition that nobody knows how’ (Foulk and Foulk 2015: 190). The crowds at the festivals are mentioned, but always simply as crowds, like extras playing minor roles in a wider drama. Apart from some sketchy discussion of the counter-cultural activists who protested against the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, there is no attempt to evaluate seriously the mass experience of the festivals. The working assumption of the book seems to be that the crowd got what the organisers provided. What other perspectives are available? One could easily observe that each of the—possibly—half a million attendees at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival would have their own story to tell: how could one collate and evaluate such diverse material? Perhaps so: but it is at least possible to adopt a change of focus, and to start one’s enquiries by considering the experience of people in the crowds, rather than starting with the stars and

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the organisers. In practice, one can rapidly identify a relatively small number of distinct trends and attitudes developing among the fans. In line with this proposed change of perspective, this paper will draw on six face-­ to-­face interviews with fans and activists who attended free festivals and other relevant events in the early 1970s, plus one email interview and one lengthy first-hand account of attendance at the three Windsor free festivals (1972–1974) posted on a website. The 1970 Isle of Wight Festival: Supporters and Critics Starting as relatively small events in the late 1950s, pop festivals boomed in the late 1960s and 1970s, becoming regular features of the cultural calendar. One survey of festivals in summer 1979 found that 24 major festivals took place, attracting between 200 and 150,000 fans (Clarke 1982: 1). It is difficult to exaggerate how seriously these events were taken at the time. Joe Boyd, the producer of numerous prestigious psychedelic and folk-rock albums of the late 1960s, recalled his thoughts at the end of the mammoth 14-hour Technicolor Dream all-night concert held in Alexander Palace in April 1967. ‘This is it, we won. We’re in charge now’2 (Gammond 2017: 0.33). For contemporary observers such as Jeremy Sandford and Ron Reid, festivals were ‘a test bed for the working of the running of some future society’ (1974: 5); for Michael Clarke they were ‘a test of counter-cultural independence’ (Clarke 1982: 83). Even Foulk considered that at his giant Isle of Wight festivals ‘an air of quasi-religious camaraderie’ was created as ‘the counter-culture [reached] its zenith’ (Foulk and Foulk 2015: 42; Foulk 2016: xvii). At the same time, festivals were the focus of much public scrutiny and opposition. A Harris opinion poll from 1972, published in the Daily Express, uncovered a clear, generational difference of opinion: 75% of respondents over 55 disapproved of pop festivals in their local area, while only 26% of respondents aged between 16 and 24 shared such views. Twenty-seven per cent of people aged over 55 wanted all pop festivals banned; only 4% of respondents aged between 16 and 24 concurred (cited in National Archives, HLG 120/1545, report dated 16 June 1972). The massive Isle of Wight festivals provided one model for the development of the pop festival. The first one, in 1968, started as a benefit gig to 2  Here, a qualification. Joe Boyd isn’t actually identified as the speaker of these words in the voiceover for this section of Gamond’s film. But the voice certainly sounds like his.

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raise money for the construction of a swimming pool (Foulk and Foulk 2015). Significantly, the organisers knew little about the British counter-­ culture: they had to quickly learn who were the rising stars; perhaps more importantly, their concept of festival was a received one, drawn from their impressions of other events (Foulk and Foulk 2015). Foulk was aware of the success of Woodstock, but felt that his team could do better. He rehearses criticisms of the American festival: ‘Inadequate facilities, appalling weather and widely distributed bad acid reduced the American event to a disaster area’ (Foulk 2016: xviii). The result was the stripped-down concentration in 1969 on ‘getting’ Dylan, as if this act in and of itself would constitute a successful festival. If the figure of half a million attendees is to be believed, then Foulk’s massive 1970 Isle of Wight festival has a strong claim to be the biggest festival in history. But Foulk’s preparations for the 1970 event were no better than those for Woodstock. The site for the festival was only agreed 26 days before the festival started (Foulk 2016: 81). Preparations unrolled at a madcap pace and inevitably centred on the parallel lines of two security fences to ensure that only ticket-holders could attend. (One lesson which Foulk clearly took from Woodstock was that it was essential to ensure that ticketing and security functioned properly.) Organising the 1970 festival was like controlling ‘a supertanker at sea’ observes Foulk (2016: 109): an evocative phrase which brings home Foulk’s experience of organising the event and his distance from the crowd of festival-goers. Contemporary photos of the Isle of Wight festivals and Murray Lerner’s documentary films reveal the results of this rushed, stripped-down approach: one sees a crowded, squalid arena, in which any human scale has been lost. At first sight, the crammed festival site looks like a holding area for evacuees from some horrific natural disaster. Foulk’s own words echo this impression: ‘The site was not so much the refugee camp of cliché—it seemed far worse than that. It had a more squalid air about it’ (Foulk 2016: 159). Even the performers on the stage were taken aback by the sheer, stark size of the arena. The experienced soul singer Marsha Hunt recalled her shock as she came on stage at the Isle of Wight in 1969. ‘It was impossible to concentrate on one face or to see the audience in full because the expanse of bodies was too vast. The shockingly awesome sight of people the size of ants and dots crawling for nearly a mile back took me off guard’ (cited in Foulk and Foulk 2015: 165). The dishevelled youngsters attending Woodstock spread out over nearby woods, hills and pools. In films and photos they retain a youthful charm, while in comparison the

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compact, sunburnt, denim-clad masses at the Isle of Wight seem to lose individuality and identity. Understandably, there were immediate protests by attendees at the Isle of Wight festival. Sometimes these were incoherent and poorly aimed. Often they focused on the security fence and the price of tickets: but, given that the festival actually lost money and the organisers ended up in debt, claiming that the festival was financially exploitative seems a weak argument (Foulk 2016: 260–262). Stronger arguments could be made about the ambience and planning of the festival space. Two of my interviewees attended. C recalls the atmosphere of the festival as ‘pretty grim’. It was ‘overwhelming: a flat carpark, so you basically sat and watched… There was little else happening’. He told a story about queuing for a long time for fish and chips, only to find that the stall ran out of food just as it was his turn (C 2017). J remembered being treated ‘like a bloody animal’ and complained about the lack of toilets (J 2016). Other contemporaries concurred. ‘A cattle market’, commented Nik Turner, Hawkwind’s saxophonist (cited in Aubrey and Shearlaw 2004: 36). Counter-cultural activist and musician Mick Farren commented that the security fence had all the charm of the East German border (Farren 2001: 284). More significant still is his observation about what was missing: where were the macrobiotic centres, organisations, underground press, theatre and street performers? (Farren 2001: 287). For many, the single-minded focus on performer and audience actually destroyed an important element of what a festival was supposed to be about. At one level, the organisers of the massive Isle of Wight had simply misunderstood the nature of 1960s pop festival: the most important point was not the music. The element of participation was also vital, and while one can trade criticisms and comments about whether Woodstock or the Isle of Wight (1970) deserve to be seen as the greatest festival of the period, it is probably true that Woodstock constituted a better example of mass participation in practice. This is suggested in the film of Woodstock: the most common theme is that of the audience, who clearly take precedence over the performers and organisers (Ireland 2019: 81). The same cannot be said for Lerner’s series of films concerning the Isle of Wight festival, in which the films centre on the stars, with brief interludes on the audience. ‘You’ve been a very, very fine audience’, comments MC Rikki towards the end of Lerner’s Message to Love (Lerner 1997 [1970], 1.08.15). His words are intended as a gesture of reconciliation between organisers, fans and stars, but they could also be read as a statement of

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defeat: what of those who had expected that a festival would allow them to be something other than an audience? One of the vox-pops in Lerner’s Message to Love makes the following critical comment on the cultural hierarchy of the event. It was ‘almost like a feudal court scene… your royalty on the stage, and backstage you have your courtiers, the groupies and the managers, the people that keep the pop-kings in power, and then you have your serfs out in the audience, behind corrugated iron fences’ (Lerner 1997 [1970], 34:58). Similar criticisms about the Isle of Wight and about the nature of festivals were discussed in counter-cultural circles. Activist and journalist Richard Neville published a razor-sharp critique of the commercial model of the pop festival. ‘It rehabilitated the concept of hierarchies, superstardom, VIP’s, and all the other paraphernalia of class society, which a genuine people’s festival would strive to dismantle… drugs are virtually essential to survival— how else could most people endure planned traffic jams, hard hitching, 72 pre-dominantly sleepless hours, rain, wind, bad food’ (Neville 1972). Significantly, many of those involved in the organisation of the first Glastonbury Fayre were thinking along similar lines. Andrew Kerr, one-­ time private secretary to Randolph Churchill, attended the Isle of Wight festival and sat with the protestors on the hill overlooking the main arena. The festival ‘disgusted me’ he recalled (Kerr 2011: 188). Thomas Crimble, another of the co-organisers of Glastonbury 1971, summed up his aims: ‘to be the exact opposite of the Isle of Wight’ (cited in Aubrey and Shearlaw 2004: 27). At first reading, many of these criticisms may sound banal and obvious. It is worth stressing that they were part of a bigger struggle concerning the legitimacy of a pop festival. The counter-cultural activists were challenging the right of new pop entrepreneurs to exploit a format which the activists considered was rightfully theirs. Their complaints were not simply hot air: they intended to seize back the format. Organising an Alternative to the Mass Festival One of the great impulses within the hippy counter-culture was self-­ activity. Farren evokes this neatly: ‘If you recognised that something wasn’t being done, you did it, and if you didn’t immediately screw things up, everyone left you alone and within a matter of days you’d become a fixture’ (Farren 2001: 83). C, one of my interviewees, provides an almost textbook-clear example of this type of self-activity. He worked in Oxford

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as a junior technician and was drawn into the Mayfly free festival in 1972, where he volunteered to help with the car park. In 1973 he was interested in participating again, but found that no one was actively organising it. So he took on this responsibility and found it all surprisingly easy. He came away with a great boost to his self-esteem: ‘we could do this’ (C 2017). Without going into details about the various free festivals of the early 1970s, it seems clear that something like a common programme for them developed. The need for some form of organisation was clearly recognised: even free festivals did not just happen. A participatory, DIY ethic animated activists and supporters. The Meigan Fayres in west Wales relied on a network of three to four hundred volunteers, who raised funds before the events (J 2016). The first Glastonbury festival (1971) worked along the same lines. ‘We just contacted people, put the vibe out that something was happening, and people just used to turn up—anyone who was doing anything weird and wonderful’ (Thomas Crimble, cited in Aubrey and Shearlaw 2004: 27). EP organised free food kitchens at free festivals, and admitted that after years of experience, he still couldn’t quite see how they worked—but they did. He would start with nothing and appeal for donations. People would always have food they didn’t want: all you needed was a distribution point. At the end of his brief description he laughed and commented that he’d never known a free food kitchen that didn’t ultimately make a profit (EP 2017). Talking about this ethic, EP lapsed into blank verse: A chance to create something A space to create something else in… You took something to the festival: You didn’t expect the festival to provide it Bring what you expect to find Someone with a bubble machine You’re creating this You’re in charge of this: anarchy (EP 2017)

One point which is repeatedly stressed by free festival participants is the relative unimportance of the music, in contrast to the format of the Isle of Wight festival. Ra noted ‘the music was not the main focus for me’ (Ra 2017), J that ‘the music wasn’t the most important thing’ (J 2016), contemporary observer Michael Clarke that music was ‘only one of a variety of activities’ (Clarke 1982: 85). Commenting on the first Glastonbury

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festival, Thomas Crimble noted ‘there was music on the stage, but everyone made their own entertainment’ (cited in Aubrey and Shearlaw 2004: 33). Clarke lists a number of activities which could contribute to a free festival: preparing and distributing food, arts and crafts, theatre, folk dancing, fireworks, ecological activities and the occult. Even the Department of Environment’s working group on festivals caught the vibe: ‘free festivals… are developing an interest in a number of activities—for example, theatre, folklore, mime, rural arts and crafts, alternative technologies and experimental architecture’ (Working Group 1976: 19). The film of the 1976 Meigan Fayre illustrates this point: during the course of the film one sees many instances of the ordinary participants playing usually unamplified music for their own enjoyment, setting up of tents and tepees, drumming and dancing, dressing up as clowns, providing puppet shows and performing yoga and tai chi (Aurua n.d. [1976?]). Arguably, because free festivals were not so tied to the need to make a profit, there was more space and time for these grassroots, participatory activities by festival-goers. In general, all festival organisers in this period tended to adopt a vaguely pastoral tone in their advertising and presentations of their project. Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Woodstock’ heralded a return ‘back to the garden’ (Kintner 2016) and the adverts for the Woodstock festival had promised ‘Hundreds of Acres to Roam on—Walk around for three days without seeing a skyscraper or a traffic light. Fly a kite, sun yourself, cook your own food and breathe unspoiled air’ (cited in Ireland 2019: 22). Arabella Churchill, one of the co-organisers of Glastonbury 1971, explained the general popularity of pop festivals among young people in the following terms: they ‘go to a place where they can find others of their own age to enjoy the wonders of nature under an open sky’ (cited in Kerr 2011: 354). The Department of the Environment working group on festivals picked up this theme. ‘Living and camping together in the open air are almost always part of the attractions of a pop festival, sometimes the main attraction… Festivals give people from inner city areas the incentive to get out into the countryside, which many of them would not otherwise do’ (Working Group 1976: 4 and 22). But despite their conformity to this pastoral tone, the organisers of the Isle of Wight and Woodstock festivals chose the localities for their events for commercial reasons. In both cases, their initial proposals were refused or obstructed by local people, and the location of final site was therefore a pragmatic, even forced, decision.

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Free festival organisers attempted to root their events in a particular locality for more positive, if sometimes fanciful, reasons. Kerr was initially interested in the idea of holding a festival in a place of ‘some cosmic significance’ (cited in Aubrey and Shearlaw 2004: 25). Inspired by the mystical writing of John Michell, he considered Stonehenge as a possible site, but then accepted that it was too near ploughed fields to be suitable (Michell 1972; Kerr 2011). Kerr viewed the final site at Glastonbury in terms of its alignment within a giant earth-bound zodiac (Bowman 2007; Gemie 2017). The organisers of the 1974 Meigan Fayre were fascinated by the thought that their site was close to the place where the giant bluestones had been cut for Stonehenge, but also saw their project as part of the ongoing development of a relationship between hippy incomers and Welsh locals. Above all, ‘getting on with the local people’ was a constant priority for the festival organisers (J 2016). The three illegal free festivals in Windsor Great Park represent a different approach: while sometimes the organisers might portray their project as a picnic in a park, there was a hard-edged political angle to the Windsor Free Festival, which centred on the provocation of hippy activists claiming the right to hold a festival in a Royal Park (Nita and Gemie 2020). In a similar vein, free festival organisers attempted to locate their events within a sense of history, resembling earlier folklorists who re-worked and re-imagined vernacular traditions, often with little regard to the historical record (Gemie 2019). The organisers of Glastonbury 1971 claimed that: ‘It will be a fair in the medieval tradition, embodying the legends of the area, with music, dance, poetry, theatre, lights and the opportunity for spontaneous entertainments’ (cited in Aubrey and Shearlaw 2004: 21). In Wales, the organisers of the Meigan Fayre referred back to the older hiring fair at St Meigans when they planned their festival (J 2016). The East Anglian Albion Fayres invoked ‘an earthy, mystical, mythical Blakean alternate world of British history’ (McKay 1996: 38). The activists who supported the illegal Stonehenge free festivals in the mid-1970s were consciously aiming to hold a festival in ‘a sacred space at a sacred time’ (Worthington 2004: 35). The choice of these spaces and places was not arbitrary: it had meaning for the organisers and participants. This rooting of the event in the natural flows of time and space suggests a ‘back to nature’ ethos, which in turn might encourage nudity among festival participants. In part, nudity at mass festivals was simply a necessity: stuck for several days in under-resourced places, without access to baths or showers, how else could festival attendees wash except by plunging

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unclothed into nearby rivers or pools? Predictably, such actions were seized on by a fascinated or critical mass media, eagerly seeking evidence for hippy depravity. Nina Sabaroff’s comment concerning press coverage of Woodstock is probably relevant to all festivals in this period: the press was always far more interested in liberated nipples than in liberated women (cited in Ireland 2019: 30). At the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, the mass media were fixated by the sight of hundreds of naked hippy bathers at Compton bay (Foulk 2016: 122). But this obsession was not just confined to a hostile mass media: it is significant that the first two close-up shots of individual women in Lerner’s Message to Love are of naked female streakers attempting to invade the stage: one has to wait until the film’s 25th minute before a woman speaks directly to the camera. As in fine art, a woman at a festival who wore no clothes was not simply naked: her body automatically formed an arena for interpretation and sensationalisation by others. Were free festivals any different? Three of my interviewees mentioned nudity in passing. A mentioned it while discussing her lasting impression of Woodstock: ‘a political expression, nakedness [and] free love’ (A 2017). B attended Glastonbury 1971 and recalled ‘dancing naked in the rain. Lots of people were doing that—it felt great, like liberation’ (B 2017). C recalls arriving at Glastonbury 1971 and seeing a naked couple in a field. He immediately thought ‘this was the kind of lifestyle I could embrace’ (C 2017). These three references all point to nakedness as a positive symbol of cultural liberation and possibly sexual liberation, quite different from the mass media’s sensationalised perspective. Interviews and first-hand accounts of free festivals present an understanding of them as participatory zones, rather than as places for audiences to view star musicians. Jane Gibbs attended all three Windsor free festivals (1972–1974) and summed up her impression of the dominant ethic: ‘People working together as one for the benefit of all—and you don’t get that at the overpriced rip-offs masquerading as festivals these days… Everybody was happy and everyone helped each other, for no personal gain and for no other reason than they wanted to’ (Gibbs n.d., unpaginated). C was one of the volunteers who helped construct at the stages at Windsor 1974. He could vaguely recall someone saying to him ‘a festival’s coming, you’re good at this sort of thing’. He arrived on the first day of the festival to find that seven stages were being constructed. Within minutes of his arrival he was holding up scaffolding poles, then assisting in the construction of a lightshow and a roof. ‘Someone must have had a plan’,

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he remembered, ‘but I never met them’. Once constructed, he considered the stages to be ‘fine… quite sturdy’. Some had been made with the assistance of professional scaffolders from London, but everyone working at the festival was unpaid (C 2017). J recalls the same ethic guiding the volunteers in the 1974 Meigan Fayre: everyone ‘was in agreement with what to do… [There was] creative chaos, trust’ (J 2016). Ra was not involved in the organisation of the 1974 Windsor festival she attended. Still a teenager, she had run away from home and school. ‘I had not felt very well cared for or protected by my family or my community as a child, and this was one of the things I was looking for at festivals and on “the scene”’ (Ra 2017). Free festival culture provided her with a friendly and supportive zone. She provided a lyrical and evocative account of her time there. For me the important thing was being in the crowd, immersing yourself. Not in chairs in straight rows, like in a concert… But you can drift in and out, as you please… You dance or not dance, as you wish… It’s a free festival: no one has applied for a licence… That’s the freedom of it… The music was not the main focus for me. I was always more interested in the participatory aspects such as comparing notes with others who creatively patched their own jeans; trading in Indian silver bangles and friendship bands; dancing (music does help); sitting in circles, strumming guitars, making up songs and jokes and striking up random conversations—learning from other people. (Ra 2017)

Was this so different from the experience of fans at the commercial festivals? Perhaps not: it’s more than likely that some fans drifted in and out of activities at the edge of the crowd in a manner similar to that evoked by Ra. But, on the other hand, the sheer intensity of the crowd pressure at— for example—the Isle of Wight in 1970 would have hampered such freewheel drifting. The evidence of films and photos show how difficult fans found it to move through the crowd at the Isle of Wight festival. Simply by being smaller and less intensive, free festivals gave attendees greater freedom to construct their own paths through the events.

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Free Festivals: Two Case Studies—Glastonbury 1971, Windsor 1972–1974 The pages above have stressed the common features shared by free festivals in the early 1970s. However, there were some important differences, which can be seen by comparing the Glastonbury and Windsor festivals. Among the inner circle of people who organised Glastonbury, one finds a conscious religious or spiritual inspiration. Kerr was motivated by his idiosyncratic rethinking of Christian teaching (Kerr 2011: 186). The festival itself was thought of as an ethical act: one of giving, not grabbing (Kerr 2011: 356). This was linked to a backward-looking ecological sensibility, based on the perception that ‘in the old days’ people had more reverence for the planet and the passing of the seasons (Arabella Churchill, cited in Kerr 2011: 354). Glastonbury 1971 was to foster ‘a respect for nature and life; and a spiritual awakening’ (Kerr 2011: 357). Reading such words, it is hard not to be reminded of E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which was published in 1977. Schumacher rehearsed the argument that nineteenth-century rationality, industrialism and urbanism had destroyed the legacy of medieval Christianity. His great aim was that of a re-balancing of the country and the city as part of a larger ecological project. The drive behind Glastonbury 1971 can, therefore, be situated at a turning point in British ecological thought: its inspiration lay somewhere between an older, conservative and sometimes explicitly right-wing generation of ecologists who saw the over-population as the key issue, and a younger generation, inspired by post-68 leftism, who saw capitalism as responsible for ecological destruction (Beckett 2009: 234–243). Kerr and Churchill’s pronouncements suggest a backward-looking, ethical conservatism. The Windsor festivals developed from Underground and counter-­ cultural circles in London. Here the dominant tone was leftist: the stress was on mass participation in the festivals, and the festival itself was seen as an active agent in its own right. The improvised daily bulletin, Windsor Freek Daily, gives revealing expression to such ideas. ‘Every [free] festival has been without authority and the only organisation has been to publicise and co-ordinate bands and stages. What really happens at this festival this year depends upon all of us to get food, water, stages built and rubbish out’ (Windsor Freek Daily 1974, day 1). Discussing the possibility of police intervention in the site, the Freek Daily commented: ‘Any trouble

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anywhere and the WHOLE SITE SHOULD BE ROUSED so we decide collectively’ (Windsor Freek Daily 1974, day 1). Other currents were present: Ubi Dwyer, the Windsor Festivals’ charismatic spokesperson, was willing to cite charters issued by Henry IV and Henry VIII as authorising the festival, and even to claim that he had God’s permission to organise it, and so did not require further consent (National Archives, CRES 35/5095, memo dated 11 March 1974; National Archives, CRES 35/5095, press release dated 10 September 1974). But, in general, the Windsor activists sounded a leftist, populist note. The intensely political nature of the Windsor festivals was demonstrated in 1974. For reasons which are still not clear, on 29 August 1974 the Thames Valley Police abruptly ended their policy of reluctant toleration of the Windsor Free Festival. They entered the site and ordered festival-goers to immediately take down their tents. Several violent confrontations took place and were reported by the media. In one incident, reported by RELEASE and three of my interviewees, police officers attacked a seven and a half months pregnant woman, kneeing her in the stomach (Release 1974). Following this confrontation, the police were on the defensive. Even the Sun ran a headline: ‘Were the Police Too Tough?’ (cited in Clarke 1982: 112). Seven national papers took up the call for public enquiry into the events (Release 1974). Minutes of a meeting attended by the Home Secretary included the euphemistic comment that public reaction to the police operation was ‘less positive than one would have expected’ (National Archives, CRES 36/451, minutes dated 31 October 1974). David Holdsworth, Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, later revealingly complained about ‘the limitless appetite of the media in the publication and broadcast of unsubstantiated, dramatic and blood-­ curdling complaints against the Police’ (Holdsworth n.d. [1975?]: 46). His words reflect the most commonly circulating interpretation of the events: the police were the aggressors, the festival-goers the victims. The confrontation of August 1974 ended one cycle of free festivals. A clear line had been traced: in future the authorities (whether local or national) would no longer simply disapprove of illegal free festivals; they would use the power of the police to actively confront them. This new policy can be seen as a precedent for the aggressive, confrontational police tactics deployed in the Battle of Orgreave during the Miners’ Strike of 1984 and the Battle of the Beanfield in 1984 (East et  al. 1985; Worthington 2004).

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Conclusion: The Roots of Glastonbury During the early 1970s two rival visions of the pop festival faced each other. On the one hand, the Isle of Wight model suggested a sprawling, hierarchic schema, in which mass attention was rigidly focused on charismatic stars and the audience’s needs were anticipated and directed by gifted entrepreneurs who provided for them. On the other hand, free festivals proposed celebrations on a different scale. Being smaller and therefore less concentrated, there was room for spontaneous initiatives and innovations. Festival attendees were encouraged to be participants rather than spectators; the range of entertainments and diversions was broader, and while specific singers or musicians might briefly become the focus of attention, the idea that the main stage was the overwhelming focus for the entire festival was rejected by nearly all involved. While the numbers attending free festivals were inevitably smaller than those attending massive events like the Isle of Wight, it is possible to argue that free festival attendees enjoyed a more intense and memorable experience. The differences between the two models should not be overemphasised. During the early 1970s, the annual Reading festival clearly developed along the lines of mass festival, but somehow still seemed to manage to assume something of the vibe of a free festival, with a less concentrated focus on the stage and the audience. Most important, of course, is the example of Glastonbury. While the first Glastonbury Fayre (in 1971) was free, in 1979 attendees were charged £5 for entrance, and subsequent Glastonbury festivals operated on a ticket-only basis. The final turning point occurred in 1988. For much of the 1980s there was an informal policy of toleration for those who sneaked over or under the fence without tickets: this was an open secret. In these years, the organisers seemed to work on the basis that as long as all the tickets were sold, it did not matter if a few people got in without paying. However, by 1988, serious security problems associated with the presence of organised drug gangs meant that for the first time, ticketing was rigidly enforced (Aubrey and Shearlaw 2004). The nature and character of Glastonbury in the twenty-first century has been the subject of some debate: some dismiss it as simply a hip version of consumer capitalism (Flinn and Frew 2014; Anderton 2015). Such analyses are probably too reductive: they risk generalising in a patronising manner about the extremely varied experiences of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom still approach and experience Glastonbury as a type of liberated zone. While attracting massive crowds today, and while tickets

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cost approximately £265, Glastonbury somehow retains something of the ambience of a free festival. Attendees spend much of their time wandering through a variety of entertainments and diversions, rather sitting still like spectators. Many dress up for the event, suggesting a degree of participation in it, rather than acceptance of it. The counter-cultural, hippy activists who created the free festivals of the early 1970s had high ideals, yet they approached the organisation of their events with realism, good humour and flexibility and successfully mobilised the goodwill and voluntary efforts of considerable numbers of helpers and sympathisers. Their model of a multi-media, semi-­spontaneous, participatory event remains attractive and continues to inspire festivals today. Indeed, it could be argued that this model sets the criteria for a successful festival in today’s world.

References Anderton, Chris. 2015. Branding, Sponsorship and the Music Festival. In The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture, ed. George McKay, 199–212. London: Bloomsbury. Anonymous. n.d. Sikkens Prize winners. http://www.sikkensprize.org/en/winner/the-­hippies/. Accessed 28 November 2019. Aubrey, Crispin, and John Shearlaw. 2004. Glastonbury: an Oral History of the Music, Mud and Magic. London: Random House. Aurua films. n.d. [1976?]. Meigan Fayre: A Free Festival Filmed in the Prescelli Mountains, Wales. Beckett, Andy. 2009. When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies. London: faber and faber. Bowman, Marion. 2007. Arthur and Bridget in Avalon: Celtic Myth, Vernacular Religion and Contemporary Spirituality in Glastonbury. Fabula 48 (1/2): 16–32. Campion, Nicholas. 2016. The New Age in the Modern West: Counterculture, Utopia and Prophecy from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present Day. London: Bloomsbury. Clarke, Michael. 1982. The Politics of Pop Festivals. London: Junction Books. East, Robert, Helen Power, and Philip Thomas. 1985. The Death of Mass Picketing. Journal of Law and Society 12 (3): 305–319. Farren, Mick. 2001. Give the Anarchist a Cigarette. London: Jonathan Cape. Flinn, Jenny, and Matt Frew. 2014. Glastonbury: Managing the Mystification of Festivity. Leisure Studies 33 (4): 418–433. Foulk, Ray, and Caroline Foulk. 2015. When the World Came to the Isle of Wight, Volume One: Stealing Dylan from Woodstock. Surbiton: Medina.

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———. 2016. When the World Came to the Isle of Wight, 1970; The Last Great Event with Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Surbition: Medina. Gammond, Stephen. 2017. A Technicolour Dream. Epsom: White Crow Productions. Gemie, Sharif. 2017. Visions of Albion: Ancient Landscapes, Glastonbury and Alternative Forms of Nationalism. Nations and Nationalism 23 (2): 327–345. ———. 2019. The Oak and the Acorn: Music and Political Values in the Work of Cecil Sharp, posted on 17 April 2019. https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/ oak_acorn.htm. Gibbs, Jane. n.d. Jane’s Story. Accessed 13 December 2016. http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/windsor-­Janes-­story.html. Hall, Stuart. 2007. The Hippies: An American “moment”. In CCCS Selected Working Papers, ed. Ann Grey, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson, and Helen Wood, 146–167. London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1993. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Routledge. Hill, Sarah. 2016. San Francisco and the Long 60s. London: Bloomsbury. Hinckle, Warren. 1967. A Social History of the Hippies. Ramparts: 5–26. Holdsworth, David. n.d. [1975?]. The New Society: A Report on the Development of Pop and ‘Free’ Festivals in the Thames Valley Police Area 1972–75 (no publisher). Ireland, Brian. 2019. Woodstock and Altamont: The Music Festivals that Defined the 1960s. Bedford: Wymer. Kerr, Andrew. 2011. Intolerably Hip. Kirstead: Frontier Publishing. Kintner, Amy. 2016. Back to the Garden Again: Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” and Utopianism in Song. Popular Music 35 (1): 1–22. Lerner, Murray. (1997 [1970]). Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival—the Movie. London: Castle Music Pictures. McKay, George. 1996. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties. London: Verso. Michell, John. 1972. The View over Atlantis. Revised edition. London: Garnstone Press. Mills, Richard. 1973. Young Outsiders: A Study of Alternative Communities. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Neville, Richard. 1972. Stanley Baker’s Barbed Wire Circus. International Times 132: 26–31. Nita, Maria, and Sharif Gemie. 2020. Counterculture, Local Authorities and British Christianity at the Windsor and Watchfield Free Festivals (1972–5). Twentieth Century British History 31 (1): 51–78. RELEASE. 1974. Truncheons in the Park. Accessed 2 December 2017. Reproduced in: http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/windsor-­report.html. Sandbrook, Dominic. 2012. White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. London: Abacus.

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Sandford, Jeremy, and Ron Reid. 1974. Tomorrow’s People. London: Jerome Publishing. Schumacher, E.F. 1977. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. London: Vintage Books. Surawicz, Frida G. 1968. A Trip to San Francisco’s “Hippieland”: Glorification of Delinquency and Irresponsibility. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 12: 63–70. Willis, Paul E. 1978. Profane Culture. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Windsor Free Festival Freek Press. 1974. [online]. Accessed 3 December 2018. http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/win-­74-­freek-­one.html. Working Group on Pop Festivals. 1976. Free Festivals. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Worthington, Andy. 2004. Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion. Loughborough: Alternative Albion. Yablonsky, Lewis. 1973. The Hippie Trip. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin.

CHAPTER 4

“Come, Look and Hear How the Past Has Been and the Future Will Be!” Festival Culture and Neo-Nationalism in Hungary István Povedák

Introduction Together with hundreds of visitors, we walk nearly a kilometre from the parking lot to the site of the “heritage-preserving festival”.1 It is a hot day, the light breeze stirs up the sand of the Hungarian Great Plain. Arriving to the huge field, several nomadic yurt-like tents greet visitors. Some are decorated with oriental, Inner-Asian-like ornaments. The attire of their “inhabitants” seems to be reminiscent of nineteenth-century Hungarian peasants: white loose pants, white loose shirts, crab or a helmet that rather resembles ninth-century nomadic Hungarians’ representations in history books. In the middle of the huge field is a carved “tree of life” with an obviously religious function, next to it a huge molino with the image of 1  This publication is an outcome of the ERC CZ project n. LL2006 (“ReEnchEu”) funded by the Czech MŠMT and led by Dr. Alessandro Testa at the Department of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague.

I. Povedák (*) Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_4

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Attila the Hun and the inscription “Etele Grand King” written in Hungarian and “ancient runic writing”. Several people take photos underneath the molino. I am allowed to capture the taking of a family picture and then I mingle in the crowd of thousands at the fairground. Nomadic bows, whips, linen clothes, wooden bowls forming the map of the historical “Great Hungary”, necklaces depicting Turul bird2 or the ornamentation of archaeological findings, belt bags and pendants evoking the symbols of ancient Hungarian mythology are available in the fairground. The book tents offer volumes mainly dealing with “glorious” but so far “hidden” chapters of Hungarian history, including the Hungarian origin of Jesus, the Sumer–Hungarian genetic connection, or the esoteric interpretations of the Holy Crown of Hungarian kings. The three-day event features lectures on alternative history, Hun–Egyptian–Sumerian– Etruscan–Syriusian, and so on and Hungarian genetic relations, alternative life strategies and Hungarian eco-villages or the negative effects of globalization. Meanwhile, folk music performances and patriotic rock concerts can be heard on the stages all day long. This short report could depict almost any of the “heritage-preserving” festivals in Hungary. Such programmes can be found in Kurultaj, which has been held since 2008 and attracts 150–250,000 people a year, at the National Assembly of Hungarians [Magyarok Országos Gyűlése] (MOGY) of similar size, but also at smaller, local festivals. No matter where they are held, the success of these so-called heritage-preserving festivals is certain. The two most monstrous festivals have been organized far from populated areas: Kurultaj is held in Bugacpuszta, about 100 km from Budapest, in the sparsely populated wilderness of the Great Plain in mid-August, while MOGY in even more inaccessible parts of the Great Plain, Bösztörpuszta, then Apajpuszta, and now in Ópusztaszer, yet their number of visitors is hundreds of thousands in every year. In the last, approximately 15 years, a seemingly “heritage-preserving” Hungarian neo-nationalist festival brand has visibly developed. Although this was only a subcultural phenomenon in the 2000s, these festivals entered mainstream mass culture today. Whilst similar initiatives were not even reported in the national media in the 2000s, nor were these handled as merely pseudo-scientific, radically rightwing or just amateurish initiatives to be smiled at, today Kurultaj and MOGY receive state support, leading government politicians give opening 2  Turul bird is the mythological bird of pre-Christian Hungarians, the clan symbol of the ruling House of Árpáds (cca. The end of ninth century to 1301).

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speeches and patronize them. The two large aforementioned festivals served as a model for several similar, smaller local festivals in Hungary and in the Hungarian settlements of the Carpathian Basin in Slovakia and Transylvania (Romania). These are festivals that offer fun, historical and religious programmes. Their common cohesive force is Hungarian neo-­ mythology and the seemingly authentic and ancient Hungarian culture. In this chapter, I examine the neo-nationalist Hungarian festival culture. In the past ten years, I have undertaken multi-sited ethnographic research (Marcus 2009) at the MOGY festival and conducted numerous in-depth interviews with participants. Concurrently I have been following the festival’s media representation, social media profile, and their online visitors’ comments. In this chapter, I try to demonstrate how a neo-­ nationalist festival constructs the symbolic dimension of imagined Hungarian identity. I interrogate how such a festival reinterprets Hungarian culture and the concept of Hungarian authenticity and tradition—as I ask which elements of this “banal (neo)nationalism” (Billig 1995) are put in the spotlight to aid in this construction?

Hungarian Festivals on the Global Festival Scene As many have noted, despite all sorts of political and economic crises, the tourism industry remains one of the fastest-growing global and transnational economic sectors (Stausberg 2011: 1). With the exception of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the same can be said for festivals: festivals became one of the fastest-growing branches of the tourist industry (Crompton and McKay 1997), and today there are countless specialized versions of festivals (Küchler et al. 2011). Recent decades have brought a never before experienced diversification in the local and global festival scene. Events, whether organized on national, transnational or local levels, provide an opportunity to represent different cultural identities, lifestyles, political ideologies, leisure practices, foodways and music at the same time. As Bennett, Taylor and Woodward note, festivals have not only become an economically attractive way of packaging and selling cultural performance and generating tourism but can strengthen community ties and sense of local identity (Bennett et al. 2014: 1). Festival experience is far more multi-sensual today as it was ever before. Visitors no longer come “only” for music, movies, aesthetics, food or leisure, but also for gaining religious experiences, for preserving and strengthening political ideologies and historical memory or for strengthening collective identity. Today it is

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evident that festivals have become an integral part of the cultural landscape. Festivals are no longer elsewhere, they are everywhere. Particularly interesting variations of the process can be observed in the regions located on the “periphery” of festival culture, including Hungary, which was dissolved in global mass culture only after 1989. The dismantling of the Iron Curtain also led to the collapse of the festive culture created and regulated as a top-down process after World War II in the former Soviet bloc states. As a result, a triple process can be discovered: (1) The feasts and holidays that form the basis of national identity and the associated festive culture had to be “reinvented” at the state level. (2) Frequent, often international art and music festivals related to leisure culture have appeared. Of these, the Sziget (The Island of Freedom) Festival has become one of the largest international pop music festivals in Europe.3 (3) Previously repressed local and grassroots initiatives have gained ground. The re-construction of local identity in Hungary has led to the emergence of several village (Pusztai 2003), city (Kürti 2011) and regional festivals (Fejős and Szijártó 2002) and invented traditions, and in addition, certain religious rites have been going through the process of festivalization. The Csatka pilgrimage, for instance, has become the most important festival of the Romanies, mainly attracting the Roma in Hungary, but also in Slovakia, Serbia, and Transylvania, offering both religious and entertaining programmes (Povedák 2020b). In this chapter, I present an event reflecting the ideology of neo-­ nationalism in Hungary, which simultaneously carries the characteristic features of all three trends. The National Assembly of Hungarians (MOGY) is tied to “re-inventing” national identity, offers entertainment (musical, literary, popular-scientific) programmes, and emerged as a grassroots initiative. However, in order to interpret these kinds of events not merely as mega-scale historical re-enactments, or (seemingly) heritage-preserving festivals, we need to know the Hungarian neo-nationalist culture4 that produces such massive, ritual events.

 See more: https://szigetfestival.com/en/ Last access 19/10/2020.  The concept of neo-nationalism (Gingrich and Banks 2006) differs considerably from earlier forms of nationalism that aggressively aimed at nation-building in the nineteenth– twentieth centuries. Neo-nationalism—as Eger and Valdez put it—is a subset of nationalism occurring within a context where national boundaries are settled and accepted domestically and internationally but are nevertheless perceived to be under threat (Eger and Valdez 2015: 127). 3 4

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The Hungarian Neo-nationalist Culture Although Hungary has been apostrophized in Europe since 2010 as a model state for political neo-nationalism and right-wing populism, neo-­ nationalism has not developed here as a result of the activities of the Orbán governments, in power since 2010. In short, Hungarian neo-nationalism did not even start because of the economic crisis of 2008, neither did it emerge as a counter-movement of the country’s EU connection in 2004, nor as an anti-globalization movement in the early 1990s. Moreover, it doesn’t even trace back to the change of the regime in 1989, when the collapsing communist internationalism was replaced by a nationalism that was being reconstructed at that time. In fact, all these events amplified the nationalist discourse in both the political and the public spheres, but the result of contemporary Hungarian neo-nationalism is to be found in earlier grievances. We must be aware that Hungarian public thinking and national politics are still under the influence of the “Trianon trauma”, and in the popular culture of neo-nationalism, rejection of the Treaty of Trianon (4 June 1920) that dismembered the country represents a key historical factor in contemporary politics. The fact that roughly 20% of the Hungarians live outside the current borders in the neighbouring countries and the “Trianon trauma” that has been feeding on it for 100 years now forms the foundation of national thinking at the national level: both contemporary neo-nationalist symbolical politics and the neo-nationalist popular culture turn back towards the Horthy-era of the interwar years (1920–1944) and rediscover and reuse its symbolism. Just as in the Horthy-era, the symbols of Greater Hungary, the Calvary of the Hungarian people, symbols referring to its divinely chosen role have appeared on objects of everyday culture. Just as they were a century ago, they can be seen today on plates, wall decorations, decorative objects, newspapers and wall hangings and used by patriotic rock bands or in online meme-culture. Thus, there exist a wounded collective identity (Máté-Tóth 2019) that automatically creates the conditions necessary for neo-nationalism to function, which are now inherent parts of popular culture. In addition, there is another explanatory factor for the emergence of neo-nationalism, which can be found in high political processes. These include the emergence of radical right-wing political parties in the 1990s and the increasing right-wing orientation of Fidesz and the Orbán governments (primarily from 2010). Indeed, after the international refugee and migration crisis in 2015, neo-nationalist discourse became the main determining factor of

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Fidesz that was being radicalized and shaped into an all-right party (Povedák 2020a). This institutional political trend is primarily in the crossfire of international political debates and is used to determine the characteristics of neo-nationalism. In addition to all this, there is a segment of neo-nationalism that can be perceived in popular culture in everyday life as neo-nationalism, being shaped not only by the rhetoric of party politics but also by cultural products and discursive forms emerging within civil and market frames that are expropriated in the course of everyday practice (Feischmidt 2014: 20). This everyday version of neo-nationalism can be presented and analysed particularly well through mass rites and festivals, where the symbols associated with it can be analysed, (not only political, but also cultural, religious) ideologies linked to neo-nationalism and theorist themselves line up. In the following, I describe the National Assembly of Hungarians (MOGY), which attracts Hungarians not only from the motherland but from the neighbouring countries too. It is important to note that the range of neo-nationalist festivals in Hungary is not fully covered by MOGY. While MOGY and similar festivals are usually not affiliated with political parties, there is an explicitly radical right-wing festival brand created by far-right politicians and organizations (e.g., Magyar Sziget and the Highland Magyar Sziget and Szekler Island in the Hungarian-inhabited areas of Slovakia and Transylvania). These also feature patriotic rock bands and ex-skinhead bands, radically right-wing politicians and ideologues speak out, therefore, the political (far-right, sometimes neo-Nazi) charge can be clearly experienced. However, this chapter does not address these per se political entertainment festivals.

The National Assembly of Hungarians MOGY was held for the “long-term survival of the nation” in 2009 for the first time in Kunszentmiklós-Bösztörpuszta by Fraternity of Hungarians [Magyarok Szövetsége], a non-governmental organization.5 The three-­ day-­long festival was held far from all major settlements in mid-August in Kunszentmiklós-Bösztörpuszta (2009–2012), then in the neighbouring Apajpuszta (2013) and since 2018 in the Ópusztaszer National Memorial Park. The goal of the organizers was to create the greatest social, cultural and heritage-preservation event with a market for Hungarian products; an 5  http://www.magyarokszovetsege.hu/content/magyarok-szoevetsege 19/10/2020.

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occasion where “in addition to informal entertainment, it provides an ideal place for all who would like to relive the community-forming power of the community, for whom our cultural heritage matters, who are interested in learning more about our history, and for whom the future of our nation is important”.6 The first MOGY in 2009 attracted about 180,000 people, and in 2011 the number was about 140,000. The number of visitors is rather significant considering the remote location of the festival. MOGY offers hundreds of programmes for all ages and all kinds of interests over the three days, which are impossible to present exhaustively. The varied programmes can be basically divided into two major groups: heritage- and identity-preserving events and sacred rites. The former include such essential parts of festivals as music concerts, fairs, historical re-enactment shows and popular- scientific lectures. Performers of entertainment concerts include folk singers and folk dance ensembles representing different ethno-regions and “seemingly traditional” performers like shaman drum bands, patriotic folk-rock bands as well as radical right-wing patriotic rock bands. The soundscape of the festival, the sound of the performers and their external appearance to a different extent but refers to the imagined ancient Hungarian culture. The lyrics of the various songs refer mostly to the glorification of ancient Hungarian past and figures or the need for cohesion among Hungarians torn apart since the Treaty in Trianon in 1920. The organizers describe the vendors at the handicrafts fair as manufactures of traditional historical costumes; however, the actual market supply reveals a much more complex picture. Indeed, several items of traditional costumes related to folk culture are displayed (e.g., leather sandals, boots and the folk dress of a particular ethnic or regional group), but most of the artefacts only look Hungarian-like and were never an organic part of Hungarian folk culture (such as the white linen clothing, felt hats or most of the decorative motifs). The characteristic features of the style include authentic motifs derived from Hungarian folk decoration (mainly flower motifs) mingling together with certain elements of Hungarian mythology and pre-Christian arts. A good example for the revitalization of pre-Christian religious objects is shaman drums. A large proportion of these shaman drums are decorated with symbols (e.g., the Turul bird) that are completely the opposite of the original ritualistic decoration. National and political 6  http://www.magyarokszovetsege.hu/content/az-orszag-legnagyobb-szabadteritalalkozojat-­szervezi-boesztoerpusztan-magyarok-szoevetsege Last access 18/09/2009.

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symbols (the double cross, the Holy Crown of Hungary, a map of Greater Hungary) are also often represented on these objects (Figs.  4.1, 4.2, and 4.3).7 The food culture of the festival is similarly dominated by traditionalism or at least the appearance of it. The menu features traditional foods advertised in national colours and foods that want to look traditional side by side: in addition to sausages and stuffed cabbage, the menu is dominated by various grilled meats, “iron-flattened” meats, organic juice, artisan beers, wines and various pálinka.8

Fig. 4.1  Busy festival marketplace

7  Szeklers [Hung. székelyek] are a Hungarian-speaking minority of about 1 million people living in Transylvania, Romania. Their ancient writing is commonly called “Szekler runic writing”, presumably of Turkish origin. 8  Pálinka is traditional Hungarian fruit brandy protected as a geographical indication of the European Union.

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Fig. 4.2  Shaman drum for sale at MOGY festival

The historical lectures interpreting Hungarian history differently from “academic historiography”, as well as fair of books related to alternative sciences are also essential ideological elements of the festival. As a result of the protracted effects of the 2008 economic crisis in Hungary, MOGY also devotes considerable space to topics analysing the possibilities of recovering from the crisis. Such lectures simultaneously reject globalization, its economic and cultural processes, which are interpreted as the current forms of colonization. For this reason, the emphasis is on independent, national solutions that feed on traditional patterns of localization rather than transnationality. More recently, the rejection of the international migration crisis has appeared in both official media coverage and programmes. As one of the founders and organizers of MOGY, Ferenc Vukics, said, the migration crisis poses another threat to the Hungarians, because at the same time “partisans, pseudo-NGOs belonging to ‘Uncle Gyuri’ [a reference to George Soros who is demonized by the Orbán government—I.P.] want to seize even more power at the

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Fig. 4.3 ‘Kézikönyv városból menekülőknek’/‘Handbook for Refugees from Cities’

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expense of the nation-states, without any social authority or support”.9 There are also dance venues, archery, horsemanship and baranta martial arts performances. In addition to the staged performances, there are a rich variety of talks about culture, history and business, a spectacular handicrafts fair and religious or spiritual events (Figs. 4.4 and 4.5). Walking through the festival, the event gives the appearance of a huge re-enactment show at first glance, where in addition to the vendors, a significant portion of the visitors also wear apparel that seems authentic. In addition, historical re-enactment shows also play a central role among the programmes. The largest of these is the “historical live image”, a complex battle re-enactment during which a mythical or real episode of Hungarian prehistory is played. (In 2018 with the participation of 300 cavalry and 1000 infantry historical re-enactors.) When, among other things, the horsemen ride around the “borders of the country” three times, commemorating the blood oath of the conquering Hungarian tribe leaders,10 the re-enactors march with the historical flags, hundreds marching in the process of whipping, as well as contrasting with the glory of the past, they display the (frustrating) tendencies of the present. In both the equestrian parade and the battle re-enactments, warriors depicting nomadic Hungarians, equestrian hussars as well as the defeated “Slavic and German” soldiers appear. According to the promotion, “the most important thing the thousands of participants wish to express is the need for joint action, a shared sense of responsibility for the fate of the nation”.11 In addition, during the three days, with various quizzes (e.g., whip world championship, steppe equestrian gallop, archery competitions), the organizers simultaneously indicate that they want to present Hungarian history comprehensively, but only focusing on the glorious memory. All of these elements are synthesized by the motto of the festival: “The faith and suffering of our ancestors created and held our homeland. Come to Bösztörpuszta to see and hear what the past was like and what the future holds. Our national unity, the Fraternity of Hungarians, calls upon you to do this”, and “Being Hungarian is a proud beauty” or “National unification by the soul”. 9  https://pestisracok.hu/magyar-seregszemle-szazezer-embert-varnak-a-magyarok-­ orszagos-­gyulesere-opusztaszerre/ Last access 29/10/2020. 10  According to historical myths the leaders of the seven Hungarian tribes took a blood oath, a severe contract after conquering the territory of Carpathian Basin in 896. 11  See Szilaj Csikó 2010 (25–26): 55.

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Fig. 4.4  Holy tent at MOGY festival

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Fig. 4.5  Parade in traditional dress at MOGY festival

The process of traditionalization can also be observed in connection with the heritagization of the festival place. Organizers cite Şumuleu Ciuc [Hung. Csíksomlyó], the most visited Hungarian pilgrimage site as a reference, through which they want to create the appearance of traditionalism and religiosity of the festival: “Csíksomlyó and Bösztörpuszta … the mountain and the plain … two places that every Hungarian has to visit! It can not only be believed here, but seen that Hungary was, is, and will be—for us”.12 The sacred rites of MOGY have undergone ideological change over the years. This is due, on the one hand, to the creation of different sacred spaces at the three sites and, on the other hand, to the fact that the ethno-­ pagan and polyspiritual nature of sacred rites gradually intensified. At first, the organizers emphasized that the event would be organized around 12  Quote from Ferenc Vukics the president of Fraternity of Hungarians from the official homepage of MOGY. http://www.bosztorpuszta.hu/csiksomlyo-es-bosztorpuszta-­szivar vany-visszatert Last access 18/09/2013.

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Feast of the Assumption (15 August); moreover, pastors from the Catholic and Reformed Churches also appeared. The Christian image is also strengthened by the fact that the religious centre of the event was organized around the “Tent of the Seven Blessed Women” with a double cross on top of the tent. In 2013, after the festival moved to Apajpuszta, a newly made Babba Mary statue and its yurt became the sacral centre,13 although a healing pilgrimage was organized to the remains of the “Tent of the Seven Blessed Women” in Bösztörpuszta. At that time the most important sacred rites, the Holy Crown Ceremony and the “blessed women’s walk through the land”, on the Day of Assumption inevitably used Christian symbolism. During the Holy Crown Ceremony, the replica of the holy crown was accompanied by alternative healers and Baranta14 soldiers singing Marian folk hymns to the Tent, where visitors waiting in long lines bow their heads in front of “His Majesty, the Holy Crown” as they name it. The “blessed women’s walk through the land” ritual starts near the Tent of the Seven Blessed Women “with welcoming the Newborn Light with Csángó folk hymns to the Virgin Mary when the Sun wakes up … Following the midday ringing of the bells—at the peak of the Light—we create a tableau with the help of the visitors. At this point the visitors themselves also become active parts of the ritual because they represent the borders of Mary’s land. The delegates from various regions, dressed in folk costumes, carrying the flags of their settlements, become the body of the nation. Women dressed in festive folk costumes connect with each other and walk through the Carpathian home. The female power walking around is accompanied by folk hymns to the Mother God and by the prayers of our historical heroes … This homecoming represents the Assumption of Mary and the fact that our ancestors always returned under the protective mantle of our Blessed Women, to the land of Mary”.15 13  Babba Mary is an ethnic name of Virgin Mary among Szeklers and Csángós (Hungarian minority group in Romania). 14  Baranta is an invented “ancient Hungarian” martial art which was developed by Ferenc Vukics after 1990. Baranta tries to reconstruct the ancient Hungarian equestrian and melee fight based—among other things—on the kinetic elements of the stumbling folk dance. In addition to fighting tactics, Baranta places emphasis on knowledge of traditions (folk songs, folk dances, folk customs) and the development of national identity. Today, there are more than 2500 Baranta practitioners in more than 100 associations in Hungary and the neighbouring countries. 15  http://www.bosztorpuszta.hu/boldogasszony-unnep Last access 18/09/2013.

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Recently, since 2018, Christian references and symbolism have been less emphasized. The organizers indicated that a stylized 10-metre-­ diameter Holy Crown would be erected, which “will be the sanctuary”16 in the middle of the Healing Village, but there was no reference to Christianity in the media representation either. These symbols still appear at some alternative healers in the “Healing Village”; however, the image of Virgin Mary appearing in front of the angel therapy tent now is only one of the many religious references and only one among the various healing methods. The image of Virgin Mary fits well between the “Hungarian Yoga” tent, the witches and the meridian masseurs. As the organizers noted, “To the best of our knowledge, there is no such cooperation and collaboration in the field of alternative healing in the Carpathian Basin. Bonesetters, masseurs, ointment therapists, cuppers, tendon healers, energy mediators, spiritual and energy healers, oriental therapists, parapsychologists, radionics, kinesiologists, family therapists, reflexologists, lifestyle and nutrition consultants, angel therapists, flower therapists, and many other specialists offer their help to those in need and to our healthy fellow human beings who are striving for a better quality of life”.17 A typically Eastern European ethnic-pagan character (Hubbes and Povedák 2014) emerged, in which elements related to shamanism, “pagan” motifs and Christian symbols appear simultaneously, mixed with ideologies aimed at sacralizing Hungarians and glorifying their historical role (Povedák 2014) (Fig. 4.6).

Relationship with the Past Lewis and Hammer start their classic volume “The Invention of Sacred Tradition” with the statement that modern societies show an ambivalent attitude towards the past. On the one hand, people today generally cannot resist the attractiveness of innovation and the almost religious belief in scientific and technological progress. Therefore, they say, most of us tend to accord little power and importance to tradition. Yet, “a felt continuity with the past provides social institutions and private life with a sense of stability” (Lewis and Hammer 2007: 1).

16  https://www.mogy2019.hu/single-post/2018/07/30/Gyogyit%25C3%25B3-faluba-­ jelentkezok-figyelem Last access 11/10/2019. 17  http://www.bosztorpuszta.hu/gyogyito-falu-apajpusztan Last access 18/09/2013.

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Fig. 4.6  Healers and festival goers in a healing tent

The National Assembly of Hungarians provides a spectacular case study of this view, even though the “tradition” that appears here is only apparent. The material culture, “folklore” and the musical scene of MOGY are undoubtedly a classic example for Hobsbawm’s concept of “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm 1983). The identity-preserving and sacred programmes equally use (invent, re-invent, re-enact) symbolic forms and set of magical or pseudo-magical acts from times past. However, not in their original form, but as authentic fakes (Chidester 2005) or folkloresque (Foster and Tolbert 2016) that seem to be authentic components from the past. In spite of their false authenticity these festivals—as Chidester wrote on authentic fake religious phenomena—“[are] doing real religious work in forging community, focusing desire, and facilitating exchange in ways that looks just like religion” (Chidester 2005: viii). The authentic-­ like, folkish music indeed uses traditional folk music elements; also, members of the drum band dressed in shaman-like costumes play the authentic-like shamanic drums, and by listening to this folkloresque music

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their audience “hear” Hungarian folk tradition as beautiful and valuable. The musical and lyrical worlds of such songs are formally connected to the past, yet rooted in and constructed by the existential and material needs of the present (Testa 2020: 24). Although the organizers of both MOGY and similar neo-nationalist festivals define these as traditional, heritage-preserving events, they offer significantly more to the visitors. The most important functions of their programmes are (a) identity-preserving as they aim to foster the nation’s survival and facilitate people to learn about history; (b) preserving remembrance and tradition, when the ancestors’ and historical heroes’/heroes’ life and achievements are placed in the centre; (c) healing at both individual and community levels as they intend to physically and mentally cure the consciousness and broken unity of individuals and the nation; (d) entertaining at concerts and historical re-enactment shows and (e) communicating with and praising the transcendent forces at sacred rites. Besides, the relevance of heritage-preserving can always be found behind the “entertaining” nature of non-religious parts. Concerts and equestrian performances are not purely “secular rituals”, as behind the multisensory effects, not only mundane, joyful experience-giving/gaining motivation can be observed, but also the maintenance of knowledge presumed to be ancient. Similarly, the material culture of the fairgrounds, the ornaments of the objects not only bear aesthetic characteristics, but also articulate a prominent ideological basis. The analysis of the symbols themselves without their context should simply result in the symbolic manifestation of national identity in a material dimension. However, taking into consideration the semiotic circumstances—where and how these symbols appear, who buys objects decorated with these symbols and why, and when and how they are used—a deeper connotation emerges. This can be seen in the use of “ancient Szekler-Hungarian runes”, which signify much more than just the revitalization of the long-forgotten traditional writing. Certainly this has nothing to do with traditionalism when it appears on T-shirts together with irredentist symbols or on wooden plates shaped like the map of historical Great Hungary. These are demonstrative sets of tools belonging to the repository of neo-nationalism, which also represents their customers identity and their relationship to the nations’ history (at least to the alternative concepts of Hungarian history). MOGY and similar festivals are thus clearly linked to both the “re-­ enchantment”, “ritualization” and “heritage-making” processes (Isnart and Testa 2020). They are built on community needs that were previously

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tried to be suppressed and controlled in Soviet times. As a counter-effect, the rites of MOGY aim to revitalize earlier elements and practices of beliefs, add new interpretations to religious culture, sacralize ethnicity and invent new traditions. As Bennett and Woodward note these festivals as liminal spaces are removed from the more mundane process of everyday life, offering opportunities for experimentation with identity and the articulation of identity politics that may often be less feasible and acceptable— and in some cases socially circumscribed—in everyday settings (Bennett and Woodward 2014: 11). For a few days—as in a historical re-enactment show—the participants could “buy”, “take on”, “listen to” or “taste” the Hungarian “heritage” and re-experience the glorious past that might have never existed in reality, but have been recreated by the power of creative imagination. They participate in a condensed, multi-sensual re-enactment that they experience nowhere else. It is true that pseudo-traditional symbols may appear in their everyday lives and they might possess objects with folkloresque ornamentation, such as wooden plates shaped like the map of historical Great Hungary, or even have their Bible written with “ancient Szekler-Hungarian runes”, and might listen to patriotic rock music at home, but in most cases, these only add together into a normative system regulating and defining all aspects of identity during the festival. MOGY gives a colourful example that festivals operate as politicized zones of community-­building, lifestyle narration and social protest across divisions of identity. This cultural festivals have become one of the most important site for representing, encountering, incorporating and understanding aspects of cultural community (Bennett and Woodward 2014: 15). Finally, a question might arise: why do Hungarian neo-nationalist festivals turn back to such a distant past that has no active connection to the present other than myths, when (re)constructing contemporary national identity? The more than thousand-year-old historical events they depict have already disappeared from social memory centuries ago and have only become part of historical knowledge, again with the spread of literacy and historical books. The most relevant beliefs and specifics of the sacred and healing rites of today’s neo-nationalist festivals had already existed on the verge of folklore, in fragmented forms, for the past 100 years. Why have these almost completely forgotten forms of belief been reactivated? On the one hand, as Testa says “in the case of events like those presented […] the best type of past, in a manner of speaking, is the antique time of pagan festivals, according to what has been called ‘popular Frazerism’, a declension of a postmodern romantic imaginary, with its taste for magic, fantastic

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creatures, medievalness, or primeval times. It is this ‘sense of the antique’ (more than any possible and actual antique feature, which can be easily altered or even invented), that permits the binding of a tradition and the people who practise it to a past that can be used to enhance collective sentiments of belonging, community, and identity, but also narrative, memory, and emotional structuring at the micro-level of the individual” (Testa 2020: 30–31). This is true, but on the other hand, we also need to consider the mechanisms of myth formation. That is, myths and beliefs arise where the available knowledge is incomplete and this gap might be filled with creative imagination (Voigt 1980). In this sense, the events of the recent past, about which more knowledge is available, are less suited to function as a complete worldview shaping national identity. Moreover, the stretching of the temporal depth means the widening of the symbolic density and stratification (Testa 2020: 31), and thus folkloresque music, costumes, ornaments and food culture might also enter the festival’s identity market. This is how, says Michael Herzfeld concerning the concept of structural nostalgia, an idealized past can become a normative and shared reference for interpreting and regulating the conflicts existing in the present (Herzfeld 1997).

Conclusion Whilst the global festival scene offers opportunities for encountering other types of social and cultural difference (Bennett and Woodward 2014: 14), Hungarian neo-nationalist festivals are exclusive and aim towards uniformity. The various forms of sensual and embodied experience based on engagements with different tastes, sounds or dress styles do not serve inclusivity and openness, but exclusivity and confinement. A neo-­ nationalist festival is a meeting and melting place for social strata who think in the same way, imagine and use the past in the same way, where participants can play out—represent and celebrate—their national identity. They resemble nostalgia festivals in that they idealize the past, aiming to bring its various forms back into contemporary everyday culture. However, they can only imagine the object of nostalgia, the “coveted” era—since they never experienced it and it probably never existed anyway. This is the way the artefacts on display at the festival became part of the participants’ ongoing lifestyle project and orientation points for the future. The past is used in many creative ways. As Paul Post emphasized “vessel rituals” such as MOGY possess allure because they have various

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compensation functions for the “malfunctions” of the present. They offer “a holdfast in a modern, hectic, and most of all ordered and minimally surprising or exciting existence, but also offers a holdfast for an existence which has diminished in quality in regard to identity and interpersonal relations, or that has run amok, or that has become confused. One seeks in the past a holdfast as an orientation towards the future […] Through a detour to the past, one seeks identity and quality of life through a series of contrast in experiences. Just as in so many other places in the modern world, tradition offers here an island of time and meaning” (Post 1994: 94–95). The number and importance of neo-nationalist festivals in Hungary have steadily increased in recent years. As for their economic machinery— which was not introduced in this chapter—it is essential to recognize that it is no longer a DIY industry capable of satisfying the needs of a smaller subculture, but a mass-producing large-scale industry for the neo-­ nationalist consumers’ market. With the increasing domination of neo-­ nationalism in high political processes in Hungary since the second Orbán government got in power in 2010, the situation and prospects of neo-­ nationalist festivals have also been changing. The events and their organizers receive more and more media publicity and state support. Ideologies and artefacts appearing in the festival market are likely to gain more ground in everyday life as well. However, a question arises: while “Western” neo-pagan and new religious groups who “invent sacral tradition” are usually fully aware of the gulf separating the past from the present to the point of readily accepting that they are not recreating but inventing a tradition (Harvey 2007), the opposite can be experienced in Hungary. The inventors of sacred traditions here are confident in their products’ authenticity, whilst they condemn all other “academic” historical conceptions—such as the Finno-Ugric origin of Hungarian language or the denial of Hun-­ Hungarian genetic connection—as false and conspiracy theory (Hubbes and Povedák 2015). To what extent could such festivals—their ideologies and material cultures—be able to influence cultural life outside the time and space of the festival?

References Bennett, Andy, Jodie Taylor, and, Ian Woodward. Eds. 2014. The Festivalization of Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.

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Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic fakes. Religion and American popular culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crompton, John L., and Stacey L.  McKay. 1997. Motives of visitors attending festival events. Annals of Tourism Research 24 (2): 425–439. Eger, Maureen A., and Sarah Valdez. 2015. Neo-nationalism in Western Europe. European Sociological Review 31 (1): 115–130. Feischmidt, Margit, ed. 2014. Nemzet a mindennapokban. Az újnacionalizmus populáris kultúrája. [nation in everyday life. The popular culture of Neonationalism]. Budapest: L’Harmattan—MTA TKI. Fejős, Zoltán, and Zsolt Szijártó, eds. 2002. Egy tér alakváltozásai. Esettanulmányok a Káli-medencéről. [transformations of a place. Case studies from the Káli-basin]. Budapest: Néprajzi Múzeum. Foster, Michael Dylan, and Jeffrey A.  Tolbert, eds. 2016. The Folkloresque: Reframing folklore in a popular culture world. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Gingrich, Andre, and Marcus Banks. 2006. Neo-nationalism in Europe and beyond. Perspectives from social anthropology. New York & Oxford: Berghahn. Harvey, Graham. 2007. Inventing Paganisms: Making Nature. In The invention of sacred tradition, ed. James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer, 277–290. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural intimacy: Social poetics in the nation-state. London and New York: Routledge. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. Introduction: Inventing traditions. In The invention of tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hubbes, László Attila, and István Povedák. 2014. Competitive pasts. Ethno-­ paganism as a placebo-effect for identity reconstruction processes in Hungary and Romania? Religiski, Filozofiski Raksti 17: 133–152. ———. 2015. Már a múlt sem a régi. Új magyar, újmagyar (?) mitológia. [not even the past is what it used to be: New Hungarian or new Hungarianist mythology?]. In Már a múlt sem a régi… Az új magyar mitológia multidiszciplináris elemzése, ed. László Attila Hubbes and István Povedák, 9–28. Szeged: MTA-SZTE Vallási Kultúrakutató Csoport—MAKAT Modern Mitológiakutató Műhely. Isnart, Cyril, and Alessandro Testa. 2020. Reconfiguring tradition(s) in Europe: An introduction to the special issue. Ethnologia Europaea 50 (1): 5–19. Küchler, Susanne, László Kürti, and Hisham Elkadi, eds. 2011. Every Day’s a festival! Diversity on show. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing. Kürti, László. 2011. The politics of festivals: Fantasies and feasts in Hungary. In Every Day’s a festival! Diversity on show, ed. Susanne Küchler, László Kürti, and Hisham Elkadi, 53–82. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing.

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Lewis, Jamer R., and Olav Hammer, eds. 2007. The invention of sacred tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, George. 2009. Multi-sited ethnography: Notes and queries. In Multi-­ sited ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research, ed. Mark-Anthony Falzon, 181–196. Aldershot: Ashgate. Máté-Tóth, András. 2019. Freiheit und Populismus. Verwundete Identitäten in Ostmitteleuropa. Berlin: Springer. Post, Paul. 1994. The modern pilgrim. A study of contemporary Pilgrims” accounts. Ethnologia Europea 24 (2): 85–100. Povedák, István. 2014. Invisible Borders: Christian–Neopagan syncretism in Hungary. In Religion, religiosity and contemporary culture. From mystical to (I) rational and vice versa, ed. Aleksandra Pavićević, 143–156. Belgrade: Institute of Ethnography SASA. ———. 2020a. “Give me some beautiful holy images that are Colorful, play music, and flash!” the Roma pilgrimage to Csatka, Hungary. Journal of Global Catholicism 4 (2): 36–67. ———. 2020b. The religious neo-nationalism in Hungary. In Religion, populism, Neonationalism, ed. Florian Höhne and Torsten Meireis, 289–308. Berlin: Nomos. Pusztai, Bertalan, ed. 2003. Invented traditions and village tourism. Szeged: Jatepress. Stausberg, Michael. 2011. Religion and tourism: Crossroads, destinations and encounters. London and New York: Routledge. Testa, Alessandro. 2020. Intertwining processes of reconfiguring tradition: Three European case studies. Ethnologia Europaea 50 (1): 20–38. Voigt, Vilmos. 1980. Miért hiszünk a hiedelmekben? A hiedelem paradigmatikus és szintagmatikus tengelye. [why we believe in beliefs? The paradigmatic and systematic Axis of beliefs]. In Hiedelemrendszer és társadalmi tudat I, ed. Iván Vitányi, 281–289. Budapest: Tömegkommunikációs Kutatóközpont.

CHAPTER 5

Burning Man in Europe: Burns, Culture and Transformation Botond Vitos, Graham St John, and François Gauthier

Introduction Commencing in 1986 as a summer solstice celebration in which a wooden effigy called “The Man” was burned on Baker Beach, San Francisco, Burning Man evolved into an annual city (Black Rock City or BRC) and a global movement. Organised since 1990  in Nevada’s harsh Black Rock Desert playa, as a “demonstrable, built, ephemeral, frontier city” (Rohrmeier and Starrs 2014, 158) BRC features its own newspapers, The original version of this chapter was revised: The author Botond Vitos affiliation and email adderss are updated. Correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_11 B. Vitos (*) Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] G. St John University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK F. Gauthier Université de Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_5

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radio, post office, census and a multitude of departments and services in a consciously liminal, heterotopic, event culture (St John 2020a). BRC is reliant on distinct conduct and practice that includes the non-exclusive prohibition on monetary transactions during the event1 and the advocacy of gifting, novel artistic expression and waste minimisation. Integral to this culture is the Black Rock Desert playa, a 400 square mile desiccated lakebed “big and long and wide and flat and talcum-white, with an eternally twisting, changing pattern of cracks” (Doherty 2006, 52). This dustscape is commonly seen as a blank canvas, a “playaspace” encouraging artistic and social experimentation (St John 2019a). During the event, the fabric of this liminal space is interwoven with fire rituals, performances, workshops and interactive participatory art projects, drawing participants, self-identifying as “Burners,” into a complex rite of passage (Van Gennep 1960) that may trigger changes in the post-liminal, “default world.” Following this logic, Burning Man is regarded as prototypically transformational in academic (Pike 2001; Gilmore 2010) and popular (Leung 2010) commentaries. At the same time the idea that Burning Man possesses a “transformational” purpose is hotly debated internally. For example, Burner-scribe Caveat Magister (2019, 119) takes issue with the way a potential effect (i.e. people becoming “transformed”) is conflated with “a primary characteristic of the thing itself (Burning Man is itself ‘transformational’).” Burning Man is endowed with complex transformational potency since it is sans any pre-defined transformational ideology or agenda. It is “an engine of possibility because it has no point” (ibid., 57). After a rapid population surge, to 8000 in 1996 from less than a hundred in 1990, Burning Man experimented with a formal organisational structure that successfully navigated “between under- and overorganizing” to enable a temporary arts community (Chen 2009, 154). In the eyes of detractors however, the growing popularity of BRC (with a total population approximating 80,000 by 2017) contributed to an overregulated, predictable haven of convenience for Silicon Valley elites, dance tourists and unacculturated eventgoers (Rohrmeier and Starrs 2014, 166–167; St John 2017a, 234–236, b). Partly in response to these developments, Burning Man spawned a worldwide diasporic movement with over 100 official Burning Man “Regional Events” (“burns”) by 2020 (Burning Man 2019). The burns are endorsed by the Burning Man Project (BMP: the non-profit organising BRC) and share the orthopraxy crystallised in  The exceptions to this prohibition are the sale of beverages at Center Camp Café and ice at Arctica. 1

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the Ten Principles.2 Furthermore, the transformational potency of Burner culture extends beyond the boundaries of events. According to Associate Director of Community Events for Burning Man and founding member of the Burning Man Regional Network Committee and Regional Events Committee, Steven Raspa, the worldwide community supports thousands of unofficial year-round events that include “build-weekends for art projects, workshops, lectures, beach clean-ups, picnics in the park.”3 Outside North America, these developments are most pronounced in European region (which includes Israel), assisted by the European Leadership Summit mounted annually in different European cities since 2014. Formulated by Burning Man’s primary founder Larry Harvey as descriptive guidelines for the emerging Regional Network in 2004, defining the ethos of Burning Man, the Ten Principles are complementary yet paradoxical as they flourish in a relationship of creative tension. For example, Communal Effort (emphasising cooperation and collaboration) may clash with certain modes of artistic expression (endorsed by Radical Self-­ expression) enabling immediate experience (codified in Immediacy). Such has been the case with disruptive dance music camps and contentious “mutant vehicles” causing disputes since the early years (St John 2017a, 225–29). For critics, BRC’s burgeoning electronic dance music spectacles, often stated to be expressions of Gifting (the principle advocating unconditional gifting practices), have detracted from the participatory potential of the event, and sometimes conflicting with Decommodification (evoking a desire for nurturing social interactions independent from market forces) (St John 2017a, 234–36). The BMP has addressed this controversy by discouraging the promotion of star DJs and demarcating sound-level zones that enable performances sans civic upheaval. Such tensions are native to sometimes competing, other times complimentary, civic/ludic proclivities that are pivotal to the Burner ethos and which evoke a creative tension endemic to burn culture (St John 2020a). As Harvey stated, “principles interrogating one another … that’s the muscular work of philosophy.”4 The complex and paradoxical nature of this philosophical 2  The Ten Principles are Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-­ reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and Immediacy. For an explanation of each, see: https://burningman.org/ culture/philosophical-center/10-principles. The principles are sometimes reworded or amended at regional events. In this chapter, the principles are capitalised and italicised. 3  Interviewed by GS, 5 April 2016. 4  Interviewed by GS, 8 April 2016.

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drive highlights the hyperliminal character of Burning Man and its diasporic event horizon. The coexistence of ludic and civic impulses at burns can be understood through Santino’s (2017) differentiation between carnivalesque and ritualesque performance modes. Following Bakhtin’s (1968) terminology, events may offer carnivalesque opportunities for social and sensual abandon, where participants celebrate a temporary overturn of the world or mock authority by exhibiting expressive and often excessive behaviour. At the same time, as ritualesque, public performances can pursue instrumental, extra-ceremonial goals and promote transformation outside the event (Santino 2017, 6). The two modes have the potential to merge: an event can be playful while marking or reinforcing social categories, and it can be expressive while at the same time enacting change post-event. As indicated later in this text, the ritualesque and the carnivalesque provide useful heuristics to chart the complex innovations of Burner culture. This chapter draws on the findings of Burning Progeny (2016–2019), a four-year comparative ethnography of European and Israeli regional burns and Black Rock City.5 The project was the first study dedicated to Burning Man’s regional movement, involving participant research, interviews and two mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) surveys conducted among EuroBurners (European Burners) in 2014 and 2017. As proposed here, the transformative potency of burns is heir to the complex liminal experiment that is Black Rock City, a hyperliminal space mirrored and mutated in a worldwide event culture. While this cultural transmission has been interpreted with the assistance of heterotopology, the empirical findings in this chapter help illustrate Burning Man’s hyper-transformational profile. Reporting qualitative results from surveys addressing Burner values and motivations, we first discuss the appeal of regionals, notably their multiplex potential for personal and cultural change. The analysis then explores the multiple ways Burning Man principles are interpreted, performed and contested at burns and in daily life. Benefiting from a multi-methods approach that triangulates survey findings with case studies from fieldwork conducted (by BV) in 2018 and 2019 in Germany, and focusing on the 5  Based in the Department of Social Science at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, from 2016–2019, and supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Burning Progeny included events in Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA: https://www.burningprogeny.org/.

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principles of Gifting and Leaving No Trace, the chapter illuminates the heterotopic character of burns and therefore their complex transformative potency. Within the burner community, identity is defined through social interactions informed by an ethos reinforced in liminal contexts, situating Burning Man on a continuum with other event-centred movements, which are not based on traditional modes of belonging (such as those offered by church, state or family) but autonomously produce novel forms of culture and identification (St John 2014, 244, 2017c, 10). The chapter therefore contributes to the theorisation of “transformational” event cultures and movements, among which Burning Man is widely regarded as an innovative prototype.

EuroBurner Surveys: Methodological Remarks Various surveys have been conducted within the Burner movement, including those endorsed by the BMP. For instance, the BRC Census team provides an annual statistically representative survey of BRC (DeVaul et al. 2019), which informs scholarship (McRae et  al. 2011; Oliphant et  al., 2018; Beaulieu-Prévost et al. 2019). Some European regionals, including Nowhere (Spain) and Kiez Burn (Germany), produce surveys, although their methodology is less statistically robust. Other surveys are conducted primarily for academic purposes and are usually restricted to a single event such as BRC (Gilmore 2010) or Afrikaburn (Atkinson and Ingle 2016). Burning Progeny conducted the first collective survey of EuroBurners, designed in cooperation with the BRC Census team. The number of valid responses was 283 in our 2014 Survey (S1) and 102 in the 2017 Survey (S2). Both surveys were anonymous. The quantitative component featured mainly sociodemographic questions, enabling comparison with the BRC Census.6 The qualitative component featured ten open-ended inquiries in S1 and eight in S2 (with six overlapping) that sought details from respondents including their affiliation and attendance at European regional events, motives for participation, comparison of regionals with BRC, evaluation of the Ten Principles and changes and modifications in everyday life. 6  Similar to the BRC Census, respondents were highly educated and tended to situate themselves on the left of the political spectrum, although the wealthy were less represented in our sample than at BRC over the same period. Further details of our comparative results are accessible at: https://www.burningprogeny.org/surveys.

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Outside North America, Europe features the highest concentration of burns in the world (Fig. 5.1). These events are significantly smaller than BRC, with attendance typically ranging from two hundred to several thousand. Implemented using Survey Monkey, our surveys targeted “EuroBurners,” though they were not a statistically representative “census” of EuroBurners. The sample was not randomly selected: invitations were circulated on Burning Man media (Jack Rabbit Speaks newsletter and Burning Man Journal), and some respondents were European Leadership Summit participants. Most respondents were from the UK, France, Germany, the USA, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden (in this order). A minority of survey participants identified as “Community Leaders” (19% in S1; 12% in S2).7 The majority of respondents confirmed their participation in European Regional Events (73% in S1; 78% in S2) or their membership of a regional email list (12% in S1; 13% in S2). A minority noted that they are not connected to Burning Man communities in their region (15% in S1; 9% in S2), although most attended BRC at least

Fig. 5.1  Burning Man’s Global Regional Network (Courtesy of Burning Man and Google Maps) 7

 Throughout this chapter, percentage values are rounded to the nearest whole number.

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once. Consequently, those who considered themselves “EuroBurners” arrived from a loosely defined spectrum, with Burners or Burner-friendly respondents of European descent on one end of the scale and those who are deeply involved in European Regional Events on the other. We received 254 valid responses in the qualitative section of S1 and 94 in S2, respectively. All responses were coded manually to identify the recurring categories and themes in our data, employing an adapted version of the open coding technique from grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1998). Each response was treated as a single unit of data and linked with one or more codes emerging progressively from the text. Where needed, axial coding was employed to identify themes and relationships between the open codes. Our report in the following sections provides a general idea of the magnitude of our observations and a starting point for further qualitative analysis.

Motivations for Participating in Regional Events In both surveys, respondents were asked to identify their motivations for participating in European burn events. We distributed the factors into three thematic groups; most responses evinced more than one motivation. Accessibility Accessibility (location and price) are frequently mentioned as motivators. The overwhelming majority (over 86%) of our respondents are located in Europe. Accordingly, many mention the convenient location of events. With the added expense of long-haul flights from Europe, BRC is far more costly than local burns and thus inaccessible for some respondents. The remaining factors can be distributed into two thematic groups: community and other (general) impressions. Community—Social Intimacies and Interactions Identification with the Burner community is the most important motivation to attend regionals. A shared identity is evident in expressions such as “Burners,” “tribe,” “the people” or “community,” and participation (an urge to contribute and co-create) is stated to be a chief motivation, with some respondents stating that involvement in organisational tasks is more accessible to them at regionals than at BRC. As one participant noted: “I

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can actually be part of the creation of the blank canvas that people here need so much to be able to paint on.” In many cases, the Burner community signifies strong affection and intimacy, often expressed as being “at home” or with the “family.” Quite a few respondents are eager to encounter local members of the worldwide community, expressing a sense of shared (European) identity and an interest in local culture. Not unlike that found for participants in BRC (St John 2017b), some respondents express gratitude towards a regional event community. Others relate the importance of meeting friends and forging long-lasting friendships at regionals where it is usually easier to maintain friendships than those formed in BRC. Finally, some respondents praise the diverse, tolerant and non-­ judgemental community at regionals. General Impressions This group includes other appealing characteristics of European events. Respondents commend the possibilities for artistic expression ranging from individual artworks to social experimentation. A burn is often defined as a safe, experimental space, with regionals sometimes reported to provide more opportunities for innovation than BRC. Some respondents regard the event space (denoted as the “playa”) as a special space demarcated from the “default world.” They often praise the prevalence of the Burner “spirit” or “vibe” at events, which is animated by behaving in accord with the Ten Principles. Some emphasise their intentions to share and spread this spirit at Regional Events and beyond or to “spread the Burning Man sparkle in Europe.” Participation may hold educational potential, whether “personal growth,” “growing together,” “making a difference” or empowering others by “spread[ing] the word.” Another incentive to participate is the expectation of fun and play. A less pronounced motivator is the sense of freedom enjoyed at regionals, by which respondents variously mean freedom of expression, uninhibited personal and social experimentation or a sense of liberation. The smaller scale of regional events is sometimes praised as conducive to a strong feeling of intimacy. A few respondents note that regionals are reminiscent of BRC. As the word cloud (Fig.  5.2)8 also suggests, community is the most important motivating factor, with smaller events often regarded as more 8  The word cloud visualises the 100 most frequently used words in the answers (minimum word length: 3 letters; words with the same stem are grouped together).

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Fig. 5.2  Word Cloud (S1 and S2 Aggregate): “Motivations to Participate in European Events”

intimate than BRC. It is widely stated that the events enable co-creation, as well as the possibility for personal and social development, highlighting the transformational potential of burn culture. Our results show some similarities with earlier research on motivations for festive event participation. In their influential text, drawing on Iso-­ Ahola’s (1982) escape-seeking dichotomy and the conceptually related push-pull model, Crompton and McKay (1997) shed light on the (generic) social-psychological benefits sought by festival attendees, with cultural exploration and social interaction arising as central motivations. Other domains in their model include novelty, rest and escape, suggesting that the seeking and escaping impulses are intertwined (Crompton and McKay 1997, 437). Yet as Getz (2010, 9) notes, festival motivation studies are strongly attached to marketing and consumer research that tends to eschew social and cultural theory. After providing a literature review on motivations to attend music festivals (largely quantitative), Li and Wood (2016, 337) underline the necessity of qualitative research for a more in-depth understanding of motivations that takes into account contextual differences. In their qualitative case

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study of the Chinese Midi Music Festival, they discuss “spiritual escape” and “spiritual pursuit” as intertwined motivators that do not appear in earlier motivation studies of (Westernised) music festivals, the general taxonomy of which includes socialisation, novelty, togetherness, entertainment, excitement and music. Li and Wood (2016, 344–46) suggest that for many participants, Midi Festival is a symbol of utopian ideals and freedom, enabling the pursuit of one’s dreams within a liminal space that seems unaffected by the exceedingly materialistic market forces and social controversies of China in transition. Albeit pertaining to a different sociocultural context, this formulation shows some resonance with the way the blank canvas of the BRC playa is imagined and replicated worldwide. At the same time, Midi bears the marks of a traditional (rock) music festival embedded in the service industry (Li and Wood 2016, 337), which differentiates it from the experimental event space of Burning Man reliant on its unique ethos codified in the Ten Principles, the transformative aspects of which will be unpacked below.

Transformation in Daily Life With BRC often described as a site of contemporary pilgrimage with heterogeneous and contested meanings, Burning Man is a movement with a non-homogeneous transformative potential (Gilmore 2008, 2010; St John 2019b) all the more potent since it is sans an official transformational agenda (St John 2020b). On a personal level, the principles of Burning Man can be integrated into the post-burn world in a variety of ways, informing the way of life of participants. The transformative qualities (almost exclusively positive) invoked by respondents can be distributed into the four thematic groups described below. Personal Attributes The largest group encompasses positive character changes, with open-­ mindedness and tolerance emerging as the most common category. Participants experience greater empathy, feel less judgemental or are more open towards new ideas. Many respondents believe Burning Man has provided them with the confidence and courage to explore their own avenues and ways of self-expression in life. They often feel less shy, more social or more self-reliant. As noted by one respondent: “I have become more open to others, more courageous, more honest with myself, more able to live

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within my skin, more positive, more fulfilled, and much less scared and alone.” An increased awareness of one’s self and purpose is frequently mentioned, which may contribute to leading a more conscious and authentic life, being at peace with oneself or living life to the fullest. Improved self-awareness is sometimes coupled with a growing understanding of the surrounding (social) reality. Participants sense that they are more focused on the moment, are able to think more critically or are less manipulated by the media. “Burning Man made me STOP looking at my phone and instead look UP,” reports one respondent. “I now pay attention to my behaviour, I look strangers in the eyes, and I encourage exchange with strangers!” Being more open towards strangers often leads to more generosity, care and affection. Participants also report improved emotional wellbeing, feeling joyful and serene. Some feel more honest with themselves or others: “BM has given me my true self, and I express my gratitude for that by giving myself to others wholeheartedly and free of judgement.” A general sense of freedom in daily life is variously connected to personal growth, to a defiance of constraints and inhibitions or to an opening up of possibilities. For a few participants, money no longer plays a central role in their lives as they have learned that happiness cannot be bought with capital. Daily Interactions Many respondents note that Burner culture has inspired profound alterations in their daily interactions. The most common response involves gifting or helping others, sharing resources or volunteering in community projects. One participant emphasises that they “learned how to give without expecting anything back, and how to accept help of others/material things without feeling guilty about not being able to help or give back.” Gifts are sometimes directed to “random people.” Many respondents refer to widening friendship circles or developing new communities: “Radical Inclusion and Gifting has opened me to people [who] would be otherwise unknown to me.” The Burner creativity and “doer attitude” can be channelled into art projects, crafting workshops, DIY activities or hobbies. “I don’t see myself as an artist,” says one respondent. “I see myself as someone who loves sharing creative ideas with others, and in community with other Burners I found my own flow in doing things together.” Increased energy, motivations or curiosity is frequently stated, which may result in more active or adventurous lifestyles, and an expanded capacity to solve

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problems, with Burning Man providing inspiration for the professional development and work projects of some respondents. A smaller number of respondents were keen to introduce the Burner event culture to others, typically as an example of better living. The Greater Good The following changes transcend the individual and possess a universal significance. With Burning Man endorsing sustainable living practices, an ecological consciousness is apparent in everyday practices such as minimising waste and promoting environmental awareness. Some respondents express their dedication to live according to the ethos of Burning Man, suggesting that the event teaches “life lessons” distilled in the Ten Principles. It is stated that by promoting universal values such as respect for self, others and the environment, Burner culture inspires activism and may contribute to wider social improvements. Finally, a few discovered spirituality at Burning Man or feel that its ethos may provide a viable substitute for religion. No Change These respondents had approximated the principles before encountering Burner culture. Some mention that it was not attendance at burns that influenced their lifestyle, but the other way around: they found a cultural home at such events because they had already been practising the values. Four participants state that these values had been influenced by new religious and spiritual sensibilities (the Vineyard Christian movement and the New Age teachings of Eckhart Nolle are specified), or alternative cultural formations such as the hippie and squat movements, as well as the hiking community. The survey findings indicate a range of transformations in daily life, including positive personality shifts (most significantly, becoming more open-minded or tolerant), enrichment of daily interactions (notably through more gifting, sharing or volunteering) and professional improvements. Certain changes are endowed with universal significance; of particular interest here (and to be discussed later) is a magnified environmental consciousness, as codified in Leaving No Trace. The variety of responses signals the complex transformational potential of Burner culture, with the experimental hyperliminality of playaspace channelled into the post-burn

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world in multiple and sometimes controversial ways. For instance, according to three respondents, Burning Man caused changes that, although regarded as positive, were detrimental to their careers. Another respondent is dismissive of those he sees as taking Burner culture too seriously and states that self-awareness, moral conduct and personal values should emerge from within, from the contexts of everyday life, and not from the event environment.

Gifts of Kiez Burn Black Rock City’s playa has been transposed to diverse spaces, from arid landscapes to abandoned quarries and from warehouses to castles. The following section offers a case study from our European ethnography that, triangulated with the survey results, contributes to the understanding of the heterotopic progeny of Burning Man. Though small in contrast to some other European events, Kiez Burn is the largest German outdoor burn, with approximately 900 attendees in 2019 (700  in 2018).9 As a nascent event, Kiez Burn inherited and reconfigured cultural patterns within the European Burning Man diaspora. Located at a two-hour drive from Berlin, the name of the five-day burn is inspired by the colloquial word Kiez, applied to some of the capital’s characteristic neighbourhoods (informally defined by the inhabitants) and invoking a sense of belonging. Like BRC, the event features a variety of theme camps (camps inspired by a central theme, designed and built entirely by participants) also called Kieze (the plural of Kiez), some hosting music stages mainly oriented to electronic dance music and operating mostly at night. Unlike BRC, the event is organised in a lush setting, with forest patches, glades and two lakes. BV conducted fieldwork at Kiez Burn 2018 and 2019, encountering theme camps such as Downtempo Saloon, Pirate Kiez, Underworld, Zerzura and Kinder Kiez. A few other Kieze will also be introduced below. Ella, a yoga teacher residing in Berlin, had been invited by a friend to the first Kiez Burn in 2017. She quickly became involved as core organiser of Just Being Kiez, a camp focused on yoga, wellbeing and related workshops. When asked about her 2018 highlights, Ella recalls a workshop 9  It should be noted that references to Kiez Burn did not arise in the surveys (the first event was organised in June 2017, when the majority of S2 responses were already collected). The fieldwork and the survey data are thus independent while yielding similar results, which may suggest that our ethnographic findings are also prevalent at other regionals.

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called Fake Healing Session (organised by Pyjamcakes: a playful, sex-­ positive camp gifting pancakes to the community) that offered a parody of alternative healing techniques, which she held in esteem. Although initially reluctant to participate and do “all kinds of weird stuff to heal [a] person [who] did not need any healing,” she thoroughly enjoyed the workshop, which underlines the ludic impulse animating Burner culture.10 Ella’s playful subversion of “default world” cultural patterns is also consistent with the “open-mindedness and tolerance” category in the survey analysis, which is the most significant change in personal attributes. In 2019, Ella conceived a smaller “comedy camp” called Spießer at Heart.11 The satirical camp provided a response to the eccentric appearance of many Burners who, for example, embody the principles of Radical Self-­ expression (which promotes authentic expressions gifted to the community), as Participation (the rejection of consumer roles through co-creation). However, as Ella notes: It’s OK if you are a Spießer, it’s OK when you are very random and normal. You can also express that. [laughs] There’s also room for that. It doesn’t always have to be super crazy. Accordingly, the Spießer camp featured carefully maintained, mini flower gardens surrounded by fences, accompanied by garden gnomes and a CCTV Surveillance warning sign in their communal area. They also organised “workshops” focused on German Schlager12 hit singalongs, gossiping and cake-eating. This integration of hyper-ordinary practices into the extraordinary liminal burn space illustrates an absurdist impulse evident in burn events worldwide. When asked about the importance of the Ten Principles, Ella noted that her gifting is not restricted to material objects: When you’re organising, that is a gift that you bring into the community. That was a hard thing for me to learn: I had some people in a group who are not very handy, so they don’t build anything, they are not very organisational, so they can’t really think ahead … At some point I got so frustrated [with one such person], until I realised he was bringing such a good vibe into the group and making everyone so happy and joking around. And I felt like: wow, this is so important, to have this person. And then I realised: OK,  Interviewed by BV, 10 May 2019. All further quotes are from this interview.  Spießer is the colloquial expression for the unhip or “square” Germans fiercely attached to philistine norms and values. 12  Sentimental retro-pop music often detracted as kitschy and nostalgic. 10 11

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everyone is having their own little gifts, and it’s so important to … appreciate them with others. And I feel that complimenting is a principle that’s not mentioned anywhere … Nowhere else do I get so many compliments and so much appreciation as in this community.

Convergent with the survey results, where an increase in gifting, sharing or volunteering arises as the most significant change in the daily interactions of participants, Ella’s comments evoke the importance of gifting and gratitude as driving forces within the community.13 Here, volunteer shifts, collaborative works and other commitments fashion art that, according to Hyde, are gifts that are “true” since they cannot be possessed but remain in circulation as they inspire appreciation in others (St John 2017b). Ella’s case is illustrative and resonates with the experience of many participants we have encountered, at BRC and regionals. The ethos of gifting sharply distinguishes Burners from the vast majority of other events, in which buying and selling remain structural. In his famous essay The Gift, Mauss (1954[1925]) insisted on the gift’s complex nature, as a compound of liberty and obligation, as well as self-interest and altruism. For Mauss, the gift is a cycle made of three interdependent moments: giving, receiving and returning. In the logic of the gift, the latter moment can be (or sometimes must be) delayed, and what is rendered or given in return must be of different nature or of a higher value than that received. Incidentally, every giving back becomes itself a gift, spurring a new cycle. While market exchange is self-abolishing and does not produce a residue, gift exchanges produce obligations (to receive and to give back) and a social bond. This bond is the gift’s very reason: in a gift relation, the value of the bond is more important than the material value of what is given. Our research has uncovered that many first-time Burners understand the gift imperative by distributing objects, such as “swag.” As one becomes immersed in the event, though, a different understanding tends to emerge, one to which Ella gives voice. The various ways of contributing to burns can be interpreted as gifts, as the importance is indeed on the social bonds that are created through the communal participation in the burn’s dense and wildly imaginative life. Participants are continually gifted in a myriad 13  The significance of gratitude is acknowledged at other burns. For instance, in the 2017 Afterburn survey of San Diego-based regional Youtopia, participants were asked to rank the Principles on a scale of one to five, with Gratitude and Consent added as additional principles. Gratitude scored first with a mean score of 4.64, followed by Consent (4.63) and Immediacy (4.44) (San Diego Collaborative Arts Project n.d.).

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of ways, from receiving food and swag, to assistance and mutual aid around camp, but they are also provided with the possibilities of experience, in an environment where one feels genuinely welcome. This inclusiveness fuels the desire to give in turn, enacting what Godbout (1994) calls the positive cycle of mutual indebtedness. Burners report feeling the need to give in return to other persons, creating a rapidly expanding web of obligations, recognition and social bond. Yet it is also clear that whatever one gives to whom, one is also giving to the community of Burners as a whole; one is always giving to “Burning Man,” which is therefore the implicit third of gift exchanges. Here, one not only exchanges with specific people or groups, but with Burning Man—the community—itself. At burns and beyond, gifting practices are often channelled into collaborative art projects and workshops, where culture is continuously reinforced and contested. The Fake Healing Session and the workshops of the Spießer camp provide such examples, with numerous other projects also offering playful reflections or inversions of “default world” or Burner routines at Kiez Burn. The volunteer office of the 2018 event was named “Intergalactic Arbeitsamt” (Fig. 5.3), which used the German expression for unemployment office (“Arbeitsamt”), while playing with the art theme (“Intergalactic Family”). The entrance to the 2019 event, dubbed Monkey Gate, offered a parody of German bureaucratic procedures and the convoluted ticketing processes at BRC and larger regionals. The Monkey Gate (built by participants in a homonymous Kiez) featured a closed ticket booth where ticket holders were requested to interact with gate personnel through four rectangular holes cut into a wall without windows. The procedure included the completion of a Permit A38 form (a reference to a scene from the animated feature film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix) with a series of nonsensical questions and demands in German (which was not the official language of the event),14 as well as a “noseprint” request. In the same year, one of the sex-positive Kieze was called Camp Schlampagne, where Schlampagne is a wordplay on Schlampe—the German word for slut—Kampagne (campaign) and champagne, and also the name of a German lesbian-feminist movement founded in 1999 (Altenhoefer 2009). The camp gifted champagne to the community and organised “Discover Your Inner Schlampe” 14  Many Kiez Burners arrive from the English-speaking expat community of Berlin. According to the results of the 2019 Kiez Burn Census (online survey with 314 respondents), English was more widely understood than German at the event.

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Fig. 5.3  Intergalactic Arbeitsamt. (Photo by Botond Vitos)

workshops, where expert “Schlampologists” determined the “Whoroscopes” of visitors, giving them explanatory personality cards (such as Bling Baby, Dark Desire and The Poly Politician) and designating their perfect matches. Illustrating how patterns of both the event’s host culture and BRC are mirrored, subverted and parodied, not unlike at other burns on the event horizon, these examples help define Kiez Burn as heterotopic (Foucault 2008[1967]). In particular, Camp Schlampagne and its workshops revolve around one extreme pole of Foucault’s heterotopic spaces, exemplified in the forbidden and phantasmagoric brothel, which creates “a space of illusion that exposes all real space … as even more illusory” (Foucault 2008[1967], 21).

Ramifications of Leaving No Trace Focused on the principle of Leaving No Trace (LNT), our second case study illustrates the interpretation of the Ten Principles in everyday life and the complexities of their translation. Claiming to be “the largest leave no trace event in the world,”15 Burning Man commits to eliminating post-­ event waste, or “MOOP” (Matter Out of Place). BRC participants are  See: https://survival.burningman.org/leave-no-trace/.

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requested to keep the playa clean and remove their waste and belongings upon leaving (no trash bins are provided). In compliance with federal regulations, a thorough after-event clean-up is accomplished by the Playa Restoration Team (Resto), who also produce an elaborate MOOP map of BRC that influences the placement of camps in subsequent years. In addition to this ecological restoration, the post-event practice of LNT can be interpreted as a purification ritual. Upon disassembling BRC, Resto members work for weeks to remove all trace of human presence—that is, all non-dust—returning the playa to its pristine, “blank canvas” condition.16 By returning an entire city to dust year after year, the restoration ritual “reverses the practice of eliminating dust cardinal to our pretense of keeping an orderly life” and “permits participants to meditate on the permanence of impermanence” (St John 2019a, 19).17 The practice of LNT and the attitude towards MOOP enacted both on playa and in daily life echo ecological sensitivities among participants, a circumstance reflected in our surveys. As one respondent notes: I am much more conscious about recycling and avoiding waste, being aware of the cycle of manufacture, fabrication and the tragedy of its inevitable destination as landfill. I remember reading in advance for my trip to Black Rock City about MOOP, and how the tiniest stuff (such as glitter) was actually the most difficult to remove. Of course we all have a tiny material impact on our planet, but it all adds up to such a huge footprint we leave behind…. I teach at a school of Architecture, and I hope I convey some of this ethos to my students.

Questions relating to “Environmental Perspectives” introduced in the 2018 BRC Census yielded similar results, with the vast majority of respondents expressing their concern for environmental issues (DeVaul et  al. 2019, 86) and self-identifying to varying degrees as “environmentally-­ friendly consumers” (DeVaul et al. 2019, 85). At the same time, the ecological footprint of BRC is by no means negligible. While the BMP acknowledges that the majority of carbon emissions are transport-related and endorses charter bus and air travel or car-pooling (Burning Man 2018), in 2018 only 12% of participants arrived by bus or shuttle, and the vast majority (75%) of those who chose private transport used high fuel  See: https://burningman.org/event/volunteering/teams/playa-restoration/.  See St John (2019a, 16–19) for a more elaborate discussion of LNT including its genealogy. 16 17

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consumption vehicles such as pick-up trucks, SUVs, RVs or vans (DeVaul et  al. 2019, 193; 195). Carbon emissions are multiplied in the case of EuroBurners flying to the USA; as noted by some of our survey respondents, attending a local Regional Event is a more sustainable alternative. In addition to travel-related carbon footprints, Ella expresses her concern about “consumer choices at the burns [that are] not really about sustainability” such as the maintenance of superfluous costume wardrobes or the reliance on products imported from Eastern countries, as well as burning large-scale wooden structures in BRC. Acknowledging these issues, in 2019 the BMP declared commitment to a three-tier strategy “to become carbon negative, sustainably manage waste, and be ecologically regenerative by 2030” (Burning Man Project 2019). Ella also notes that “LNT has a wide spectrum” and is prone to a range of interpretations that furnish the concept with an “interesting tension.” That event principles are contested and negotiated at burns is underlined by the following field example. At Kiez Burn 2019, BV was part of the Yalla Hambibi Kiez, a camp declaring solidarity with prolonged protests against the extension of the Hambach mine—the largest opencast coal mine in the world—that necessitates the deforestation of the highly biodiverse Hambacher Forest in western Germany (Brock and Dunlap 2018, 33). The environmentalists, one of whom was part of the Kiez, occupied the forest several times (first in 2012). Many began living in tree houses, became engaged in nonviolent direct action and violent resistance and built tripods (raised platforms) acting as barricades and watchtowers. On the first day of Kiez Burn, BV and his companion were debarking tree trunks on a forest trail near Yalla camp in order to replicate a Hambacher tripod, which would serve as the central structure of the camp (over seven meters high), accommodating hammocks and providing a chill space (Fig. 5.4). A Wandering Ranger18 passed by and politely requested that the fresh bark be cleaned away “to avoid any MOOP production.” Though it would count as such in the Black Rock Desert playa, that tree bark could be “matter out of place” in a forest is a questionable proposition. Different environmental and social contexts may lead to divergent readings of the principles, and even within the same context, interpretations may vary. While not contested during the fieldwork, the Wandering Ranger’s request could be read as an overzealous interpretation of LNT, signifying ­moreover 18  Wandering Rangers are Kiez Burn’s volunteer community caretakers and mediators, modelled after BRC’s Black Rock Rangers.

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Fig. 5.4  Erecting the Tripod. (Photo by Botond Vitos)

the principle’s inappropriate application to local conditions. Following this line of thought, the episode may then have revealed the purificatory logic of LNT, as laid out earlier in this section. David provides another example of the career of the LNT ethos. Originally from Tel Aviv, Israel, David moved to Berlin in 2016 where,

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dissatisfied with the rapid growth of larger-scale burn events such as Israel’s Midburn,19 he became involved in the core organisation of Kiez Burn. When asked if the principles guide his daily life, David gave account of a lake trip in the outskirts of Berlin, where he felt compelled to clear up lakeside garbage. While he did not feel that “the Burner’s job is to pick up trash,” he devised the idea of educating others to keep their environment clean by leaving no trace, as part of a park clean-up operation that would also involve distributing flyers.20 Based on these ideas, in 2018, David organised two Kick Butts events focused on cleaning up cigarette butts and campaigning against littering in Berlin parks. Further “edu-actions” were organised in 2019, where portable ashtrays were gifted to passers-by. While cigarette butts discarded in urban environments constitute non-­ biodegradable, hazardous waste that is often carried as runoff from the streets through the drains to rivers and the ocean (Novotny et al. 2009), and their elimination serves environmental ends, the Kick Butts events are also aesthetic in scope, following the purification ritual model. By contrast, the Rebel Burn Parade organised in Berlin in October 2019 appears to be a more prominent expression of the eco-activist interpretation of LNT and its transposition into daily life. As part of the two-­ week-­ long worldwide protests of Extinction Rebellion, “the global movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience to demand ambitious climate action” (Corbett 2019), Burners paraded in (animal) costumes through inner city Berlin to raise awareness of the destructive impacts of exploitative and polluting human activities on the environment. Purported to be attended by over 100 Burners, the event featured a sound system and an “eco-erotic-aerobic” performance, where the sexually laden choreography of the protesters was intended to “push the climate agenda” (Contre-Jour Photography 2019). These performances offered a playful and erotic alternative to the more disruptive protests that led to mass arrests in capitals such as Sydney and London. The Kick Butts and Rebel Burn Parade events are educational and redressive affairs organised in the post-burn world, prompted by the interfacing of Leaving No Trace with other principles such as Civic Responsibility, 19  Among our interviewees, rapid growth is commonly regarded as detrimental to the social dynamic of the event culture as it creates an uneven balance between veterans and newcomers. A typical example mentioned is Midburn, which grew from 3,000 participants in 2014, to 12,000 by 2018, a population explosion influencing Midburn’s cancelation in 2019. 20  Interviewed by BV, 31 July 2018.

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Gifting and, particularly in the case of the Rebel Burn Parade, Radical Self-expression. They also exemplify Burner activism, not unlike the volunteer projects of Black Rock Labs (renewable energies)21 and Burners Without Borders (a programme of the Burning Man Project focused on disaster relief and community initiatives).22 As Christopher Breedlove, Program Manager of Burners Without Borders (BWB), notes, these civic projects are inextricably bound up with artistic processes: “all art through Burning Man is somehow civically engaged … and again, most civic engagement is creative or artistic in some way.”23 Examples range from combustible sculptures built from found wood that served as community gathering spots during the BWB’s Hurricane Katrina disaster relief programme in 2006 to the establishment of a screen printing programme serving marginalised artists in Haiti in 2013. Breedlove also mentions Burner initiatives such as costumed beach and neighbourhood clean-ups, often featuring sound systems, resonating with the eco-actions of the Berlin Burner community.

Discussion Following Santino’s (2017) differentiation between the carnivalesque and ritualesque traits of public performances, the field examples discussed in the previous section demonstrate characteristics of both. The erection of the Hambacher tripod to string up hammocks, David’s Kick Butts events, Burners parading with Extinction Rebellion: these are playfully expressive group performances intended to elicit change in everyday life. This duality is ingrained in Burner culture and acknowledged by the BMP—the annual BRC art themes have included “Carnival of Mirrors” (2015) and “Radical Ritual” (2017). BRC offers myriad examples of carnivalesque and ritualesque acts that echo the ludic-civic tension in the Burner ethos. This tension was, for example, evident in the erection of satirical “shrines,” including a large golden toilet displayed at the base the Man in 2017, when the effigy was named The Temple of the Golden Spike—a reference to the ritual (in which the survey team drive the

 See: https://blackrocklabs.org/.  See: https://help.burningman.org/hc/en-us/articles/360024490632-What-isBurners-Without-Borders-. 23  Interviewed by GS, 4 April 2017. 21

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“Golden Spike” into the playa at the site of the Man) that commences the city’s build. The serious undertone of many playful Burner initiatives resonates with the “serious parody” of Situationists détournements (Cammaerts 2007, 76) in which “the mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy” (Debord and Wolman 2006[1956], 15). The Burner events investigated in this chapter signal a preference for similar assemblages, from the Whoroscope workshops of Camp Schlampagne, to the Intergalactic Arbeitsamt’s volunteer recruitment, to the eco-erotic-aerobic performance of the Rebel Burn Parade. The Situationists saw détournement as a “powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle” (Debord and Wolman 2006[1956], 18) aimed to annihilate the bourgeois notion of “art” downstream from Dada/Surrealism. Although not serving a Marxist agenda, many Burner projects are engaged in Dadaist critiques of consumer culture or offer antidotes to alienating market forces, reinforced by principles such as Decommodification, Immediacy and Participation. As formulated by Larry Harvey, Burning Man is “in a way realising the program of the Situationists, which intellectually speaking is probably the closest thing to us.”24 With the playaspace and ethos of BRC replicated and mutated worldwide, the regional burn offers, in the words of a German interviewee (Peter), “a training camp for reality”25—or as Breedlove puts it: “to be able to effectively navigate Black Rock City as well as the larger Burning Man world … is very much like navigating the politics of everyday life.”26 Our survey results indicate that many Burners find their cultural home in a hyperliminal environment encouraging novel and playful ways of social interaction that can be subsequently integrated into daily routines in heterogeneous ways. These experimental interactions are endorsed by a community reliant on gifting and gratitude and where personal flaws and failures are not stigmatised. Ella’s Kiez Burn recollections and projects offer such examples, informed by Burner principles such as Gifting and Radical Inclusion. As discussed earlier, the gift perspective explains the reproduction of community at Burning Man and why participants seek to  Interviewed by GS, 8 April 2016.  Interviewed by BV, 19 April 2018. 26  Interviewed by GS, 4 April 2017. 24 25

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belong to regionals and other groups outside burns. Accordingly, our survey respondents give accounts of becoming more open minded and inclusive in daily life as well, which can be accompanied by changes in daily interactions such as increased gifting and volunteering and the widening of friend circles. Descriptive and not prescriptive, the principles are prone to re-­ evaluation, often accompanied by carnivalesque modes of expression at burns. At Kiez Burn 2019, this was exemplified in the Spießer camp workshops (providing a critique of Radical Self-expression as well as Participation) or the entrance procedure of the Monkey Gate (alluding to the limits of Radical Inclusion and lampooning German bureaucratic procedures). Such critiques and parodies are potentiated by the heterotopic fragmentation of the Burnerverse: a cultural cornucopia of centrifugal “other spaces” that have variably transposed the “playa” in regions worldwide. The culture is sustained by the Ten Principles, which appear to be tailored according to local contexts, as suggested by the Kiez Burn projects and the ramifications of LNT discussed in this chapter. As our present case studies are limited to the German community of the Burner diaspora, further qualitative research is warranted to trace the transnational career of the principles beyond BRC. Steven Raspa mentions that certain Burners engage in “serial eventism” by zealously visiting burn events while finding it difficult to transpose the ethos in everyday life.27 As noted by Berlin event organiser Oliver, this challenge is intensified in a city that is rich in alternative culture and offers a plethora of potentially distracting programmes.28 At the same time, from the Rebel Burn Parade to the BWB’s disaster relief activities to Catharsis on the Mall (St John 2019b), the Burner ethos inspires a wide range of civic initiatives and public performances worldwide. Eschewing traditional forms of belonging, these actions evince the kaleidoscopic transformational potential of the Burning Man movement. As Raspa suggests: “the fact that [the movement] is crossing physical boundaries, religious boundaries, political boundaries, philosophical boundaries, is what I think gives us all a sense of real meaning.”29

 Interviewed by GS, 5 April 2016.  Interviewed by BV, 9 July 2018. 29  Interviewed by GS, 5 April 2016. 27 28

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Conclusion Focusing on the European adaption of the culture of Burning Man—or burn culture—this chapter has contributed to the nascent study of transformational event cultures. In particular it developed an understanding of Burning Man as a heterotopic performance and a hyperliminal space for experimentation. This has been achieved through the interconnected pathways benefiting from multi-modal research. In the first part of the chapter, survey response interpretation illustrated that European Burners are members of a prolific event community where “burns” are the contexts for multiple, sometimes conflicting, means of transformation and innovation. In the second, field research demonstrated that burns are experimental and heterotopic “counter spaces” that enable performance through ritual and carnival modes both within and beyond the event spaces. To “burn” is to perform at the confluence of the ritualesque and carnivalesque dimensions identified by Santino (2017), as illustrated by field examples including Kiez Burn’s Spießer Camp, Monkey Gate, Camp Schlampagne and Yalla Hambibi, as well as the Kick Butts and Rebel Burn Parade events organised in Berlin. Throughout, the chapter has addressed the dovetailing of Gifting and Leaving No Trace, two among the Ten Principles of Burning Man, demonstrating the transformational potential of their adoption at burns and beyond.

References Altenhoefer, Gwendolin. 2009. Friend Hoppers, Pleasure Activism, the Schlampagne and the Octopus: Non-monogamous Activism in the German Lesbian-Feminist Subculture. Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality 12. Atkinson, Doreen, and Mark Ingle. 2016. Growing like a Magic Mushroom: The AfrikaBurn Festival in the Tankwa Karoo. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure 5 (2): 1–27. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and his world. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Beaulieu-Prévost, Dominic, Cormier Mélanie, S.  Megan Heller, David Nelson-­ Gal, and Kateri McRae. 2019. Welcome to Wonderland? A Population Study of Intimate Experiences and Safe Sex at a Transformational Mass Gathering (Burning Man). Archives of Sexual Behavior 48 (7): 2055–2073. Brock, Andrea, and Alexander Dunlap. 2018. Normalising Corporate Counterinsurgency: Engineering Consent, Managing Resistance and Greening Destruction Around the Hambach Coal Mine and Beyond. Political Geography 62 (Jan.): 33–47.

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Burn, Kiez. 2019. ‘Kiez Burn 2019 recap—Census results.’ [online]. Accessed 14 June 2021. https://kiezburn.org/kiez-­burn-­2019-­recap-­census-­results/. Burning Man. 2018. Burning Man’s 2018 Environmental Check-Up. Burning Man Journal, https://journal.burningman.org/2018/03/black-­rock-­city/ leaving-­no-­trace/burning-­mans-­2018-­environmental-­check-­up/. ———. 2019. 2018 Annual Report, https://annualreport2018.burningman.org/. Burning Man Project. 2019. Burning Man Project: 2030 Environmental Sustainability Roadmap. Accessed 14 June 2021. https://medium.com/@ burningman/burning-­m an-­p roject-­2 030-­g environmental-­s ustainability­roadmap-­c79657e18146. Cammaerts, Bart. 2007. Jamming the Political: Beyond Counter-hegemonic Practices. Continuum 21 (1): 71–90. Chen, Katherine K. 2009. Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Contre-Jour Photography. 2019. Extinction Rebellion—Eco-Erotic-Aerobics 3. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2724441284509479. Corbett, Jessica. 2019. Extinction Rebellion Movement Kicks off Two Weeks of Civil Disobedience Around the World. Salon, October 8. Accessed 14 June 2021. https://www.salon.com/2019/10/08/extinction-­rebellion-­movement­kicks-­off-­two-­weeks-­of-­civil-­disobedience-­around-­the-­world/. Crompton, John and Stacey McKay. 1997. Motives of Visitors Attending Festival Events. Annals of Tourism Research 24 (2): 425–439. Debord, Guy, and Gil J. Wolman. 2006 [1956]. ‘A User’s Guide to Detournement.’ In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 14–21. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets. DeVaul, Dana Lilienthal, Dominic Beaulieu-Prévost, S. Megan Heller, and 2018 Census Lab. 2019. Black Rock City Census: 2013–2018 Population Analysis. Black Rock City Census. Doherty, Brian. 2006. This Is Burning Man : The Rise of a New American Underground. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books. Foucault, Michel. 2008 [1967]. ‘Of Other Spaces.’ Translated by Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene. In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 13–29. London: Routledge. Getz, Donald. 2010. The Nature and Scope of Festival Studies. International Journal of Event Management Research 5 (1): 1–47. Gilmore, Lee. 2010. Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Godbout, Jacques T. 1994. ‘L’état d’endettement mutuel.’ Revue du MAUSS semestrielle no. 4. Iso-Ahola, Seppo E. 1982. Toward a Social Psychological Theory of Tourism Motivation: A Rejoinder. Annals of Tourism Research 9 (2): 256–262.

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Gilmore, Lee. 2008. Of Ordeals and Operas: Reflexive Ritualizing at the Burning Man Festival. In Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St John. New York: Berghahn. Leung, Jeet Kei. 2010. Transformational Festivals. TEDxVancouver 23: 41. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8tDpQp6m0A. Li, Yan-Ning, and Emma H. Wood. 2016. Music Festival Motivation in China: Free the Mind. Leisure Studies 35 (3): 332–351. Magister, Caveat. 2019. The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us about Building Better Communities. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Mauss, Marcel. 1954 [1925]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. McRae, Kateri, S.  Megan Heller, Oliver P.  John, and James J.  Gross. 2011. Context-Dependent Emotion Regulation: Suppression and Reappraisal at the Burning Man Festival. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 33 (4): 346–350. Novotny, Thomas E., Kristen Lum, Elizabeth Smith, Vivian Wang, and Richard Barnes. 2009. Cigarettes Butts and the Case for an Environmental Policy on Hazardous Cigarette Waste. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 6 (5): 1691–1705. Oliphant, Andrew J., Sam Stein, and Garrett Bradford. 2018. Micrometeorology of an Ephemeral Desert City, the Burning Man Experiment. Urban Climate 23 (March): 53–70. Pike, Sarah M. 2001. Desert Goddesses and Apocalyptic Art: Making Sacred Space at the Burning Man Festival. In God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, ed. Eric Mazur and Kate McCarthy, 155–176. New  York: Routledge. Rohrmeier, Kerry, and Paul F. Starrs. 2014. The Paradoxical Black Rock City: All Cities are Mad. Geographical Review 104 (2): 153–173. San Diego Collaborative Arts Project. n.d. Dada Scientists. Accessed March 20, 2020. http://www.sdcap.org/youtopia-­2017-­afterburn-­report/2017-­dada­scientists/. Santino, Jack. 2017. From Carnivalesque to Ritualesque: Public Ritual and the Theater of the Street. In Public Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque, ed. Jack Santino, 3–15. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. St John, Graham. 2014. Liminal Being: Electronic Dance Music Cultures, Ritualization and the Case of Psytrance. In The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music, ed. Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman. London: SAGE. ———. 2017a. Charms War: Dance Camps and Sound Cars at Burning Man. In Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures, 219–244. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017b. Blazing Grace: The Gifted Culture of Burning Man. NANO: New American Notes Online 11 (July) https://nanocrit.com/issues/issue11/ Blazing-­Grace-­The-­Gifted-­Culture-­of-­Burning-­Man.

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———. 2017c. Introduction: Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures. In Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures, 1–21. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2019a. At Home in the Big Empty: Burning Man and the Playa Sublime. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 13 (3): 286–313. ———. 2019b. The Cultural Heroes of Do-ocracy: Burning Man, Catharsis on the Mall and Caps of Liberty. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 15 (1): 1–25. ———. 2020a. Dramatic Heterotopia: The Participatory Spectacle of Burning Man. In Interrupting Globalisation: Heterotopia in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Simon Ferdinand, Irina Souch, and Daan Wesselman, 178–194. New York: Routledge. ———. 2020b. Ephemeropolis: Burning Man, Transformation and Heterotopia. Journal of Festive Studies 2 (1). Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. 1998. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 6

Ritualized Art: Cultural Innovation and Greening at Festivals and Protestivals Zsófia Szonja Illés and Maria Nita

The chapter is structured somewhat differently to a traditional academic essay: after an initial discussion of ritual as artistic socially engaged practice, we follow with an interview or dialogue between the two authors, Zsófia Szonja Illés, a design researcher, artist and lecturer at The Glasgow School of Art, and Dr Maria Nita, a lecturer in Religious Studies at The Open University. Our dialogue on Zsófia’s art, creative process, inspiration and influences is followed by a theoretical framing of the issues raised and concluding argument.

Z. S. Illés (*) The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, UK M. Nita The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_6

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Ritual as Artistic Socially Engaged Practice Within the broader trends of the post 1960s changes experienced by religion in an European and particularly Western European context (Folk 2019; Nita and Gemie 2020), where religious identity is understood to have progressively moved towards secularization, individualization and pluralization (Müller 2012), traditional religious communities, largely representing Christianity, have been developing an increasingly democratic, collaborative and socially engaged dimension.1 Within the context of the greening of religion, also since the 1960s and 1970s, historians, like Lynn White Jr, and theologians, like Mathew Fox, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and many others, have been expecting religious traditions to become socially engaged and play a role in supporting an environmental civic education, both inside religious communities and the wider public sphere (Bratton 2018). We can see this clearly in the role played by grassroots communities engaging in collaborative practice, albeit we can also see it in the more solitary work of world religious leaders, like Pope Francis and the Orthodox Christian Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who have become public voices for the campaign against climate change. It is quite evident when we look at Green Christian grassroots movements that these have developed new collaborative methodologies for socially engaged practices, in their varied ‘bottom up’ efforts to reach out to both Christian communities and churches, as well as the wider unengaged public, often in the context of artistic and educational activities in schools or during festivals and protestivals (Kidwell et  al. 2018; Nita 2016, 2018, 2020; Wilkinson 2012). In the UK, this trend towards an artistic social engagement has seen religious networks spilling out of their church communities and starting to operate both inside and outside of their respective Churches, with such green organizations as Green Christian in England, Forest Church in Wales and Eco-Congregation in Scotland representing some of the key players in this field. These religious networks have reclaimed religious rituals, as they began to curate new ritual places, during retreats and festivals and outdoor events (Nita 2018)—given that music festivals more widely 1  This is more evident in the case of the Christian tradition, which of course has a long history (intersecting the other Abrahamic faiths) of the politics of artistic representation in connection with the evolution of the canon and so on—see Ganz, David, and Schellewald, Barbara, eds. 2018. Clothing Sacred Scriptures: Book Art and Book Religion in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Cultures. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2018.

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have been recognized as sites for cultivating ecological values and behaviours (Ricaurte-Bermudez 2015). We can see examples of artistic socially engaged practice in Green Christian educational projects, which aim to provide nature connections for children and young people (Nita 2020). Many Green Christians support educational projects in urban environments, forest schools and nature retreats that help connect inner-city school children to nature, through a range of artistic, imaginative and reflective practices, intersecting religious and spiritual praxis (i.e. Deep Ecology). For example, A Rocha UK, an environmental Christian organization that has a global outreach via eco-missionary activities in Africa or Latin America, developed a project called ‘Environmental Encounters’ in the UK that supports the work of Geography and Science educators through new artistic methodologies, such as collaboratively designing a ‘sensory garden’. These socially engaged artistic practices have many different layers; they do not only aim to communicate about the ecological and climate crisis but also have a pastoral role in addressing ‘eco-anxiety’ among young people, understood as growing distress about the ecological crisis (Pihkala 2020). Most importantly, these practices are ritualized, given that in many of their novel methodologies for an artistic socially engaged practice, Green Christians draw on their spiritual and mystical contemplative practices, whilst also introducing novel artistic and performative elements such as storytelling, praying through painting, making new altar arrangements and curating green ritual spaces in nature (Nita 2020) (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). As Nita has shown in her ethnographic work at the Greenbelt Festival (Nita 2018), this Christian festival with a strong concern for environmental and social justice represents an important central hub for cross-­ fertilization and cultural innovation inside the Green Christian networks in the UK and beyond, through its international links. At the Greenbelt Festival, the boundary between art and ritual fades because these processes of making art and ritual are exposed, they are happening in the main fields and are visible with the naked eye (also see Bosman 2020; Džalto 2019). The artwork in Fig. 6.3, which was under construction at Greenbelt when the photo was taken, represents a central critique within Green and Liberal Christian ranks, which has to do with the conservatism of the church (the tin church in the artwork is locked with a heavy padlock) which is symbolically causing the Church to fall into a derelict and neglected state, or be abandoned by the communities it excludes, with the LGBTQ community being a central concern. The fact that Green and Liberal Christians can use

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Fig. 6.1  Green Christian altar, Annual Retreat, 2010

art in such a manner, in their countercultural critique of the church, makes an important point about the historically controversial role of art in religion. Iconoclasm needs to be understood not only as a movement against images but also a movement against the power artists have to change the core meaning of the content that is being represented through images, through subtle but important cues: a large padlock, a tear at the corner of a the virgin’s eye, an expression of humanity and grief on the face of a divine being. Greening artistic and ritual practices not only aim to provide spaces for reflection but also convey knowledge and understanding of the ecological and climate crisis. A new public role in educating and engaging the public often through a mixture of artistic means and reskilling activities (see

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Fig. 6.2  Green Christians praying through painting, Annual Retreat, 2012

Asilsoy and Oktay 2018) has been claimed by green grassroot activist organizations, such as those aggregated by the Extinction Rebellion’s (XR) movement, who are not only engaged in political protest but also attempting to educate the public about climate change, through a variety of behavioural, discursive and performative interventions, such as cooking vegan food in a public protest site. In the UK, XR’s Regenerative Culture networks, intersecting many other campaigns and initiatives (e.g. Climate Museum UK or Culture Declares Emergency), have had a public presence via protestivals, again attempting to develop an ecological citizenship by engaging (and challenging) the collective imagination (Norgaard 2018), through artistic means (Fig. 6.4).

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Fig. 6.3  ‘Locked up’ Greenbelt Festival Art, 2018

The Artist and Their Socially Engaged Practice: Maria Nita Interviewing Zsófia Szonja Illés Maria:

I hoped you would talk about your unique perspective as an artist who produces art installations at festivals, both in the U.K., Hungary and internationally. You are a global artist going to

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Fig. 6.4  XR activists raising awareness about Carbon and pollution, in Bath and Bristol, UK, 2019

local festivals and creating art that can inspire communities. How is that for you? Zsófia: I have been taking part in different design-build festivals that celebrate co-design and co-creation (e.g.: ‘Hello Wood’) since 2015. We have just started the preparation for ‘Test Unit’, a similar multi-disciplinary, collaborative architecture festival here in Glasgow, when the pandemic started. ‘Hello Wood’ functions as an international summer university and Test Unit focuses on enabling the artist or designer to use the physical site specifically for testing out new ideas. Most of the time architects, artists and designers are expected to produce ‘useful designs’, but they are not provided with the means for experimentation. In science however, failure and experimentation are part of the process that leads to scientific findings (a failure is also an important finding). This is somehow not true for the creative process. When you get a grant, there needs to be a visually appealing result. When you get commissioned for work you are rarely paid for the time and materials to cover a phase of experimentation— especially happening on a larger scale. Both festivals mentioned

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Maria: Zsófia:

Maria:

Zsófia: Maria: Zsófia:

provide a unique opportunity for playful, collaborative experimentation and creation. So, it’s almost like the festival allows for the introduction of a new step in the process, isn’t it? It is practically collaborative ‘prototyping’: not only creating and experimenting collaboratively but going further by also inviting in the public to engage with this experiment (the site and designed object or piece of art) that has been temporarily placed into the landscape. Every object or intervention into the landscape is an invitation for a kind of behaviour. This part of the process is therefore very important in allowing the designers to not only predict but also practice this responsibility by experimenting with this interaction between the public and the object. Imagine if we had the time, resources and space to include this step in every creative process! It’s possibly, almost like, by introducing this new step and a temporary audience that gives you feedback, that must give you [the artist] the possibility to work with that vision in a completely new direction? Exactly. Most festivals provide that opportunity to artists: to experiment with large scale structures and have an audience to inhabit that space. How long does the entire process take? It’s an intense 7 to 14 days process of building. Artists, designers or architects rarely have the chance to experience the tangible outcomes of their designs in such a short time. It is a liminal space in this sense, where processes that would normally take much longer, are experienced in an intense, compressed way. The communist-era voluntary ‘Youth Building Camps’ in Hungary must have had a similar atmosphere (Fig. 6.5).

I think in most creative processes we miss this element. During these festivals you focus exclusively on your project. There is no other aspects of life getting in the way. You are witnessing the artwork growing and developing. From blank canvas to a structure that can be spatially experienced. It is a really empowering experience for an artist. Maria: It sounds like an accelerated process, where everything is compressed within these two weeks…

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Fig. 6.5  Lengyeltóti ‘Youth Building Camp’, Hungary, 1974, Courtesy of Tamás Urbán/ Fortepan

Zsófia: Well, maybe both compressed and expanded. The experience is compressed and heightened while you are given an expanded space, a literal field for your imagination. Maria: I was thinking about this notion of play, for you as an artist… I wanted to ask you if you wanted to reflect on some of your first memories of engagement with art festivals. Zsófia: I grew up in Hungary during communism in the 80’s but I had a protestant upbringing. Christianity was a form of ­counter-­culture during that time—at least for my family. I wasn’t allowed to take part in the pioneer movement—a scout-like organization for children operated by the communist party. Therefore, I missed out on all the summer camps, and fancy uniforms. We had a relative cultural freedom in Hungary in the 80’s anyway, with the reputation of being ‘the happiest of barracks’. I know from relatives that it was much more intense in Romania, right? Maria: Yes, that’s right. And for me festivals were something that I first experienced in the UK when I was in my late 20s, and I remem-

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Zsófia: Maria: Zsófia:

Maria: Zsófia:

ber not having the language to really describe them, or even not knowing how to play the festival game with the others… I do not know if you have seen this interesting 1970s film on the early Glastonbury Festival. It was really interesting for me to see how people moved, they would suddenly break into this freestyle dance, as if they were performing ‘freedom’ at the festival. I could recognize that as entirely foreign… [laughing] my body suffers from an Eastern European sort of stiffness which comes from being told to sit straight as a child in communist Romania. And of course, going to artistic festivals in Romania today, one can clearly see that these are missing an important ingredient. They do not have a legacy, there are no 1970s freedom dance moves to draw on, even though they might want to replicate the vision of what an arts and performance festival ought to be. Yes, it would have been Romanian Roma communities who would have perhaps known that freedom… Exactly. I think the Roma community represents one of the few alternative cultures in Romania who actively resisted communism so to speak. Sorry, back to your childhood. Well, while growing up in communist Hungary, I also had a strict protestant upbringing. Speaking of freedom, I certainly did not experience this kind of freedom of the festivals until my twenties. It was only when I moved to Brazil for a year in 2002 that I had my first real festival experience. I have been to outdoor electronic music festivals in these extremely beautiful landscapes. Since then, I think, this remained an important aspect of the festival experience for me: this situatedness within nature, where I have the chance to get away from the crowd and be alone, reflect and enjoy the landscape. How about art festivals where you effectively work for two weeks and an installation is produced? It is somewhat similar. These design-build festivals, like ‘Hello Wood’, take time, and it also takes time for people to adjust to the pace and intensity. However, you are only part of a smaller community of around 200 participants as opposed to the scale of music festivals, for example. It is only at the end of the creative process, after 10–14 days, that the festival opens up for the public for a kind of exhibition opening event. It is always a contrasting and shocking experience to face the outside world after

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Maria:

Zsófia:

Maria: Zsófia:

Maria:

Zsófia:

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a period of intensive creative isolation. The roles also suddenly change: from being equally engaged as participants in creating a piece of work, in the ritual of it, you suddenly have spectators and you are being observed. Yes, because in a way, like you said, the festival creates that boundary, and suddenly you have an audience from people who were outsiders. Naturally they arrived in order to take part. But they are an audience for you. How was this process different for you, because you were working in a community, and that’s very different from the solitary artist that produces something to be exhibited in a gallery perhaps? I suppose the idea with festivals might be that you don’t have an audience. Everyone takes part. Everyone is a participant somehow. I mean there are so many levels to participatory forms of art… I agree. There are different levels of participation involved, and the artist’s role is also changing during the process. Firstly, the installation itself is created through a collaborative form of art and collaborative creativity (Miell and Littleton 2004). Then the public is invited in to experience this artwork in an immersive way that is very different from the traditional gallery experience. They become your audience and you are suddenly performing a different, curated ritual. And then there is also a secondary audience who will not experience the ephemeral artwork but see it through documentation. For the artists and designers the work itself is the process. That is interesting, does this make it a performance? There are in fact two different kinds of performances (or rituals if you like) happening in this process. Performing the ritual of collaborative creation in the liminal space of the festival (Binder et al. 2011). And then opening up this experience for the public, which always happens through an engaging and performative event. There is no detached spectator anymore. That’s fascinating, you know, this real proximity between the participants and the artist. Do you feel in any way that your identity as artist is challenged by that or do you feel comfortable being part of this kind of cooperative artistic experience? I have always worked with this boundary of the social, collaborative and the artistic. The most inspiring way for me to create art is through dialogue: between place, context, participants and

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artist. It is often hard to position such artworks, as the aesthetic in this case is the dialogue itself [The term, ‘dialogical aesthetics’ was coined by Kester 2004]. Such projects could easily be dismissed and labelled as community projects, community engagement or activism. And in fact they are all of the above. The art of creating and curating spaces of dialogue. Maria: When was your first real collaborative art project at an art building festival? Zsófia: I was invited to take part in the Hello Wood design-build festival in 2015—and again in 2016, 2017 and 2019. During these years the overarching theme of the festival was ‘Project Village’. Year by year we were building up a symbolic ‘settlement’ together: first by starting with a master plan for the site, and slowly adding important functions and community spaces (Fig. 6.6).

Fig. 6.6  ‘Tea Totem’ installation, Hello Wood festival, 2015 (with Moomoo Architects)

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Thank you for bringing these up on the screen, are these installations from Project Village? Zsófia: Yes, these are installations from the four years I was part of building up ‘Project Village’. In 2015 we first designed the ‘Tea Totem’ which was a hybrid between a single unit marketplace selling herbs and tea, and with a focus on the one-to-one interaction between vendor and customer (or if you like: artis and visitor), and with an emphasis on locally sourced seasonal ingredients, local herbal medicine. With its minimal style it ­ made you feel like you were in a zen sanctuary or a traditional Japanese teahouse. It was designed to be used by only two people at once. After buying your herbs and tea—which was foraged from the surrounding meadows and drying above your head in the tower structure—you could sit down on the floor, in this 6-metre-tall tower, with your cup of tea. The structure has been purposefully designed to direct your attention up towards the sky—almost like in a church. This was a one-to-one unit for performance (artist-audience), for market (vendor-customer) and for ritual. During the years of ‘Project Village’, we were looking at important community functions—e.g. places for ritual and gathering, places for sharing food—and representing these functions in a symbolic way through installations. For example, in the following year, with the ‘Fire/Nest’ installation we emphasized the importance of the fireplace for small village communities: a place for gathering, for singing songs, for sharing food and telling stories. In 2017 we further developed the idea of the fireplace and built the ‘Hello Pizza’ community oven and kitchen. It was the first year we have worked with materials other than wood and invited a traditional Hungarian oven builder to join us in the process. The ‘Hello Pizza’ structure gave place to many curated events, where we performed how a community shares tasks, food, songs and stories around rituals of food. Our design departed from traditional, local community oven designs. The final year of ‘Project Village’ was celebrated with a Carnival, with mobile and wearable installation structures. We continued to explore the theme of sharing food, through creating a modular, puzzle-like table (‘Carnival Table’). The emphasis here was on performance (Fig. 6.7).

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Fig. 6.7  The performative ‘Carnival Table’ installation, Hello Wood, 2019 (with architects Lemonot and Space Saloon)

Maria: How was your artistic practice impacted by these festivals? Zsófia: Collaboration has a huge power. It allows you to imagine bigger than you could imagine alone, build bigger than you could build alone (Fig. 6.8). Maria: Fascinating. I can see that you incinerated some of the artwork. Was this at all evocative of Burning Man? Zsófia: At these design-build festivals we didn’t burn structures, but the communal aspect of fire—for cooking and celebrating—has always been quite central. The structure you refer to might be the installation I made for an exhibition, ‘Forest’ in 2016. A year after the timber was brought back to the forest and burnt as part of a Summer Solstice performance (‘Fire Table’, 2017) (Fig. 6.9).

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Fig. 6.8  ‘Fire Table’ installation, 2017 (with AU Workshop and Simon Platter)

The Creative Process, Art and Ritual Maria: Can I ask you about the creative process? How do you feel? How does it develop? Could you reflect on festivals and the creative process? Zsófia: I’m inspired by nature, tradition and festivities. Whenever I am commissioned to work on an installation piece for a festival, I create work for that particular geographical and cultural context. Every piece of design starts with a research of the context: seasonal and local traditions, local forms of architecture and community, local festivities and seasonal food traditions. A lot of my work explores this entangled, interconnected, layered human experience of the landscape and our environment. Our experience of place is primarily sensory, and made up of many different layers of meaning: memory, imagination, rituals… By recreating rituals, we are also making sense of them, sense of our past in our contemporary world. And again, we do this sense-making

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Fig. 6.9  ‘Forest’ installation, Platan Gallery, 2016 (with Moomoo Architects)

through sensory experiences. These performances and sensory installations become rituals of embodied, sensory ways of meaning-making. Maria: Yes, and we have really got to reflect on this with the Covid-19 social isolation. Is that perhaps what festivals do in the summer, are they times when we kind of get together in a way that wouldn’t be possible for us modern, isolated people? Zsófia: Yes, these events are, without question, the social and creative highlight of my year. I just realised, as we are talking, that I am both creating and seeking to be part of these almost ‘religious” experiences at festivals. Maria: But without ‘religion’? Zsófia: Having had a rather strict Protestant upbringing, religion implies to me a lot of restrictions, a set of predefined rules, where you are not part of the discussion. Whereas, collaborative forms of art have the potential to become places of ritual without imposing a belief system on you. It is up to you to create the

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meaning. Installations created through the process of co-design, are collaborative forms of meaning-making as well. And by their own collaborative nature they also speak to ideal models of community, exploring our entanglements with community, rituals and the environment. Maria: Certainly, the materials you use in your art, like wood, smoke or beeswax speak to these connections? Zsófia: Yes, certainly. I would like to distinguish here between the two different types of collaborative work that I am involved in, though. The ones we have talked about before, were all created in the context of design-build festivals, so the ritual aspect is experienced during the process of collaborative creation. Everyone is equally a participant. While these installations that you’re asking about, were made for exhibitions: a curated space for ritual. The materials of beeswax and smoke were indeed intended to evoke memories and emotions, and through them point at our entangled relationship with our seasonal rituals and our natural environment. The ‘Bees/Wax’ installation was created in collaboration with Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop, a group of architects who work with a very similar ethos. The beeswax came from their own beehives. Everything was sourced from that one location, except for the clay for the ceramic jar that we used for fermenting honey. But even the jar was glazed inside with beeswax (Fig. 6.10). Maria: Did you conceive that installation to have an anti-consumeristic message? Was this political art? And would you say that your artistic engagement is in this way socio-political engagement? Zsófia: It was coming more from a more ecological-psychological place of intention, to point to the importance of our connection with the environment and the materials we surround ourselves with. The installation speaks about the strong connection between embodied sensory experiences, memory and emotions. This connection has been explored by environmental psychology and neuroscience, for example, in the multisensory treatment of dementia patients. I ultimately wanted to draw attention to the interconnectedness of our inner and outer worlds. How what we consume and surround ourselves with, also has the potential

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Fig. 6.10  ‘Bees/Wax’ performance lecture and soirée, Design Week Budapest, 2018 (with AU Workshop)

to make us feel connected or disconnected. And fostering a heightened sense of connection by experimenting with making the chain of production and consumption the shortest possible: the honey, what we take in, and the beeswax that takes the shape of our objects, they all comes from one source. Maria: How did you imagine this? Zsófia: Complex issues, like climate change or the Anthropocene have often been described as problems of human comprehension. Trying to grasp the complexity of some of these issues can be paralysing. The processes involved may easily escape the human sensorium. We often only experience them as concepts and so they can feel alienating. In these performance-installations complex concepts are being literally digested, experienced by the body. You are not just looking at a piece of art or trying to intellectually grasp a concept, but you are sensing it—in order to make sense of it. At the Bees/Wax soirée, each person was given

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Fig. 6.11  ‘Smoke’ installation, Taste Modern Gallery, 2016 (with AU Workshop)

a tiny beeswax cup to drink the fermented honey mead from. As participants were holding the cups, the wax started to become mouldable in their hands, which naturally invited in and inspired a behaviour: to mould this wax in new shapes. They created small sculptures and objects and took those away with them at the end. There were no wasted materials at the end. This was exactly our intention: to point to an alternative relationship we can foster with materials. Materials that are alive, evoke memories and have stories—that are not ‘from nowhere’ (Fig. 6.11).

Theoretical Framing and Discussion Understanding art as ritual and ritual as art can reframe both these categories and widen their respective fields to practices that engage the imagination and drive (or can stall!) cultural innovation. One key element the above interview brought to the fore was the fact that some of Illés’

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ritualized art contained elements from religious traditions that were, both, deliberately designed—such as the ‘Tea Tower’—and also elements from the Christian tradition that were often found at a deeper syntax level: the beeswax ritual described above has powerful religious undertones: semiotically we can observe the signs of giving and receiving communion. This deep tissue Christian semiotics has been a key focus in Nita’s own research with Christian and other activists (Nita 2016, 2018, 2020). Nita’s research showed that activists ritualized and performed the climate crisis whilst maintaining a performative dimension that is ritualistic or ritualized though the architectural and design ‘relics’ of Christian discourses—which after all is there on the streets and in the public sphere, in our post-­ Christian society. For example, Nita interviewed activists and street performers in the Red Brigade, whose red gowns represent the blood of the species that have been lost and will be lost as a result of the mass extinction caused by climate change and the ecological crisis. Of course, blood is a key symbol in Judeo-Christian ritual (sacrificial blood, the blood of Christ) and thus a powerful message that can be (more easily) decoded by the audience and onlookers. Nita has argued that the syntax of ritual and protest space are indeed very similar and that the semiotics of protest actions (specifically in Western Europe) need to be examined in this broader context of the Christian tradition (Nita 2019). Art is of course central to environmental activism, a hallmark of involvement with the ecological crisis. Many environmental networks experiment with art and ritual in the context of art and performance festivals or ‘protestivals’ (Nita 2016). On one hand it seems clear that festivals can support acculturative processes: the notion that art and performance activities can help in the cultural transmission of environmental attitudes is supported by theoretical positions on the role of the body in cultural transmission (Shilling 2017). Festivals and protestivals support green acculturative processes through small-scale and large-scale experimentation, such as the Burning Man festival experimenting with creativity and resilience in an arid climate for instance. By looking at ‘ritualized art’—or art as ritual and ritual as art—we can begin to ask more questions about how processes of cultural transmission, acculturation, cultural change, and cultural innovation are mediated through religious language and symbols, as well as this deeper semiotic level of ritual syntax. Moreover, we can examine the political dimension of both art and ritual through their implicit and explicit storytelling or narrative threads: what are the individual and community stories that are being told through these actions?

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To what extent are these alternative storytelling processes that can engage communities around social and environmental issues, whereby ‘narratives […] become agents of social change’ (Harvey and Robinson 2016). Many approaches to ritual focus specifically on its role in acculturative potential.2 For Victor Turner rituals mediate cultural changes; he describes this as ‘a co-adaptation’, ‘a leap to a new cultural knowledge’ (Turner 1982: 225). Schechner endorses Turner’s search for ritual’s creative power and explains that ritual is ‘not only a conservator of evolutionary and cultural behaviour, but [also] a generator’, a tightrope between tradition and innovation, and our best hope to avoid self-extinction (Schechner 1993: 255, 263). According to Schechner, the element of play is a means of regulating our emotions and collective anxiety, a safe frame for learning new attitudes and behaviours (Schechner 1993: 25). A related practice that can straddle the secular and religious spheres is contemporary storytelling, which is developing into a complex model of participation and community empowerment as well as an academic model for research and public engagement (Gersie et  al. 2014; Little and Froggett 2010). Anthony Nanson draws a parallel between the ‘gap of desire’ as a narrative device in storytelling, to keep the listener engaged with the story, and ‘a gap of desire between talk about sustainability and action that does something about it’ (Nanson 2014: 141). Nanson suggests that the process of empathizing with the protagonists in the story can motivate the listener, who may take some of that desire into their own lives, and thus the story can begin to make a real difference in the world. Performance art allows for a similar kind of exploration and engagement in an imaginative experience, offering a direct and immediate involvement for the player/narrator/protagonist, in a manner akin to that of ritual. Does this mean that ritualized art can make us better? The arts and other representational artistic media as a source of morality is a controversial subject, addressed by such influential philosophers as Kant, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. For Kant, imagination was a bridge between rationality and judgement—a unique mode of aesthetic, reflective and moral cognition (Kant 1951 [1892]). Treading in these philosophical traditions, contemporary voices still debate whether art itself can improve us, most scholars only going halfway to agreeing that art can exert some form of 2  This is also the focus of this article—certainly rituals, and we would argue forms of ritualized art, can be equally investigated as having a role in cultural transmission and withstanding cultural change.

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moral influence on the audience or develop our moral imagination (Leung 2018). Such moral imagination is connected to the role that the arts might play in enabling us to ‘revalue’ the world and human experience (ibid.)— albeit such a value change is often understood to have a post-­material dimension (Lassander 2014). However scholars claim that public education and awareness-raising around environmental degradation and climate change are missing3 an important emotional dimension and place connection (Salama and Aboukoura 2018; Strzelecka et al. 2017)—which, as our interview showed, it is richly there in new forms of ritualized art. Ecological rituals are used by a variety of groups and networks as means of enabling participants to reflect on human and other-than-human relationships. In his article ‘Ritual Theory and the Environment’ Ronald Grimes shows that, although eco-ritual may not seem a pragmatic solution for alleviating the environmental crisis, many believe that it has much to offer, since it can enable humans ‘to learn, or re-learn, ritual ways of becoming attuned to their environments’ (Grimes 2003: 31). Grimes exemplifies this with rituals that aim to mythologize new stories for the emergence of life, like ‘The Universe Story’, and rituals that aim ‘to cultivate a felt connection with the earth and its creatures’, like ‘The Council of All Beings’. ‘The Universe Story’, for example, is a lyrical and performative version of the scientific story of the universe. Similarly, the ‘Council of All Beings’ ritual consists of a storytelling circle in which participants, wearing animal masks, speak to and for other species—by imagining what these might say to humans (Nita 2016: 78–9). In other versions of this ritual, participants imagine what future generations may have to say about their present actions or inactions.

Conclusions Our chapter proposed ritualized art as a theoretical concept that can provide a new scholarly lens for looking at processes of acculturation—and specifically we discussed this here in the context of the greening of religion, specifically the greening of the Christian tradition, with ‘greening’ itself being a growing and pervasive phenomenon. We argued that Green Christian rituals can be seen as collaborative artistic socially engaged 3  It is not only an issue of omission: the emotionless framing of climate change represents a problem that needs to be or rather can be openly addressed by artists, by reflecting on, and moving away from, its cliché representations in the media (Brisman 2018).

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practices, which points not only to similar developments in the worlds of art and religion/ art and ritual but also to their long and interconnected history. Although rituals are often understood as processes of cultural transmission, rather than cultural change, green rituals can be case studies for their transparent activation of mechanisms or processes of cultural innovation and change. Green rituals were less prescriptive in terms of the artistic result, the site (often a protest site in the case of the Green Christian networks Nita investigated) or green altars that emerged from the art-­ ritual experiments in which participants collaborated. Although the sites for these rituals were constructed by participants, in a collaborative fashion, certainly the guidelines of the ‘ritual’ appeared firmer than it may be the case with the types of collaborative artistic projects Illés described in our interview, especially the ones in which the artist-designer is fee to ‘test their needs’. In the case of constructing a green ritual site, participants might have simply been told to use natural materials (such as sticks, stones, leaves, cones, feathers, flowers, etc.) in their artworks, albeit expectations and instructions about what would ultimately be produced could be communicated in a variety of subtle ways, such as through certain elements of prosody that evoke/invoke sorrow and lament—and Nita’s research suggests that lament is a key strategy for cultural change, a mechanism which is rooted in the Christian tradition (Nita 2018). By suspending the boundary between art and ritual we claimed that scholars can more freely investigate the processes of cultural change or cultural innovation, in the context of the dynamic relationships between actants (including the public). In contrast, when ignoring the interconnectedness of ritual and artistic practices, by looking at these domains as distinct, it may be tempting to see ‘art as free’ and ‘ritual or religion as static’—it is no wonder, for example, that art was expected to become ‘freed from its previous service to religion’ in our secular/post secular age and as such a free agent to ‘have the potential to re-enchant the world’ (Graham 2007). We however showed here that by looking at how art and ritual/ritualized art are engaged in acculturative processes, and by (at least temporarily) removing the conceptual boundary between art and ritual, we can look instead at the composition of these cultural processes at many different levels—narrative, performative, semiotic—and layers of experience—individual, collective, sensorial, memorialized.

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Little, R.M., and L.  Froggett. 2010. Making Meaning in Muddy Waters: Representing Complexity through Community Based Storytelling. Community Development Journal 45 (4): 458–473. Miell, Dorothy, and Karen Littleton. 2004. Collaborative Creativity: Contemporary Perspectives. London: Free Association Books. Müller, Olaf. 2012. The Social Significance of Religion in the Enlarged Europe: Secularization, Individualization and Pluralization. London: Routledge. Nanson, Anthony. 2014. Jumping the Gap of Desire: Telling Stories from Ecological History about Species Extinction to Evoke an Empathetic and Questioning Response. In Storytelling for a Greener World: Environment, Community and Story-Based Learning, ed. Alida Gersie, Anthony Nanson, and Edward Schieffelin, 141–152. Stroud: Hawthorn Press. Nita. 2016. Praying and Campaigning with Environmental Christians: Green Religion and the Climate Movement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Christian Discourses and Cultural Change: The Greenbelt Art and Performance Festival as an Alternative Community for Green and Liberal Christians. Implicit Religion. 21 (1): 44–69. ———. 2019. A Relational Analysis of Extinction Rebellion (XR) Songs and Performances during Protestivals, paper presented at Visualising Cultures: Media, Technology and Religion (BASR Annual Conference), Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, 2–4 September. ———. 2020. ‘Inside Story’ Participatory Storytelling and Imagination in Eco-­ pedagogical Contexts. In Storytelling for Sustainability in Higher Education: An Educator’s Handbook, ed. Petra Molthan-Hill, Heather Luna, Tony Wall, Helen Puntha, and Denise Baden, 154–167. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Nita, Maria, and Sharif Gemie. 2020. Counterculture, Local Authorities and British Christianity at the Windsor and Watchfield Free Festivals (1972–5). Twentieth Century British History 31 (1): 51–78. Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2018. The Sociological Imagination in a Time of Climate Change. Global and Planetary Change 163 (1): 171–177. Pihkala, Panu. 2020. Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Education. Sustainability 12: 101–149. Ricaurte-Bermudez, Maria Daniela. 2015. Communicating Environmental Awareness at Music Festivals: A Study of the Hove and Øya Festivals in Norway. Norwegian Open Research Archives (NORA) [online]. Accessed 28 June 2018. https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/44917. Salama, Sefat, and Khalil Aboukoura. 2018. The Role of Emotions in Climate Change Communication. In Handbook of Climate Change Communication, ed. Walter Leal Filho, Evangelos Manolas, Anabella M. Azul, Ullises M. Azeiteiro, and Henry McGhie. Gewerbestrasse: Springer. Schechner, Richard. 1993. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Routledge.

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Shilling, Chris. 2017. Body Pedagogics: Embodiment, Cognition and Cultural Transmission. Sociology 51: 1205–1221. Strzelecka, Marianna, Bynum B.  Boley, and Kyle M.  Woosnam. 2017. Place Attachment and Empowerment: Do Residents Need to Be Attached to Be Empowered? Annals of Tourism Research 66: 61–73. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ. Wilkinson, Katharine K. 2012. Between God and Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Festivals: Monument Making, Mythologies and Memory Barbara Brayshay and Jacqui Mulville

Monuments, to be monuments, must be more than big memorials. They must possess the qualities of monumentality, the foremost of which is the imaginary. We do not merely see them and remember. We feel them and imagine. (Pauketat 2014, 442; cited in Hicks and Mallet 2019, 87)

In this chapter we discuss findings from a research project into UK music festivals. Focusing on Glastonbury festival, one of the largest music, arts and performance festivals in the world, we explore a unique aspect of the festival site: a monumental stone circle that was created specifically for the event, in 1992, and known as the Swan Circle. The monument is built in the style of a megalithic stone circle, a circular alignment of standing stones that are a common feature typical of the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Northern Europe. The relatively recent creation of a monument mimicking a megalithic stone circle on the festival site is an B. Brayshay (*) Livingmaps Network, London, UK J. Mulville Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_7

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interesting phenomenon in itself; here we describe how we explored this festival monument and its significance through the lens of contemporary archaeology, a methodological approach that we suggest can bring fresh perspectives to festival studies. By considering the present-day use of the circle through observation and conversation, we ask why does Glastonbury—an event that has an ephemeral material existence—have a stone circle—a permanent structure? What are the narratives that provide meaning and continuity to the motif of the stone circle? How and why do people use it in the present? Are the people themselves and their perceptions and interactions with the monument affected or influenced by archaeological insights? And how can contemporary archaeology as a mixed research methodology help the researcher understand the festival and its culture? To understand the relationality between festival goers and the monument, we needed to consider its ‘inter-monumentality’, that is, its relationship to other monuments it references within the framework of contemporary archaeology. We describe how we captured audience responses to the Swan Circle and then present an analysis of these responses, in order to interrogate how this megalithic monument provokes those who attend Glastonbury festival. What emerges is a complex and intertwined account of myth, reality, pilgrimage, procession and memorialisation. A discussion of these elements exposes undocumented aspects of festival culture and reveals how festivals create new worlds and new realities for participants. By examining and recording the actions and experiences of the festival attendees to a constructed monumental stone circle, we aim to shed light both on the present-day festival experience and on monuments, past and present.

The Lure of the Stones The project began at the 2015 Glastonbury festival. We had been working at the festival since 2010 within the Craft Field, at the gateway to an area described on the festival site maps as the Sacred Space or the Kings Meadow. This area is located at the south western periphery of the festival site and overlooks the valley within which the festival is set (Map Ref: 51.144760, −2.585402).

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The Swan Circle is located in the Kings Meadow. Despite its curious modernity and location on the periphery of the main festival site, the monument is a place of some significance. The Kings Meadow, and the stone circle within it, function not only as the location for the festivals’ opening ceremony and other events, but also as we observed from our workshop doorway, as a destination for a continual steady stream of festival goers, many walking considerable distances across the site to come here.

A Theoretical Frame: Using Contemporary Archaeology to Examine Festival Sites Contemporary Archaeology is a field of archaeology that focuses on the most recent past, using archaeological techniques and methods to explore the contemporary world (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Graves-Brown et  al. 2013). It is an approach that seeks to understand the cultural and social meaning of material culture moving beyond the purely descriptive methodologies of traditional archaeology to embrace a diversity of multi-disciplinary possibilities, as Daniel Lee (2018) suggests: This is an archaeology that can nestle itself alongside anthropologists, geographers and artists, and collectively engage with the same events, happenings, places and materials in the process of them being made. In other words, such interdisciplinary collaborations can occupy the same temporality and physical space

Dan Hicks and Sarah Mallet’s definition in their work in the Calais Jungle refugee camps is particularly relevant to our project as it emphasises both the recent past and the active materiality of the site, a contemporary archaeology that: draws on the distinctive focus on material culture, the built environment, and landscapes and ecologies that emerge through the application of approaches from anthropological archaeology to the most recent past and the undocumented present (Hicks and Mallet 2019, V).

Also of relevance here is the development of innovative methodologies by contemporary archaeologists to combine evidence from both functioning and abandoned sites. As Symonds and Vareka (2014, 166) point out, this dual perspective which studies both ‘living and extinct material

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practices’ has been identified as a defining characteristic of contemporary archaeology (Harrison and Schofield 2010, 16). In the context of the Swan Circle, we are able to bring together previous research findings from studies of ancient monuments with explorations of the living material practice of the modern monument. As archaeologists working in the present, we have the opportunity to bring together the archaeological evidence base, with primary and secondary sources, as well as present-day observations of how people use and relate to the place and its artefacts (Graves-Brown et al. 2013, 15). Linking archaeological interpretations of ancient monuments to a recently built stone circle brings a very different disciplinary approach to festival studies and we feel that a contemporary archaeology can contribute to building a deeper understanding of the festival experience and how this relates to the festival landscape, constructed identities and processes of engagement, enactment and ritual. It is not about past or present stone circles providing direct analogies for each other, more a case of using the debates about ancient monuments to open up the ways we look at contemporary festival sites at the crossing between memorialised and imaginary spaces. Our contemporary archaeology frame for the study of the Swan Circle is grounded in traditional field and drone surveys undertaken by archaeologists from the University of Cardiff in 2014 and the primary documented description of its construction and purpose by the monuments architect, Ivan McBeth (1992, 2016). The findings and theories derived from similar archaeological monuments, together with other secondary sources such as heritage festival literature, come together to create a multi-layered context in which we can situate the other less tangible, qualitative observations of how people use and interact with the monument. From a contemporary archaeological perspective, we were interested in exploring how these various lines of evidence contribute to answering our research questions, and if by engaging in this type of mixed-methods research, we would gain access to a missing dimension in our understanding of the materiality of the sit, that of bringing the users’ embodied sense of place into our interpretations.

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Literature Review, Primary and Secondary Sources: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives The purpose of megalithic circular stone monuments has been a source of enquiry for archaeologists dating back to the work of John Aubrey in the late 1600s, in the eighteenth century by William Stukeley (1740) and later work by Gordon Childe (1947), Richard Bradley (1998) and the extensive Riverside Project at Stonehenge Parker Pearson (2013). The most recent discovery of the Durrington Shafts in the Stonehenge landscape (Gaffney et  al. 2020) that headlined in the national press illustrates the fascination that these sites and landscapes hold both for archaeologists and for the public alike. Although many theories have been advanced to explain their use, often as settings for ceremonies or rituals associated with lunar or solar alignments, there is little consensus among archaeologists as to their intended function. As archaeologists, usually engaged in describing and interpreting ancient archaeological sites, we wanted to first explore this pseudo ancient site through an archaeological lens. We know from archaeological studies of ancient stone circles and megalithic monuments that sites such as Stonehenge have been interpreted as places for commemoration, seasonal gatherings and ritual (Parker Pearson 2013; Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998) traditions that persist in some form or another today. Stonehenge draws people annually to observe the midsummer and midwinter sunrises to marvel at the solar alignment of the monument and experience a sense of connection with the ancestors. Given the symbolic or spiritual significance that Stonehenge has for many people, the presence of a modern stone circle on the Glastonbury festival site raises many interesting questions. We focus principally on Stonehenge, as the most frequently interpreted and well-known megalithic monument in the UK, as well as its relative proximity to Glastonbury and long-term associations with the festival. Henge monuments, created by the first farmers, provide the earliest archaeological evidence for mass gatherings in the UK. During construction monuments like Stonehenge required teamwork, the coordination of large groups of people, sophisticated levels of social organisation and technical skill. We suggest that when the stones and sun aligned, Stonehenge operated almost as an equivalent of a festival main stage and could draw a huge crowd in the same way. The archaeological evidence indicates that

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these prehistoric party people appear to have followed the modern festival philosophy of ‘leave no trace’ at least in this area (Mulville 2018). Fortunately for us, just like at today’s Glastonbury festival, the Stonehenge ‘festival’ folk left the equivalent of their tents and rubbish behind at their ‘campsite’. At Durrington Walls, just two miles from Stonehenge, there is evidence that thousands of people gathered there seasonally, probably to take part in activities associated with the solstices. Despite the abundant archaeological evidence for food and feasting at Durrington Walls (Parker Pearson 2013; Madgwick et al. 2019), it remains difficult to provide details on the social nature of ancient ‘festival’ activities. Ethnography and analogy suggest that in a world with no other forms of mass communication, festivals were the best way to exchange information. These gatherings would bind societies together and provide a forum for socialising, meeting new partners, reinforcing allegiances, exchanging gifts, telling stories, trading exotic goods, learning new skills and passing on traditions, shared values and purpose. We cannot prove this of course, but feel fairly certain, that in common with most of humankind they probably danced to music, drank alcohol (there is early evidence for brewing) and dabbled with drugs (Mulville 2018). Alternative explanations for these enigmatic stones have been proposed by archaeologists, as a burial site, a religious pilgrimage destination, a memorial to connect with the ancestors, an astronomical calendar and a place for healing. Large public ceremonial events may also be tied into structures of authority—being places and times where political elites could be legitimatised or challenged. The most recent analysis of the material from Durrington Walls has provided evidence that the site was indeed a meeting place, people were drawn there, and by association to Stonehenge, evidenced by the movement of materials from across the UK, to the site. Recent work on foods and feasting has used stable isotopic evidence to map where foods (in particular animal foods) have come from, with the assumption that they were bought to the site by residents of those areas travelling to the site (Madgwick et al. 2019). Running parallel with archaeological narratives of Stonehenge are the many myths, legend and folk tales which as Cusack (2012) suggests have a powerful vernacular identity in popular imagination. Speculation about the construction and purpose of the monument date as far back as the Middle Ages. Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae (written in approximately 1136) suggested that it was built by the

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legendary wizard Merlin aided by giants. Alternative theories of ‘Who Built Stonehenge’ range from Erich on Däniken’s (1966) belief that ancient megastructures such as Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids and the Moai heads of Easter Island were built using know-how passed down from God-­like aliens, to links with Druidism, proposed by John Aubrey in the late 1600s and again in the eighteenth century by William Stukeley (1740) that have persisted into the present day. Prehistoric megaliths and the folklore that surrounds them have been adopted by modern Druidism and other neopagan religious traditions, such as Wicca, creating a new and ‘alternative archaeological megalithic folklore’, which we see manifest in the solstice events at Stonehenge today.

The Past in the Present Moving forward in time to the 1970s a direct link between Stonehenge and the Glastonbury festival site was established, following a series of events at Stonehenge as druidic ceremonies at the midwinter and midsummer solstice began to attract countercultural networks. Travellers and spiritual seekers came to the site to celebrate solar events that became part of a calendar of annual gatherings such as the Stonehenge Free Peoples Festival in 1974 celebrating the midsummer solstice. Conflict over access and ownership of the site erupted as numbers attending the solar events increased. The Stones became a contested space between English Heritage (the body charged with responsibility for the monument), the Druids and the Peace Convoy of free festival travellers (Bender 1998). Tensions increased and finally culminated in a violent confrontation between Wiltshire police and travellers in 1985 that came to be known as the Battle of the Beanfield, in which approximately 500 people were arrested. Following the Battle of Beanfield the remains of the Peace Convoy travelled on to the Glastonbury festival site looking for a safe haven. The following year access to the Stonehenge monument was restricted by English Heritage, although modern Druids continue to access the site to perform their solar rituals. Today it is only possible to walk amongst the stones at Stonehenge on special access tours or during the two solstices and equinoxes, when a special provision is made at dawn. Whilst people are no longer able to approach or touch the Stonehenge stones (apart from at the summer and winter solstice events), the stones at Glastonbury are caressed, climbed upon and heavily used as a social space (Fig. 7.1).

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Fig. 7.1  The Swan Circle Glastonbury Festival 2017

The Stonehenge archaeological discourse, of temporality, monumentality and commemoration, provides a rich frame for our Swan Circle study. Not to draw simplistic or naïve comparisons between two very different megalithic sites, but rather understand the site in the context of analogy or, as Chris Tilley suggests (in Bender 1998, 2), as metaphor: Stonehenge becomes a trope by which we understand the past, and by which we understand our relationship in the present. It lives through its relationship to ourselves and to others.

Glastonbury Festival Creation Myths Delving into accounts of the festival’s history (reviewed in Eavis and Eavis 2019), it is clear that mythological narratives associated with history and pre-history were embedded in the festival’s ethos from its very earliest days. Naming the festival, the Glastonbury festival, and not the Pilton or Shepton Mallet festival (which were in fact the nearest places to Worthy Farm), linked it by association to the Glastonbury legends of Avalon, early Christianity and New Age mysticism. We can see from accounts of the first Glastonbury Fayre in 1970 that the inspiration for the event wasn’t just to

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put some music on in a field, neither was it conceived as a commercial, money-making enterprise. Michael Eavis, a local farmer, was ‘hit for six’ by his experience at the 1970s Blues and Progressive Music Festival at the Bath and West Showground and decided to hold ‘one of these’ on his farm: It was the whole flower-power era, and all the girls and blokes looked amazing. It was a very lovey-dovey affair, and emotional too. I’d never seen anything like it in my life (Eavis and Eavis 2019, 10)

To reassure anxious local residents he set out his vision for the event in an article in the Pilton Parish Magazine, his description of the forthcoming event was clearly written to set anxious locals minds at rest; it was to be cast in the guise of a country harvest festival, in tune with the familiar rhythms and seasonality of the familiar farming calendar: I wish to give the image of a Festival to celebrate the incoming of the harvest and if the sale of tickets is enough to justify it, to include the roasting of an ox over an open fire.

For the event organisers the ideology underpinning their idea of festival was deeply entwined with a wider cultural shift, the ‘whimsical utopian dreaming of e sixties’ (Green in Eavis and Eavis 2019, 27), the prevailing 1960–1970s ‘flower power’, anti-establishment counterculture. For Andrew Kerr it was a reimagining of festival as a country fair and the reinventing of a lifestyle harking back to an idealised pastoral idyll, a return to medieval traditions of the carnivalesque. It will be a fayre in the medieval tradition, embodying the legends of the era with music, dance, poetry, theatre and the opportunity for spontaneous entertainments. There will be no monetary profit—it will be free!

Fundamental to the early festival mythology was the belief that Glastonbury and the surrounding area is special because it is linked to a network of ‘earth energy lines’ as Michael Eavis recalls: John Michell, a famous writer who’d developed the ‘Earth mysteries’ movement and believed that the Glastonbury area had a sacred power … he did some dowsing, playing around with hazel twigs and worked out where the first Pyramid Stage should be. (Eavis and Eavis 2019, 13)

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Connections with ancient sacred sites also inspired the design of the Pyramid stage; its architect Bill Harkin who came up with the idea of the Pyramid wanted to recreate the Great Pyramid of Giza (Eavis and Eavis 2019). The Swan Circle was not the only monument to appear in the Pilton landscape in 1992. A local resident, Anne Goode, erected a 30 ft white-lit crucifix that still glows across the valley today. New monuments raised in relation to, or as a response to, others is a common theme in the development of ancient monument complexes and we see this echoed in the White Cross, constructed to act as a counterbalance to the pagan Swan Circle. From the vantage point of the high ground of the Kings Meadow we can look down the valley and see the Tor in the distance, framed by the two modern monuments, each tapping into the imagined traditions of the ancient past and the legends of Avalon, early Christianity and New Age mysticism. On the festival site itself, other more ephemeral monuments have been constructed, as temporary installations mimicking the megalithic circle motif. The Pixie Circle built in 1990 was a smaller, precursor to the Swan Circle and megametallic monuments, Carhenge in 1987 and Bughenge in 1997 followed. More recent installations that referenced the trilithon structures and the ‘alter stone’ at Stonehenge were built by Banksy in 2007; ‘Henge’ made from portaloos was built in the Kings Meadow in close proximity to the Swan Circle, parodying Stonehenge the artist countered critics saying A lot of monuments are a bit rubbish, but this really is a pile of crap. The Portable Toilet Henge was followed in 2010 by Cube Henge, Connected Cube and other incarnations including washing machine-henge and an amusing Welly Boot Henge, a monument to the infamous Glastonbury mud. The interweaving of the past in the present as expressed in the various forms of megalithic themed monuments that have appeared on the festival site demonstrates the embeddedness of the symbolic nature of megalithic structures in the festival culture.

Methodological Approaches There are clearly challenges to undertaking archaeological research on the Glastonbury festival site mainly due to the ephemeral nature of both the event and the site itself. Any evidence of the festival in the form of material

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culture: structures, assemblages and artefacts—the ‘stuff’ of archaeology—almost all disappears once the festival is over. The Stone Circle, the Pyramid stage (repurposed as a cow shed), the children’s play area, service roads and networks and the Glastonbury security fence are all that is visible on Google Earth for most of the year. Little evidence remains on the surface to indicate the scale and complexity of the festival site or of anything of the history of its fifty-year evolution. Over the years the festival has developed a rigorous ‘leave no trace’ policy to ensure that every scrap of debris is removed both during and after the event allowing livestock to be return and graze safely in the fields each year. Our methodology makes reference to the festival research of Äikäs et al. (2016) and White (2013, 2020) as an ‘active site archaeology’ that draws on archaeology, cultural ethnography and oral history to construct a theoretical base for the research. Unlike the ephemeral nature of almost all other festival ‘archaeology’, the Swan Circle is a permanent structure that enables us to explore the festival archaeology by bringing together knowledge of the construction and materiality of the stone circle itself, with understanding from an ethnographic study of the experiences of people who visit the site. In the ethnographic element of the research, our aim was to explore qualitatively the lived experience of the stone circle through the practice of the people who go there—rather than the view of those who construct, create and curate the festival. By capturing the personal accounts of users, we could potentially reveal the layers of personal cultural and social meaning associated with the monument to create an accessible and richer archaeology of now, in which its actors contribute their voices to its interpretation. In practical terms designing research instruments for use in the field presented a number of challenges, in particular—how to find unobtrusive and playful ways to explore and record people’s stories within the ephemeral setting of a four-day music festival in uncertain weather conditions! We realised that our research methods would have to be essentially experimental and could not impinge on the festival goers’ experience. We had no idea what would work in the relatively chaotic festival setting with a crowd of approximately 175,000 people. Importantly, we didn’t want to structure the research around testing pre-conceived ideas that we might have about people’s behaviour and beliefs around the monument, such as asking them if they found it a ‘spiritual place’ or if they went there for any

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ritual or symbolic purpose. Grounded theory design (Charmaz 2014; Evans 2013) allowed for a ‘bottom-up’ approach in which we collected stories, impressions, histories and memoires from which a typology of key words, repeated ideas and concepts emerged. Collecting Stories The ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken over three festivals in 2015, 2017, 2019. All responses were voluntary and anonymous; we collected no demographic information in order to protect the privacy of respondents. In the first-year pilot study, we designed a simple survey tool— inviting people visiting our craft workshop, often on their way to or from the Swan Circle to share their experiences. We used a simple label which we tied to a ‘story wall’ on which participants were encouraged to share and view the contributions. On the label we asked people to simply tell us when they went to the Swan Circle, why they went there and what they did when they were there. In the second phase of field work in 2017, we used collaborative mapping as an engagement tool with the aim of broadening the scope of the study beyond the immediate vicinity of the Swan Circle and Kings Meadow. We employed a festival site map as a vehicle to explore festival goers’ sense of place and place making and their awareness of the Swan Circle away from its immediate vicinity. This involved roaming the festival site with an AO map as a ‘gameboard’, inviting people to put pins in significant places and send postcards via a post-box to share their memories of festival experiences and special places. Approximately 200 postcard stories were collected. Using the map in this way it became more than precision mapping or a factual guide to ‘where places are’ or a visualisation of ‘where people go’, but rather it evolved as a process, an encounter with the event and place itself. Acting as an ‘agent provocateur’ rather like a campfire—people gathered round the map and it provoked conversations, revealing through their storytelling a rich multi-layered, place-making narrative. The map postcards that directly referenced the Swan Circle were separated for this study from the data set and combined with those from 2015 (N = 125). The daytime mass gatherings of the CND Peace Sign (2017) and Extinction Rebellion (2019) events (see below) were opportunities for participant observation and informal conversations with festival goers.

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Text from the postcards was transcribed into a database. The most commonly used adjectives were tagged and used to categorise the responses thematically.

Data Analysis: Into the Swan Circle Following in the footsteps of many other festival goers, it’s time to take a walk up the hill away from the main festival arena to look more closely at the Swan Circle itself. We journey through space and time, bringing with us knowledge of ancient Megalithic traditions, especially the archaeologies of Stonehenge, Glastonbury’s legendary landscape stories and the mythologies of the festival site itself. We walk past the Green Field, the Tipi Village and Peace Garden, still resonant with the iconography of the 1970s counter culture, into the Kings Meadow and our final destination—the Swan Circle. The archaeological field and drone surveys undertaken in 2016 provide a descriptive archaeological plan of the site, from this we learn that it is located at the site of Worthy Farm (map reference ST590397) situated in a valley lying between two low sandstone ridges. The monument lies in Kings Meadow at the far south of the area enclosed by the Glastonbury festival. The monument comprises about 20 stones ranging from over 2.5 metres to approximately 1.5 metres in height and includes a balanced horizontal stone resting on a number of smaller stones. The stones form an oval with a maximum length of 25 m and a minimum of 20 m in diameter with a central band of stones (Figs. 7.2 and 7.3). Unlike ancient sites where archaeologists have to meticulously record and analyse structures, materials, artefacts and the landscape setting before they can begin to reconstruct the details of construction and purpose, we have a detailed account of the building of the Swan Circle written by its architect, Ivan McBeth (1992, 2016). McBeth’s handbook is not a simple construction manual—and most definitely not an Ikea flat pack guide! He does provide some practical construction details, such as the sourcing of the stones and the physical challenges encountered putting them in place. We learn from McBeth that the monument is constructed of limestone sourced from a local quarry, Torr Works, and that each stone weighed between five and thirteen metric tons and they were transported to the site using tractors and tipper trailers where each had its position carefully considered before erection. The

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Fig. 7.2  The Swan Circle—Archaeological Site Plan

individual stones were allocated to particular positions and then left on the ground as close to the postholes as possible and ritual deposits were placed into the postholes prior to the stones being set in place:

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Fig. 7.3  Swan Circle drone survey (Ariel Cam 2017) On the morning of May 31st, I spent time with each hole, noting its orientation, and individual purpose. I did a simple ceremony with each, leaving gifts and offerings that were appropriate. In each hole I left the following: Chalice Well water: homemade St John’s Wort: a crystal from the central chamber of Crystal Mountain; a scattering of crystals from South West Ireland, a pinch of tobacco, and assorted flowers and herbs.

Unlike archaeologists attempting to reconstruct the intent of ancient monument builders, McBeth’s account recounts in some detail his decision-­making processes. From the handbook we discover that the location and structure of the monument are informed by the influence of celestial alignments and new age mysticism. The morphology and orientation of the monument are deliberately linked to the landscape features of the Kings Meadow, as well as alignments with the stars and the summer Solstice sunrise. The positioning of the prominent stones in the circle, inspired by McBeth observing the flight of swans over Kings Meadow, represent the major stars of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, hence the name of the monument.

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The stone circle I was to build would mirror the Cygnus Constellation that flew around the sky at Midsummer (McBeth 2016, 14)

Most importantly we discover these are not simply representational elements interwoven into the monument for artistic or symbolic effect, but embedded in the design and layout of the stones is McBeth’s belief that the configuration of the stone circle and the links to astrological and solar alignments create a transformative, liminal space: Stone circles generate sacred space. Simply by separating out a circular area of land from the integrated ‘mundane’ landscape, with magical intent, imbues the space with special other worldly properties. The enclosed area becomes a home for the Sacred, the point at which heaven unites with earth, a connection point with the Source, the centre of All. (McBeth 2016, 7)

From McBeth’s account we learn something of the mechanics of its construction but more importantly that the project was animated by his belief in new age mysticism and intimately linked to the Glastonbury landscape and celestial and solar alignments that are specific to the site. His intent goes far beyond simply creating a festival monument in a field—embedded in the layout and design of the site is the notion that it will create a sacred temple—a spiritual meeting place for ‘the tribes of Avalon’ as a focal point for people to gather round. The intent behind the Swan Stone Circle is to provide the festival site with a stone temple, a powerful nodal point (power spot) in the earth energy network. To honour and facilitate the annual Summer Solstice tribal gathering in Avalon. It is a physical, energetic reminder that the gathering of the tribes has an essential spiritual aspect. (McBeth 2016, 7)

It follows that in our exploration of the ‘meaning’ of the Swan Circle, McBeth’s account draws us into his affinities with myths, legends and astronomy that then become as integral to the materiality of the monument as the stones themselves, as Sarah de Nardi in her work on Visualising Place Memory and the Imagined (2019, 62) found: I mused that, after all, heritage values cannot easily be untangled amid the web of overlapping meanings that make places. In our fieldwork, entities such as place names, legends, and memory, albeit intangible and possibly ephemeral, constitute as much part of material culture as monuments and artefacts.

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What Do People Say about the Stones Many accounts recognised the structure as a spiritual place—associating them with words in this connotative field, such as ‘blessed’, ‘magical’ and ‘ancestors’: I think the stone circle is a beautiful place to visit. The structure is remote and it’s a nice place to go, it’s a spiritual and magical place, the Stones are grounding to touch, I feel as though I am communing with the ancestors—they are blessed. (Map Postcard 2017)

Only a few people we talked to had any knowledge of the celestial orientation of the stones with the constellation of Cygnus that had guided McBeth’s construction: I don’t know much about its meaning—it just feels old, like it’s always been here, I didn’t even know it was called the Swan Circle we just call it the Stones. (Swan Circle Interview: June 2017)

It is the connection with daily and annual solar events that draws many people to the site; visiting the stone circle is a significant destination on festival goers’ itinerary, often described in terms of individual acts of pilgrimage that are ritualised by association with the sunrise or evening sunset. Away from the melee of the main site, it provides a spectacular vista as the sun rises or falls, a place for contemplation: I go up the hill every festival on the Solstice to watch the sunrise—it’s peaceful, calm—time out to think about life, the universe and everything (Story Wall contribution: June 2015) We always go to the Circle at sunset, light candles and sit by the fire—meditate and watch the sun go down (Map Postcards: June 2017)

The Swan Circle Narratives The archaeological survey of the site and findings from primary and secondary sources provide detailed picture of the many influences impacting on its construction and location. Like Stonehenge, the Swan Circle doesn’t exist in isolation from the histories and temporality of its surrounding

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landscape setting. It is much more than a circle of stones in a field. Here we turn to the first of our research questions, where we asked if we would discover a missing dimension in the archaeology—that of the people who are there walking amongst the stones? What would ethnographic studies reveal as we bring the people and their voices into the space? It would seem from the numbers of people who visit the Swan Circle during the festival that McBeth’s dream of creating a meeting place has certainly been realised—but what of the idea of the circle as a transformative space? Themes that emerged from the analysis of the festival stories were those of memory making, commemoration & remembrance, ancestors, ritual & ceremony, solstice, sunrise/sunset, community, friendship, love and peace, sacred space and drugs. The individual stories we gathered come together into a collection of Swan Circle narratives that reveal fascinating insights into the experience of festival as a place of transformation and imagining. Far from being a static monument the Swan Circle is very much a living monument evolving from its original conception as a stone temple (McBeth 2016, 7) into a performative space for present-day collective and individual memorial making.

Antiquity and Orientation We also aimed to discover how the archaeology of the stones, the age of the monument, its configuration as a stone circle and its relationship with solar and celestial alignments influenced visitors’ experience and interaction with the site. Conversations with festival goers revealed that the majority of people were unaware that it is a recently created monument, they assumed that it was ancient; however, interestingly when informed that it was constructed in 1992 its antiquity appeared to be immaterial to people’s perception of it as a ‘special or sacred place’. For them, the experience of going to the Swan Circle, either to a collective, organised event or on an individual journey, is one in which they create their own traditions and personal mythologies. The location of the Swan Circle, its remoteness from both the outside world and on the periphery of the main festival arena enhances a sense of separation and liminality, one of journeying into a transformational space. The stones appear to represent an iconographic, symbolic structure that evokes a religious or ‘spiritual’ experience, consciously or

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sub-­ consciously connected to archaeological interpretations of ancient megalithic sites. Many people expressed a sense of connecting with the knowledge and wisdom of the ancestors through the circle of stones.

A Living Monument: Memorialisation, Ritual and Protestival Each year an opening ceremony takes place at the Circle to mark the start of the festival. Fire is a key element, with dancers bringing fire from the Healing Field to the Swan Circle to ignite and burn a wooden sculpture in the form of a mythical creature, which is the centre piece of the ritual. It is tempting to draw some parallels here with other festival monuments that have ritual and symbolic purpose. The Temple at the Burning Man festival, for example, is an ephemeral monument reconstructed anew each year as a space where commemoration is ritualised through memorial offerings in the form of letters, photographs and altars creating a rich material culture of grief and memory that is symbolically burned at the end of the festival. The ‘burn’ of the Burning Man effigy and Temple has resonances with the Glastonbury opening fire ceremony. In contrast to the spectacle of the opening ceremony the end of the festival is marked symbolically by people gathering informally at the Stones to watch the sunrise. As well as the opening and closing events, in recent years the Swan Circle has become the focus for a series of special events held during the festival that incorporate elements of ‘protestival’ (St John 2008) in acts of collective protest, ritual, procession and gathering—a symbolic space in which political elites are challenged through performative action, a continuation of the festivals’ long association with CND, Greenpeace and more generally with countercultural politics. The circle was chosen as the place for the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, to address devotees and festival goers at the ‘hallowed ground of the Stone Circle’ when he visited the festival in 2015. In his address to the crowd, he spoke of the need for action to bring about world peace and to prevent climate catastrophe. The Dalai Lama’s themes of world peace and climate change were subsequently the focus for two events also held at the Swan Circle. In 2017 a crowd estimated to be over 15,000 festival goers gathered to create a human sculpture of the CND peace sign. The event was inspired by a terrorist attack at the Manchester

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and London earlier in the year and was an emotional event for many participants, wishing to commemorate the dead and to make a symbolic call for an end to war and world peace: We all come together here, making the biggest peace sign on record—proud to be part of it for our future—sending out massive love and peace vibrations to heal the planet from the sacred Stones (Peace Sign Event Interview: 22nd June, 2017) Its beautiful people coming together at the Stones and sending a message to the world “Glastonbury is for peace so fuck off war mongering fascists—the people are rising up again for peace and love” (Peace Sign Event Interview: 2017) CND were here right at the start of Glastonbury—this sign was on top of the Pyramid Stage in the early days—and we are still here now, coming to the Stones, still calling for world peace and an end to war. (Peace Sign Event Interview: 22nd June 2017)

The theme of climate change was taken up by a march organised by Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace on the second day of the 2019 festival. Starting at the Park Stage a colourful procession culminated in the formation of a human sculpture of the Extinction Rebellion logo, linked symbolically to the Swan Circle. Speakers paid tribute to indigenous people who have led the fight against global warming and called for action on climate change. These themes of peace and environment still resonate today with the ideologies of the early Glastonbury CND and later Greenpeace festivals and demonstrate how the festival experience acts as a vehicle for the transmission of these cultural values into the present day. Such gatherings are perceived to have added potency by taking place at the Swan Circle; people are drawn to the symbolic space and experience a sense of social empowerment by taking part in acts of ideological and political solidarity. In the liminal space of the festival, the Stones form a nucleus for temporary, ephemeral communities as geo-socio—ecologies in which participants can express shared values and purpose (Fig. 7.4). I came up today with XR and its cool—it seems a good place to be making our sign for the planet away from all the shabby market stalls and craziness. (XR Event Interview: June 27th 2019)

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Fig. 7.4  XR Human sculpture at the Swan Circle 2019. (Photo by Andre Pattenden)

Memorialisation and Remembrance Personal pilgrimages to the Stones are frequently associated with commemoration and remembrance for many festival goers. Ivan McBeth makes no reference to the circle as a memorial site in his plan of the Swan Circle—rather he sees it as a place for the living, a ‘meeting place for the tribes of Avalon’. The living and the dead however are not so obviously separate; through the performance of commemorative rituals, it has become for some festival attendees a sacred space for remembrance of the

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dead and the ancestors and for connecting with family members and friends who have died: Part of my Dad is scattered at the Swan Stone Circle and it really does bring a lot of comfort knowing he is at a place of such beauty with amazing energy. (Map postcards: June 2017) The Stone Circle is where I put my daughters’ ashes in 1997—Michael Eavis agreed. (Map postcards: June 2017) I always come to the Stones to remember my best friend who died, way to young, love you Bro, remembering you always (Swan Circle Interview: 22nd June 2019) I always walk up to the Stones of an evening, take some time out to sit and think and remembering those who aren’t with us anymore (Map Postcards: June 2017)

The Danger Zone There are undoubtedly many festival goers who don’t know anything of the Swan Circle’s existence and there are others who avoid going there, deterred by its reputation as a place where people go to buy and take drugs. Here we found interesting tensions between the stone circle as both a sacred and a profane space. For some it is perceived as a place of danger to be avoided rather than as a place for meeting or contemplation. I don’t go there, I avoid it because of the weird people and drugs there, people go there to take drugs, and there is this drumming and it feels dangerous and unsafe. (Map Postcards: June 2017) I’ve never really been interested in the stone circle as a place to go, I walked up there once ages ago of an evening there was a lot of rubbish lying about, larger cans and empty NO2 caps—pretty shabby ‘stoners’ sitting around smoking dope and drinking lager—someone was playing bongo’s. (Map postcards: 2017) I don’t like it there—it’s away from everything and dark at night, people lying about wasted and it feels scary. (Map postcards: 2017)

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Inevitably it is these qualities that make it attractive for others: I like the bongos, that drum beat and sense of danger, because its chilled and amazing—primaeval it draws you there. (Swan Circle; June 2017)

Conclusion In our study of the Glastonbury Swan Circle, we have brought together archaeological, historical and ethnographic sources to explore the relationship between monumentality, mythology and festival culture. We would like to make a case here for the use of contemporary archaeology and the qualitative methodologies employed in our research as valuable tools for further festival studies, particularly in the exploration of the cultural significance and meaning of festivals both in the past and in the present . A key finding from our research is that our exploration of festival through the lens of contemporary archaeology provides a pathway to greater understanding of festival culture because it considers not just the materiality of the festival site, its monumentality (both fixed and ephemeral) and its landscape context but also its connections and relationship to people and histories. We have produced the first archaeological plan and drone survey of the Swan Circle (other than Ivan McBeths original sketch plans) and considered the stone circle motif adopted by McBeth in the context of previous archaeological interpretations and understandings of ancient sites such as Stonehenge. We found that the celestial and astronomical orientations common to the construction of ancient stone circles are echoed in this contemporary monument. Historical and archival sources provided fascinating insights into the relationship between the Swan Circle, the Glastonbury festival site and its hinterland of mythological and magical landscapes revolving around Glastonbury Tor and Stonehenge that have permeated the festival site and are reflected in its iconic monumentality. Our study of festival site maps dating from 1972 to the present provided an additional source of information on the development of the festival site, reflecting its diverging and complex ideology over time. Up to this point our methodologies are typical of conventional, descriptive archaeological research and as such are valuable in themselves as tools for approaching a complex festival site such as Glastonbury with its

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relatively long history and exponential growth from the early festivals to the mega-site that it has become today. However, what sets our study apart from pure description is the ethnographic dimension in which we set out to bring the voices of festival goers and their experience into our interpretation of the factual data. In our Swan Circle narratives, we found that it has acquired in the twenty-eight years since its creation, an aura of the past that has come about through the practice of its use, a patina of ‘ancientness’ that has been reimagined through ritual events, meetings, commemoration and remembrance. The configuration of the Stones, replicating an ancient monument, is fundamental to festival goers’ experience of the space as ‘sacred’. A place in which community is emphasised, a place to meet with other like-minded people and as a space to connect with imagined more socially just and equitable worlds. The Swan Circle emerges as many different things to many different people. In the same way that Jacquetta Hawkes observed in 1967 that ‘every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves— and desires’, we may also say that today every individual gets the Swan Circle they deserve and desire. We were curious to know if our findings would challenge or reaffirm popular media portrayals of festival culture as one of economic and hedonistic excess. Though no doubt there are those festivellers for whom festival is an escape into drug and alcohol excess, our findings echo those of Buck-Mathews (2018) in that they challenge prevalent negative stereotypes and representations of festival. The Swan Circle stories we gathered are many faceted, nested in a landscape of evolving mythological narratives. But rather than being a conveyor of a remote and arcane past, they reveal that it is very much a living monument, and a locus for the transmission and continuation of Glastonbury festivals cultural values, those themes of peace and caring for the planet that were evident in the early Greenpeace and CDN festivals that resonate still in the rituals and practices of the present. We see mirrored in festival goers’ experience the persistence of traditions of seasonal gatherings, first evidenced millennia ago at Stonehenge and other megalithic sites. Communal knowledge and experiences of our present day, and highly curated past, have to a degree informed festival goers’ attitudes and activities at the circle. From our direct observations and recording of how people use and relate to the site in the present we have discovered a space where people make connections, histories and memories that in their telling revealed a rich narrative of searching for utopias, pilgrimage,

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commemoration and ritual at festivals. Just like our ancient ancestors at that mythical Stonehenge event people continue to find joy in great gatherings, fulfilment in the creation of meaning and legend and a desire to connect and reflect, with the modern music festival providing the opportunity for this to occur. As Glastonbury reaches its 50th year, we also ask is it time to consider the cultural and heritage value of this event? Prior to Ian McBeth’s publication in 2016, which parallels material on his website (ivanmcbeth.com), there is virtually nothing written about this monument. In our documentation of its use, we are witnessing the interplay between tangible heritage—the objects, artefacts, buildings, places and monuments that have a physical presence and intangible cultural heritage—the traditions and living expressions inherited from ancestors and passed on to descendants. The myths, practices and legends of the Stone Circle, its role in the festival and its meaning to attendees provide a fascinating window into the transmission of ideas and practices in the past, an understanding of the wider views of ancient monuments and how festivals can develop their own sacred landscapes, rites and rituals that people are keen to enact and embellish. Acknowledgements  We would like firstly thank Kirsty Harding and Ian Dennis, the core team members, who in recent years have been supplemented by Jerrod Seifert and Martin Weiner; Maria Nita and Michael Eavis for supporting our work in 2017; our hosts the Greencrafts Village, Marie, Nic and Clodagh, the Green Fields, Toby and Liz Elliott; Kate Doody and Sarah Slater for their warm welcome and continual friendship; Adam Stanford and Steve Mills for surveying and recording the monument; Cardiff University for supporting the project and Maria Nita and Mark Edmonds for their comments and advice on our manuscript and finally to Andre Pattenden for permission to use his ariel photograph of the XR Human Sculpture at the Swan Circle (2019).

References Äikäs, Tina, Wesa Perttola, and Tina Kuokkanen. 2016. ‘The Sole You Found was the Soul of the Festival: Archaeological Study of a Rock Festival in Seinäjoki, Finland. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 3 (1): 77–101. Bender, Barbara. 1998. Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Bradley, Richard. 1998. The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. London: Routledge.

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Buchli, Victor, and Gavin Lucas. 2001. The Absent Present: Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. In Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, ed. Victor Bucheli and Gavin Lucas. London: Routledge. Buck-Mathews, Eveleigh. 2018. Re-Framing Music Festivals: Exploring Space, Solidarity, Spirituality and Self with Young People. Coventry University: Unpublished PhD Thesis. Charmaz, Kathy. 2014. Constructing Grounded Theory. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Childe, Gordon. 1947. Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles. Glasgow and London: Gilmour & Dean Ltd. Cusack, Carole. 2012. Charmed Circle: Stonehenge, Contemporary Paganism, and Alternative Archaeology. Numen 59 (2–3): 138–155. De Nardi, Sarah. 2019. Visualising Place, Memory and the Imagined. London and New York: Routledge. Eavis, Emily, and Michael Eavis. 2019. Glastonbury 50. Hachette UK. Evans, Gary. 2013. A Novice Researcher’s First Walk Through the Maze of Grounded Theory: Rationalization for Classical Grounded Theory. The Grounded Theory Review 12 (1): 37–55. Gaffney, Vincent, et al. 2020. A Massive, Late Neolithic Pit Structure associated with Durrington Walls Henge. Internet Archaeology 55. https://doi. org/10.11141/ia.55.4. Geoffrey of Monmouth. 1966. The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated by Lewis Thorpe Harmondsworth. London: Penguin. Graves-Brown, Paul, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini, eds. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Rodney, and John Schofield. 2010. After Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkes, Jacinta. 1967. God in the Machine. Antiquity 41: 174–180. Hicks, Dan, and Sarah Mallet. 2019. Lande: The Calais ‘Jungle’ and Beyond. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Lee, Daniel. 2018. Experimental Mapping in Archaeology Process, Practice and Archaeologies of the Moment. In Re-Mapping Archaeology: Critical Perspectives, Alternative Mappings, ed. Mark Gillings, Piraye Hacıgüzeller, and Gary Lock. London: Routledge. Madgwick, Richard, Angela Lamb, H. Sloane, A. Nederbragt, Umberto Albarella, M. Pearson, and Jane Evans. 2019. Multi-isotope Analysis Reveals that Feasts in the Stonehenge Environs and across Wessex Drew People and Animals from throughout Britain. Science Advances 5: eaau6078. https://doi.org/10.1126/ sciadv.aau6078.

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McBeth, Ivan. 1992, 2016. The Swan Circle. The Birth of a New Stone Circle in King’s Meadow, Worthy Farm, Near Glastonbury. Glastonbury: Unique Publications. Mulville, Jacqui. 2018. What Will Future Archaeologists Think of Glastonbury? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/what-­will-­future-­archaeo logists-­think-­of-­glastonbury-­43666. Parker Pearson, Mike. 2013. Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument. New York: The Experiment. Parker Pearson, Mike, and Ramilisonina. 1998. Stonehenge for the Ancestors: The Stones Pass on the Message. Antiquity 72 (276): 308–326. St John, Graham. 2008. Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present. Social Movement Studies Journal 7 (2): 167–190. Stukeley, William. 1740. Stonehenge, a temple restor’d to the British druids. London: W.  Innys and R.  Manby, St Paul. Repository Collection Widener Library, Harvard University [online]. Accessed June 14, 2021. https://nrs.harvard. edu/urn-­3:FHCL:10937246. Symonds, James, and Pavel Vareka. 2014. Cowboys and Bohemians: Recreation, Resistance, and the Tramping Movement in West Bohemia. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1 (1): 165–193. White, Carolyn L. 2013. The Burning Man Festival and Archaeology of Ephemeral and Temporary Gatherings. In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, ed. Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini, 595–712. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

CHAPTER 8

Sherpagate: Tourists and Cultural Drama at Burning Man Graham St John

Introduction An ostentatious cavalcade pulses through the sprawling gate on the verge of the desert, sending dust clouds into orbit. Riding in this motley caravan, virgins and veterans alike arrive in Black Rock City (BRC), the colossal fire-arts gathering that for Labor Day week every August congresses in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and more specifically, on the flat open expanses of its a 400 square-mile playa. Burning Man has been installed in this remote wilderness every year since 1990, migrating from San Francisco’s Baker Beach, where a wooden effigy called “The Man” had been razed each summer solstice since 1986. On “the playa,” this statue stands at the center of a fire pageant—the “Fire Conclave” on “Burn Night”—around which a city, a cultural movement, and an international community has evolved. Participating in over 1000 theme camps, volunteering for shifts in dozens of departments, and afterwards returning to the “default” world, “Burners” negotiate a complex ethos known as the

G. St John (*) University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_8

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“Ten Principles.”1 While the means by which participants are “acculturated” to this ethos are manifold, the primary vehicles of transmission are collaborative art projects, many conspiring around the annual art theme. As BRC has evolved a community ethos, a distinct form of artistic citizenship has been forged to address challenges associated with dis/assembling a city in unforgiving physical, political, and social environments. As it has met these challenges, Burning Man has germinated a culture reflexively proficient in addressing the concerns that jeopardize its reproduction. A catalogue of crises have threatened to undermine Black Rock City since the event’s inception. Adversities have compelled participants to adapt, with BRC evolving as a unique co-creation. Exploring the cultural dimensions of this experiment, informed by the author’s experience with BRC in eight cycles since 2003, and contributing to a study addressing BRC and its worldwide progeny as artistic heterotopias,2 the chapter is shaped by Victor Turner’s insights on culture as dramatic process. Though Turner is widely invoked, his dramatic processualism has been largely neglected by Burning Man scholars. While a wide variety of events are noted to dramatize participants’ “ultimate concerns” (e.g. MacAloon 1984; Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993; St John 2012), the chapter demonstrates that the reproduction of BRC and the safeguarding of its cultural progeny are paramount concerns for participants. More specifically, with a growing culture of “convenience” perceived to jeopardize the event, Burners have co-created responses that hold redressive intent. Black Rock City holds three decades of innovative solutions to complications implicit to its dis/assemblage in one of the most austere spaces in North America. Organizationally, BRC has evolved through refined responses to legitimation crises associated with rising attendance levels, health and safety issues, policing, liability concerns, playa restoration, logistical problems, the presence of predatory media, and commercialism. The annual reproduction of a temporary city with a population near 80,000 (by 2017) necessitated complex planning strategies, volunteer 1  The Ten Principles are Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-­ reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leave No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy. For an explanation of each, see https://burningman.org/ culture/philosophical-center/10-principles. In this chapter, all principles are capitalized and italicized. 2  The Swiss National Science Foundation project Burning Progeny (January 2016– December 2019), Department of Social Science, University of Fribourg, Switzerland: www. burningprogeny.org.

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co-ordination, risk management solutions, and educational practices. The nonprofit Burning Man Project (BMP) has fostered co-creative solutions to rebuilding a large-scale event in the wilderness, where important lessons have been converted from unforeseen disruptions, unmet objectives, risk, and failure. Burning Man has evolved a cultural repertoire enabling its own regeneration. That satire and parody are integral to this repertory is in no small way due to the San Francisco Cacophony Society whose Surrealist and Dadaist inspired exploits were pivotal to early Burning Man and remain evident today (Evans et  al. 2013; St John and Vitos Forthcoming). Storytelling is also integral and has been instrumental to the efforts of the BMP to retain “authentic voice” and “meaningful participation” (Chen 2016) in the face of growing bureaucratization. Stories conveyed on community blogs, and in e-newsletter Jack Rabbit Speaks, permit participants to articulate a community ethos and thereby become agents in the making of their identity. Narratives conveyed in BRC publication Piss Clear, in the online Burning Man Journal, and expressed pervasively across social media, continually re-evaluate the boundary between the desirable and the undesirable, the principled and the unprincipled. The resulting rhetoric is integral to the Ten Principles, a beleaguered ethos subject to ongoing interrogation via art themes and collaborative art projects. As the BMP evolved as a popular organization committed not only to seasonally reproduce the event in Nevada but to inspire a worldwide movement,3 Burning Man has become fraught with ethical contradictions, accusations of hypocrisy, and elitism. Prominent among the complaints is that Burning Man has grown convenient and commodified, a tension aggravated in 2014 with the “plug-n-play,” or “sherpagate,” controversy. As the chapter demonstrates, this controversy fueled an identity crisis, sparked debate, and provoked a redressive artifice, including that evident in the 2016 art theme, Da Vinci’s Workshop. As will be discussed, this theme attests to a superliminal architecture that, evolving over 35 successive years of event making, enables the Burner community to confront, perform, and navigate the controversies assailing it. Before discussing “sherpagate,” Da Vinci’s Workshop, and other redressive aesthetics within the Burner repertoire, the chapter introduces Turner’s “social” and “cultural” drama

3  As of 2020, there were 90+ official Regional Events in the Burning Man Regional Network: https://regionals.burningman.org/.

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model and assesses its usefulness in understanding a unique arts culture responsive to a crisis embodied in the figure of the tourist.

Art Themes, Social Dramas, and Superliminality Annual art themes are integral to Black Rock City. Despite the likelihood that many participants pay little interest, as primary founder Larry Harvey early stated, themes provide a “governing context” through which disparate individuals and groups commit to a common enterprise (in Beale 1996). Themes provide an artifice that enables the Burner community to gaze upon themselves, as festivalgoers, city dwellers, and global movement participants. Interviewed in 1997 by Darrel van Rhey,4 Harvey related that “we’re reclaiming the social function of art… We use our shows to create collective stories, myths which dramatize the life of our community” (van Rhey 1997). That Burning Man was less an innocuous on-playa interlude than an event that shapes the off-playa lifeworld was desirable. While certain that “art should imitate life,” Harvey claimed he was “not happy until life starts to imitate art.” On the annual theme, he continued: “What good is all this if it’s not about how to live the rest of your life?” (in Hirshberg 2014). Accompanied by a prolegomenon penned by Harvey5 until his death in 2018, the theme tends to channel the values, passions, and causes of the event population, who are entrusted, through artist honoraria and prompted by articles circulating on the Burning Man Journal, to interpret, deconstruct, and burlesque the theme’s motifs.6 As the brainchild of Harvey and Mangrum, the first Burning Man art theme was an interactive dramatization of the corporate take-over of Burning Man titled The Inferno (1996). The Dante-inspired theme was responsive to the popularization of Burning Man, which by 1996 had become exposed to the risks of commodification, notably through media reports inspiring its popular appeal. With consumerism substituted for metaphysical evil, Harvey and Mangrum invented HELCO, “a corporate colossus styled as a supra-national conglomerate” (Harvey 2007). During the event, a show was staged in Center Camp where Papa Satan was 4  Described as “a journalist living in San Francisco,” Darrel van Rhey—an anagram of Larry Harvey—is a literary device of Harvey and Burning Man Education Director Stuart Mangrum. 5  And co-writer, Stuart Mangrum, from 2013. 6  For a detailed discussion of BRC art themes, see St John (Forthcoming).

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enthroned before an array of corporate mascots (representing HELCO’s board of directors). At this “HELCO stockholders meeting,” Harvey was tempted on three occasions to sign over the property rights to Burning Man and BRC by HELCO’s attorney, played by Mangrum. As Harvey recalled, “Three times I refused and reeled back. Turning toward the audience, pen and contract still in hand, I finally shouted, ‘I can’t sign this! I don’t own Black Rock City! Burning Man belongs to all of you! You have to decide!’” (Harvey 2007). Burning Man, it turns out, wasn’t going to “sell out.” Later, HELCO Tower, a mock skyscraper surrounded by the façades of corporate franchises, was incinerated. While The Inferno enacted a failed acquisition, the growing popularity of Burning Man has been a cause of discord in the ensuing decades. By 2016, the BMP had become a registered nonprofit organization, individual sale tickets (worth approx. $480) sold out in fifteen minutes, and BRC had reached a population cap (80,000). Representing a highpoint of self-­ awareness, Da Vinci’s Workshop was a powerfully redressive artifice. This theme and the events informing it will be discussed below. As we’ll see, the theme is a supra-event “cultural drama” at the center of which dwells the “tourist.” Already invoked in the 2014 BRC theme Caravansary, this maligned figure was distinguished from the “traveler,” or more accurately, the “travel-wearied pilgrim” who, among other sojourners, were welcomed under the cover of that theme’s narrative: “fakirs, dancers, sadhus, seers and potentates…like figures that adorn the fabric of a silk brocade.” By contrast, in BRC, as not uncommon to the history of other bohemian, subcultural, and countercultural scenes, the tourist is a parasitic other to genuine participants and culture makers. Scene natives maintain and consolidate their status, and cultural capital, as authentic insiders and co-­ creators through actively identifying this other in their midst. At Burning Man, evoking a detached spectatorship, the tourist is a focal point of self-reflexive satire, often lambasted in BRC publications like Piss Clear, BRC Weekly, and in discussion threads on the typically snarky ePlaya. Here, the figure may be excoriated in derogations like “sparkle pony,” “broner,” or “douche.” In condemnations of the detached gawker and party monster, the tourist holds parity with the flâneur who strolls the space of an exhibition, who is a consumer of trending entertainments, a client to service professionals in the experience industry. The tourist appears to be at the center of a cultural flashpoint in BRC, the embodiment of a crisis around which a volunteer-based frontier arts movement is educated.

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Burning Man scholars appear to have invoked Victor Turner more than any other socio-cultural theorist. Whether pilgrimage destination, hippie communitas, passage rite, transformational event, researchers (e.g. Pike 2001; Hockett 2004; Bonin 2009; Gilmore 2010) explore an exemplary liminal environment. As a result, Turner has become something of a culture hero for ethnographers searching for solid ground to pitch camp and excavate traces of that social liminality he knew as “communitas.” Trekking deep into this terrain, Lee Gilmore discovered that Turner had not only exerted an influence on researchers, but artists too, specifically in modeling ritual passage in theater projects such as the series of operas produced by Pepe Ozan performed on-playa between 1996 and 2000 (Gilmore 2008). Apparently, the family resemblance was such that sons of Victor and Edith Turner once contacted the organization to determine if the event had been modeled on their father’s ideas (Gilmore 2008, 223). It hadn’t—at least not intentionally. As an example of “reflexive ritualizing” where the concepts of theorists like Turner, and not to mention Van Gennep, Eliade, William James, Norman Cohn, Johan Huizinga, among others, help shape the way the event is designed and experienced, Burning Man “bears witness to the recursive absorption of ritual theory” (Gilmore 2008, 224). In his early research, Jeremy Hockett regarded Burning Man as an “optimally situated environment for reflexive self-­ discovery” (Hockett 2005, 76). The Burner community has cultivated a “heteroglot language” that “turns its gaze back on itself as if to question its own existence, reality, and authenticity” (Hockett 2004, 134). Implicit to this language is biting sarcasm or “snark,” referred to as a “self-­ regulating characteristic” of BRC that “wraps truth in humor so that it can encourage and challenge at the same time” (Berry 2018). While the theory of liminality offers a rich lens on Burning Man, its optimally liminal culture demands critical attention. For its annual three-­ decade reproduction, BRC has required the implementation of strategic design improvements. Possessing a scalable iterative design with new editions of the event improving upon previous versions, BRC has become an adaptive superliminal event—the inspiration for an event culture. With the purpose of optimization, the BMP has mobilized in response to a host of physical, social, and civic challenges to augment BRC. This said, while the liminal status of BRC has been augmented over recurrent events, event liminality, and thus transformation, is complicated terrain. While BRC is often considered the prototype “Transformational Festival,” it is questionably a “festival” and is not determined by any mandate, including that of

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“transformation” (see Magister 2016, 201). The complexity of liminal event culture was a research challenge posed by Australia’s alternative lifestyle festival ConFest (St John 2001) and subsequently transnational psyculture and its primary assembly grounds Portugal’s Boom Festival (St John 2014). That body of work is partly informed by Foucault’s (1986) concept of “heterotopia,” subsequently adapted in the study of BRC (St John 2020a) and its hyperliminal cultural archipelago of regional events (St John et al. Forthcoming). Notably, this work illustrates that to “burn” is to enact paradox, with the Ten Principles recognized as a contested and malleable ecology. Performing the paradox inherent to this ethos is a source of creative tension integral to the transformative potential of Burning Man. As a testament to this performance, BRC is seen as a hallmark participatory spectacle (St John 2020b). Disputes over meaning were observed in the earliest research on Burning Man, not unrelated to the BMP’s abstention from authoritative frameworks for its signature burn events—a fecund lacunae resulting in an interpretative free-for-all. It was argued, for example, that the “sheer hybrid strangeness and polyglot weirdness of the participants and performances contradict and challenge one another, and, for a weekend, the desert becomes a contest of meanings.” Wray continued that, “no one interpretation of the event can ever carry the day. If there is a definitive meaning of the Man, it is that there is no definitive meaning” (Wray 1995). Referring to debates over “gawkers” (i.e. intrusive photographers), “nasty neighbors,” and abandoned waste raised in discussions circulating on the E-Playa Bulletin Board, in her research Sarah Pike indicated that the most striking characteristics of these discussions were “the conflicts that emerge as participants and organizers create festival space, experience the festival, deconstruct their experiences after the fact, and plan for next year’s festival” (Pike 2001, 168). In Theatre in a Crowded Fire, Gilmore noted how polyvocal discourses and practices—for example, “tourist” and “pilgrim” archetypes—may be negotiated, and perhaps even resolved, by way of performance. Pointing out how internal controversies around increased regulations, commerce, and art grant allocations exposed the BMP to growing criticism, it was discovered that the Burner ethos had become a field of dispute. With allegations that the event was “failing to live up to its ideals,” the organization sought to address these concerns by “proactively promoting the event’s ethical principles in order to acculturate new community members and extend the event’s ideological reach into the default world”—measures in

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turn disputed as “prescriptive and dogmatic” (Gilmore 2010, 105). While these brief observations were taken no further, it seems pertinent to inquire how disputes over Burner ethos are enacted through on-playa practices, projects, and performances that explicitly expose and navigate tensions. That is, study of the redressive potential of emic ritualization performed in response to crises impacting the Burner community offers insights on the cultural dynamics of Burning Man. While Turner has been widely adopted by Burning Man scholars, his “social drama” model is largely neglected in this field of research.7 Turner’s career originated with the “social drama” concept, later refined—as “cultural drama”—to understand diverse cultural performances. Turner understood that crises catalyzed culture, which he had observed in the 1950s studying rituals among the Ndembu of Zaire, interpreted with the aid of a literary and dramatic arts background (Turner 1957). Turner ushered the idea of the “social drama”—a process typically composed of a sequence of phases, including the initial “breach,” ensuing “crisis,” cultural “redress,” and historical “resolution” (either in the form of “reintegration” or “schism”) (Turner 1974, 38–42)—into the annals of social theory. Breaking from British structural-functionalism, the Ndembu research prompted Turner to plot how conflicts began with a breach of a rule or norm in escalated situations involving the wider community. The building crisis prompts redressive adjustments “ranging from informal arbitration to elaborate rituals, that result either in healing the breach or public recognition of its irremediable character” (Turner 1985a, 74). Given conflict is as universally human as the desire for redress, the concept has not lost appeal. As Turner recognized, life’s dramas are the lifeblood of the arts, fueling storytelling, from scripture to sculpture, novellas to screenplays, operas to sports, and carnival to cinema (Turner 1982). Influenced by theater and performance scholar Richard Schechner (1985), Turner observed that cultural performances inspired by life’s crises are the fuel for renewed social dramas. This ongoing cycle, wherein life and art imitate each other, provides an ongoing cultural redressive mechanism (Turner 1985b). And since affected communities commit resources to redressing their causes, crises are integral to cultural evolution. 7  With the exception of Hockett, who recognized the utility of the model. Yet, while Burning Man is considered “a highly elaborate, seven-day theatrical performance that seeks to redress the cultural crisis of postmodern fragmentation, cooptation, and assimilation” (Hockett 2004, 191), the application is poorly handled.

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Notably, Turner focused on the redressive mechanism of cultural performances—for example, theater, literature, festivals—through which people are enabled to reflexively attend to ruptures in their midst (Turner 1983). Ritual, film, festivals, and other reflexive performance matrixes are “active agencies of change,” representing, thought Turner, “the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting ‘designs for living’” (1987, 24). Such mechanisms are in this approach rooted in the capacity of ritual to facilitate reintegration and healing—though they also trigger break-off groups and secessionists. As Turner knew, from the study of Ndembu ritual through Greek Tragedy and Noh Theatre, social crises are refracted through the prism of a culture’s performance frameworks, dramatized through its art. As Turner himself knew, social reality tends to escape templates like “social drama.” As recognized in the study of conflict within Ndembu village structure, social dramas do not ordinarily possess clear commencement and termination points, especially given that any individual can be triangulated in multiple overlapping crises at any one time and any actual “reintegration” or “schism” may be temporary. Commentators have also identified weaknesses that challenge an approach not originally formulated to comprehend conflict resolution in complex societies—that is, societies possessing a profusion of “post-ritual” cultural performance frameworks (Alexander 2004).8 One can also recognize that we live in an age, what Žižek (2014) named “a New Dark age,” or what Mishra (2017) called “the age of anger,” or Redhead (2017) “claustropolitanism,” in which the world pitches without resolve through a “global crisis” fed by climate change, an uncontrollable virus, rampant misogyny, rising intolerance, and demagoguery. And yet, with the protracted nature of the tragedy exposing weighted concerns at the root of the human condition, the language of drama remains pertinent, as, for example, illustrated by the work of Smith and Howe (2015), recognizing the role of storytelling and rhetoric in shaping perception and guiding debate around root-causes of momentous problems. Clearly, the narratives and enactments implicit to what Turner called “cultural drama,” from opera, to science fiction, to football matches, are pivotal to the way communities experience crises. But during the late 1970s and at the turn of the 1980s, an interrogation 8  For more on the complexities of social drama, see St John (2008), Cohen et al. (2008), and Cottle (2008).

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of the redressive logics of cultural performance frameworks in (post)modern societies led Turner to recognize how TV and cinema, street theater, and carnival, among many other cultural performances, conspire toward a prismatic “hall of mirrors” effect: “magic mirrors, each interpreting as well as reflecting the images beamed to it, and flashed from one to the others.” Complex multi-genre events like Mardi-Gras are, for example, composed of “flexible and nuanced instruments capable of carrying and communicating many messages at once, even of subverting on one level what it appears to be ‘saying’ on another” (Turner 1987, 24). In such heterotopian dramatic spaces, the interaction of multiple modes of communication advances the possibility for multivalent interpretations. This approach to cultural dramatization illuminates Burning Man. On-playa projects like “art cars,” theme camps, or large-scale installations (e.g. the Man) are collaborative teams of artists and makers. Camps and installations are typically designed with an interpretation (not uncommonly influenced by the art theme) and provide the context for scheduled performances (from theater of the absurd to choral), which may ultimately include an installation’s destruction by fire.9 These spaces and projects also occasion unscheduled contributions, random interactions, and spontaneous performances composed of multiple elements (e.g. masking, dance styles, gifted ice cream). Such performance “elements” include individual participants themselves, who are encouraged to live by the principles of Immediacy and Radical Self-expression. With outcomes not fixed in advance the event-scape is consequently spontaneous and unpredictable. Perhaps the apotheosis of such unpredictability emerged, tragically, on Burn Night in 2017, when the art theme was Radical Ritual, and where, during the fiery destruction of the event’s eponymous effigy, and in the view of thousands of spectators, one agile “performer” offered his contribution to the spectacle by sprinting into the massive inferno just beyond the reach of desperate fire-suited protectors, where he perished. BRC is an intense conurbation of art, with a multitude of “projects” spilling “light” onto the surface of other works igniting across the city, with each act of creative destruction refracting the “message.” The choice of language is deliberate here given how Burning Man has cultivated a unique fire-arts aesthetic that, in its scale and intensity made possible by a distinct theater of operation—the playa—casts light, illuminates the mind, and fires debate. The climbing cinders, plumes of smoke, and “dust 9

 See Raiser (2014) for many examples.

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devils” animated by intense conflagrations taking hold in this otherworldly space provide an ecology of metaphors that illuminate the variable effect of the dramatic process itself: provocative, unsettling, obscuring, and coruscating. While the fire dies down, its vestiges are legion. When the smoke has cleared, the flames have licked at the imagination of those who will return in subsequent editions inspired to build and destroy seemingly ever more impressive works, themselves colored by multiple conceptual agendas, from the utopian to the discordian. While the processual telos was integral to Turner—informed by Van Gennep’s model of ritual transition—here we approach the value of redressivity sans “resolution,” of liminality without “reintegration.” The uncertainty of the outcome is magnified in an arts community where performance is interactive and interpretation open-ended. While breaches in values expose contradictions, spark controversy, and fuel “art projects” that are engineered by co-creative consortiums who will tend these fires, this community fosters a hyper-reflexivity inhering in an interactive performance mosaic where the audience may also be performers and where the distinction between “spectator” and “artist,” “consumer,” and “maker” is decidedly opaque. As Burning Man is an “arts culture,” the breaches that ignite controversy serve as source material across its entire arts program, from concepts implicit to the official art theme and its interpretation to project submissions awarded honoraria by the Black Rock Art Foundation and from theme camps to a plethora of private pageantries performed across the playascape in which participants may dramatize—for example, from satire to ceremonial—their ultimate concerns. Notable is the concern that Burning Man will not survive the trenchant risks to its participatory ethos posed by tourists and their service providers, an existential threat that materialized in “sherpagate.”

Sherpagate The growing presence of affluent attendees and “VIP camps” in Black Rock City has posed a challenge to the Burner ethos. BRC’s status as a playground for the ultra-rich and a haven for service professionals vying for the patronage of privileged clientele gained exposure in 2014 when The New York Times ran an exposé describing an “annual getaway for a new crop of millionaire and billionaire technology moguls.” The exposé, which featured an image of giant yacht-like art car Christina, exposed a landscape of gated RV compounds and high-end concierge services that

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appeared to be sanctioned by the BMP. One camp was reported to possess a $25K per head fee, featuring private return flights to Black Rock City Airport, luxury restroom trailers, female models flown in from New York, sushi chefs, and “sherpas” (Bilton 2014). The story arrived amid reports identifying Burning Man as a “business bacchanalia” for Silicon Valley professionals (Bowles 2014), among them chief executives of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber. These exposés sparked outrage across social media, fueled debate in the “burnerverse,” triggering fresh lamentation on the demise of Burning Man, the fate of which now appeared sealed by elites populating the outer radial street of the city dubbed “Billionaires Row.” Controversy brewing for years now erupted in the wake of “sherpagate,” triggering public grievances, resentment, and recriminations over the apparent outsourcing of event principles like Participation, Gifting, and Radical Self-reliance. The object of reproach was non-participatory camps, dubbed “plug-n-­ play,” “turnkey,” or “convenience” camps. Scorn was poured on camps with a “pay-to-play” model—that is, more approximate to “Adventure” outfits selling a “Burning Man Experience” to clients (Chase 2012) than legitimate sources of art patronage. The situation demanded attention when it was revealed that a chief culprit inspiring the exposé was a 2013 theme camp (Camp Olympus), underwritten by billionaire founder and CEO of leading healthcare investment fund Foresite Capital, James Tananbaum, who was at that time on the Board of Directors of the BMP. In a story in Bloomberg Businessweek featuring an image of a Learjet soaring to altitude above BRC, Tananbaum’s 2014 camp, Caravancicle, was lambasted as an elitist hotel for wrist-banded VIPs flown in on private jets (and paying 15K per head) (Gillette 2015). That camp participants were to be issued popsicles they could distribute as “gifts” to other Burners offered a strong suggestion that Gifting—the principle which states the “the value of a gift is unconditional” and “gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value”—was being outsourced to providers of experience. With Burning Man and its Regional Events like Nowhere in Spain featured within the pages of inflight magazines (e.g. Delta, EasyJet, and Eurowings), there was further protest, not least since these incidences represent a transgression of Decommodification.10 10  Decommodification: “In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.” On-site vending is traditionally limited to ice and tea/coffee.

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While the “breach” exposed in the 2014 The NYT story may have made “plug-n-play” camps a cause célèbre, elements heating this controversy had been evident for years, boiling over in 2011 when the event reached its population cap. Subsequent ticket scarcity was linked to a hike in the percentage of “virgin” participants, many among them with the means to buy-up expensive early-round tickets—increased fears that Burning Man had passed its “used by date.” In 2011, editor of BRC Weekly, Adrian Roberts, ran a cover story on “VIP camps” and those “burnerprenuers” who create businesses “catering to burner culture.” The story reported the early 2011 eBay auction (for $95,000) for a “Bucket List Burning Man Package of a Lifetime”: “We’ll bring you to Burning Man without the set-up and clean-up, flying you into Black Rock City with no wait in line, and with transportation to and from your camp, where 5 coaches and 5 staff members will be waiting.” A businessman interviewed revealed a long-standing commitment to VIP service provision for playa clients. Named “Mr Redundant,” this entrepreneur commented that he had escorted “a lot of entertainment industry people—Hollywood studio moguls and Broadway producers,” to the playa. The pre-packaged service offered three tiers of RVs, from the “Britney Spears tour bus” type ($10,000) to more modest RVs ($3,000). Mr Redundant and his staff also provides a large, air-conditioned lounge dome with a dining area, “where a chef serves gourmet meals everyday.” Clients had the option of arriving on a private jet (Roberts 2011). The rancor runs deep, traceable to the mid-1990s, with detractors witnessing over-regulation, micro-management, and elitism. These are complex issues. The controversy is addressed in Brian Doherty’s This is Burning Man (Doherty 2004) and in Olivier Bonin’s documentary Dust & Illusions (Bonin 2009). Both portray BRC as a stage upon which inner conflicts are enacted, with each featuring Burning Man co-founder John Law (also founder of the Cacophony Society) who clashed with Harvey before leaving the organization in 1996. Where Harvey adopted a movement-­ orientated civic mission, Law was an anarchist contemptuous of formalizing and incorporation. Illustrating how BRC provides the means to air its dirty laundry, Portland Burners staged a fake “Larry Harvey book signing” at Center Camp in 2000. According to Doherty, One of their number donned a fedora and stuck a cigarette in his mouth— Harvey’s signature accessories—and sat on a couch on the mobile living room art car. Supplicants were forced to kneel at gunpoint before ‘Larry’ as

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he signed cheap, thrift-store paperbacks with xeroxed cover stickers identifying the book as Mein Camp by Larry Harvey (Doherty 2000).

Years later, a stage show enacted tensions triggered by growing popularization. First performed at Stage Werks, San Francisco, in 2008, and subsequently at Teatro Zinzanni in October 2009, How to Survive the Apocalypse: A Burning Opera dramatized the clash between the two principal founders, Harvey (Stetson) and Law (Moustachio). One scene depicts the aftermath of 1996, an event that had doubled in population (to 8,000), a circumstance contributing to semi-chaotic conditions that drew the ire of local law enforcement: Moustachio: A passionate yearning drew us to this desert But we’ve grown too big for our britches And it’s time for it to die. Stetson: It grows because it’s alive The world is just beginning again This is a snag, a hitch, the law can be appeased It’s part of the plan, befriending the man We are cooking up something everybody needs Why shouldn’t they be drawn to our fire Moustachio: There’s too many damn people We can’t control it without control Who wants more control? …. Stetson: … We are giving light to culture Thousands will hear the call If we build the man, they will come If we burn the man Then everyone will see the smoke Moustachio: Who cares about a bonfire man? Nobody cares about a stupid scarecrow We should burn a pig or a piano Or a temple of black leather boots Who needs another logo? Why circle around the man When we should disperse Across the desert, across the world Not gather our wagons in

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… Culture dies the moment you name it The moment you tie it down You are building another cage here Another scam for another age here Another spectacular con But the Cacophony is gone Stetson: Our way is hard …. But something great is gathering Out of the chaos something will be born11

The dialogue captures an abiding dispute between those fostering a movement and those seeking to disappear into the cracks, between popularization and expansion, clandestinity and abatement. The latter might exhort “The first rule of Fight Club,” which is that “you Do Not talk about Fight Club.” The injunction is worth highlighting here given that Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk was a Cacophony Society member. This implicit rule required that events resemble “temporary autonomous zones,” that is, the guerilla art aesthetic promoted in The TAZ (Bey 1991), an influential book among Cacophonists and consanguineous with their “leave no trace” ethos. The carefree anarcho-conspiratorial desire to live in the moment implicit to this aesthetic was antithetical to the vision of growth that necessitated compliance with regulatory standards, a health and safety plan, seeking counsel in relevant judiciary matters, obtaining liability insurance coverage, developing infrastructure, bureaucracy, promotional strategies, and so on. Detractors were horrified at the thought of celebrities, spectators, and “bucketlisters.” While Harvey defended a “civilizing” approach celebrating the principle of Radical Inclusion, others observed the growth of elitism and exclusionary behavior, apparent, for example, in camps that appear like gated-communities. In such cases, dozens of large RVs are positioned to create private alcoves. Clients to these “getaways” are privileged to a structured experience that may present a variation on what MacCannell (1973) named “staged authenticity.”

11  How to Survive the Apocalypse: A Burning Opera featured the music of Mark Nichols, lyrics by Erik Davis, and was produced by Dana Harrison and directed by Christopher Fülling.

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As Burning Man developed brand recognition and with the number of “virgin” attendees averaging around 37% in recent years, acculturation pressures accumulated. In these circumstances, singular principles, like Radical Self-expression, which celebrates “the unique gifts of the individual,” are often championed to the exclusion of other principles, like Leaving No Trace, the commitment to “leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather.” And specific principles, like Gifting, are bowdlerized through selective interpretation, as evident in the controversial legacy of large-scale dance camps, mobile sound systems, and thronging legions of rave tourists (see St John 2017a). Such incursions have demanded a response from the BMP, interrogating intentions, reforming theme camp registration criteria and placement policy, and openly discussing the significance of entrepreneurs at Burning Man. To that end, the BMP has undertaken the difficult task of sorting those who provide little more than services for privileged clients, and lip service to event principles, from those thought to be catalyzing the co-creation of art on the playa. With acrimony building in the wake of “sherpagate,” rising tensions triggered unprecedented public focus on the role of patronage in BRC, prompting extensive communications and performances addressing the fraught relationship between commerce and community.

Renaissance Man: Da Vinci’s Workshop Later in life, Turner directed attention to the operations of performance frameworks that facilitate “collective reflexology.” Through the discursive event-space of festivals, for example, populations are compelled to undertake interrogation of their cultural inheritance. In these frameworks, community members are encouraged: “to think about how they think, about the terms in which they conduct their thinking, or to feel about how they feel in daily life” (Turner 1984, 22). Taking many forms, providing communities with a framework to celebrate and revision their identities, festivals have long accommodated a transformational sensibility, given their meta-performative context for dramatically thematicizing concerns of the day. The framework by which members of the Burning Man community are afforded opportunities to interrogate the integrity of principles that have codified cherished values offers a useful case study, not least given that theatrical interventions are intentionally self-reflexive. Describing early urban shows at San Francisco’s SOMArts Gallery and themes subsequently enacted in BRC, Harvey has drawn attention to a performance’s

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pedagogical role—that is, that it should be provocative. “It should amuse and delight. It should entertain and engage. It should startle folks and make them laugh—but it should also strive to make them think and choose. Though this be farce and Dada, it should have a moral backbone” (Harvey 2007). At the time of the plug-n-play controversy, Harvey is reported to state that it would be “a shame to waste a good crisis” (Gillette 2015). Within the career trajectory of the social drama, a population is given the opportunity to peer through the window of its own soul. In BRC, the figure leering back through the dust from the city’s “axis mundi” is none other than “the Man.” Standing naked at the center of the city, Burning Man’s eponymous effigy has been gussied up in the axioms of the moment, pimped in the zeitgeist, changing color year-in-year-out, like a desert chameleon. While the BMP offers no official meaning for Burn Night at which time the effigy is destroyed in an advanced feat of pyromania, the Man (and the expansive “public square” that has evolved around its base) is nevertheless invested with polyvalent significance via art themes. By 2014, at over one hundred feet, the towering effigy presided over Caravansary, a worldly theme paying explicit attention to the unique trade winds of the playa in which gifting, not commercialism, prevails. While “a bazaar of the bizarre wherein treasures of every sort, from every land and age, flow in and out to be flaunted, lost, exploited and discovered,” the narrative was quick to state that “this is not a tourist destination, but a home for travelers who come here bearing gifts.” With the base of the Man designed to appear like a Moroccan souk, “the only thing of value in this ‘marketplace,’” it was stated, “will be one’s interaction with a fellow human being.” This leads us to Da Vinci’s Workshop, in which the Man stood at the center of a city drunk on the memory of Renaissance Florence, known to be watershed in the history of civilization, enabling an unprecedented flourishing of artistic excellence. That is, in a grand gesture literally geared to ends both pragmatic and symbolic, the Man was commanded to peddle the wheel of the BMP. In a highly selective interpretation of the Florence of late fifteenth century, Harvey introduced Burners to the world of Lorenzo de Medici, its de facto ruler. Described as “a poet, a banker and a politician,” Medici was said to be “famous for befriending artists and advancing their careers.” He created a salon, “a scene which formed the epicenter of a new Italian culture, and there is little doubt that this was fueled by money; the Medici were masters of an international banking

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network, and Florence’s emergent middle class, organized around a system of art and craft guilds, sponsored competitions that rewarded artists for their work” (Harvey 2016). In adopting the young Michelangelo, whom he sponsored among other geniuses, Medici’s acts of patronage are recognized as integral to the Renaissance and the dissemination of humanist ideals. The perceived parallels with BRC were emphasized in the text introducing the art theme, acknowledging that private philanthropy has “funded some of the most beloved artworks that have honored our city” (Burning Man 2015). While that funding resembled the BMP’s distribution (in 2016) of $1.2 million in honoraria to artists, Harvey also indicated that money does not flow through “quasi-governmental” and private patronage alone. Art projects are subsidized through community fundraising events and crowdfunding campaigns held throughout the year. And much of the art in BRC—from theme camps to art cars and costumes—is self-funded (i.e. they are gifts). In a community devoted to Participation and Gifting, “anyone at any time can be both artist and philanthropist.” With Renaissance Florence offered as an illustration, money “can be made to serve non-monetary values in a way that’s self-­ sustaining.” Ultimately, in an explanation that serves to defend the BMP in light of growing concern about the uses of wealth, Florence demonstrated that “civilization isn’t possible without widespread commercial activity” (Harvey 2016). Exemplifying how the arts are intentionally deployed to redress crisis, responsive to the fraught state of Burning Man’s gift culture, Da Vinci’s Workshop was a cultural program opening dialogue on the role of wealth. The theme was conceptualized in a series of articles published throughout 2016 in the Burning Man Journal, addressing the weave of money and creativity both in and beyond Burning Man. In the opening article, Burner scholar Caveat Magister addressed a fundamental tension: that Burning Man is now “perhaps the largest hub for crowd-and-participant funded art in the world,” while at the same time “the new favorite playground of the ultra-rich.” Selective elements of the Renaissance served to frame this tension and its possible resolution. “If the 21st century is to have patrons, what are best practices for them? How can they be part of the solution?” (Magister 2016). In opposition to an arts culture in which museums, elite art schools, and galleries oversee the separation of art from life, Da Vinci’s Workshop was imagined as a vehicle through which the BMP sought to connect artists (and their art) to the wider culture and civil society, thereby enhancing the value of Burning Man arts (and artists).

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Here was an opportunity to expand the gift culture of Burning Man to include philanthropic practices potentially advantageous to artists typically trapped in conditions of economic uncertainty and a vicious cycle of debt. As a pivotal component in the effort to combine Burning Man art, maker culture, and creative philanthropy, in 2016, the effigy was raised, and destroyed, as something of a Renaissance Man. For Burn Night 2016, inspired by the artwork of Leonardo, as Uomo Vitruviano, the Man was intended to be animated by way of an elaborate system of human-powered gears and pulleys. Burners were to be enlisted to voluntarily rotate the Man, turning a huge horizontal wheel, geared to turn the effigy a full 360 degrees on the vertical plane (Burning Man 2016a). While this ambitious paean to art philanthropy was finally erected, it failed to rotate due to a technical fault. But while the wheel of Renaissance Man failed to turn, and the interactive sculpture envisioned was unrealized, it is notable that the piazza around the Man thrived with dozens of maker communities in the form of thirty Guild Workshops whose various projects were selected by the Black Rock Arts Foundation in a competitive grant program funded as part of the 2016 Honorarium Art Grant. With the Philosophical Center encouraging applications from “Regional Network teams, artist collectives, maker confederacies, and various self-organized combinations thereof” (Burning Man 2016b), such patronage drew inspiration from the tradition of the artist workshop providing professional training, resource sharing, and a unique identity associated with a specific practice or craft (i.e. that holds potential market value).12 As represented in the piazza and in the wider distribution of BRAF honoraria, Da Vinci’s Workshop showcased developments exemplified by maker collectives like The Flaming Lotus Girls, Flux Foundation, and Iron Monkeys. At the same time, the BMP endorsed entrepreneurial initiatives, like Fundiversify,13 that propose benefits to artists and investors alike.14

12  For the list of placed Guild Workshops, see https://burningman.org/culture/history/ brc-history/event-archives/2016-event-archive/2016-art-installations/?yyyy=&artType=P 13  For Fundiversify, see https://www.fireinsideart.com/fundiversify. 14  As explored elsewhere (St John 2017b), Burning Man’s experimental forays across the frontiers of gifting and commerce has been informed by the influential views of Lewis Hyde (2007).

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Conclusion: The Arts of Acculturation This chapter has addressed an event community that has evolved an aesthetic apparatus designed to afford its participants the opportunity to “wholly attend” to “their own existential situation” (Turner 1984, 23). As the ethos of Burning Man was compromised, redressive aesthetics were designed to acculturate the community to its beleaguered principles. With the “plug-n-play” controversy, the BMP was perceived complicit in the contravention of Participation, Gifting and Decommodification, amid other principles, with the breach escalating into a full-scale crisis, as occurred with “sherpagate.” With the widening perception that Burning Man became a paradise for parasitic outsiders and venture capitalists, public dialogue exposed the ethos to inquiry amid unprecedented intracultural reflexivity. Burning Man art themes are cultural platforms by which tensions, controversies, and paradox are animated, performed, and perhaps transformed. An exemplar theme, Da Vinci’s Workshop was an interactive cultural strategy adopted to communicate what Harvey and others perceived as a unique mode of patronage modeled against the background of parasitical “burnerpreneurs.” With its geared Vitruvian Man design a tribute to BRC’s maker virtuosos, and with “guild” workshops flourishing in the “piazza” around the base of the effigy, Da Vinci’s Workshop showcased the role of the BMP as a patron of makers and artists. Provoked by the event’s growing stature as a tourist destination, cultural redress continues into the present through Project Cultural Citizenship, in which the BMP has attempted to navigate a path away from “convenience camping,” with CEO Marian Goodell (2019) announcing key operational modifications in line with her view that Burning Man “strives to stand in technicolor contrast to the typical consumerist, status-driven, brand-saturated, optimized-­for-your-convenience world.” Among the moves undertaken, theme camp Humano the Tribe was banned following widely reported allegations of “investors” paying up to $100,000, sex trafficking, raw sewerage spills, waste dumping, and for being a haven for “instagram influencers” (Doctorow 2019). Central to this cultural drama was an exposé of the Burning Man Project’s apparent sanctioning of experience providers servicing actors excoriated as “tourists.” As this controversy acquired the attributes of a scandal, the Burner community appears to have undergone a hallmark social drama. Through theme-inspired large-scale art projects, satire, and

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other forms of storytelling identifying unprincipled behavior, the community is reaffirmed, notably through an interrogation of its principles. While this chapter has focused on redressive aesthetics at Black Rock City, Burning Man has inspired a worldwide network of Regional Events and provoked unofficial splinter groups. These events and communities effectively imitate and mutate a prototype that has evolved a uniquely artful citizenship.

References Alexander, Jeffrey. 2004. Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy. Sociological Theory 22 (1): 527–573. Beale, Scott. 1996. Interview with Burning Man Co-Founder Larry Harvey at SOMAR in San Francisco. Laughing Squid, July 13. https://laughingsquid. com/larry-­harvey-­burning-­man-­1996-­interview/. Berry, Graham. 2018. In Defense of Snark. Burning Man Journal, July 18. https://journal.burningman.org/2018/07/opinion/serious-­s tuf f/ in-­defense-­of-­snark/. Bey, Hakim. 1991. TAZ. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. Bilton, Nick. 2014. A Line is Drawn in the Desert: At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another. New York Times, August 20. www.nytimes. com/2014/08/21/fashion/at-­b urning-­m an-­t he-­t ech-­e lite-­o ne-­u p-­o ne-­ another.html?ref=fashion&_r=2. Bonin, Olivier. 2009. Dust & Illusions: A Short History of Burning Man. Madnomad Films & Imagine. Bowles, Nellie. 2014. Burning Man Becomes a Hot Spot for Tech Titans. SFGATE, August 25. http://www.sfgate.com/style/article/Burning-­Man-­becomes-­a-­ hot-­spot-­for-­tech-­titans-­4756482.php. Burning Man. 2015. Burning Man 2016: Da Vinci’s Workshop. Burning Man Journal, October 27. http://journal.burningman.org/2015/10/burning-­ man-­arts/brc-­art/burning-­man-­2016-­da-­vincis-­workshop/. ———. 2016a. Da Vinci’s Workshop: The Piazza. Burning Man Journal, January 25. http://journal.burningman.org/2016/01/burning-­man-­arts/brc-­art/ da-­vincis-­workshop-­the-­piazza/ ———. 2016b. Guild Workshops 2016. https://burningman.org/culture/ histor y/brc-­h istor y/event-­a rchives/2016-­e vent-­a rchive/2016-­g uild­workshops/. Chase, Will. 2012. Turnkey Camping: A Clarification. Burning Man Journal, April 25. http://journal.burningman.org/2012/04/philosophical-­center/ tenprinciples/turnkey-­camping-­a-­clarification/.

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Chen, Katherine K. 2016. “Plan your burn, burn your plan”: How Decentralization, Storytelling, and Communification can Support Participatory Practices. The Sociological Quarterly 57: 71–97. Cohen, Michael, Paul Dwyer, and Laura Ginters. 2008. Performing “Sorry Business”: Reconciliation and Redressive Action. In Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St John, 76–93. New York: Berghahn. Cottle, Simon. 2008. Social Drama in a Mediatized World: The Racist Murder of Stephen Lawrence. In Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St John, 109–124. New York: Berghahn. Doctorow, Cory. 2019. Burning Man Purges One-Percenter Camp that Charged up to $100K, Littered Like Crazy, and Ripped Off its Attendees. Boing Boing, February 13. https://boingboing.net/2019/02/13/radical-­participation.html. Doherty, Brian. 2000. Burning Man Grows Up: Can the Nations’ Premier Underground Event Survive its Success?. Reason Magazine. http://reason. com/archives/2000/02/01/burning-­man-­grows-­up. ———. 2004. This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground. Little, Brown. Evans, Kevin, Carrie Galbraith, and John Law. 2013. Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society. San Francisco: Last Gasp. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (Spring): 22–27. Gillette, Felix. 2015. The Billionaires at Burning Man. Bloomberg Businessweek, February 5. Accessed July 7, 2017. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ ar ticles/2015-­0 2-­0 5/occupy-­b urning-­m an-­c lass-­w ar fare-­c omes-­t o­desert-­festival. Gilmore, Lee. 2008. Of Ordeals and Operas: Reflexive Ritualizing at the Burning Man Festival. In Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St John, 211–226. New York: Berghahn. ———. 2010. Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at the Burning Man Festival. Berkeley: UC Press. Goodell, Marian. 2019. Cultural Course Correcting: Black Rock City 2019. Burning Man Journal, February 9. https://journal.burningman.org/2019/ 02/philosophical-­center/tenprinciples/cultural-­course-­correcting/. Harvey, Larry. 2007. The Early Years: Reflections on Interactive Performance, (in Seven Parts). burningman.org Historical Archives, March. http://burningman.org/culture/history/art-­history/perspectives-­on-­playa-­art/early-­years/. ———. 2016. Following the Money: The Florentine Renaissance and Black Rock City. Burning Man Journal, March 10. http://journal.burningman. org/2016/03/philosophical-­center/tenprinciples/following-­the-­money-­the­florentine-­renaissance-­and-­black-­rock-­city/. Hirshberg, Peter. 2014. Burning Man: The Pop-Up City of Self-Governing Individualists. In From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Identity and Autonomy in a Digital Society, ed. John Clippinger, and David

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Bollie. Amherst, MA: ID3 and Off the Common Books: http://bollier.org/ blog/burning-­man-­commons. Hockett, Jeremy. 2004. Reckoning Ritual and Counterculture in the Burning Man Community: Communication, Ethnography, and the Self in Reflexive Modernism. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico. ———. 2005. Participant Observation and the Study of Self: Burning Man as Ethnographic Experience. In AfterBurn: Sacred Reflections on Burning Man, ed. Gilmore Lee and Mark Van Proyen, 65–84. Albuquerque: UNM Press. Hyde, Lewis. 2007. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Vintage. Lewis, Lowell J., and Paul Dowsey-Magog. 1993. The Maleny Fire Event: Rehearsals toward Neoliminality. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 4 (3): 198–219. MacAloon, John J. 1984. Olympic Games and the Theory of the Spectacle in Modern Societies. In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J.  MacAloon, 241–280. Philadelphia: ISHI. MacCannell, Dean. 1973. Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Setting. American Journal of Sociology 79: 589–603. Magister, Caveat. 2016. Art, Money and the Renaissance: Re-imagining the Relationship. Burning Man Journal, January 12. http://journal.burningman. org/2016/01/philosophical-­c enter/tenprinciples/art-­m oney-­a nd-­t he-­ renaissance-­introduction/. Mishra, Pankaj. 2017. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Straus and Giroux: Farrar. Pike, Sarah M. 2001. Desert Goddesses and Apocalyptic Art: Making Sacred Space at the Burning Man Festival. In God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, ed. Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy. New York: Routledge. Raiser, Jennifer. 2014. Burning Man: Art on Fire (Photography by Sidney Erthal and Scott London). New York: Race Point Publishing. Redhead, Steve. 2017. Theoretical Times. Emerald Publishing Limited. Roberts, Adrian. 2011. VIP in BRC. BRC Weekly, August 29–September 4. # 2. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Smith, Philip, and Nicolas Howe. 2015. Climate Change as Social Drama: Global Warming in the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. St John, Graham. 2001. Alternative Cultural Heterotopia and the Liminoid Body: Beyond Turner at ConFest. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 12 (1): 47–66. ———. 2008. Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance: An Introduction. In Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St John, 1–37. New York: Berghahn.

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———. 2012. Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. ———. 2014. The Logics of Sacrifice at Visionary Arts Festivals. In The Festivalisation of Culture, ed. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor, and Ian Woodward, 49–68. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2017a. Charms War: Dance Camps and Sound Cars at Burning Man. In Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures, ed. Graham St John, 219–244. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017b. Blazing Grace: The Gifted Culture of Burning Man. NANO: New American Notes Online 11. https://nanocrit.com/issues/issue11/ Blazing-­Grace-­The-­Gifted-­Culture-­of-­Burning-­Man. ———. 2020a. Ephemeropolis: Burning Man, Transformation and Heterotopia. Journal of Festive Studies 2 (1): 289–322. ———. 2020b. Dramatic Heterotopia: The Participatory Spectacle of Burning Man. In Interrupting Globalisation: Heterotopia in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Simon Ferdinand, Irina Souch, and Daan Wesselman, 178–194. New York: Routledge. ———. Forthcoming. Art Themes and Cultural Drama in Black Rock City. St John, Graham, and Botond Vitos. Forthcoming. Wurst Storm Rising: The Cacophonous Roots and Dadaist Legacy of Burning Man. St John, Graham, et al. Forthcoming. Event Horizon: Burning Man and its Hyper-­ Liminal Event-Culture. Turner, Victor. 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1982. Social Dramas and Stories About Them. In From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, ed. Victor Turner, 61–88. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. ———. 1983. Carnaval in Rio: Dionysian Drama in an Industrialising Society. In The Celebration of Society: Perspectives on Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Frank Manning, 103–124. Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green University Press. ———. 1984. Liminality and the Performative Genres. In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Towards a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon, 19–41. Philadelphia: Institute for Study of Human Issues. ———. 1985a. An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga. In On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, ed. Edith Turner, 71–94. Tucson: University of Arizona. Press. ———. 1985b. Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama? In On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, ed. Edith Turner, 291–301. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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———. 1987. Images and Reflections: Ritual, Drama, Carnival, Film, and Spectacle in Cultural Performance. In The Anthropology of Performance, Victor Turner, 21–32. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Van Rhey, Darryl. 1997. Burning Man and the Art of the 1990s: A Conversation with Larry Harvey by Darryl Van Rhey. http://burningman.org/culture/ philosophical-­center/founders-­voices/larry-­harveys-­writings/90s_art/. Wray, Matt. 1995. ‘Burning Man and the Rituals of Capitalism’ Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Live 21 (1): 230–236. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism. Allen Lane.

CHAPTER 9

Festival Co-Creation and Transformation: The Case of Tribal Gathering in Panama Leonore van den Ende

As modernized societies are increasingly confronted with ecological and social desolation, various scholars (e.g. Bottorff 2015; Johner 2015; St John 2020) have called attention to the transformative potential of contemporary festivals which respond to conditions of modernity and can offer platforms for enacting change. Indeed, the last decade evidences a proliferation of academic journal and multimedia articles, books, films, websites, and accounts that identify and describe ‘transformational festivals’ (e.g. Oroc 2018; Perry 2013). Purposeful, decentralized, and self-­ organizing, the claim that transformational festivals provide innovative spaces to co-create a better world is promising (Leung and Chan 2014), but requires further research. Festivals are special and celebratory social events with ancient roots and innovative capacity, encountered in almost all human cultures (Falassi 1987). Though the transformative potential of festivals is widely and historically acknowledged (e.g. Abrahams 1987; Turner 1982), the contemporary phenomenon and term ‘transformational festival’ became

L. van den Ende (*) VU University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_9

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recognized and utilized in the 2000s, denoting the idea that an informed and agential community is capable of bringing about change, where the festival can serve as a “vital space for cultural intervention” (Wiltshire and Davis 2009: 24). Festivals commonly (self-) identified as transformational, such as Burning Man (US and global), Symbiosis Gathering (US), Boom (Portugal), Envision (Costa Rica), or, the case of this chapter, Tribal Gathering (Panama), tend to be based on an ethos of community building, sustainable living, and creative expression, guided by principles such as inclusion and leave-no-trace (Bottorff 2015). Various authors (e.g. Chen 2009; Robinson 2015; Schmidt 2017; St John 2017b) suggest that the formation of transformational festivals is associated with event co-­ creation, indicating how events are increasingly brought into being by varied participants, blurring the boundary between actor and audience and producer and consumer. The relationship between the transformational potential and co-creative enactment of contemporary festivals remains a relatively underexplored area of research (Robinson 2015) situated at the core of this chapter. While it is acknowledged that individuals and collectivities can have transformational experiences at festivals, it is less clear how and why festivals are co-created by diverse participants to enable and facilitate such experiences (e.g. Chen 2012; Haanpää 2017; Richards et al. 2014; Sherry Jr et al. 2013). In contrast to prior event studies which draw stricter dualisms between actors and audiences, the latter are more recently construed as productive agents too, creatively and constructively engaged with the event and their experience of it, driven by a desire for self-expression and self-expansion more than entertainment (Sherry Jr et  al. 2013). This development of festival co-creation increasingly integrates the audience in creative and participative programming with an emphasis on immersion and play rather than solely relying on presentational, lineup-based frameworks that solicit spectatorship (Robinson 2015). Studying event co-­ creation necessitates a better grasp of the collective creative activities which constitute an event informed by the joint intentions, knowledge, and practices of a heterogenous community of festal participants, including organizers, workers, volunteers, artists, and attendees (Chen 2012; Haanpää 2017; Richards et al. 2014; Robinson 2015). This chapter aims to investigate how and why a festival is co-created by diverse participants and the implications this has for its perceived transformational capacity. To approach this purpose, I apply a practice-based approach focusing on the activities which co-create a festival, and draw

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from ritual theory, which has proven useful to theorize the transformational capacity of festivals (e.g. Abrahams 1987; Boissevain 2016; Gilmore 2008; St John 2015; Turner 1982). Specifically, I utilize a practice-based conceptualization of ritual termed ‘ritualization,’ here understood as a culturally strategic practice for differentiating activities in contrast to other, more ordinary activities in order to construct certain meanings and realities (Bell 1992: 74). Viewing festival through a lens of ritualization is useful for the proposed focus as it can show how and why various activities of event co-creation produce a contrast between ordinary life and the extraordinary occasion from which the event assembles its transformative capacity. In other words, this lens probes the ways in which diverse participants create the festival to intentionally set it apart from quotidian life, a mechanism through which transformational experiences may arise (Abrahams 1987). Relevant for event co-creation, it is in these times and spaces ritualized for celebration that communal creativity and inventiveness arise and comprise the event (Maffesoli 2012; Turner 1982). This research is approached with an anthropological perspective and ethnographic methods to capture the social and cultural contexts and ecologies of contemporary festivals and the role of diverse participants in their making (Robinson 2015; Sherry Jr et  al. 2013). Anthropology remains largely underrepresented in the current festival studies debate, in which management, tourism, economics, and policymaking have gained a stronger foothold, accompanied by instrumentalist approaches (Anderton 2008; Frost 2016). Addressing this gap, this study draws upon qualitative-­ ethnographic research on Tribal Gathering, an 18-day festival in the Panamanian jungle brought into being by the co-creative activities of ‘tribes’ or representatives of indigenous communities, organizers, workers, volunteers, and attendees. Primary data was gathered between February 28 and March 16, 2020 via participation-observation, twelve in-depth interviews and manifold conversations with varied participants, and photographs, videos, and fieldnotes. Secondary data was collected via multimedia sources including websites, texts, photographs, and films about Tribal Gathering and ‘transformational festivals’ more generally. This study has also been informed by my prior participation and research at various other festivals that fall, to various extents, under the ‘transformational festival’ category (e.g. Boom in Portugal, Fusion in Germany, and Ozora in Hungary). I will start with a general description of the phenomenon and terminology of transformational festival, after which I explicate the conceptual lens

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of ritualization used to theorize festivals and analyze case-specific data. According to a lens of ritualization, I will then describe how Tribal Gathering was co-created by diverse actors and discuss its transformational capacity according to four main cultural strategies that emerged from data analysis: (1) temporal stretching and spatial removal, (2) tribal aestheticization, (3) deliberate co-creation, and (4) intentional manifestation. Last, I will discuss the main implications of the findings and indicate the contributions of this chapter regarding an empirical description and theoretical synthetization of event co-creation and transformation through a lens of ritualization. In line with an emancipatory research interest to address the current urgency for change, this chapter will further provide insight into festivals as platforms for enacting change.

Transformational Festivals In the last decade, there has been a rise of so-called transformational festivals, a term popularized by writer and documentarian Jeet-Kei Leung during his TEDx talk in Vancouver (Leung 2010), and subsequently by the associated documentary series “The Bloom: A Journey Through Transformational Festivals” (Leung and Chan 2014). Leung describes transformational festivals as co-creative, participatory, and immersive events, based on a ‘new evolutionary culture’ where participants claim to have transformational experiences and where those experiences, in turn, are cultivated and supported by the culture. It has been argued that transformational festivals reflect a return to ritual reminiscent of traditional, tribal practices and communities, free from dogma and doctrine, where people can co-create meaning and reality (Leung 2010; Leung and Chan 2014). Academic literature maintains that the emergence of transformational festivals comprises a social movement in response and attendance to current ecological and social devastation, particularly in western societies, enabling participants to reconnect with community and their natural environment. Specifically, Bottorff (2015: 51) posits that transformational festivals were “co-created [as] a global series of counterculture events,” expediated by a quest for liberation and meaning in modern life’s anomie, isolation, and rootlessness. Similarly, St John (2015: 145) claims these events are “shaped by a desire to embrace practices imagined to have been lost or forgotten in a world reckoned to have grown desolate of spirit,” involving a re-enchantment of nature, community, and ancient practices

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and traditions converged with modern culture and technology, typifying them as novel cultural formations that continuously evolve. For example, dancefloor inhabitants have been referred to as ‘neo-tribes,’ DJs as ‘techno-shamans,’ and the festival as a space where ancient culture related to tribal, ecstatic dance and trance is translated and augmented using modern technologies to elevate participants to altered levels of consciousness (St John 2012). Though festivals with transformative potential are ancient, their global proliferation, scope, complexity, and proclaimed quest for transformation are quite recent (Bottorff 2015: 54). Namely, they tend to be intentionally designed and programmed to enable and facilitate a transitional environment in response to modern ailments and according to participatory ideals. Correspondingly, St John (2017b: 11) describes such festivals as “programmatically transformational” where event enablers utilize a “transformational architectonic” to design and produce an event. Beyond featuring music, both electronic and acoustic, these events are typically set apart from ‘ordinary’ or mainstream music festivals by hosting a wide range of immersive activities in the form of workshops, seminars, interactive art, films, performances, rituals, and ceremonies to foster community, creativity, and healing (Perry 2013; Schmidt 2017). Transformational festivals are thus inherently participative and co-creative events, relying on the direct and physical involvement of attendees who take on co-­productive roles through which they become increasingly united “with the objects of their experience, closing the proximal gaps between spectacle and spectator” (Robinson 2015: 2). Both the usage of the term and occurrence of ‘transformational festivals’ are becoming increasingly popular and apparent.1 Acknowledging the uniqueness and heterogeneity of transformational festivals in terms of their culture, scope, musical genre(s), activities, atmosphere, or ‘vibe’ (St John 2012), what these events seem to share, to varying degrees, is their participatory ethos, co-creative enactment, and potential for transformation. At the same time, scholars must remain critical of the ‘transformational festival ’ label, as Schmidt (2017: 107) points out the term’s growing prestige, strategic value, and use by event enablers. He further critiques that while transformational festivals are framed as ecological, they do leave an environmental footprint (Schmidt 2017: 48). In a similar vein, St John 1  See, for example, https://festivalfire.com for a list and description of ‘transformational festivals.’

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(2018: 11) points out that even though such events claim to be inclusive, they are also “commercial operations catering for a select middle-class and typically white event-going market.” Similarly, said events that intentionally reinsert tribal traditions and practices have also received criticism for cultural appropriation. And those espousing alternative event culture also succumb to mainstream pressures and may rely on new forms of capitalism (Johansson and Toraldo 2017). An anthropological perspective remains sensitive to such tensions (Chalcraft and Magaudda 2011; Frost 2016).

Ritualization To conceptualize the transformational capacity of festivals, scholars have often drawn from ritual theory (e.g. Boissevain 2016; Bottorff 2015; Gilmore 2005, 2008; Partridge 2006; Picard and Robinson 2006; Salamone 2019; St John 2015). Drawing parallels between ritual and festival in terms of their transformational capacity is not new (e.g. Abrahams 1987). The transformative character of ritual was first theorized as ‘rite de passage’ by van Gennep (1960) and expanded by Turner (1969), who defines it as a ceremonial and cathartic event marking the passage through a threshold from one status (social, moral, ontological) to another, enacting important transitions typically accompanying birth, adulthood, reproduction, and death, among other shifts. Turner (1977) explains that these transitions are enabled in a liminal phase denoting a temporary transition period between distinctions, involving ‘anti-structure’ being a suspension of ordinary structures (e.g. hierarchy, status), which can elicit ‘communitas’ or a sense of unity and common purpose when the cathartic liminal state is collectively experienced. Myerhoff (1982: 117) adds that liminal phases venture the sacral, mysterious, and powerful borders of the unchartered which can unravel fixed categories of a social system, simultaneously posing “a threat to our orderly conceptualizations” and providing a source “of renewal, possibility, innovation and creativity.” In a similar vein, festivals are theorized as ritualized events that represent augmented liminal zones, outside ordinary restrictions of modern-day life, and which enable participants to transition to altered states of being and consciousness. Extrapolating Turner’s liminality theory, St John (2015: 244) explains that transformational festivals are not necessarily meant to enable participants to transition to other states after the festival (as a traditional rite of passage would) but to “inaugurate or prolong a liminal state of being,” termed a “superliminal state,” during the festival, enabling participants to

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be ‘in the moment’ in the rediscovery of oneself in relation to others and their environment. As it remains difficult to determine what exactly constitutes ritual, Bell (1992, 1997) suggests shifting the focus from ritual as a concept to ritual as a practice, as something that actors do. She calls this ‘ritualization,’ defined as a culturally strategic way of acting “to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities” (Bell 1992: 74). Bell explains that ritualization does not merely refer to acting differently, but that it is itself a strategic practice for making distinctions and making special. Ritualization is therefore a matter of enacted contrast where different practices are employed to most effectively render social activity more significant and meaningful than ordinary, everyday activity. Relevant for this chapter’s focus on event co-creation, Gordon-­ Lennox (2017b) describes ritualization as an emergent and creative practice through which participants can shape transformation themselves, involving the body, the senses, and emotions. This echoes Myerhoff (1982: 132), who claims that in the absence of meaningful rituals in modernized societies, we need to take ritualization “into our own hands” and “author our own stories,” in contrast to institutionalized rituals which reproduce status and authority structures. Similarly, Turner (1982: 25) calls attention to the “constructed” character of ritualization and celebration, essential for the “maintenance and repair of social relationships.” The implication is that ritualization can be perceived as creative practice, enabling participants to construct meanings and realities in a self-­ determined manner and in accordance with what they deem of special significance within certain social relationships and contexts. Cultural strategies of ritualization are always contextual and do not serve as fixed or universal features (Bell 1992). Keeping in mind festival as an event-based frame for social activity, strategies may include premeditation to purposefully plan and organize according to principles, visions, or missions (Chen 2009); recurrence to repeat according to cycles, often planned around cosmic or seasonal phenomena such as full moons, eclipses, and summer and winter solstices (Toraldo and Islam 2019); removal by ‘transporting’ people from everyday milieus to a temporary alternative world (Parker 2018); performance via the use of scripts, actors, props, and instruments supplementing cultural, artistic, and musical practices (Schechner 2004); symbolization comprising meaning-laden bodies, artifacts, language, sounds, and signs (Alexander 2006; Turner 1977); aestheticization to create extraordinary space with art, décor, materials and

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sensory technologies to intensify experience and engage participants (De Molli et al. 2020); and audio-visual mediatization involving the animation of an event through sound, light, and art installations, and captured by multimedia outlets like social media, blogs, films, photographs, and websites beyond the physical platform of the event (Holt 2016). What these interrelated strategies have in common is their creation of a meaningful and immersive event intentionally distinguished from ordinary, everyday life. Therefore, the findings of this research will be analyzed by discerning the cultural strategies of ritualization through which Tribal Gathering is established as a unique and meaningful event. Festivals can thus be conceptualized as manifestations of “intentional ritualization” that enable “transitional conditions” (St John 2015: 243) through a variety of strategic and creative practices by which participants differentiate the festival from other events more specifically and from quotidian life more generally. Schmidt (2017: 93) explains that in their framed and orchestrated enactment, transformational festivals include “intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic components to distinguish [them] from the myriad other events in the … festival ecosystem.” He goes on to explain that their alternative and co-creative enactment, including “music, dance, sculpture, workshops and ritual practices,” differentiates them from the mainstream so as to “induce a sense of alterity vis-à-vis quotidian forms of political economy” (Schmidt 2017: 95). Sherry Jr and Kozinets (2004: 12) also emphasize the “otherness” of the transformational event Burning Man, where “the sacralization of the secular in the celebration of alterity is unmistakable,” and its ‘gift economy’ offers an alternative model of exchange to mainstream market capitalism. Similarly, O’Grady (2015: 80) elaborates that festivals can be consciously devised according to idealistic values that differ from those in mainstream society, offering “glimpses of different forms of social organization [aspiring] to be more ethical, sustainable, autonomous and inclusive than the day-to-day experience of industrialized, urban living.” Johansson and Toraldo (2017: 229), too, call attention to the “social differentiation” strategy of festivals engaged in finding their niche in the festival market by highlighting the “atypical quality of the festival experience [and] counterposing it to an underlying idea of what might count as a more traditional festival experience.” Marketing plays an important role here as events increasingly rely on their “strategic distinction” from other events that “do not offer countercultural authentica in their experiential design” (St John 2017c: 11). This framed ‘otherness’ often appears on festival websites, too, such as the

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‘Transformational Festival Calendar’ describing such events as “not your ordinary music events” but “as gatherings [that] are collaborative open-­ sourced villages, devoted to experimentation and inspired cocreation of the world we want to live in” (Festival Fire, 2020). With an understanding of ritualization as a culturally strategic practice for making distinctions and making special, I will now turn to the case of Tribal Gathering in Panama to show how the event was created and established by its participants, followed by a discussion concerning its interrelated and perceived transformational potential.

Tribal Gathering: More than a Music Festival Tribal Gathering is an annual 18-day event taking place every March in the jungle along the Panamanian beach of ‘Playa Chiquita.’ This year, in 2020, the event celebrated its seventh edition. The event is organized by non-­ profit organization GeoParadise with the purpose of preserving and supporting indigenous culture with an evident ritualized character. Every year, approximately sixty “tribes” or, more accurately, representatives of indigenous cultural communities and ethnic minorities are invited to participate from over thirty countries, including the Maori from New Zealand, Wounaan from Panama, Tzutujil from Guatemala, Quillassinga from Colombia, Tuareg from Mali, Lakota Sioux from North America, and Khoisan from South Africa2; thereby housing the most culturally diverse group of indigenous people at a time in the world (GeoParadise 2020). Through its design and aesthetic, Tribal Gathering has established itself as a culturally significant and unique event, distinguishing itself as “so much more than a music festival, [as] a place for the world to come together, where time is transcended and the ancient and modern converge in harmony” (GeoParadise 2020; emphasis added). Currently Tribal Gathering comprises approximately 2000 participants, of which half represent indigenous participants (international), event organizers (mainly British and European), workers (mainly European and Panamanian), and volunteers (international but mainly western), and the other half purely attendees (international but mainly western), though the boundary between these groups is often blurred as I will elaborate later. The event’s buildup includes the chai shop (tea and coffee), main kitchen, the local food vendor area, ‘the village’ or indigenous crafts market, the 2

 See https://www.tribalgathering.com for a full list of tribes and countries.

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theater, the wellness area (for healing), the art hut (for workshops), ‘the carny’ (cabaret), the phoenix stage (for indigenous ceremonies, music, and presentations), the global stage (for world music, bands, and DJs), and the playa stage (for electronic dance music). Participants can camp freely next to the festival area along the coast or can opt for more luxury at the ‘glamping’ area at extra cost. Utilizing a practiced-based lens of ritualization, I found four main cultural strategies through which various participants create Tribal Gathering so as to distinguish it from other events more specifically and from quotidian life more generally: (1) temporal stretching and spatial removal, (2) tribal aestheticization, (3) deliberate co-creation, and (4) intentional manifestation. These will be discussed separately below in the light of relevant data and literature. Temporal Stretching and Spatial Removal The first strategy of ritualization I observed was the transformation of ordinary time and space through temporal stretching and spatial removal. Specifically, the temporary, liminal framework of the event is extended and amplified via its extended 18-day duration and by removing participants from their everyday locales into a remote, natural environment in the Panamanian jungle. Time is stretched not only via the event’s lengthy duration but in the way it is ritualized as a multifaceted experience. The event is organized temporally into two phases. The first phase, lasting ten days, is called ‘Indigenous Immersive’ and revolves around tribal participants sharing their cultural knowledge and practices with attendees, enabled via presentations, workshops, music and dance performances, and rituals and ceremonies. While the focus is on indigenous cultures, there are also non-indigenous workshops and presentations on topics like sustainability and agriculture. This first phase is initiated with an official opening ceremony during which all tribal representatives are inaugurated. After nine days this phase is brought to a close with a so-called Transition Day, enabling the event to transition into the remaining week of the second phase, ‘Dance Celebration,’ focused on modern dance rituals facilitated by DJs playing electronic dance music, particularly psychedelic trance. Musically, the event is designed to be a journey through time, from ancient, tribal rhythms to modern, electronic dance beats (GeoParadise 2020).

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Tribal Gathering’s prolonged duration and remoteness require commitment, mobility, and investment from its participants: People come here, they commit, they are three weeks in the jungle, they are living off the grid, there is no cashpoint, there is hardly Internet … You know what you sign up for, for three weeks into the jungle, you know you’re going to be remote. (Maren, coordinator, 2020)

In addition to the mostly international flights that many take to get to Panama City Airport, the car trip from the airport to the gathering can take up to five hours, during which the paved, open-air road transforms into a dirt road into the jungle, obliging many participants to carry their luggage to the entrance on foot, an important threshold to be crossed from everyday life into the liminal zone of the festival. The effort it takes to get into the precinct of the festival, to set up camp, to live there for nearly three weeks, and to return back home implies a certain level of determination and participation of participants: If you’ve got to get up and go to travel halfway across the world, track several hundred miles into the jungle for a festival for over two weeks, then you’re not the sort of person that’s just going to sit idly by and let people do stuff for you. (Paul, engineer, 2020)

Respondents tend to agree that the festival “draws a certain crowd” (Florian, attendee/volunteer, 2020), namely “interested, creative people” (Paul, engineer, 2020) who seek out the secluded nature and free camping, co-creative activities, the interconnectedness and community life with others. This resonates with O’Grady (2015: 92), who claims that the “the removed geophysical character of such events” enables individuals to connect “face-to-face” and form bonds in ways that differ from urban or indoor events. Though this is true for many alternative, outdoor events which typically range from a day to a week, Tribal Gathering augments this characteristic with its 18-day duration, not only producing but prolonging a liminal state to bring participants into a ‘superliminal state’ (St John 2017a). One worker describes that “it’s a long time, three weeks … it’s a village” (Maren, coordinator, 2020), contrasting the gathering with a more short-lived event. It can be argued that stretching the temporary framework of the event and spatially removing people from regular society into a natural,

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communal setting serves to reinforce a transitional environment and individuals’ self-discovery and awakening (St John and Baldini 2012: 545). A worker claims she doesn’t “know a festival that is this long” and that “because it’s so long it has the capacity to change someone’s life from the inside” by allowing participants to “open more to higher consciousness” (Julia, coordinator, 2020). Similarly, a photographer explains, “by experiencing something like this, which has been pulling you away from regular society … by being away from that for 18 days, you get into a different state of mind” (Christof, photographer, 2020). Tribal Aestheticization An important strategy of ritualization through which participants co-­ create Tribal Gathering is what I call ‘tribal aestheticization.’ This denotes the diverse practices through which the body and the senses are engaged to construct a unique participatory experience and transitional environment that one might associate with ‘tribal.’ The term ‘tribal’ utilized in current society compels scrutiny here. Maffesoli (2012: 32) refers to a “tribal aesthetic” which characterizes postmodern communities, based on a return to ancient ways of participating and sentiments of belonging which already exist within our being. He notes that this “re-enchantment of the world” is facilitated by fluid and temporal gatherings of cultural effervescence as they enable ecological interaction and a higher state of abundance that cannot be reached in individualist political and economic systems (Maffesoli 1995). Similarly, according to Cova, Kozinets, and Shankar (2012: 4–5), the most alluring and idealistic associations with the term ‘tribal’ comprise: a primitivist longing for better bygone days; a nested and natural nostalgia for a more pristine and closer world, where nature enclosed and emplaced humanity; where small kin-like groups of people bore tighter social bonds and loving links to earth; where people were unburdened of repressive social logics and expressed themselves freely and in harmony.

In line with this idealistic vision, the event ‘Tribal Gathering’ and particularly its ‘Indigenous Immersive’ program reflect a comparable aesthetic, implying an indigenous-, communal-, and nature-oriented setting engendered by shared sentiments and co-creative activities. The event’s intimate setting is afforded by its limited membership of approximately 2000

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participants, in contrast to larger events like Glastonbury (200,000) or Burning Man (700,000). The event also self-identifies as a ‘gathering’ rather than a festival and prioritizes indigenous cultural practices over the ‘party’ aspect, particularly in its first phase: “it’s not like just music and dance, and there are not just drugs involved, it’s just really to connect with yourself, to connect with nature, to do workshops” (Maren, coordinator, 2020). The name of the event is also a discursive representation of the experience to be anticipated (Johansson and Toraldo 2017); for example, “I like the name [Tribal Gathering], it’s like we want to be part of a tribe, you know, and we want to be part of a tribe that we choose” (Willy, attendee/volunteer, 2020). This experience is further mediatized through online promotional videos, photographs, descriptions, and programming which illustrate the event’s unique ‘tribal’ character by honing in on indigenous participants, engaged attendees, games, arts, crafts, ceremony, prayer, performance, music, song, and dance.3 The event’s official website describes the experience as well: for example, “Detoxify your body, mind and soul. While immersing in cultural and spiritual experiences that deliver journeys of physical purification and personal initiation” (GeoParadise 2020). Hence, it is important to acknowledge that the tribal aestheticization of the event extends beyond the occurrence of the event itself. In a more literal and traditional sense of the term ‘tribal,’ Tribal Gathering is indeed a gathering of approximately sixty “tribes,” being representatives of indigenous cultural communities and ethnic minorities from over thirty countries, who come together to share their knowledge and practices with each other and attendees. Certainly, this is the most remarkable facet of the gathering’s tribal aestheticization which participants regard as transformational in various ways, particularly in terms of expanding consciousness: What makes this festival unique is that they bring in the indigenous knowledge and the indigenous ceremonies and the traditional ways of transforming consciousness in whatever way that is, through dance, through music, through ceremony, through medicine. (Florian, attendee/volunteer, 2020)

Indigenous participants are flown in and out, accommodated, compensated, and permitted to sell their own products (e.g. herbs and crafts) and services (e.g. healing and learning sessions), which the organization 3

 For example, see Tribal Gathering 2019 aftermovie: https://vimeo.com/339781596.

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regards as a “charitable project” (GeoParadise 2020). Included in the program, indigenous (as well as fewer non-indigenous) individuals and groups provide numerous workshops, performances, and ceremonies in such areas as weaving, knitting, macramé, permaculture, ethnic dance, natural chocolate making, jewelry making, musical instrument making and playing, painting and dying with natural materials, yoga, tai chi, reiki, breath work, meditation, sound healing, sweat lodges, sharing circles, tea ceremonies, fire ceremonies, dance ceremonies, cacao ceremonies, and entheogenic medicine ceremonies, thereby creating a sensory, participatory, and transitional environment (see Fig.  9.1). In one example, a couple took part in a bufo ceremony (entheogenic frog secretion containing DMT4), eliciting such a transformational experience that they decided to get married in the forest at an impromptu wedding ceremony officiated by

Fig. 9.1  Aztec dance ceremony (Photo: Leonore van den Ende (2020)) 4  See, for example, St John, G. (2018). The breakthrough experience: DMT hyperspace and its liminal aesthetics. Anthropology of Consciousness, 29(1), 57–76.

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representatives of the Khoisan tribe of South Africa: “I really wanted to get married there at this place, it was really special” (Sofie, attendee, 2020). Running alongside workshops and ceremonies are various presentations and documentaries covering topics like indigenous culture, tradition and heritage, medicine, religion, ecology, biology, sustainability, and agriculture, providing a platform for participants to share, exchange, and learn. In a more festive sense, music, dance, and recreational drug use are also at the core of the sensual, aesthetic experience of the event by inducing altered states of consciousness, especially during the last phase, ‘Dance Celebration,’ having its own tribal aesthetic: “they are dancing, they are stomping into the ground, it’s vibration … it’s definitely something cosmically happening there” (Maren, coordinator, 2020). Tribal Gathering is intentionally designed and programmed to combine the ceremonial and festive qualities of ritualization, which have interrelated and overlapping transformative potential: There’s this kind of like ceremonial energy, I would call it, versus the party energy [though] there is overlap, you know, on the dance floor you can have a spiritual experience, or you can have, you know, a celebration in a ceremony. (Florian, attendee/volunteer, 2020)

Central to tribal aestheticization is the event’s spatial setting and design. Naturally, the jungle, beach, sea, and open air set an organic and aesthetically pleasing backdrop for the event’s atmosphere—“a bit of paradise” (Florian, attendee/volunteer, 2020)—enabling “habitués direct contact with nature, to the four elements, the cycles of the cosmos … and thus to experiences by which they may themselves become envisioned or transformed” (St John and Baldini 2012: 523). Characteristic of the transformational festival movement is the deployment of nature-based indigenous culture, lifestyle, and activities “alongside contemporary technologies that create a heightened state of aesthetic richness” (Schmidt 2017: 45). In the case of Tribal Gathering, contemporary technologies such as modern camping tents and equipment, LED projection lights, up-to-date sound systems and stages, and expert camera devices are fused with the indigenous aesthetic of body paint, attire, décor, crafts, tipis, yurts, and tiki booths and huts. In some cases, modern technology is used to augment a tribal aesthetic such as by amplifying traditional music with modern sound systems or by fusing traditional and modern musical styles and instruments. In another example, an innovative machine is used to convert

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plastic collected from the coast into various molds to make plates, doorknobs, or coasters, in line with the ecological ethos and aesthetic of the event. Similarly, participants are required to ‘leave-no-trace’ and bring their own plates, cups, and cutlery to avoid plastic use and waste—a noteworthy problem and critique of mainstream music festivals—and can also purchase cups carved from coconuts, hand-woven plates, and wooden utensils for prolonged use. Moreover, a ‘free box’ is placed at the market for participants to give away things to avoid waste, and an upcycle workshop area and ‘plastic paradise’ booth are set up to create art from recycled materials. As I was keen to explore and understand the transformational potential of Tribal Gathering, I asked my respondents whether or not the event is designed to be transformational, which was met with varied responses. Corresponding with the mechanism of tribal aestheticization, one participant explains: It’s an aesthetic. They’re not saying, ‘oh I’m going to make a transformational festival, what do I need to do to make that happen?’ No, it’s the other way around. They know what the aesthetic is going to look like, transformation will happen on its own. (Willy, attendee/volunteer, 2020)

In this way, while transformation might not be the sole or main purpose of the event, it is fair to say the cultural strategy of tribal aestheticization serves to enable and enhance a transitional environment. Deliberate Co-Creation Tribal Gathering is further differentiated from other, more ordinary music festivals through a strategy I call ‘deliberate co-creation’ by purposefully establishing “a platform for the tribes and all those attending to see what [they] can co-create” (Wilfred, indigenous participant, 2020). This platform represents an open, decentralized, and experimental system where “all [participants] get the chance to involve [themselves] in the creative process” (GeoParadise 2020). One worker explains: [The festival is] deliberately not coordinated and organized … It’s designed so that there’s a lot of flexibility, which means that they don’t do a plan for the site. People just turn up and work out where things should go and start building something … it’s almost like a set of experiments, to see what

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a­ ctually happens … There’s an awful lot of that kind of like DIY [do it yourself] culture stuff going on here which works to various degrees, but it is quite experimental. (Ben, technician, 2020)

While there is plenty of premeditation and coordination, the event’s co-­ creation is deliberately emergent. The event is annually constructed, organized, and deconstructed, leaving nothing behind in the natural environment, a cyclical project-based process involving “a high turnover of crew [who would] come do it for a couple of years and then move on and do something else” (Paul, engineer, 2020). As the event is still growing and does not make a profit according to respondents, the crew generally don’t receive a salary, though their flight ticket, accommodation, and food and drinks are covered. The crew includes many travelers and/or people who work or have worked for other festivals, especially from England and Europe since the event director is British. One worker mentions that the director “wants people to make their ideas, make their own stuff … to be like totally self-sufficient” (Ben, technician, 2020), giving them autonomy and freedom to do their work as they see fit: “you kind of need to take it on and say, OK, I’m going to decide that now because there’s no clear instruction” (Julia, coordinator, 2020); “I never did it [tribal coordination] before … so I taught it all myself” (Maren, coordinator, 2020). Due to the lack of centralization and direction, many workers describe the organization as “chaotic,” which “some people get quite thrown by … and some people kind of like” (Ben, technician, 2020). A woman who has worked for Tribal Gathering for seven years describes her working experience as follows: You never, ever, ever can prepare for any year because every year is different, it’s every time the same, it’s this big surprise and you think it can’t be worse and then it’s worse, and then you handle it, and then at end of the day you dance on the dance floor and you say like, ‘oh my god we made this!’ (Julia, coordinator, 2029)

For attendees, this lack of organization became apparent in the changing, vague, or sometimes absent programming, including some scheduling delays and cancellations, occasional supply shortages, and several technical difficulties, complicated by the event’s self-containment and remoteness. Although the chaos of co-creation can be frustrating, for workers and

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attendees alike, it also enables creativity and novelty: “the people here are massively creative and it’s nice to be around people like that and bounce ideas off each other and work on problems together and solve problems” (Paul, engineer, 2020). Maintaining the balance between creativity and chaos, which can be “quite a tricky thing” (Ben, technician, 2020), echoes prior research like Chen’s (2009) ethnography on ‘enabling creative chaos’ where the rapid growth of the Burning Man event and organization in the 1990s required professionalization to control the chaos from getting out of hand. It will be interesting to see how Tribal Gathering will maintain this balance if they continue to grow in the future. A related aspect characterizing the deliberate co-creation of the event is its large and flexible volunteer base (see Fig. 9.2), which makes up a substantial chunk of the population, covering activities such as building, organizing, registering, bartending, cooking, serving, and translating in 5-hour shifts in exchange for 13 dollars in credit, often with additional food and drinks. One worker reflects on this system when she first came to the event as an attendee three years previously:

Fig. 9.2  Volunteer booth. (Photo: Leonore van den Ende (2020))

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I saw how brilliant the system is as well, that if you don’t have enough money, they need people … there’s a job center basically, you go there, you sign up, you work 5 hours and your dinner and food is sorted, your drinks. That’s a brilliant idea, that you get people involved. (Maren, coordinator, 2020)

Many workers I spoke with started out as volunteers, became inspired to get involved and working their way into the organization. When I asked whether they were satisfied with the compensation they received, as a volunteer and/or worker, most informed me that the point was not to make money, but instead to cover daily expenses, to meet new people, and to contribute to the experience: I don’t care about the 13 dollars; I’m still going to give it all for free … obviously the money doesn’t matter. They have taken the money right out of the volunteer situation here like no other festival I know. (Willy, attendee/volunteer, 2020)

Attendees, too, are urged and feel inspired to contribute to the festival’s production, especially since most workshops involve creating something that adds to the event’s experience and constitution. One example is an expert-led permaculture workshop where participants learn and help to build a wall of the festival’s chai shop from earth, clay, and plants (see Fig. 9.3): The co-creative approach of contemporary festivals has been criticized in extant literature, suggesting consumers pay to produce a festival as a kind of “free labor through the expropriation of knowledge, creativity, and communication” (Johansson and Toraldo 2017: 4). Acknowledging that co-creation represents a certain appeal, social and cultural value, and marketing strategy to attract a certain audience, the attendees I spoke with sincerely want to create rather than to be served a pre-produced and pre-­ packaged experience. Referring back to the attendees involved in building the wall of the chai shop, they engaged in this activity for personal learning and enjoyment, and to feel the satisfaction of “we made this.” This is in line with prior research on transformational festival culture that tends to blur the boundary between consumer and producer, which Chen (2012) calls “presumption,” that is, consumers who produce. Indeed, at Tribal Gathering “there’s a real blurring between the people who organize stuff and … the audience, where people kind of tend to move from one to the

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Fig. 9.3  Attendees building a wall during a permaculture workshop. (Photo: Leonore van den Ende (2020))

other … I think that’s definitely what they’re trying to achieve here” (Ben, technician, 2020). Regarding the roles of tribal representatives and attendees as co-­ creators, I was curious whether there would be a segregation between indigenous participants who perform and produce and mainly western attendees who spectate and consume. Was the event only catered for the latter by exhibiting and appropriating “tribes” as a kind of indigenous tourism? I found that while it is accurate that the event attracted a typically western crowd as consumers and involved “tribes” as performers whose cultures are dramatized, the event is catered for and created by both these groups albeit in various ways. Namely, the event provides a platform for tribal representatives to share their culture— for example, “I am really proud to share my culture” (Asha, indigenous participant, 2020); “I don’t want people to tell us who we are, we want to say who we are” (Kinsley, indigenous participant, 2020)—and for attendees to learn from and attend to this as an exchange: “there is a lot of

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respect [for the tribes] … this is their moment, to be right in the middle of our scene, doing it their way, and we are honoring them” (Willy, attendee/volunteer, 2020). I also observed blurring between these groups, which, in fact, is a main purpose of this event: to bring the ancient and modern worlds together through intercultural exchange (GeoParadise 2020). For example, western attendees play active roles and contribute to the production process, actively participating in ceremonies, workshops, dance, and play, clearly making them more than spectators and consumers. Comparably, when they are not performing or teaching, indigenous participants leisurely engage in the event, such as spectating other performances, dancing to music, or relaxing on the beach, making them more than producers. Moreover, sincere intermingling between various groups and their activities is evident, “creating bonds beyond borders” (Florian, attendee/volunteer, 2020). Importantly, the connectivity and creativity experienced at Tribal Gathering enable participants to imagine how ordinary life could be, or rather, to question why ordinary life is not like the festival: “you just don’t understand why is it not outside the same, why?” (Julia, coordinator, 2020). In the end, the transformation people may experience at the festival, especially through enhanced co-creation and interconnectedness, is something they want to embed into everyday life too: They’re like, ‘hey, we want our home also to be like this’ … That’s what I feel coming to these kinds of festivals again and again, you know, it’s like every time you go there you’re like, ‘oh yeah this is what life was about again’, so, you know, you’re trying to, like I say, bring it home. (Florian, attendee/volunteer, 2020)

Intentional Manifestation The fourth and last strategy of ritualization is called ‘intentional manifestation,’ referring to setting and enacting intentions in order to create and shape one’s experience of the festival. More precisely, this strategy refers to the intentional creation of meaning and reality in the context of the festival and possibly beyond. This is enabled by the co-creative framework of Tribal Gathering, in contrast to other music festivals that rely more on presentational, lineup-based frameworks. One worker claims Tribal Gathering “changed [her] life because it’s a party with a purpose” (Maren, coordinator, 2020). In accordance, the organization GeoParadise has the

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purpose of protecting and preserving indigenous knowledge and practices for the betterment of the planet: “By learning from our tribal elders, we can become better stewards of the planet and help to build a better world” (GeoParadise 2020). Participants echo this intention of helping the planet by involving indigenous people: Most of the problems of this planet had already been solved by [indigenous people] hundreds of years ago, [so] in terms of changing attitudes towards resources, looking after the planet for your children rather than making the most out of it, they [event organizers] have actually totally nailed it. (Ben, technician, 2020)

Indigenous participants, too, perceive the festival as a means to facilitate change in our time: The momentum [for change] is global, there are happening so many things like natural disasters, earthquakes, corruption and killings and murder, [and] there is an awakening happening of the new planet and the new earth. And to be part of it and coming to Tribal Gathering it’s like a method to enhance the process [of change]. (Wilfred, indigenous participant, 2020)

Some participants are motivated to take part in this event “to leave a positive footprint here on this planet” (Maren, coordinator, 2020), while others are more critical about the real change this event can make: “I don’t think it can [make a change] on its own” (Ben, technician, 2020). In a similar vein, while some believe “there’s more potential that is not being fully explored” (Sofie, attendee, 2020), others intentionally tap into the transformative potential of the festival. In one example of intentional manifestation, a group of participants and tribal representatives became inspired to create a more permanent network beyond the festival to “unite the tribes” which they call the “earth alliance” (see Fig. 9.4). Participants involved in this initiative justify it as follows: The festival is on its seventh year now and the tribes are very happy to come together to get to know each other also, and to get to know each other’s medicines and rituals … so we fantasize on top of that what would happen, what could happen, if there would be an organization which unites them all which is also doing something beyond this festival. (Can, artist, 2020)

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Fig. 9.4  Invitation leaflet to a meeting for uniting the tribes We are gathering with a lot of exchange with the possibility to see what we can do … this is something we really need, and the best time is now … this is important for us but also important for the whole world. (Mohamed, indigenous participant, 2020)

From a more critical viewpoint, several respondents point out that you don’t need to go to a festival to have a transformational experience: Do you have to fly to the other end of the world and visit the Tribal Gathering in Panama to have a transformational experience? No, you don’t. I think it depends on the person and I think they’ve been sticking the term transformational onto it to categorize it as a movement. (Christof, photographer, 2020)

Similarly, another participant claims it is not so much about transformation and instead used the metaphor of ‘planting seeds,’ which are cultivated by participants themselves: It’s with everything you experience in life. If it’s like a festival, a lover or like a person that you had a good conversation with or a negative or a positive experience, it leaves a footprint and leaves something in your heart. It’s like a little seed that got planted … And I feel that every person is responsible for that seed that they took from this festival and to spread this seed. (Julia, coordinator, 2020)

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When asked about the event’s transformational potential, most agree that this mainly has to do with intention: “the intention has to be there for it to be transformational” (Florian, attendee/volunteer, 2020); “it’s a matter of intention and what you do to, like, how you approach that, the build-up of the festival and who you bring in and how you co-create” (Sofie, attendee, 2020); or that you need to “have intention of being part of it and getting involved” (Maren, coordinator, 2020). According to alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra (2012), intentions have transformative power because they form the seeds of creation and help to manifest reality. In contrast to setting goals, setting intentions is not attached to achieving particular outcomes but to reaching a higher state of awareness and guiding action: “it’s not what the festival does it’s what the people who meet at the festival do” (Ben, engineer, 2020). In a similar vein, another participant points out that transformation is not an outcome of the festival but a life process which can be facilitated by the festival: We in the West have a very goal-oriented way of looking at things like I’m transformed if the caterpillar gets into the butterfly, then the transformation is complete … But, you know, that transformation is in every step … when the caterpillar hatches, when it eats, every bite it takes, it’s growing, it’s the same as with us … every bite we take of life, it’s making us grow. And I guess a transformational event is also an event that facilitates that growth. (Florian, attendee/volunteer, 2020)

Ultimately, these findings indicate that Tribal Gathering is not a transformational festival in itself, but offers a supportive platform for individual and collective growth.

Discussion and Conclusion Employing a lens of ‘ritualization,’ this chapter aimed to exhibit how Tribal Gathering was co-created by diverse participants and to explore the implications this has for its perceived transformational capacity. Specifically, the ritualized creation and enactment of Tribal Gathering involves four cultural strategies, (1) temporal stretching and spatial removal, (2) tribal aestheticization, (3) deliberate co-creation, and (4) intentional manifestation, which serve to augment a transitional environment. Indeed, ritualization is an intentional practice “capable of enhancing our social bonds, transforming us into caring groups and fostering organic communities

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that promote social and even ecological and geo-political stability” (Gordon-Lennox 2017a: 85). Reflecting on the findings, three themes emerged which compel further discussion in the field of festival studies, namely differentiation vis-a-vis familiarity, spectatorship vis-a-vis participation, and co-creation vis-a-vis transformation. Differentiation Vis-a-Vis Familiarity With an understanding of ritualization as a purposeful practice of differentiation so as to distinguish a festival from other events and from quotidian life, the first point of discussion is a festival’s dual embodiment of difference and sameness, which St John (2017b: 16) calls ‘familiar otherness.’ The above description of Tribal Gathering shows that practices of differentiation translate to the co-creation of an extraordinary, participatory, and potentially transformative space and experience in an augmented liminal zone, not only removed from the everyday but causing participants to question mainstream and modernized social systems. Indeed, an enduring feature of festivals is that they “operate in the zone of nostalgia” reminiscent of life in simpler social and economic systems, when individuals “could do for themselves” (Abrahams 1987: 181). Thus, while a festival is strategically set apart from quotidian society so as to establish its otherness, the longing and nostalgia festal participants feel relates to the notion of familiarity, the latter referring to a state of social and cultural abundance, sentiment of belonging, and primal energy which always reside within their being to which they incessantly wish to return. From a postmodern perspective, Maffesoli (2012: 33) calls this a “tribal aesthetic” where participants “recreate what already exists” via recurrence and its “correlative DIY approach” that underly humanity’s ultimate spiritual quest, rooted in pre-modern society and regaining importance today, as exhibited by Tribal Gathering. Drawing parallels between notions of otherness and sameness, Cova et al. (2012: 5) explain that otherness is the “idea of a wild or natural human state to which we can return,” referring to our longing for nature, community, and transcendence which has diminished in modernized societies but is fulfilled by events like Tribal Gathering. Importantly, a return to meaningful and respectful ecological interactions can be facilitated by the presence and participation of indigenous people who are embraced at Tribal Gathering yet remain conspicuously absent at many other contemporary transformational festivals, as Schmidt (2017: 111) critically points out. Moreover, Schmidt reminds us

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that though transformational festivals are differentiated from mainstream, capitalist, and consumerist societies, they are nonetheless plugged into them. As one worker at Tribal Gathering argued, “you have to be relatively well off to come here” (Ben, technician, 2020), in that not everyone can afford to attend and participate in the festival; this is a privilege. Therefore, transformational festivals are inextricably tied to mainstream society, paradoxically enabled by it while simultaneously differentiating themselves from it (Cova et al. 2012). Spectatorship Vis-a-Vis Participation The second point of discussion refers to spectatorship and participation implicit in the co-creative activities which comprise the festival. Certainly, Tribal Gathering stages and presents indigenous participants and the dissemination of their knowledge and practices as something to be consumed and spectated by mainly western, middle-class attendees. While the GeoParadise organization considers this a “charitable project” to promote and preserve indigenous culture, it is likewise a strategy to attract a certain audience, to provide unique cultural value, and thereby to survive and grow as an event in a competitive festival market. On many occasions, indigenous participants perform and dramatize their culture on stage while audiences spectate in more passive or active ways, not to mention various cameramen who document images for future reference and promotion. However, beyond spectating, I observed that attendees actively participate as they create in workshops, take part in rituals and ceremonies, dance and sing to music, volunteer and assist, listen and learn during presentations, and play and interact with one another, thus actively and sincerely taking part in the festival’s cultural production in both programmed and spontaneous ways. In this way, co-creative activities unfurl from an open domain of interactivity that narrows the gap between creator and spectator (Robinson 2015). This resonates with Schmidt (2017: 99), who explains how “myriad creative activities in the space of the festival blurs the disciplinary boundaries, breaks down the barrier between quotidian life and aesthetic encounter, [and] collapses the binary between performer and spectator.” In the case of Tribal Gathering, the event does much more than present something to be spectated and consumed by a select group; it provides numerous activities through which diverse attendees can co-­ create the event. Hence, Robinson (2015: 3) explains that it is “more useful to consider the presentational and participative festival as occupying

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two ends of a spectrum” where most festivals reside “somewhere in between.” Though Tribal Gathering leans more toward the participative end, this does not mean there is no spectating; this is one of the many activities festal participants—including indigenous peoples—take part in at the event. Rather, it is the multiplicity of activities and their co-creative nuances which set Tribal Gathering apart from other, mainstream, and/or purely presentational music festivals. In sum, from a perspective of ritualization which situates festivals in the realm of practice, the activities of diverse participants serve to co-create a meaningful event, not merely as a thing to be consumed but as an enactment to be produced by participants in practice (Cova et al. 2012). Co-Creation Vis-a-Vis Transformation The third and last point of discussion concerns the event’s co-creative enactment in relation to its perceived transformational capacity as the primary focus of this research. Perceptions of respondents indicate that Tribal Gathering is not necessarily created for the purpose of transformation, nor do participants feel that the festival is needed to have a transformational experience. Rather, I found that the festival offers a platform to facilitate transformation via its deliberate co-creative approach and ethos, but that this ultimately depends on the intentions and (inter)activities of its participants. Thus, rather than Tribal Gathering being a transformational festival in itself, it is the intentions and actions during, and possibly beyond, the event which hold transformative potential. In any case, it became clear to me that the event invited participants to critically reflect on current social and environmental issues and to expand their consciousness, which has transformative capacity in itself. The event evidences an intensifying collective awareness that something is undeniably wrong with the way in which modernized societies have progressed unsustainably and disrespected indigenous ways of life, severing ties with nature and spirit. In turn, this realization amplifies a need to do something together—that is, to co-create—in order to return to living in harmony with each other and with nature, such as by painting, building, and crafting with natural materials, by healing with herbs, plants, music, movement and breath, and by interacting with and learning from others, activities situated at the core of Tribal Gathering. Hence it can be argued that the co-creative enactment of the festival is essential to generate a shift in consciousness and mobilize collective action which can catalyze transformation. Put more simply, the

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festival is what participants make of it, in the same way that the world is what its inhabitants make of it, where creation epitomizes a sacred act and collective responsibility. Thus, when we consider festival as a transformative space, part of the solution to humanity’s modern predicament may reside in engaging in emergent ritualization to co-create meaning and reality in one’s immediate environment, shaped by intention. Indeed, “moderns need to participate directly in the creation of [their] own transformational experiences through ritual” (Levine, 2005, as cited in Gordon-­ Lennox 2017b: 80). To summarize, the main contribution of a lens of ritualization as applied in this research is the insight it provides into how event co-creation serves to optimize a transitional environment by enabling and propagating alternative ways of doing, thinking, and being in the world through which festal participants can depart from, challenge, or transform the status quo. I want to conclude with a reflection on our current social context dictated by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, which has made our modern predicament all the more serious and has coerced us into social isolation and festivals into dormancy. In fact, the end of Tribal Gathering mid-March 2020 was marked by the global outbreak of the virus, which stranded approximately 100 participants at the precinct of the event for an additional month and caused Tribal Gathering to be dubbed “the last festival on earth.” I was lucky to find my way back home. Acknowledging the social and cultural value and transformative potential of face-to-face, intimate festivals such as Tribal Gathering, relevant questions include how we might move forward in the context and aftermath of the pandemic and under what conditions we can research and participate in festivals again in the future. At the same time, while many festivals have been, at least temporarily, canceled, social movements and protests have swelled, as people take to the streets with the continued motivation to respond to modern ailments and effectuate social and cultural change through gathering, albeit with more serious rather than festive tones. Future research should therefore delve into new and alternative social gatherings and movements in our current context as people continue to mobilize with the intention of transformation in the Anthropocene that confronts the significant human impact on the earth.

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References Abrahams, Roger D. 1987. An American Vocabulary of Celebrations. Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival: 173–183. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy. In Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast, 29–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderton, Chris. 2008. Commercializing the carnivalesque: The V Festival and Image/Risk Management. Event Management 12 (1): 39–51. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Boissevain, Jeremy. 2016. The Dynamic Festival: Ritual, Regulation and Play in Changing Times. Ethnos 81 (4): 617–630. Bottorff, David L. 2015. Emerging Influence of Transmodernism and Transpersonal Psychology Reflected in the Rising Popularity of Transformational Festivals. Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health 17 (1): 50–74. Chalcraft, Jasper, and Paolo Magaudda. 2011. ‘Space is the Place’. Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, 173–189. Oxon: Routledge. Chen, Katherine K. 2009. Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2012. Artistic Presumption: Co-creative Destruction at Burning Man. American Behavioral Scientist 56 (4): 570–595. Chopra, Deepak. 2012. 5 Steps to Setting Powerful Intentions. The Chopra Center website [online]. https://chopra.com/articles/5-­steps-­to-­setting-­ powerful-­intentions. Accessed 14 June 2021. Cova, Bernard, Robert V. Kozinets, and Avi Shankar. 2012. Tribes, Inc.: The New World of Tribalism. In Consumer Tribes, ed. Bernard Cova, Robert V. Kozinets, and Avi Shankar, 19–42. London: Routledge. De Molli, Federica, Jeanne Mengis, and Alfons van Marrewijk. 2020. The Aestheticization of Hybrid Space: The Atmosphere of the Locarno Film Festival. Organization Studies 41 (11): 1491–1512. Falassi, Alessandro. 1987. Festival: Definition and Morphology. In Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, ed. Alessandro Falassi, 1–10. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Festival Fire. 2020. Festival Fire: Gatherings for Cultural Transformation. [online]. https://festivalfire.com. Accessed 10 January 2021. Frost, Nicola. 2016. Anthropology and Festivals: Festival Ecologies. London: Taylor and Francis.

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Gennep, Arnold van. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilmore, Lee. 2005. Theater in a Crowded Fire: Spirituality, Ritualization, and Cultural Performativity at the Burning Man Festival. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Graduate Theological Union. ———. 2008. Of Ordeals and Operas: Reflexive Ritualizing at the Burning Man Festival. In Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St John, 211–226. New York: Berghahn Books. Gordon-Lennox, Jeltje. 2017a. The Rhyme and Reason of Ritualmaking. In Emerging Ritual in Secular Societies: A Transdisciplinary Conversation, ed. Jeltje Gordon-Lennox. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ———, ed. 2017b. Emerging Ritual in Secular Societies: A Transdisciplinary Conversation. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Haanpää, Minni. 2017. Event Co-creation as Choreography: Autoethnographic Study on Event Volunteer Knowing. Rovaniemi: University of Lapland. Holt, Fabian. 2016. New Media, New Festival Worlds: Rethinking Cultural Events and Televisuality Through YouTube and the Tomorrowland Music Festival. In Music and the Broadcast Experience, 275–292. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johansson, Marjana, and Maria Laura Toraldo. 2017. “From Mosh Pit to Posh Pit”: Festival Imagery in the Context of the Boutique Festival. Culture and Organization 23 (3): 220–237. Johner, Andrew. 2015. Transformational Festivals: A New Religious Movement? In Exploring Psychedelic Trance and Electronic Dance Music in Modern Culture, ed. Emília Simão, Armando Malheiro da Silva, and Sérgio Tenreiro de Magalhães, 58–86. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Leung, Jeet Kei. 2010. Transformational Festivals. TEDx Vancouver. [online]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8tDpQp6m0A&ab_channel=TEDx Talks. Accessed 14 June 2021. Leung, Jeet Kei. and Akira Chan. 2014. The Bloom Series: A Journey Through Transformational Festivals: Elevate Films, Keyframe Entertainment, Multi Music & Grounded TV [online]. https://thebloom.tv/watch/. Accessed 12 June 2021.

Levine, Peter A. 2005. Foreword. In Ritual as Resource: Energy for Vibrant Living, ed. Michael Picucci. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Maffesoli, Michel. 1995. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage. ———. 2012. Tribal Aesthetic. In Consumer Tribes, ed. Bernard Cova, Robert V. Kozinets, and Avi Shankar, 43–50. London: Routledge. Myerhoff, Barbara. 1982. Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox. In Celebration: Studies in Festivity, ed. Victor Turner, 109–135. Washington, DC: Smithsonian.

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O’Grady, Alice. 2015. Dancing Outdoors: DiY Ethics and Democratised Practices of Well-being on the UK Alternative Festival Circuit. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 7 (1): 76–96. Oroc, James. 2018. The New Psychedelic Revolution: The Genesis of the Visionary Age. Vermont: Park Print Press. Parker, Priya. 2018. The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. New York: Riverwood Books. Partridge, Christopher. 2006. The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture. Culture and Religion 7 (1): 41–60. Perry, Elizabeth. 2013. Transformational Festivals: Where Ecstatic Spirit and Sonic Celebration Unite [online]. https://redefinemag.net/2013/ transformational-­festivals-­spiritual-­preview-­guide/. Accessed 12 June 2021. Picard, David, and Mike Robinson. 2006. Festivals, Tourism and Social Change: Remaking Worlds. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Richards, Greg, Lenia Marques, and Karen Mein. 2014. Event Design: Conclusions and Future Research Directions. In Event Design: Social Perspectives and Practices, ed. Greg Richards, Lenia Marques, and Karen Mein, 198–212. Robinson, Roxy. 2015. Music Festivals and the Politics of Participation. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Salamone, Frank A. 2019. Routledge Encyclopedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals. London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 2004. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Taylor & Francis. Schmidt, Bryan. 2017. Boutiquing at the Raindance Campout: Relational Aesthetics as Festival Technology. In Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures, ed. Graham St John, 93–114. New  York: Bloomsbury Academic. Sherry, John F., Jr., and Robert V. Kozinets. 2004. Sacred Iconography in Secular Space: Altars, Alters, and Alterity at the Burning Man Project. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sherry, John F., Jr., Robert V. Kozinets, and Stefania Borghini. 2013. Agents in Paradise: Experiential co-creation through Emplacement, Ritualization, and Community. In Consuming Experience, ed. Antonella Caru and Bernard Cova, 31–47. London: Routledge. St John, Graham. 2012. Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance. London: Equinox. ———. 2015. Liminal Being: Electronic Dance Music Cultures, Ritualization and the Case of Psytrance. In The Sage Handbook of Popular Music, ed. Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman, 243–260. London: Sage.

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———. 2017a. Electronic Dance Music: Trance and Techno-Shamanism. In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, ed. Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017b. Introduction to Weekend Societies: EDM Festivals and Event-­ cultures. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 7 (1): 1–14. ———. 2017c. Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-­ cultures. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2018. Civilised Tribalism: Burning Man, Event-Tribes and Maker Culture. Cultural Sociology 12 (1): 3–21. ———. 2020. Ephemeropolis: Burning Man, Transformation and Heterotopia. Journal of Festive Studies 1 (2): 289–322. St John, Graham, and Chiara Baldini. 2012. Dancing at the Crossroads of Consciousness: Techno-Mysticism, Visionary Arts and Portugal’s Boom Festival. In Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production, ed. Carole Cusack and Alex Norman, 519–552. London: Brill. Toraldo, Maria-Laura, and Gazi Islam. 2019. Festival and Organization Studies. Organization Studies 40 (3): 309–322. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. Brunswick and London: Aldine Transaction. ———. 1977. Process, System, and Symbol: A New Anthropological Synthesis. Daedalus 106 (3): 61–80. ———. 1982. Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Wiltshire, Kyer, and Erik Davis. 2009. Tribal Revival: West Coast Festival Culture. San Francisco: Lovevolution Press.

CHAPTER 10

The Renewal of Festive Traditions in Mallorca: Ludic Empowerment and Cultural Transgressions Pau Obrador, Antoni Vives-Riera, and Marcel Pich-Esteve

Introduction This chapter is concerned with invented festive traditions in Mallorca and the transgressive potential of its rich folk cultures. In recent year, traditional culture in Mallorca has experienced an exceptional moment of reinvigoration with the recent invention of more participatory rituals that are disrupting the established festive calendar of the island. These recently invented festive rituals are described in the local media as Neofestes, meaning new festivals in Catalan, although organisers do not necessarily identify

P. Obrador (*) Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Vives-Riera University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] M. Pich-Esteve Centro de Investigaciones Sociales of Bolivia, La Paz, Bolivia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_10

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themselves with this rather technical concept. The Neofestes of Mallorca thrived in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when many of these new festive rituals were established. The surge is still ongoing and, roughly speaking, a third of towns and villages on the island now have their own Neofesta. Pich (2019) has identified 20 examples of invented festive traditions, the oldest being El Cosso in Felanitx which started 30 years ago. This chapter examines one of the most successful and paradigmatic examples, La Mucada in Sineu, a bold and colourful rural summer festival that was created by the local youth in 2003. Its success is evidence of how local cultures and place identities can be transformed through festive play. This thriving worldmaking festive scene is a wide-ranging phenomenon comprising many different festive rituals; however, all of them respond to “the traditional look” (Delgado 2003, 106) of the festa popular, that is, the typical summer celebrations in honour of the local patron saint. The epicentre of this festive phenomenon is in the rural villages of Mallorca, away from the major tourist centres on the island, where there is the highest proportion of Catalan-speaking population—although there are also remarkable new traditions in the city of Palma. There is no equivalent phenomenon on the other Balearic Islands, although there have been similar processes of revitalisation in the past in other Catalan-speaking territories, which led, for example, to the invention of the fire festival of the Correfocs in Catalonia (Palomar 2011) or the Aquelarre in Cervera. There is a lot of common ground between the thriving new festive scene in Mallorca and the processes of ritual revitalisation that Boissevain (1992) identified in southern Europe in the 1980s. They are both dynamic and interactive processes that consciously object to tradition being frozen in folk museums, although, as we will evidence here, there is a much stronger emphasis on creativity in the case of Mallorca. The Neofestes of Mallorca are the epitome of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) The Invention of Tradition. We are confronted here with the deliberate creation of new public celebrations using ancient references and materials from folklore and history. Research on invented traditions has usually viewed this phenomenon with suspicion. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) think of invented traditions as examples of dishonesty and manipulation of the past, involving the deliberate presentation of something new as though it were ancient. This chapter complicates our understanding of invented traditions by looking at them as evidence of cultural creativity and revitalisation. The current vigour of the festive scene in Mallorca demonstrates the extent folklore is an “interactive, dynamic process of

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creating, communicating and performing” (Sims and Stephens 2011, 8). This chapter will therefore explore the complex cultural politics of the Neofestes of Mallorca. In particular, we are interested in the creative use of invented rituals and traditions, and their ability to disrupt static and timeless romantic narratives of place. Traditions defined as invented generally have a conservative bias and support an essentialist view of identity. The concept was originally used to describe the national traditions that consolidated in the nineteenth century to secure the legitimacy of the new political and economic order. The Neofestes of Mallorca, on the contrary, develop a more inclusive and progressive sense of place. They are subversive festive events that seek to transform the established conservative regional identity of Mallorca, reclaiming a modern, Catalan and ‘anti-tourist’ identity of the island. Their political value lies in their heterotopic ability to mobilise alternative orderings of space (St John 2001) that problematise the romantic cultural categories though which Mallorca has been traditionally consumed. They are, therefore, sites of struggle and contestation, which draw on a long-­ stranding association of festivals with resistance, transgression and protest (Chambers 2015; Jackson 1992; Sharpe 2008; St John 2001 and Turner 2017) and on scholarship underpinned by the works of Turner (1982), Bakhtin (2009) and Foucault (1986). This chapter develops a much more progressive view of invented traditions by looking at the liminoid possibilities and transformational potential of the Neofestes. We see in the Neofestes of Mallorca a bold attempt to decolonise and de-exoticize local identities, while reclaiming a global sense of the local that is autonomous from tourism. The Neofestes are particularly interesting in that political transgressions are performed in banal, intimate ways. Inspired by Haldrup et al.’s (2006) notion of practical orientalism, we examine the cultural politics of the Neofestes through the lens of performance. More broadly, our approach shows that there is a need for a more performative and embodied view of transgression that highlights the importance of ludic micro-interactions.

Methods This chapter presents new empirical research on the thriving Neofestes of Mallorca to an international audience. It is the result of a cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers from three different fields: history, tourist studies and anthropology. It builds on both the work of Antoni

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Vives and Pau Obrador (2019) on ludic transgressions within the context of La Mucada and the monographic work of Marcel Pich (2019) on the Neofestes in Mallorca. In so doing, a dialogue is established between anthropological work on festivals and event studies, two closely related traditions of thought, which according to Holloway et  al. (2010) have struggled to cross-fertilise. The chapter is based on a series of ethnographic incursions into the Neofestes of Mallorca. The bulk of the data comes from our participant observation at various festivals between 2012 and 2018. Marcel Pich attended a total of 18 different Neofestes in 2017, whereas Pau and Antoni focused their research on the case of La Mucada. Our observations focused on both performative rituals and participants accounts, often using our own bodies and emotions as sources of data. We also conducted in-situ interviews with key stakeholders and participants, and we did critical discourse analysis of key historical and contemporary documents, including social media accounts. The experiential nature of festivals requires a phenomenological stance that is focused on the experiencing reveller, and ethnographic methods are the most suited for this (Holloway et al. 2010). Ethnography is an inductive methodology, in which knowledge of the social world arises from an intimate familiarity with the context of study (Brewer 2000). It is a valuable approach for the study of events inasmuch as it reveals “the rich and complex meanings and motivations linked to event experiences, commonly excluded by positivist approaches” (Jaimangal-Jones 2014, 40). However, ethnographic methods have traditionally been associated with the study of exotic, organic cultures rather than the heterogeneous and fluid community of revellers that is the focus of this study. In using ethnography to study fleeting festive encounters, we are not seeking to represent authentic local cultures but to deconstruct a series of cultural fragments of a complex region where multiple identities coexist. Another major difference from traditional ethnographies is our position as insiders of the local culture, which calls into question our ability to represent the Neofestes as ‘they really are’. Our research responds to this challenges with an auto-ethnographic sensibility (Butz and Besio 2004) which places us in an unstable position in-between the research subjects and the academic world, adopting a critical observing position while actively contributing to the community’s auto-reflexive practices, for example with contributions to local media (Pich 2015; Vives-Riera 2015).

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The Invention of Tradition We would like to start this journey with a general overview of the invented festive traditions of Mallorca. Introducing the thriving Neofestes of Mallorca to an international audience, unfamiliar with local contexts and traditions, can be challenging. This is, after all, a highly localised phenomenon that responds to specific local circumstances, which are only fully intelligible to the members of the community. The invention of new festive traditions often comes down to the unconventional ideas of a charismatic local activist or the internal dynamics of a group of friends. Thus, there is a danger that too much ethnographic material distracts the reader from understanding the cultural relevance of these invented traditions. The Neofestes of Mallorca are a collection of recently invented festive rituals that thrive within the context of the festa popular—the outdoor festival that each town and village organises every summer generally in honour of the local patron saint. In most cases, their appearance responds to a dissatisfaction with existing local festivities, which lack the excitement of the best festes populars. Members of the young generation have all travelled to the great festivities of Pollença or Ciutadella and want something comparable back home. The remarkable increase of new invented celebrations highlights the obsolescence of official festive traditions of Mallorca, which do not generate the desired level of excitement and cohesion. The Neofestes of Mallorca effectively illustrate a process of secularisation of the traditional festa popular, which have been partly replaced by more progressive and thrilling celebrations and remain outside the sphere of influence of the Catholic church. In fact, parody of the church and conservative institutions like the monarchy and the army is a common feature of many of these celebrations. The success of these invented—often very playful— traditions points to the generative power of play: play has the ability to establish new frames of reality by “doing something else, elsewhere and otherwise” (Hamayon 2016, 68). The Neofestes of Mallorca are good examples of how local culture and identity flourish through play (Huizinga 1938). The Neofestes of Mallorca can be understood as a highly diverse phenomenon comprising different sets of festive rituals. For example, there are festivals that take the form of a Gymkhana, a generic term widely used in Catalan language to designate skill-based games and contests. The best example is the brotherhood festival of Santa Maria del Camí—Les Colles de Santa Maria consisting of a full day of collective outdoor games and contests for everyone. The festival, which started in the year 2000, includes

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firecrackers, water fights, music parades and active games where circles of friends compete against each other in the main square of the village. There are also harvest festivals with a more rustic feel, which evoke a pre-touristic agricultural past. A great example is the highly elaborate Threshing Festival in Sencelles, known as L’Embalat, which celebrates the harvest of wheat, a largely forgotten practice (Fig.  10.1). The highpoint of this complex festival, which started in 2007, is the arrival in the village of a large straw bale specially made for the occasion. Many of the new festive rituals look more like summer carnivals, with extravagant costumes, crossdressing and plenty of comic and grotesque features. A good example is the Pharaoh Mass—La Misa de la Faraona— in the small village of Pina, a mock religious service in (dis)honour of a cock that allegedly stole the village’s whiskey supply. The highly colourful mass takes place in the early hours of the morning after a night of music and dance, within the context of the village festival. The ritual, which includes a mock priest, fake religious symbols and men dressed up as women, started as an enjoyable way to clear up the square of revellers

Fig. 10.1  A large straw bale in l’Embalat, the Threshing Festival in Sencelles. (Photo: Marcel Pich)

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before the cleaning operation started. A handful of these new carnivalesque festive rituals have an explicit protest element. This is the case of El Cosso in Felanitx, the oldest and most controversial festival. Its symbol is a chicken, which is paraded and symbolically resurrected within the context of the official village festival (Fig.  10.2). The highpoint of the festival comes at the end of the religious service in honour of the local patron saint, when radical and pro-independent political symbols are paraded in front of the authorities. Not all the Neofestes of Mallorca are so controversial or freakish. There are also more serious attempts to revive the rich folk culture of Mallorca. This is the case of Sant Jaume’s festival in Manacor, where a community group has successfully re-enlivened the town’s summer festival in honour of St James. One of the most recent additions to the festive calendar is El Cap de Bou de Talapí—Talapí’s Bull Head festival—in Sa Pobla, which takes its name from a prehistoric bullhead statue discovered nearby. The yellow-themed festive ritual is organised exclusively by women within the context of the established Potato Harvest Festival. For its initial edition a carnival papier-mâché bullhead figure was paraded in

Fig. 10.2  The symbolic burial of a chicken in El Cosso in Felanitx. (Photo: Marcel Pich)

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the village with great fanfare. The new festive calendar of Mallorca concludes with a carnivalesque “underwear fun race” in the village of Bunyola with lots of flesh on display. There are some characteristics common to all these celebrations, which convey a certain singularity of this wide-ranging phenomenon. We can recognise at least six key dimensions: community orientation, independence from local authorities, carnivalesque aesthetics, a common recognisable temporal and spatial structure, a valorisation (and parody) of the rich folk culture of Mallorca, and finally a predominantly nationalist political ethos. The first and most important characteristic is their community orientation, which draws on the communal spirit of the Mediterranean festa popular. The Neofestes of Mallorca are bottom-up celebrations created by the local community for the community, “a vision of the world seen from below”, to paraphrase Stallybrass and White (1986, 7). There is, however, a stronger emphasis on the principles of co-production in this thriving festive scene. In contrast to the more conventional festive traditions, the Neofestes of Mallorca blur the established separation between performers and spectators, inviting everyone to take part and contribute to their success. With minimal involvement from political, religious or business authorities, revellers are both the subjects and objects of laughter. There is also a generational dimension to the Neofestes of Mallorca insomuch as they largely respond to the demands of young people for better local festivity. The local youth are both the main target audience of these events and their main organisers. Second, the Neofestes of Mallorca are all volunteer-­run events that are managed by independent, non-profit organisations. Large numbers of people are involved in their organisation, in most cases without clear leadership. Whilst some festivals may receive logistical support from the local authorities, the Neofestes are mainly funded by the selling of merchandise to the revellers. The festival T-shirt, which in the case of La Mucada in Sineu is distinctively pink, is inevitably the main product for sale. Third, the Neofestes of Mallorca are colourful carnivalesque events that are orientated toward collective enjoyment. There are fancy dress costumes and face painting, comic references to current affairs, merriment and revelry, semi-naked bodies that get wet and dirty, cathartic moments of collective blending and bonding, and lots of eating, music and dancing. The main characteristics of the carnivalesque are easily recognisable in most celebrations, including ritual inversion, excess, transvestism, hyper-sexuality and the privileging of the comic and the grotesque. A comparison can be made here with the colourful

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carnivals of Trinidad (Nurse 1999) and the Caribbean diaspora (Jackson 1992), which display a similar combination of colour and transgression. Fourth, there is a common recognisable temporal and spatial structure in the Neofestes of Mallorca. In most cases, they are one-day outdoor summer events that start early in the morning before the crowds arrive and finish late in the evening with a cover band or DJ. They generally take place at the centre of the village, in an attempt to reclaim the public space, often within the context of an existing local festivity, which they aim to transform. Another common spatial feature is the presence of a totem, identifying the festival. The totem is generally a papier mâché giant-headed carnival figure or mask, like in the case of the character of Much in Sineu. The totem is invoked in a comic opening speech, which is delivered by a local personality, and later paraded through the village in a mock carnivalesque procession. Most festivals also include an outdoor community meal, which is either a breakfast or a late lunch. Fifth, the new invented traditions include many folk elements, such as Mallorcan bagpipes, papier mâché giant-headed figures and Mallorcan folk dances. There is an underlying narrative of recovery and valorisation (but also parody) of the rich folk culture of Mallorca. It is as if people consciously object to tradition being frozen in folk museums rather than it being alive in the streets. Finally, most invented festive traditions have a sixth political dimension. The Neofestes of Mallorca are packed with political symbols and references, often linked to radical and nationalist movements. There are political songs, protest T-shirts, political banners, flags and even road blockages. The Neofestes of Mallorca function as spaces for social critique where participants can let off steam. This was evident, in particular, during the last right-wing government between 2011 and 2015, when new laws were introduced to diminish the presence of Catalan language and traditions in schools. The pro-Catalan movement was very visible in many of these celebrations. The Neofestes of Mallorca are paradigmatic of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) The Invention of Tradition. We are confronted here with “the use of ancient materials to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes” (1983, 6). As in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s examples, the ancient materials used come from folklore, history and anthropology (Bendix 1997; Noyes 2012). They range from old literary legends and locally significant historical events to traditional festive rituals such as folk dancing or Ball de Bot, Menorcan horse riding Jaleo rituals, giant-­ headed dwarfs and other paper-mâché festive costume figures. This is a

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brand new festive scene that shares the traditional look of the festa popular—the typical outdoor summer celebrations in honour of the local patron saint—yet this is a product of tourist modern society that evokes a pre-touristic rural past and the defunct traditional agricultural cycles. In the words of one of the organisers, the Neofestes of Mallorca are “the recycling point of popular culture”, that is, a cultural lab where existing festive rituals and traditions are recovered and given a second life. However, there is no respect for the purity of tradition in this thriving festive scene. Ancient materials are mixed with contemporary features and media references, thus creating unorthodox and highly eclectic festive rituals. There is plenty of techno music and pop anthems alongside traditional Mallorcan tunes and dances. In contrast to the invented traditions of Hobsbawm and Ranger, the Neofestes of Mallorca do not hide their recent fabrication. Everybody knows that these traditions are not original and have been substantially changed. What makes these festivals unique is this post-modern combination of traditional rituals and symbols with transgressive elements of modernity and change. The process of invention can vary significantly from one festival to another. In some cases, the new festive traditions are the result of a conscious process of construction. This is the case of Manacor and, in particular, Palma, where a community group linked to Catalan activism—Orgull Llonguet—was set up to make an existing local festival both more participatory and rooted in Mallorca tradition. In other cases, the process of invention is much more spontaneous and points to the importance of the creative impulse of ‘folk’. This is the case of the Llubí’s Motorino festive rituals, which started in the early 1990s when a young man entered a pub with his Vespa late at night after the cover band finished and improvised a Menorcan Jaleo, using the Vespa instead of horses. Research on invented traditions has generally viewed this phenomenon with suspicion, as examples of manipulation of the past. The concept was originally used to describe the massive production of new traditions following the industrial revolution and the emergence of the nation state with the aim of securing legitimacy for new political and economic order. The concept has subsequently been applied to other cultural contexts including traditional marital arts in Japan (Vlastos 1998) and Zionism and the Bible (Masalha 2006). All these invented traditions have a conservative bias and support an essentialist view of identity. The work of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) is, indeed, a powerful framework to study the creative use and abuse of tradition that highlights the contemporary

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dishonesty about the past. However, an unhelpful binary dichotomy between real and invented, legitimate and illegitimate traditions is established. Such a dichotomy is problematic not least because all traditions have been invented at some point (Handler and Linnekin 1984). The invented traditions we are studying in this chapter do not fit this view. The Neofestes of Mallorca are not deliberate creations of institutional apparatuses seeking legitimacy, but grassroots initiatives experimenting with more progressive and inclusive festive traditions. They are marked by a sense of pride, creativity and transgression that is generally missing in the examples analysed in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) edited collection. In using the notion of invented tradition, we are extending Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) framework beyond its original context, as evidence of cultural creativity and revitalisation, since these are also creative acts of self-esteem and transgression. We cannot reduce the process of invention to a question of dishonesty and manipulation. We agree with Sims and Stephens that inventing traditions “can also be a socially and politically empowering activity” (2011, 89). As we will see in the next section with the case of La Mucada, the creativity of the Neofestes of Mallorca targets a conservative romantic vision of the island. The new festive traditions respond to a generational demand for better festive traditions that local young people can relate to and be proud of, less conventional and stuffy, and more fun and participative. By inventing their own festive traditions, the youth seek to take control of festive identity practices, replacing the quaintness of the established festive traditions with something more interesting and radical. This new festive tradition has not been created to promote a conservative romantic vision of Mediterranean rural life but to actually challenge it with more progressive, non-essentialist cultural identities. Most Neofestes of Mallorca are a brave attempt to develop a progressive Catalan identity of Mallorca at a time of rapid population growth and increasing political upheaval, when tourism is expanding rapidly beyond the confines of the tourist resort, to every village on the island.

Ludic Transgressions This final section of the chapter will look in more depth at La Mucada, as we make a case for the transgressive potential of invented traditions as a site of political resistance and cultural change. La Mucada is the most iconic and successful example of the new wave of festive traditions in Mallorca. It takes place in Sineu, a picturesque village with 3600 habitants

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at the heart of the island, far away from the main tourist resorts. This colourful one-day summer festival has radically transformed the rather unexciting festive calendar of the village. In a short period of time, La Mucada has become Sineu’s most awaited festivity, rivalling the most established festive traditions on the island. The event attracts 10,000 visitors from all over the island, including many tourists. It is so successful that in 2019 the festival was moved forward a couple of days so that the official summer festival could continue without the interference of La Mucada. No other Neofesta generates as much expectation in Mallorca as La Mucada, with regular media coverage every year. Cultural festivals and performances are, to paraphrase Hollinshead and Suleman (2017, 2018), forms of worldmaking that actively contribute to reimagining places, often in terms of otherness. As the work of Bruner (2004) and Desmond (1999) shows, cultural traditions and performances are regularly used within the context of tourism to mobilise static and timeless narratives of place. This is not the case of La Mucada, which has been described as “a small revolution at the heart of Mallorca” (Pich 2015), because of its transgressive and progressive character. By looking at the case of La Mucada, this section explores the transgressive potential of invented traditions as a site of political resistance and cultural change. The main political value of the new festive tradition lies in its ability to challenge the essentialist cultural identity of the village and mobilise alternative orderings of space. The rich and syncretic festive world of La Mucada problematises the romantic categories through which rural Mallorca is consumed. The Neofestes of Mallorca are particularly interesting in that romantic constructions of place are disrupted performatively in rather banal and playful ways using the transgressive strategies of the carnivalesque. We see the recently invented festive traditions as an attempt to decolonise and de-exoticize local identities by generating more hybrid and fluid identifications. The origins of La Mucada can be found in the brotherhood lunches that were historically organised on 14 August by young people within the context of the summer village festival. The lunch was followed by an afternoon of drinking and camaraderie in the local bars of the village. In 2003, a paper-mâché mask in the shape of a demon was paraded in the village, creating a real buzz in the afternoon. The mask had been stolen from a nearby village that had recently developed a new festive ritual, known as Sa Revolta de Vilafranca. Following this spontaneous event, a group of youth decided to create a brand new festive ritual for the following year. They

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found inspiration in a local folktale, Lo Much de Reig, compiled by Alcover in his venerated collection of Mallorcan folktales (1979)—a pivotal contribution to the romantic revival of Mallorcan traditional rural culture. According to this tale, there is a hidden treasure in a nearby hill flanked by a bull. To find the treasure one must take a sip of olive oil, keep it in one’s mouth and walk around the hill three times at midnight. If one completes the three circuits without swallowing the oil, a bull—the legendary figure of Much—will appear and guide the person to the treasure. Inspired by this tale, a papier mâché figure of a bull’s head was built for the following year and the new festival officially started. The ancestral tale of Lo Much de Reig gave the name to this new figure and, by extension, to the whole festival—La Mucada. The driving force behind these new rituals was two local activists with extensive knowledge of the rich folk culture of Mallorca. The festival grew rapidly with the addition of new rituals and characters every year, many of which have nothing to do with traditional culture but are borrowed from mass media. The most important addition to the festival came in 2006 with the creation of a feminine LGBTI-friendly character named Muca. It was created by a group of women who wanted a feminine character of equal importance to men. Much and Muca were ceremoniously wedded in the 2007 edition of the festival. As the festival continued to grow, it become better organised. Thus in 2012 a non-profit entity was established called Muchal Foundation, parodying the Qatar Foundation, which was Barcelona Football Club’s sponsor at the time. What started as an afternoon of fun has now become an established festive ritual with strict protocols and a clear timetable. The festival starts at 10 am after a social breakfast at the Much Errico Taberna—the pop-up festival bar. The first event is the morning pilgrimage to Puig de Reig, a nearby hill. Using highly decorated vehicles, participants make their way to the hill where the legendary character of Much is invoked in what is the most solemn and intimate part of the celebration. The ceremony includes bagpipes, mock religious anthems known as goig and a series of games, including an international quail-egg throwing competition. The winner of this competition is responsible for invoking Much, who appears under a religious canopy. The participants then return to the village, where at noon Much makes a triumphal entrance into the small square in front of the town hall (Fig. 10.3). In the meantime, the Much Xarang’s band, the festival’s brass band, is playing well-known pop anthems at the square, which is now packed with youth wearing pink T-shirts. The morning continues with the pregó or proclamation of the festival by an invited speaker,

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Fig. 10.3  Much entering the village square in La Mucada in Sineu. (Photo: Marcel Pich)

who makes a comical speech packed with political and social references from a window of the town hall. The morning finishes with a parody of San Fermín’s bull running, after which there is a social lunch. The brotherhood lunches, which are the origin of the festival, are still divided along gender lines. At 4.30 pm there is the highpoint and most popular event of the festival—the mock procession of the Encounter, which parodies the village’s Easter Sunday procession when Jesus and the Virgin Mary meet at the market square. Much and Muca with their loud and carnivalesque entourage make their way to the market square, where they simulate a sexual act as a way to materialise the encounter. The moment of the encounter takes places in front of Can Castell bar—where later a youth will enter the pub riding an old Mobylette simulating Menorcan Jaleo rituals. The final event is the Jochs Phlorals, a biennial floral game during which the people who are to be the next Much and Muca are elected. The festival finishes at sunset to the sound of Frank Sinatra’s ‘New York, New York’. La Mucada is much more than an amusing invented tradition, a summer day of fun: it is also a transgressive political act as well as a site of

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conflict and contestation. Our case study emphasises the transgressive liminal possibilities of festival spaces in consonance with the work of Chambers (2015), Jackson (1992), Sharpe (2008), St John (2001) and Turner (2017). The new festive tradition has strong connections with left nationalist movements and is actively supported by the local branch of Obra Cultural Balear—the most important association promoting the normalisation of Catalan culture and language in Mallorca. The political character of La Mucada is evident mainly at the level of the banal, for example in the extensive use of radical political symbols such as the Basque Ikurriña flag and the Catalan pro-independence Estalada. However, there are also overtly political moments, the most important of which is the proclamation of the festival, which is delivered by a different personality each year. In 2017, for example, the opening speech was delivered by a well-known bard and pro-independence candidate for the general elections. The radical character of La Mucada has been a source of political controversy in a village that has been politically dominated by the right-wing party since 1999. A major conflict broke out in 2013, when the town hall proposed to have La Mucada on a different day because of its interference with the weekly market, which is very popular with tourists. The organisers opposed the move, which would have effectively marginalised the new invented tradition to a secondary position. The conflict become a battle over political hegemony in the village and control over local identity practices. At the time, the town hall was working on a new tourist promotion plan which aimed to adapt the village and its quaint traditions for tourism consumption. La Mucada, which the town hall wanted to make invisible, did not fit with the romantic construction of the village that the tourist plan was promoting. The conflict coincided with the political conflict around the marginalisation of the Catalan language in schools. The explicit association of La Mucada with the education strike further exacerbated the political tensions. In the end, La Mucada did not change dates and the radical youth claimed their victory. Two years later, the right-wing government was replaced by a progressive coalition, which was friendlier to the new festival. The festive transgressions of La Mucada are primarily concerned with the romantic categories through which rural Mallorca is consumed. This organic view of rural Mallorca was consolidated in the nineteenth century with the first romantic travellers, most notably Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria (Trias-Mercant 1992; Vives-Riera 2013), whose encyclopaedic work forms the basis of the Mallorca tourist identity. Romantic travellers

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reimagined local cultures in terms of alterity, effectively developing an orientalist view of rural Mallorca. Orientalism is a discursive system for dominance, first identified by Said (1979), through which Western fears and desires are projected onto other spaces, which are inevitably consigned to the past (Haldrup et al. 2006; Yan and Santos 2009). Orientalist constructions of place are problematic insomuch as a binary contrast is established between timeless local cultures and modern Western tourists. The established festive calendar of Sineu draws extensively on these orientalist constructions of rural Mallorca. It is also a key part of the tourist discourse of Sineu, which the new tourist plan sought to consolidate. The highlights of Sineu’s festive calendar include the Holy Easter celebrations; the weekly agricultural market, of medieval origin; the summer festival in honour of our Lady of August, and a more recent gastronomical fair. All these celebrations promote a conservative, Catholic and decorous imaginary of the village, in tune with the romantic construction of rural Mallorca. The new festive tradition was set against this organic and highly conservative identity of the village, which youth increasingly dislike and parody. La Mucada is an attempt to decolonise and de-touristify local identities by problematising the traditional cultural categories through which rural Mallorca is consumed as the epitome of traditional Mediterranean life. Festive transgressions are particularly interesting in that romantic, orientalist constructions of place are performatively disrupted in a sensual and material way, beyond discourse. La Mucada brings local discomfort with touristified constructions of rural Mallorca to the level of the sensual and the mundane. What matters most politically is not so much the actual radical message of the festival as the playful disruption of the established frames of identity. It is the performing and ludic body, dressing up, dancing and singing, that upsets the orientalist vision of Mediterranean life. Orientalist constructions of place have been mainly analysed at a discursive level, ignoring the fact that places are constructed sensually as well as semiotically. However, orientalism, as Haldrup et al. explain, “is not merely a matter of textual or symbolic acts, but [as something] profoundly rooted in sensual everyday encounters” (2006, 183). The notion of practical orientalism (Haldrup and Larsen 2009; Haldrup et  al. 2006) is the most relevant contribution highlighting the banal and intimate ways in which orientalist constructions of place are produced and negotiated (Haldrup et al. 2006). Practical orientalism is a useful concept here insomuch as it recognises festive traditions as a key part of the everyday banal infrastructure through which epistemologies of difference are reproduced and

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challenged. By emphasising the corporeality of the carnivalesque festive practices, this chapter takes Haldrup et  al.’s (2006) notion of practical orientalism to its natural conclusion. If binary dichotomies are produced in banal and intimate ways, they must also be challenged performatively. As Haldrup et al. explain, “The notion of practical orientalism indicates that to challenge the ‘big’ regimes of knowledge and the grand strategies of geopolitics does not work without at the same time challenging the ‘small’ imaginations and affects constructed in the inter-corporeal encounters in everyday life” (Haldrup et al. 2006, 183). If we want to make sense of the cultural importance of La Mucada, it is necessary to develop a performative and embodied conceptualisation of transgression. The transgressive politics of La Mucada is mobilised through a carnivalesque aesthetics of resistance. The carnivalesque is a generic term that identifies a series of festive rituals that are symbolically opposed to official feast. It is a festive attitude and sensibility that is characterised by a process of negation and inversion of the established social order. The main contribution to the study of carnivals and the carnivalesque comes from the work of Bakhtin (2009), who sees them as transgressive acts of political resistance. According to Stallybrass and White (1986), “Carnival, for Bakhtin, is both a populist utopian vision of the world seen from below and a festive critique, through the inversion of hierarchy, of the ‘high’ culture” (1986, 7). As explained earlier, the main characteristics of the carnivalesque are easily recognisable in La Mucada. The most carnivalesque part of the festival is the afternoon procession of the Encounter, which parodies the most popular religious festival of the village—the solemn Easter procession in which Jesus meets the Virgin Mary on Easter Sunday. This is a highly irreverent procession which includes, for example, a group of men dressed as female dancers with pink tutus, big hairy bellies and oversized fake breasts. There is a traditional Easter float with a teddy bear carrying an electric guitar instead of a religious image, as well as a mock religious ceremonial canopy covering Much during the parade in an incongruous mix of folk and ultra-conservative religious references. With her deep cleavage and sagging breasts, the character of Muca is also an example of carnivalesque hyper-sexualisation. The importance of carnivalesque parodies confirms that the main political value of La Mucada lies in its ability to ridicule tradition and fabricate alternative worlds of meaning. La Mucada functions in a similar way to the colourful carnivals of Trinidad, as a “hybrid site of ritual negotiation of cultural identity and practice” (Nurse 1999, 661). There is no respect for tradition or indeed

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the sacred character of the Easter procession in this event, which actively encourages the (con)fusion of traditional and modern references. Through the juxtaposition of things that are usually not found together, the festival works as a heterotypic space, where alternative spatial and cultural orderings are celebrated (St Johns 2001). The transgressive politics of La Mucada has a lot in common with the queer strategies of LGBTI Pride parades (Johnston 2005; Markwell and Waitt 2009; Waitt and Stapel 2011). In creating La Mucada, youth effectively queered the established identity of Sineu, producing an ambiguous space that alters the established relation between the local and the global. Queer politics involves the destabilisation of the binary categories of knowledge through which we make sense of the world. With its floats, irreverent costumes and sexual innuendo, La Mucada rivals LGBTI Pride parades in their use of carnivalesque strategies to disrupt queer—binary differences with a complex mix of creative performances, entertainment and protest. Like LGBTI Pride parades, La Mucada emphasises the potential of the bodies and spaces of tourism as sites of radical possibility away from the oppressive spaces of modernity. These displays can also be read “as public deconstructive tactics, a queering of the streets” (Johnston 2005, 190). The similarities are perhaps not surprising if we remember that the whole festival is greatly inspired by LGBTI Pride parades with all its flamboyant floats. While La Mucada is not an LGBTI event, there is a fluid use of queer references, the most obvious one being the pink theme of the event. In sharp contrast to the harsh masculinities of the countryside, all participants wear pink garments, including the must-have official pink T-shirt. The queerness of the event reached its zenith in 2014 when a local drag queen resembling Conchita Wurst was selected to deliver the opening speech, in which the conservative mayor was effectively ousted. There is also a visible presence of the rainbow flag, which is associated with the feminine character of Muca. The adoption of festive strategies and symbols of LGBTI pride highlights that the festive transgressions of La Mucada are not limited to orientalist constructions of place, but also concern stable notions of sexuality and gender. This is an event that indirectly challenges the dominance and ubiquity of heteronormativity, blurring the boundaries between homo and other. By emphasising more partial, fluid and unfixed identifications, La Mucada promotes a cultural politics of hybridity (Bhabha 1994).

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Conclusion This chapter has introduced the thriving Neofestes of Mallorca to an international audience, with a special reference to the rural festival of La Mucada in the village of Sineu, the most paradigmatic invented festive ritual on the island. By making creative use of the rich folk culture of Mallorca, the Neofestes are the epitome of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) The Invention of Tradition. However, this chapter has not considered invented traditions as examples of manipulation of the past but, in contrast, as evidence of cultural creativity and revitalisation. Their most distinctive feature is the bold combination of traditional rituals evoking a pre-touristic past with explicitly modern features. The transgressive potential of the invented festive traditions of Mallorca has been the main focus of this chapter. We were preoccupied here with how the creative elements of invented rituals and traditions can be deployed to incite cultural and political change. The main political value of the Neofestes of Mallorca lies in their heterotopic ability to mobilise alternative orderings of space (St John 2001) which are more inclusive and progressive. We see in festivals such as La Mucada a highly sophisticated generational endeavour to decolonise and de-exoticise the romantic categories through which rural Mallorca is consumed. There is, however, a danger in over-romanticising the radical possibilities of festive transgressions. While creatively disrupting the established festive calendar of the island, the carnivalesque Neofestes of Mallorca are a sort of fiction that safely contains transgression within certain spaces and times. The case of Mallorca is particularly interesting in that the essentialist cultural identities of tourism are challenged performatively in a banal and intimate way. Inspired by the work of Haldrup et al. (2006) on practical orientalism, the chapter has developed a performative view of festive transgressions. If romantic local categories are produced in banal and intimate ways, they must also be challenged performatively. The Neofestes of Mallorca are highly localised phenomena that respond to the specific circumstances of a fast-changing island. Their relevance, however, extends well beyond Mallorca. Our case study highlights the increasing discomfort with the romantic identities of tourism as well as the growing desire to decolonise local cultures. Our case study also highlights the dynamic and interactive character of tradition. We are confronted here with a post-traditional phenomenon that is free from the constraints of a romantic authentic past and does not hide its recent invention. There is no

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respect for the purity of tradition or indeed its local ancestral character. The invented traditions of Mallorca are irreverent and highly unorthodox phenomena that mix local specificities with global references. By investing in a more forward-looking global tradition, Mallorcan youth complicate our understandings of tradition by disassociating it from conservative and static ideas of place. Last but not least, the case study illustrates the political relevance of festive practices as a locus for political contestation and cultural change. The cultural battle for the Mallorcan soul is fought at street parties in pink outfits and mock religious processions, parading irreverent totems. On an increasingly secularised island dominated by the leisure and entrainment industry, local identities are playfully and creatively reconstructed in the context of festival spaces. Indeed, we need to take seriously the transformative potential of ludic practices, particularly the cultural change that comes through fun.

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Correction to: Burning Man in Europe: Burns, Culture and Transformation Botond Vitos, Graham St John, and François Gauthier

Correction to: Chapter 5 in: M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_5 The affiliation and email address of author Botond Vitos were wrong in the published version and have been updated as below: B. Vitos Leuphana University, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

The updated online version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­88392-­8_5 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_11

C1

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 1970s, 6, 7, 15–42, 45, 47–53, 55–58, 60, 61, 116, 124, 147–149, 153, 177 A Acculturative, 5, 9, 10, 39, 40, 42, 134–137, 170, 175, 184, 188–189 Activists, 7, 16, 36–38, 42, 45, 48, 49, 51–53, 55, 59, 61, 118, 121, 134, 231, 239 Aesthetic, 10, 25, 26, 67, 81, 107, 126, 135, 171, 178, 183, 188, 189, 202, 203, 206, 209, 210, 220, 234, 243 Aestheticization, 198, 201, 204, 206–210, 218 Alternative futures, 4, 5

Alternatives, 6–8, 15–42, 52–57, 66, 73, 78, 79, 81, 98, 100, 105, 107, 110, 124, 133, 135, 146, 147, 175, 200–202, 205, 218, 222, 229, 238, 243–245 American, 24n3, 50 Ancestors, 75, 78, 81, 145, 146, 157–159, 162, 165 Ancient, 8, 27, 66, 67, 71, 72n7, 78n14, 81, 144–147, 150, 153, 155, 158, 159, 163–165, 195, 198, 199, 203, 204, 206, 215, 228, 235, 236 Anthropology, 2, 6, 29, 143, 197, 200, 229, 230, 235 Archaeologists, 143–146, 153, 155 Archaeology, 2, 9, 66, 142–148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157–159, 163 Archives, 16–19, 26, 38, 163

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Nita, J. H. Kidwell (eds.), Festival Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8

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250 

INDEX

Artist, 9, 10, 15, 29, 88, 89, 94, 97, 108, 115–133, 135–137, 136n3, 143, 150, 156, 170, 172, 174, 178, 179, 185–188, 196, 201, 216 Arts, 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, 16, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 37, 40–42, 46, 47, 54, 56, 68, 71, 75, 78n14, 88, 89, 97, 101, 102, 108, 109, 115–137, 141, 169–181, 183–189, 199, 201, 202, 204, 207, 210, 236 Audience, 9, 17, 39, 40, 50–52, 56, 60, 81, 122, 125, 134, 136, 142, 173, 179, 196, 213, 220, 229, 231, 234, 245 Authenticity, 46, 47, 67, 71, 75, 80, 84, 97, 100, 173, 174, 183, 230, 245 Authority, 16, 18, 19, 22, 26, 29–34, 36, 58, 59, 75, 90, 146, 201, 233, 234 B Belief, 8, 22, 79, 82, 83, 130, 147, 149, 151, 156 Belonging, 16, 21, 29, 73, 81, 83, 91, 99, 104, 110, 173, 206, 219 Black Rock city (BRC), 8, 10, 87–96, 91n6, 99, 101–105, 105n18, 108–110, 169–175, 178–181, 184–186, 188, 189 Body, 11, 20, 26, 50, 56, 78, 124, 132, 134, 147, 173, 175, 201, 206, 207, 209, 219, 230, 234, 242, 244 Brexit, 16, 23, 24, 38 Britain, 5, 6, 15–42 British, 6, 7, 16, 17, 20, 23–26, 24n3, 24n4, 31, 33, 42, 45, 50, 55, 58, 176, 203, 211

Building, 4, 10, 19, 21, 24, 68n4, 82, 122, 126, 127, 144, 153, 165, 176, 184, 196, 210, 212–214, 221 Burning Man, 1, 3, 21, 87–111, 134, 159, 169–189, 196 C Calendar, 49, 146, 147, 149, 227, 233, 234, 238, 242, 245 Camps, 39, 50, 54, 89, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 123, 143, 169, 174, 178–181, 183, 184, 186, 188, 204, 205, 209 Carnival, 16, 111, 127, 176, 178, 232, 233, 235, 243 Carnivalesque, 8, 90, 108, 110, 111, 149, 233–235, 238, 240, 243–245 Celebrations, 6, 16, 20, 20n2, 48, 60, 83, 87, 90, 121, 127, 147, 149, 184, 197, 201–203, 209, 228, 231, 232, 234–236, 239, 242, 244 Census, 88, 91, 91n6, 92, 104 Ceremony, 27, 143, 145–147, 155, 158, 159, 179, 199, 200, 204, 207–209, 215, 220, 239, 243 Christian, 5–7, 9, 17, 23, 38–42, 58, 78, 79, 116, 116n1, 117, 123, 134, 136, 137, 148, 150 Circle, 9, 36, 52, 57, 58, 97, 110, 136, 141–145, 150, 151, 155–159, 161–164, 208, 232 City, 3, 9, 39, 54, 58, 68, 74, 87, 89, 104, 107, 109, 110, 169, 170, 172, 178, 185, 186, 228 Class, 23, 52, 109, 186 Climate change, 4, 17, 18, 31, 36–39, 42, 107, 116–119, 132, 134, 136, 136n3, 159, 160, 177

 INDEX 

Collaborative, 9, 79, 89, 101, 102, 116, 122, 125, 126, 130, 131, 136, 137, 143, 152, 170, 171, 178, 203, 229 Colourful, 27, 37, 47, 72, 82, 160, 185, 232, 234, 235, 238, 243 Commemoration, 5, 16, 37, 145, 148, 158–161, 164, 165 Communes, 15, 17, 20, 30–32, 34, 35 Conflict, 3, 22, 24, 26, 83, 89, 111, 147, 175–177, 181, 241 Consciousness, 81, 98, 199, 200, 206, 207, 209, 221 Conservative, 7, 16, 27, 29, 58, 229, 231, 236, 237, 242, 244, 246 Consumers, 60, 84, 95, 100, 104, 105, 109, 173, 179, 196, 213–215 Controversy, 47, 89, 96, 99, 118, 135, 171, 175, 179–181, 184, 185, 188, 233, 241 Costumes, 37, 71, 78, 80, 83, 105, 107, 108, 186, 232, 234, 235, 244 Countercultural, 3–7, 15, 16, 23, 25, 32, 39, 40, 42, 45, 48–52, 58, 61, 118, 123, 147, 149, 153, 159, 173, 198, 202 Crafts, 7, 54, 97, 142, 152, 186, 187, 203, 207, 209, 221 Criticism, 50–52, 175, 200 Current, 3, 24, 30, 34, 59, 69, 73, 197, 198, 203, 206, 221, 222, 228, 234 D Dancing, 26, 30, 54–57, 71, 75, 78n14, 88, 89, 99, 124, 149, 159, 173, 178, 184, 199, 202, 204, 207–209, 211, 215, 220, 232, 234–236, 242, 243

251

Desert, 3, 4, 169, 175, 185 Design, 9, 11, 115, 117, 121, 122, 125, 127, 129, 134, 150–152, 156, 174, 188, 209 Destruction, 6, 16, 29, 58, 107, 178 Discourse, 4–7, 12, 16, 19, 20, 24, 39, 40, 69, 134, 148, 175, 230, 242 Drama, 48, 171–179, 185, 188 Dramatize, 59, 170, 172, 176–179, 182, 214, 220 Dress, 25, 28, 47, 61, 71, 77, 83, 234 Drugs, 16, 20, 26, 38, 46, 47, 52, 60, 146, 158, 162, 164, 207, 209 Dwelling, 1, 3, 7, 17, 20, 21, 31 E Earth, 39, 136, 149, 156, 206, 213, 216, 222 Eavis, Michael, 148–150 Ecology, 4, 17, 39, 54, 58, 98, 104, 105, 117–119, 134, 136, 143, 160, 175, 179, 195, 197–199, 206, 209, 210, 219 Effigy, 87, 108, 159, 169, 178, 185, 187, 188 Emotion, 39, 40, 83, 97, 131, 135, 136, 136n3, 149, 160, 201, 230 Employment, 10, 25, 32, 34, 35, 93, 152, 163, 201, 218 Empowerment, 19, 20, 39, 40, 135 Environment, 3, 11, 38, 98, 99, 102, 107, 109, 117, 129, 131, 136, 160, 170, 174, 180n10, 198, 199, 201, 204, 206, 210, 211, 218, 222 Environmental, 3–5, 9, 15, 17, 21–23, 36, 38, 42, 98, 104, 105, 107, 116, 117, 131, 134–136, 199, 221

252 

INDEX

Ephemeral, 3, 10, 87, 125, 142, 150, 151, 156, 159, 160, 163 Ethical, 19, 53, 56–58, 171, 175, 202 Ethnography, 8, 17–19, 38, 67, 90, 99, 99n9, 117, 146, 151, 152, 158, 163, 164, 174, 197, 212, 230, 231 Europe, 3, 9, 20, 22, 24n3, 68, 69, 87–111, 116, 203, 211, 228 European, 9, 24n3, 89–91, 93, 94, 99, 111, 203 Evolving, 87, 152, 158, 164, 169–171, 185, 188, 189, 199 Experiment, 2, 4, 9–11, 16, 19–21, 42, 48, 50, 53, 57, 60, 67, 82–84, 89, 90, 96, 101, 102, 122–125, 129–132, 134–137, 142, 144, 145, 149, 151, 152, 158, 160, 164, 170, 173, 175, 177, 180, 180n10, 183, 188, 196–199, 202, 206–211, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221, 222, 230 Experimental, 7, 8, 37, 54, 94, 96, 98, 109, 111, 151, 187n14, 210, 211 Extinction, 36, 37, 134, 143 Extinction Rebellion (XR), 6, 7, 15–42, 107, 108, 119, 121, 152, 160, 161 F Family, 5, 22, 25, 30, 35, 42, 57, 66, 79, 91, 94, 123, 149, 162, 174, 219 Fayre, 7, 149 Festival field, 1–8, 12, 29, 55, 56, 65, 79, 105, 108, 111, 116, 117, 123, 133, 143, 144, 149, 151–153, 156–158, 175, 176, 219, 229 Festival organisers, 6, 7, 46, 48, 54, 55

Festival program, 109, 179, 186, 187, 206, 208 Folk, 8, 54, 66, 71, 78, 78n14, 80, 81, 146, 185, 227, 228, 233–236, 239, 243, 245 Folklore, 11, 54, 80, 82, 147, 228, 235 Food, 25, 36, 51–54, 58, 67, 72, 83, 102, 119, 127, 129, 146, 203, 211–213 Forest, 99, 105, 117, 128, 130, 208 G Gatherings, 3, 8, 11, 20, 31, 48, 108, 127, 145–147, 152, 156, 159, 160, 164, 165, 169, 203, 205–207 Generational, 49, 58, 136, 231, 234, 237, 245 Gifting, 8, 9, 60, 88, 89, 91, 97–103, 107–111, 146, 155, 178, 180, 180n10, 184–188, 187n14 Glastonbury, 2–4, 7, 9, 21, 31n13, 45, 52–56, 58–61, 124, 141, 142, 145–151, 153, 156, 159, 160, 163–165, 207 Global, 1–6, 8, 10–12, 15, 21, 22, 24, 28, 29, 37, 42, 66–68, 73, 83, 87, 107, 117, 120, 160, 172, 196, 198, 199, 204, 216, 222, 229, 244, 246 Globalisation, 2, 4–12 Government, 19, 31, 32, 66, 69, 73, 84, 235, 241 Green, 4, 18, 20, 31, 32, 34, 38, 42, 115–137 Greenbelt Festival, 23, 117, 120 Grounded Theory, 19, 93, 152

 INDEX 

H Handbook, 74, 153, 155 Healing, 78–82, 100, 146, 160, 176, 177, 199, 204, 207, 208, 221 Heritage, 11, 71, 77, 82, 144, 156, 165, 209 Heterotopia, 8, 170, 175 Heterotopic, 88, 91, 99, 103, 110, 111, 229, 245 Hippy, 1, 5–7, 16, 17, 19–21, 25–32, 34–39, 41, 42, 45–61, 98, 174 Historical, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 18, 18n1, 55, 66–69, 71, 73, 75, 75n10, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 118, 145–147, 163, 176, 195, 230, 235, 238 History, 2, 6–8, 11, 12, 21, 31, 45, 48, 50, 55, 65, 66, 71, 73, 75, 81, 116n1, 137, 148, 151, 152, 157, 163, 164, 173, 185, 228, 229, 235 Holy, 27, 76, 78 Hungarians, 8, 65–84, 127 I Identity, 3–8, 11, 12, 17, 19–21, 24n5, 25, 27–29, 31, 39–41, 46, 51, 67–69, 78n14, 81–84, 91, 93, 94, 116, 125, 144, 146, 171, 184, 187, 228–231, 236–238, 241–246 Ideology, 67, 68, 70, 73, 77, 79, 81, 84, 88, 149, 160, 163, 175 Imagination, 4, 8, 9, 15, 20, 22, 26, 39, 67, 71, 82, 83, 96, 101, 117, 119, 122, 123, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135, 136, 141, 144, 146, 150, 158, 164, 179, 186, 198, 215, 242, 243

253

Indigenous, 28, 29, 160, 197, 203, 204, 207–210, 214–217, 219–221 Individualism, 3, 22, 51, 116, 206 Innovation, 4, 5, 8–10, 12, 60, 79, 90, 91, 94, 111, 115–137, 143, 170, 195, 200, 209 Installations, 9, 120, 124–131, 133, 150, 178, 202 Invention, 6, 11, 68, 78n14, 79, 80, 82–84, 172, 227–229, 231–238, 240, 241, 245, 246 Ireland, 1, 21, 30, 48, 51, 54, 56 Isolated, 17, 19–21, 30, 32, 125, 130, 157, 198, 222 J Journey, 21, 40, 153, 158, 204, 207, 231 Jungle, 197, 203–205, 209 L Landscape, 5, 6, 16, 19, 20, 25, 26, 28, 39, 68, 99, 122, 124, 129, 143–145, 150, 153, 155, 156, 158, 163–165, 179 Legends, 55, 146, 148, 150, 156, 165, 235 Liberal, 3, 7, 29, 38, 42 Lifestyles, 5–7, 17–19, 24, 25, 30–36, 41, 56, 67, 79, 82, 83, 97, 98, 149, 175, 209 Liminal, 82, 88, 90, 91, 96, 98, 100, 109, 111, 122, 125, 156, 158, 160, 174, 175, 179, 200, 204, 205, 219, 241 Locality, 3, 7, 20, 54, 55, 73 London, 18, 19, 33, 36, 57, 58, 107, 160 Ludic, 89, 90, 100, 227–246

254 

INDEX

M Magical, 80, 82, 156, 157, 163 Magyarok Országos Gyűlése (MOGY, National Assembly of Hungarians), 66–68, 70, 71, 73, 76, 77, 80–83 Mainstream, 5, 7, 15, 18, 27, 32, 34, 38, 66, 199, 200, 202, 210, 219–221 Mallorca, 11, 227–246 Mapping, 3, 22, 23, 66, 72, 81, 82, 104, 142, 146, 152, 153, 163 March, 37, 46, 59, 75, 160, 197, 203 Material culture, 8, 69, 71, 72, 80–84, 100, 101, 122, 132, 133, 143, 150–151, 156, 159, 165, 180, 199, 228, 234, 235 Materials, 8, 10, 11, 16, 19, 22, 26, 42, 48, 81, 97, 100, 101, 104, 121, 127, 131, 133, 137, 142–144, 146, 151, 153, 156, 163, 165, 179, 201, 208, 210, 221, 228, 231, 235, 236, 242 Mckay, George, 20, 23, 55, 67, 95 Media, 2, 7, 10, 11, 16–19, 25–34, 37–42, 56, 59, 66, 67, 73, 79, 84, 92, 97, 135, 136n3, 164, 170, 172, 180, 202, 227, 230, 236, 238, 239 Mediatized, 207 Megalithic, 9, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 150, 153, 159, 164 Memorial, 9, 10, 37, 41, 137, 141, 142, 146, 158–162 Money, 36, 50, 51, 97, 185, 186, 213 Monument, 9, 10, 141–165 Movement, 5, 6, 8, 15–18, 22–24, 26, 36–38, 39n29, 42, 47, 69, 87, 88, 90, 91, 96, 98, 102, 107, 110, 116, 118, 119, 123, 146, 149, 169, 171–173, 183, 198, 209, 217, 221, 222, 235, 241 Mucada, 228, 230, 234, 237–245

Music, 2, 21, 28, 48, 51, 53–55, 57, 66–68, 71, 80–83, 89, 95, 96, 99, 100n12, 116, 124, 141, 146, 149, 151, 165, 183n11, 199, 201–215, 220, 221, 232, 234, 236 Mythology, 8, 66, 66n2, 71, 136, 141–165 N Naked, 26, 27, 56, 117, 185 Narrative, 6, 10, 11, 20, 39, 82, 83, 134, 135, 137, 142, 146, 148, 152, 157–158, 164, 171, 173, 177, 185, 229, 235 Nationalism, 3, 6, 16, 23, 38, 68n4, 69 Nationalist, 22, 69, 234, 235, 241 Nature, 7, 16, 47, 51, 52, 54, 58–60, 77, 81, 89, 101, 117, 124, 129, 131, 146, 150, 151, 177, 198, 205–207, 209, 219, 221, 230 Neofestes, 11, 227–231, 233–238, 245 Network, 3, 11, 21, 29, 42, 53, 116, 117, 119, 134, 136, 137, 147, 149, 151, 156, 186, 189, 216 News report, 11, 18, 28, 31, 32, 37, 42, 49, 66, 93, 97, 102, 172, 180 O Online, 2, 3, 37, 67, 69, 102n14, 171, 207 P Pagan, 79, 82, 150 Parade, 6, 75, 77, 108 Parody, 100, 102, 103, 110, 150, 171, 231, 234, 235, 239, 240, 242, 243

 INDEX 

Participatory, 7, 10, 11, 38, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 88, 89, 175, 179, 180n10, 198, 199, 206, 208, 219, 227, 236 Peace, 28, 97, 158–160, 164 Performance, 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 16, 20, 23, 25, 26, 37, 39, 40n29, 41, 42, 47, 48, 66, 67, 75, 81, 88–90, 107–111, 117, 119, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134–137, 141, 158, 159, 161, 175–179, 176n7, 184, 199, 201, 204, 207, 208, 215, 229, 230, 238, 243–245 Philosophical, 89, 110, 135, 146 Pilgrimage, 1, 2, 10, 16, 17, 21, 37, 39, 42, 68, 77, 78, 96, 142, 146, 157, 161, 164, 174, 239 Planet, 58, 104, 160, 164, 216 Play, 5, 11, 48, 54, 80, 83, 94, 100, 102, 107–109, 116, 122–124, 135, 136, 149, 151, 162, 196, 204, 208, 215, 220, 228, 231, 238, 239, 242, 246 Playa, 2, 87, 88, 94, 96, 99, 104, 105, 109, 110, 169, 170, 178, 181, 184, 185, 204 Police, 19, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 40, 42, 58, 59, 147, 170 Politics, 2, 11, 16, 22–24, 69, 70, 82, 109, 116n1, 159, 229, 243, 244 Principles, 8–10, 35, 89–91, 89n2, 96, 98, 100, 101, 101n13, 103, 105–107, 109, 110, 170n1, 175, 178, 180, 183, 184, 188, 189, 196, 201, 234 Protest, 15–17, 19, 32, 37, 39, 39–40n29, 47, 51, 82, 105, 107, 119, 134, 137, 159, 180, 222, 229, 233, 235, 244

255

Protestival, 2, 6, 15, 18, 24, 37, 115–137, 159–160 Publics, 5–7, 9, 11, 16, 17, 19, 22, 25, 26, 30–40, 42, 49, 59, 69, 90, 108, 110, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124, 125, 134–137, 145, 146, 176, 180, 184, 185, 188, 244 R Rebellion, 2, 6, 15–19, 24, 32, 37, 39, 39–40n29, 47, 51, 82, 105, 107, 115–137, 159–160, 180, 222, 229, 233, 235, 244 Reflexive, 10, 170, 174, 177, 188 Region, 18, 19, 68, 71, 78, 89–96, 99n9, 101, 101n13, 102, 109, 110, 175, 229, 230 Relational, 20, 142 Religion, 17, 22, 23, 25, 39, 80, 98, 116, 130, 136, 137, 209 Religious, 2–6, 16, 17, 21–25, 39, 58, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 75, 78–80, 82, 84, 98, 110, 115–118, 130, 134–137, 146, 147, 158, 209, 232–234, 239, 243, 246 Remembrance, 81, 158, 161–162, 164 Renaissance, 184–187 Representation, 18, 24, 45, 65, 67, 79, 116n1, 136n3, 164, 207 Research, 2, 8–10, 12, 16–18, 20, 23, 30, 36, 38, 39, 47, 67, 90, 95, 101, 110, 111, 115, 129, 134, 135, 137, 141, 142, 144, 150, 151, 158, 163, 174–176, 196–198, 202, 212, 213, 221, 222, 228–230, 236 Respondents, 49, 91–94, 91n6, 96–99, 102n14, 104, 105, 110, 152, 205, 210, 211, 217, 221

256 

INDEX

Ritual, 11, 24, 39, 48, 68, 70, 71, 77, 78, 81–83, 88, 104, 107, 108, 111, 115–120, 125, 127, 129–137, 135n2, 144, 145, 147, 152, 154, 158–160, 164, 165, 174, 176, 177, 179, 197–204, 206, 209, 215, 216, 218–222, 227, 228, 230–236, 238–240, 243, 245 Ritualesque, 8, 90, 108, 111 Rock, 8, 45n1, 46, 66, 69–71, 82, 96 Romania, 5, 6, 17, 67, 72n7, 78n13, 123, 124 Romantic, 11, 82, 229, 237–239, 241, 242, 245 Rural, 3, 54, 228, 236–239, 241, 242, 245 S Sacred, 17, 20, 55, 71, 77, 78, 80–82, 84, 149, 150, 156, 158, 160–162, 164, 165, 222, 244 Seasonally, 31, 58, 127, 129, 131, 145, 146, 149, 164, 171, 201 Secularization, 3, 5, 16, 22, 39, 42, 81, 116, 135, 137, 202, 231 Self, 97, 98 Semiotics, 7, 17, 42, 81, 134, 137, 242 Senses, 5, 6, 11, 22, 47, 48, 55, 67, 75, 79, 83, 94, 97, 99, 110, 117, 122, 129–132, 144, 145, 152, 158–160, 163, 200–202, 206–209, 229, 237, 243, 244 Sexuality, 17, 56, 107, 240, 244 Sherpagate, 169–189 Sociological, 4, 6 Solstice, 27, 30, 87, 128, 146, 147, 155–158, 169, 201

Sound, 47, 49n2, 52, 71, 83, 107, 108, 122, 184, 201, 202, 208, 209, 240 Spectators, 60, 61, 125, 178, 179, 183, 199, 214, 215, 220, 221, 234 Spiritual, 2, 21, 27, 30, 47, 58, 75, 79, 96, 98, 117, 145, 147, 151, 156–159, 202, 207, 209, 219 Stage, 6, 7, 17, 23, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56–58, 60, 66, 99, 145, 149–151, 160, 181, 182, 204, 209, 220 Stonehenge, 7, 9, 20, 27, 30, 55, 145–148, 150, 153, 157, 163–165 Stones, 9, 27, 137, 141–147, 150, 151, 153–164 Story, 20, 42, 48, 51, 117, 127, 133–136, 146, 151–153, 157, 158, 164, 171, 172, 176, 177, 180, 181, 189, 201 Storytelling, 117, 134–136, 152, 171, 176, 177, 189 Summer, 17, 20, 30, 31, 33, 49, 87, 121, 123, 128, 130, 147, 155, 156, 169, 201, 228, 231–233, 235, 236, 238, 240, 242 Survey, 8, 49, 90–93, 98–101, 99n9, 101n13, 102n14, 104, 105, 108–111, 144, 152, 153, 155, 157, 163 Sustainability, 10, 98, 105, 110, 135, 196, 202, 204, 209 Swan Circle, 9, 141–144, 148, 150–164 Symbols, 8, 56, 66, 66n2, 67, 69–72, 79–83, 96, 126, 127, 134, 145, 150, 152, 156, 158–160, 185, 232, 233, 235, 236, 241, 242, 244

 INDEX 

T Technology, 4, 7, 54, 79, 179, 199, 202, 209 Temporal, 21, 83, 143, 148, 157, 198, 204–206, 218, 234, 235 Tent, 27, 30, 54, 59, 65, 66, 76, 78–80, 146, 170, 209 Test, 49, 121, 137, 151 Theatre, 47, 51, 54, 55, 149 Tourism, 2, 11, 21, 67, 197, 214, 229, 237, 238, 241, 244, 245 Tourists, 2, 67, 88, 169–189, 228, 229, 236–238, 241, 242 Transformational festivals, 10, 90, 91, 96, 156, 158, 174, 175, 195–200, 202, 209, 210, 213, 216, 218–222, 246 Transgressive, 180, 227–246 Transitional, 11, 96, 179, 199, 200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 218, 222 Transmission, 5, 10, 12, 90, 134, 135n2, 137, 160, 164, 165, 170 Travel, 21, 28, 104, 147, 173, 185, 205, 211, 231, 241 Tribal, 46, 156, 195–222 Tribal Gathering, 10, 156, 195–222 Tribes, 29, 47, 75, 75n10, 93, 156, 161, 188, 197, 203, 207, 209, 210, 214–217 Turner, Victor, 10, 135, 170, 171, 174, 176–179, 184, 188, 195, 197, 200, 201, 229, 241

257

V Values, 3–5, 7, 10–12, 17, 20–25, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38–40, 42, 46, 48, 90, 92n7, 98, 99, 100n11, 101, 117, 136, 146, 156, 160, 164, 165, 172, 179, 180, 184–187, 199, 202, 213, 220, 222, 229, 238, 243, 245 Village, 3, 16, 26, 28, 31, 32, 39, 68, 127, 177, 203, 205, 228, 231–235, 237–243, 245 Volunteer, 53, 56, 57, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105n18, 108–110, 169, 170, 196, 197, 203, 205, 207, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 218, 220 W Well, 4, 9–12, 16–19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 35, 37, 40, 47, 57, 70, 71, 73, 75, 79, 84, 95, 98, 101, 102, 105, 109–111, 116, 123, 124, 131, 134, 135, 144, 145, 155, 159, 178, 204, 207, 208, 213, 220, 240, 242, 243, 245 Western, 12, 17, 39, 84, 142, 198, 203, 214, 215, 220, 242 Windsor festival, 45, 57–59 Woodstock, 25, 25n6, 26, 50, 51, 54, 56 Workshops, 2, 8, 37, 88, 89, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 109, 110, 131–133, 143, 152, 184–188, 199, 202, 204, 207–210, 213–215, 220