- Title
- Festivals and sense of community in places of transition: the Yakkerboo Festival, an Australian case study
- Creator
- Duffy, Michelle; Mair, Judith
- Relation
- Exploring Community Festivals and Events p. 54-65
- Relation
- Routledge Advances in Event Research
- Relation
- https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781317690856/chapters/10.4324%2F9781315776569-12
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- Introduction: I think it gives the people something to really look forward to. Yakkerboo’s coming, something to work on and everything, and I think it gives them pride in the fact that our town has a great festival. Now when you talk about the town we live in to other people, I think it helps to give them pride. (Yakkerboo Festival committee member, 2013) The underlying assumption that lies behind the festival event is that it functions as a community-building activity. The festival is, as anthropologist Robert Lavenda describes it, 'people celebrating themselves and their community in an "authentic" and traditional way, or at least emerging spontaneously from their homes for a communitywide expression of fellowship' (1992, p. 76). Hence, participation in a community festival is an interactive process that produces a sense of a social reality for a 'located' group identity, and, although a temporary event, the festival has implications for a group's identity/identities that extend beyond this time period and specific geographical location. Embedded within these sorts of ideas about the festival is an understanding of a clearly articulated relationship between place and community, with the festival a means to represent this intersection. Yet there are other processes involved, specifically the ways in which different actors understand and activate ideas about place, and how place and its various constituents (human and non-human) are connected and networked. These frameworks of place point to the ways in which heterogeneous relations of people, processes and materials are important to constituting meanings about a place and community. This also means that the festival is something that activates and is activated by ideas and issues about 'community' identity and 'place' that are already in circulation. We need to acknowledge, though, that there is inequality in any constitution of community and place. As Clarke and Jepson (2011, p. 8) point out, political relations are significant to the creation of a festival because there are particular individuals who are the power brokers of that community, 'those who hold direct power over the festival and its construction'. A community festival is therefore constituted out of a complex set of power relations that nonetheless serve to define notions of belonging.
- Subject
- community; festivals; Yakkerboo Festival
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1356322
- Identifier
- uon:31672
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781138023284
- Language
- eng
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