A01=David M. Guss
african diaspora
afro venezuelan
anthropology
Author_David M. Guss
Category=JBFA
Category=JBGB
Category=JBSL1
Category=JHMC
celebration
ceremony
community
corporation
cultural performance
cultural theory
culture
custom
day of the monkey
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnicity
ethnography
festivals
folk narrative
folk practice
folk tradition
folklore
gender
history
india
mestizo
nationhood
popular culture
public display
public world
ritual
san juan
social theory
tamuangue
tobacco
tradition
Product details
- ISBN 9780520223318
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 02 Jan 2001
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the "uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive," and The Festive State is an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates "the ideology of tradition," combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.
David M. Guss is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and author of To Weave and Sing (California, 1989).
