Festival Days

Last weekend I attended the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF) in Black Mountain, NC. Being there, amid all that creativity and expressive freedom, got me thinking about many things related to the role of the festival, general merrymaking and conviviality in human life. As for the personal experience, there were the expected yet unpredictable moments of catharsis--the musical brilliance and exuberance of the Canadian trio Nightingale, the pure contagious energy of a late night swing band, the Sunday morning New Orleans brass service led by Big Sam Williams, formerly of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Then there were the dances, the lakeside fire show, the parade, the informal and impromptu assemblies of musicians and performers here and there, costumed revelers everywhere. Just the shear joy and communality of the festive moment. Then also the more mundane yet defining aspects of festival attendance--the abandonment or relaxation of bodily barriers and pretenses and functions, dirty children (and adults), common bathroom facilities, unkempt hair and clothing, etc. In short, a time for the temporary suspension of social conventions for the indulgence of carnal pleasures. This is in itself liberating of course, and that is part of what inspired me to write about it.



I've been reading a whole lot lately about what might broadly be called cultural resistance. All of these readings invariably include discussions about Carnival and other such festive events and routine merrymaking and the central part they have played in fomenting cultural resistance and rebellion through their function of temporarily inverting the social order, thus providing a glimpse of what an alternative society might look like, or else as a forum for creatively articulating hidden criticisms. In this way the festive moment is one that has been central to the emancipation, temporary and otherwise, of the human spirit, especially of those who suffer and struggle as a result of oppressive social hierarchies. Not to suggest that many of the attendees at LEAF are in any way oppressed--they (we) most decidedly are not generally speaking, and are in fact quite privileged to be there at all. Which is another of the things that got me thinking. What role do festivals play now, having become such highly commodified, largely middle class experiences? Is this simply another example of how capital has managed to colonize every aspect of social life? Is it an expression of the gentrification of the festive occasion? I wondered often while there (though while greatly enjoying the whole thing), is it possible to have some approximation of the festive occasion that is not commodified? Is there still any revolutionary potential in festivity?



Coincidentally I've also been reading The Hobbit with my oldest son, the starting point for our ambitious plan to read all of Tolkien's tales about Middle Earth (mostly my idea I admit, but one my son now shares my enthusiasm for). In The Hobbit, a great deal of space is devoted to descriptions of merrymaking of various sorts. Indeed festivity provides a pretty regular backdrop to his tales (in The Hobbit anyway) and not infrequently plays a direct role in the plot. A favorite passage from the book attends Thorin's final conversation with Bilbo as he lays dying. In the equality of death Thorin finally comes to understand the wisdom of hobbits and among his last words to Bilbo are these: "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."



Of course, festivals have perhaps always been necessarily commodified on some level, as the bringing together of the accoutrement of celebration in massive quantities has its attendant costs. In its history though, those costs have often been accepted without much concern for recompense. In the various Cofradia-sponsored ritual celebrations common in much of Latin America, the bulk of such costs were often shouldered by the Mayordomia, a burden that shifted annually, but one that was accepted without qualm. Indeed, it was considered quite an honor to be the sponsor of a village Saint's Day celebration, a position which carried with it certain prestige. These and similar events and their collective planning, alongside more quotidian but essential daily activities (largely centered around food production, preservation and consumption) and religious life, formed the axes around which village life revolved. Similarly, in discussing pre-capitalist habits of consumption, work, and notions of the good life in late Medieval/early modern England, David Graeber states, ". . . the typical reaction to economic good times, even among urban craftsmen and most of the proto-bourgeoisie, was to take more days off . . . When the Land of Cockaigne was translated into reality, it was in the form of popular festivals like Carnival; almost any increase in popular wealth was immediately diverted into communal feasts, parades, and collective indulgences." This quote reminds one of the Les Blank's films about Cajun Mardi Gras, especially the suggestive title of the first in this series, Spend It All.



So what changed? In the case of Latin American festival occasions, it was pressure from first the Catholic Church, then Protestant missionaries, that diminished the role of the collective festival celebration, replacing it with a more familiar individualistic sensibility grounded in the nuclear family unit. The sponsorship of such events, in addition to their being idolatrous/heretical and indulgent, placed unnecessary economic burdens on sponsoring families--resources that should be better placed in securing the economic well-being of the nuclear family, or so the reasoning went. In England, similar pressures came from the so-called "Reformation of Manners," wherein the emergent Puritan merchant class and their ecclesiastic counterparts were able to impose their values on the populace at large. Relating both cases to the ascendancy of capitalist modes of production and social relations, I return to Graeber, who states, "One of the processes that made capitalism possible, then, was what might be termed the privatization of desire." That privatization displaced the extended community and replaced it with the nuclear family as the primary locus of economic and social activity. As June Nash noted in her study of Bolivian tin miners, "The nuclear family has been analyzed as a compliment to industrialization . . . the nuclear family, because of its mobility, can conform to the vagaries of changing jobs . . . because it is a small, self-sufficient unit dedicated to aggrandizing its own consumption ends, the nuclear family creates dependency of a woman and her offspring on the male breadwinner and thus ties a man to his job." In so doing, communal ties are sundered and with them, the spirit of conviviality, of connectivity, that fuels communal celebrations.



So then, what if any comparison can be made between the festive occasion as it was observed traditionally and its contemporary manifestations? I am under no delusions that LEAF is a contemporary equivalent to Carnival, but some elements of the former do inform the latter, especially as far as the body is concerned. David Graeber, in a wonderful essay on the Reformation of Manners as this affected changing popular attitudes concerning the body as the locus for the observance of interpersonal communication and social hierarchies as these articulate emerging notions of private property offers some insight here. Using an older anthropological distinction between "joking relations" and "relations of avoidance," in the former the body is conceived as continuous with the world around it, "constituted mainly of substances--stuff flowing in or flowing out." In contrast, the body in relations of avoidance is just the opposite--the body shut off and guarded, the body as property. It is this distinction, argues Graeber, that allowed the ruling classes to imagine themselves as socially superior to the masses, motivated as they presumably were by a more basal and primitive carnality (notions that translated only too easily into the racialized discourses of colonial subjugation). So it was a matter of comportment largely, the conventions for which were established and upheld by the elites themselves. The joking body was the equivalent of Bakhtin's grotesque and/or carnivalesque body. It was the carnivalesque body that became the target of the middle class reformers zeal, and later, the other-ized locus justifying the colonizer's covetous desires. Graeber again: "Essentially it came down to the attempt, largely on the part of the middle class religious authorities [with the support of the merchant middle class], to improve the manners of those below: most of all, by eliminating any traces of the carnivalesque from popular life. . . among their targets [were] 'actors, ballads, bear baiting, bull-fights, cards, chapbooks, charivaris, charlatans, dancing, dicing, divining, fairs, folktales, fortune-telling, magic, masks, minstrels, puppets, taverns and witchcraft.'" As Peter Linebaugh continues in similar fashion, reformation focused on "the elimination of cakes and ale, the elimination of sports, the shunning of dance, the abolition of festivals, and the strict discipline of male and female bodies." Especially female bodies. More or less all forms of merrymaking thus became the target of reform, which sought to replace them with Weber's Protestant work ethic. Importantly, Graeber argues, these competing notions of comportment accompanied the generalization of relations of avoidance as the transition to capitalist social organization required the internalization of social relations based on private property. The body was thus necessarily the first site of conquest. In such a way the body was readied for the emergent regime of labor discipline, a process that complimented the enclosure of the commons. The result, as Linebaugh puts it, was that "The land and the body lost their magics."

There was resistance of course--always there is resistance. In the colonial context this resistance is represented in literature and art by the likes of Shakespeare's Caliban, who in Sylvia Federici's estimation represents "not only the anti-colonial rebel . . . but the world proletariat and, more specifically . . . the proletarian body as a terrain and instrument of resistance to the logic of capitalism." And here the festive body figures centrally. Again, Graeber: "Festivals had once been moments to define a community of equals: now, after they had been pulled out of the fabric of everyday life and challenged from above, the definition began to acquire a whole new meaning. Like Carnivals on the Continent, they came to commemorate a golden age when, it was imagined, equality and physical happiness were not yet things of the past."



So, are we to imagine the contemporary festival as some expression of this same tension? Clearly, though standards of comportment are considerably relaxed today compared with those of the Early Modern period, they still exist in a similar tension between competing ideologies. One element often lending counter-cultural movements their gravitas, after all, is their insistence on subverting conventional ideas of comportment. So are men with long hair, women with unshaven armpits and legs (to use perhaps too trite examples from the U.S. context) equivalent expressions to Bakhtin's carnivalesque or Graeber's joking body? How could they be otherwise? And herein lies the power of the festival, even today, however commodified it may be. I suspect that many young festival attendees are the same individuals who might otherwise be engaged in yet another kind of festival--the festival of resistance. As I drove into the festival and parked the car, while walking back to the camping area I noticed stacked in the back of a pickup truck, backpack frames for giant puppets, a stock feature of contemporary protest events since Bread and Puppet Theatre started using them in the 1960s.



Though LEAF is anything but a subversive event (even if it is one that is heavily policed, not unlike other such festivals, i.e., Bonnaroo), it nonetheless contains elements of subversion, if for no other reason than its genealogy in the lineage of the festive moment. Too, such non-political festivals might perhaps be seen as a kind of muster for their more explicitly political counterparts. How else to account the common presence of giant puppets and people on stilts.