Review of Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India, by Rebecca M. Brown (original) (raw)
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The riotous carnival that regularly punctuated the ordered life of traditional societies was characterized by the collective suspension of religious norms. The licentious eruption of animal instincts was epitomized by universal laughter that embraced all and spared none. The vernacular mock-brahmin, who violated the very norms he embodies, nevertheless had his counterpart in the jester of the classical theater, standing beside in dialectical opposition to the king as pivot of the socio-cosmic order. The literate, refined, and spiritual ethos of India’s traditional elite remained continuous with, grounded in, and nourished by ‘Rabelaisian’ popular culture. For the carnival is the temporal projection of a more fundamental, all-pervasive, and ever-present dialectic of order and disorder, interdiction, and violation. The ultimate goal of this alternation was the freedom at the heart of Abhinavagupta’s aesthetics. ‘Creative chaos’ within our multiplying conflicts of civilization assumes ...
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This article employs the concept of culture as a consumable resource in visually-mediated global markets. The Festival of India, first hosted in 1982 in Britain, was a unique state-sponsored spectacle that packaged Indian culture as a commodity for Western audiences. Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister took keen interest in the 'visual scheme' of India that was projected during the Festival, simultaneously conscious of her own image as she returned to power after the contentious rule of the 'Emergency'. The article suggests that Gandhi sought to divert negative media attention on her regime by putting on display India's 'soft power' in artistic and scientific fields. It further comments upon the diversity in the reception of the event by various audiences thereby challenging the notion of passivity often attributed to consumers of cultural performance. By examining how Gandhi and her advisors used culture as something 'exportable' to remake her image, the article seeks to place the Festival alongside similar spectacles staged in the early 1980s when Gandhi's leadership faced a crisis of legitimacy, both at home and abroad.
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The Anthropology of Festivals: Changes in Theory and Practice
Public Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque, 2017
Ritual, festival, celebRation, caRnival, holiday, public display eventthese terms and others are used to refer to a variety of public performances. Often the terms overlap. Sometimes they are used interchangeably. In part, this is due to the porous, shifting nature of the events themselves, heavily dependent on context and intended purpose. It is the intention of this essay to examine public performances in order to tease out shared qualities and to set forth ways of apprehending these events in a way that allows us to more fully grasp their purposeful meanings and to articulate ways that they differ. By approaching performance events as carnivalesque and ritualesque, we are able to understand the multiple modes of communication; the simultaneity of joy and anger, of politics and fun; and how "fun" in some contexts equals protest. Carnival, strictly speaking, refers to the pre-Lenten festival that represents an opportunity for sensual abandon in advance of the deprivations of the forty-day period of Lent. This festive occasion is known in several guises and in fact sometimes occurs outside of reference to the Western Christian church calendar: for instance, Fastnacht is celebrated in some Protestant areas after Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent (Tokofsky 2004); and as European colonizers and settlers brought the tradition with them to the New World, it became heavily synthesized with African masquerade traditions, resulting in a New World Afro-Caribbean and South American carnival complex. As West Indian populations in turn migrated to North America and Europe, Trinidadian-style carnival is often celebrated in summer in these new locations (Allen 1999). No longer tied to a Christian calendar and heavily Africanized, these Trinidad-and Rio-styled