Toward a Theory of Festival. By Amanda Lucia.

Historically, religious festivals have been means to celebrate special occasions, markers of sacred time and space, means to consolidate political power and reify community identity, ways to invoke the divine and/or nature in daily life, methods of marking the passage of time, and releases for social unrest and discord. They can also be connected to life­cycle rituals, performed to sanctify social bonds and transitions. For believers, religious festivals designate moments of divine intercession into the mundane realities of daily living wherein everyday occurrences become sacralized and life takes on symbolic meaning. Here, the gods become present, are made manifest, and intervene on behalf of humanity.

In the field of the sociology of religion, scholars have analyzed religious festivals as sanctimonious spaces that demarcate a special time, a time set apart from the ordinary. Festivals signify a sacred time in the Durkheimian sense of matter set apart, wholly distinct from the profane of everyday reality. (Durkheim 1995? Caillois 1959) In anthropology, scholars following Victor Turner have analyzed religious festivals as rites of renewal and transition that employ the liminal spaces and times of festivals to signify important social and lifecycle transitions. (Turner 1982? van Gennep 1960? Bell 2009)

Through the work of this collaborative humanities studio, our researchers have found that the public displays of religious identity and communal solidarity during festivals also construct and reify participants as distinctive religious communities. During festivals, these communities co­operate within intricate symbolic systems augmented by the shared belief that festival occasions are moments of heightened access to divinity and sacrality. In the United States, among transnational populations living in this diasporic context, public festivals have become important moments that express communal solidarity in the presence of daily experiences of cultural dislocation among minority communities.

From the Mexican­-American celebrations of Dia de los Muertos to the American Hindu celebrations of Holi, the celebrations of festivals in public define and unite communities with reference to their pasts, their memories, and their shared traditions. Religious festivals become the public means to enact communal memories in both mournful and celebratory ways. As in times past, witnesses to religious festivals are often captivated by their extraordinary sensory stimuli. Religious festivals are multisensory experiences replete with music, art, drama, food, smells, crowds, and sentiment. They are also inherently public, usually occurring simultaneously in domestic, temple, and public spheres. The combination of their public expression and their multisensory nature has drawn the attention of outsiders in both positive and negative ways.

Governments have sometimes viewed festivals as exuberant, but dangerous social extravagances that needed to be curtailed and controlled. Public festivals are also important times for the community to gather together to engage in political mobilization and community organizing. As a result, festival spaces are policed spaces. Far from the unbridled exuberance of ancient mythological accounts, our research shows that public religious festivals have become governmentally monitored social venting mechanisms wherein minority communities in the United States vie for public recognition and cultural representation in the liberal multicultural context. They are means to reconnect with the memories of a given community, but also occasions to imprint those cultural memories onto the public sphere.