Heritage and Festivals in Europe

Performing Identities

Ullrich Kockel, Cristina Clopot, Baiba Tjarve, Máiréad Nic Craith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429514982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Heritage and Festivals in Europe critically investigates the purpose, reach and effects of heritage festivals. Providing a comprehensive and detailed analysis of comparatively selected aspects of intangible cultural heritage, the volume demonstrates how such heritage is mobilised within events that have specific agency, particularly in the production and consumption of intrinsic and instrumental benefits for tourists, local communities and performers.

Bringing together experts from a wide range of disciplines, the volume presents case studies from across Europe that consider many different varieties of heritage festivals. Focusing primarily on the popular and institutional practices of heritage making, the book addresses the gap between discourses of heritage at an official level and cultural practice at the local and regional level. Contributors to the volume also study the different factors influencing the sustainable development of tradition as part of intangible cultural heritage at the micro- and meso-levels, and examine underlying structures that are common across different countries.

Heritage and Festivals in Europe takes a multidisciplinary approach and as such, should be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of heritage studies, tourism, performing arts, cultural studies and identity studies. Policymakers and practitioners throughout Europe should also find much to interest them within the pages of this volume.

Chapters 1, 2, 3, 10, 11, and 13 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1Heritages, identities and Europe

Exploring cultural forms and expressions

Ullrich Kockel, Máiréad Nic Craith, Cristina Clopot and Baiba Tjarve

Traditional arts practices and festivals have attracted increasing and diverse attention in the European context since policymakers discovered ‘culture’ as a resource in the 1980s (see, e.g., Kilday 1998). Their impact on their respective communities of practice, modes of production and exchange value in contemporary European society is under the spotlight from various angles within the newly emerged field of ‘festival studies’, which is deeply connected to policy issues (Frost 2016). However, much of this interest is instrumentally concerned with revenue potential, leaving key concepts, such as heritage, identity and indeed Europe, defined in rather vague and often contradictory terms (Kockel, Nic Craith and Frykman 2012; Logan, Kockel and Nic Craith 2015; Kølvraa 2016; Lähdesmäki 2016; Whitehead and Bozoğlu 2017). Moreover, the number and range of events labelled as ‘festival’ is growing (Frost 2016: 569), requiring a broader perspective on performances of heritage and identity.

The present volume arose from a research programme that set out to examine, from a critical heritage perspective, how the European project (Lähdesmäki 2011) has been manifesting itself in terms of policy, values, heritage, and performance of traditional arts. Empirically and theoretically concerned with both popular and institutionalised practices of heritage making, the programme has addressed especially the gap between discourses of heritage at official – including European – level and actual cultural practice, often informal or unofficial, at the local and regional level. Researchers have explored in particular heritage festivals – broadly defined – as sites for the reframing of collective memory and the reinterpretation of the notion of a common European heritage. With reference to the Olympic Games, MacAloon (1984: 1) claimed that festivals are ‘occasions where as a culture or society we can reflect upon and define ourselves, dramatise our collective myths and history, present ourselves with alternatives and eventually changing ourselves in some ways while remaining the same in others’. And, as Fabiani (2005: 64) noted, ‘[f]‌estivals are always crowded with argumentative people, who disagree about many things but who hold at least one belief in common: that the festival is the archetype of public space, where physical closeness and a right to speak define the primary conditions of collective life’. In that sense, heritage festivals are opportunities for citizens to negotiate, articulate and transform their European identity (Fligstein et al. 2012; Kaina and Karolewski 2009) at local level. Given tourism’s major and growing economic role, and its sociocultural as well as environmental impacts, several contributors to this volume consider heritage festivals as tourism events.

Cultural traditions, being part of cultural heritages, are significant factors that shape local, regional, national and European identities. From the late 1950s, Bausinger (1961) and others have turned the ethnological searchlight from the disappearing world of the European peasantry as the guardians of tradition and heritage towards contemporary and emerging cultural forms and expressions. Among other factors, demographic transformation through international migration and ageing established populations, the commercialisation and commodification of traditional lifestyle elements in the course of globalisation, and IT developments, including social media, have affected the continuity of traditions. The ‘heritage boom’ from the 1980s onwards has raised awareness of the importance of cultural resources in a broad sense, although much of this has shared the intuition of a ‘salvage ethnology’ concerned solely with the preservation of heritage items (Kockel 2002). Meanwhile in many European countries, cultural communities and cultural policymakers look for policy strategies and measures for how to develop cultural traditions, safeguard intangible cultural heritages (ICH) and ensure their sustainability for future generations (Nic Craith, Kockel and Lloyd 2019). Beyond this, there has been growing interest in the development of ‘heritage futures’ (Nic Craith and Kockel 2002; see also Holtorf and Högberg 2013), that is, new forms and expressions of tradition and heritage. The capacity of what the ethnologist Hamish Henderson called the ‘carrying stream’ (see Bort 2012) of tradition, to sustain and regenerate cultural heritages, arguably rests as much in its innovative power as it does in its potential for conservation (Kockel 2008). As ecological contexts (Frost 2016) for the making, unmaking and remaking of group identities, ‘festivals can be seen as political formations open to multiple uses both from above and below’ (Leal 2016: 594). The contributors to this book examine the different factors influencing the sustainable development of tradition as part of ICH at different levels and trace underlying common structures. Focussing on case studies of selected regions and cultural groups across Europe, they explore increasingly interconnected heritages and provide examples of heritage-making that simultaneously look backwards and forwards, at the same time addressing the complexities of heritage in contemporary Europe from different theoretical positions.

Most of the research presented here focusses on festivals and performances of different types and reflects the interdisciplinarity that has become somewhat of a hallmark of heritage research (Waterton and Watson 2015). The term ‘performance’ has acquired many possible meanings and applications in the arts, humanities and social sciences. A performance may be a specific event that involves presentation of rehearsed, often artistic, actions, such as a play or an opera, or it may refer to any kind of event involving a performer and a spectator, from a tennis match to a shamanic ritual. But performance is also a complex and contested concept that helps us to understand social and cultural processes. McKerrell and Pfeiffer (this volume), engaging with scholarship on performance from different disciplines, explore various scholarly approaches to performance and the cultural work performance does, from theatre and performance studies to ethnomusicology. They focus on performance as an embodied act of communication between performers and audiences that facilitates an affective exchange with effects that reverberate beyond the moment. Their analysis illustrates how performances as a means of meaning-making, in which meaning is co-created between performers and audiences, provide opportunities to explore questions about the social and cultural role of imaginative interpretations of ICH. In a sense, all chapters in this collection emphasise the performative aspects of festivals and of the issues and tensions arising from communities’ efforts to transmit and transform practices, values and traditions through them. Performance and transformation of heritage are treated in the present collection as cultural forms and expressions of identity in general, and a European identity of sorts in particular. The key terms and underlying concepts directing and demarcating the research – heritage, identity, Europe – thus offer a useful way of framing the collection.

1.1 Heritage

Leal (2016: 594f.) analyses ‘heritage making as group making’. Few discussions of heritage festivals can proceed without delimiting the scope of the slippery concept of heritage (see Logan, Kockel and Nic Craith 2015) and its limitations in current use, especially the increasingly contested separation between tangible and intangible heritage (Nic Craith and Kockel 2015). Moreover, institutionalised heritage-making practices (Harvey 2001) and grassroots efforts (Nic Craith 2012; McFadyen and Nic Craith, this volume) that might at times stand against such top-down approaches (Hafstein 2012; Taylor 2016), need to be problematised because ‘[t]‌he latter have become more salient under the current regime of “heritagisation” promoted by UNESCO’s category of Immaterial Cultural Heritage’ (Leal 2016: 594).

With its various conventions, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO 1954; 1970; 1972; 2001; 2003) has drawn attention to different dimensions of heritage. While much academic, policy and professional interest in heritage concentrates on material culture, and this therefore inevitably features throughout this book, our focus is on ICH. UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage suggests that ICH is particularly evident in the following domains:

• oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage;
• performing arts;
• social practices, rituals and festive events;
• knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;
• traditional craftsmanship.

While all of the above feature in case studies throughout the book, the notion of ‘festivals’ provides a focal point that brings together different aspects of ICH, with an emphasis on performance and on the issue of the European-ness of these heritages. Who owns the heritages that are celebrated at these festivals? How does one strike a balance between various local and translocal domains of ownership? How are the interests of tradition-bearers protected at the European level? Such tensions reflect the debate generated by the European Union’s motto of ‘unity in diversity’, a term that can be interpreted in multiple ways. For example, a study of the European discourse of German expellee associations (Kockel, this volume) indicates the co-existence of conflicting versions – parallel versus integral – within the same historical heritage context. On the one hand, this might be regarded as an affirmation of diverse expressions of ICH, which ultimately remain at the local level. On the other hand, where policy supports one or other of these versions, it might be regarded as appropriation of expressions of identity by the centre for its own ends; this may wrest ownership of ICH from the local level just as much as commodification can (Kockel 2007).

A key case study in the research programme from which this book arose is the Song and Dance Celebration tradition in the Baltic States, designated by UNESCO as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity in 2003. The research covered several aspects of this festival: cultural, economic, social and governance. Muktupāvela and Laķe (this volume) develop a quantitative analysis of the potential of festivals for national branding. Two forms of how international recognition may be developed are outlined: special strategies created either by experts more or less spontaneously and national identity brands stemming from traditional cultural symbols that are important for people on the ground. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Baltic States have attempted via purposeful, state-financed policies to ‘brand’ their nations. During this process, the use of informal symbols, such as the ‘singing nations’, so characteristic for the Baltic region, was deliberately avoided. Nevertheless, this symbol, which is rooted in the Song and Dance Celebration, has remained an important and influential agent from cultural, social, ideological and economic points of view.

Driven in part by an increased awareness of tourism benefits, the appeal of heritage festivals has increased exponentially across Europe (Testa 2017). It is now widely accepted that festivals represent occasions for identity-building (Frost 2016) and that they can foster belonging (Kuutma 1998). Reflecting on identity as a binary process, with self-identification involving the drawing of boundaries in relation to ‘others’ (Barth 1969), Clopot and McCullagh (this volume) examine identity processes of performers and participants at heritage festivals. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two distinct locations, they analyse these processes by taking a comparative view of two festivals celebrating migrant heritage. A Scottish fire festival related to Viking heritage, Up-Helly-Aa in Shetland, is contrasted with the multicultural Romanian festival Proetnica. Whereas in the former, ‘othering’ appears set across gender divisions, the latter illustrates the difficulties of negotiating majority/minority relations even in the context of a festival designed to promote pluralism and diversity.

Heritage is often associated with nostalgia, an issue that ‘in many ways [has] been a persistent and even notorious issue within the field of heritage studies from its very inception’ (Campbell, Smith and Wetherell 2017: 609). Regarded as inaccurate and sentimental, it has been shunned as a research topic and considered inappropriate for framing heritage interpretation. Drawing on data collected at the Cappadox festival in Turkey, research by Taheri, Gannon and Olya (this volume) offers a different perspective on heritage and nostalgia. Grounding their study in a perspective of interactive sociality, they reflect on the instrumentalisation of nostalgia (Clopot 2017) for enhancing belonging. While it is acknowledged that festivals and cultural events are powerful, interactive venues that have the potential to stimulate feelings of nostalgia, they serve as key sites and moments for individuals to engage in ‘sense making’, ‘self-exploration’, ‘self-discovery’ and ‘yearning for a past’ through interactive sociality. Taheri, Gannon and Olya draw attention to the ‘transformative’ and ‘nostalgic’ nature of festivals and events as ‘part of the varied embodied semiotics produced when dealing with “the past”’ (Campbell, Smith and Wetherell 2017: 609).

The promotion of local and regional ‘heritage’ as a resource especially for tourism has been linked to the rise of neo-liberalism, which sees local culture and identity as assets if they can be harnessed to provide foundations for social and economic growth in the face of a decline in manufacturing (Kockel 2007). With sustainability of the resource base seen as a growing issue, the utilisation of heritage is supposed to boost rather than deplete the cultural resource base. This, however, provokes questions concerning the character of heritage as a ‘product’ and its relation to ‘tradition’ as a creative process, pointing to the individual as a cultural actor and to issues of authenticity and identity. ‘How can an individual, or even a small group, pretend to express collective feelings?’, asks Fabiani (2005: 54), putting his finger on a key issue of sociocultural agency. While expressed as a challenge to a purely aesthetic representation of the world, his question points directly to the dark heart of populism as much as to struggles for reconciliation through revisioning of heritages and identities (for examples of the latter, see Pfeiffer and Weiglhofer; also Kockel, this volume).

1.2 Identity

The link between heritage and identity has become a commonplace topic (Smith 2006). In anthropological literature, explorations of festivals and identities in general tend to mirror the Durkheimian concern with ‘the relationship between festivals and social cohesion (social cohesion being rephrased as collective identity)’ (Leal 2016: 586). Festivals, in this analysis,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Heritages, identities and Europe: Exploring cultural forms and expressions
• 2 On the relationship between performance and intangible cultural heritage
• 3 Comparative aspects of the Song and Dance Celebration of the Baltic countries in the context of nation-branding processes
• 4 The construction of belonging and Otherness in heritage events
• 5 Nostalgic festivals: The case of Cappadox
• 6 Events that want to become heritage: Vernacularisation of ICH and the politics of culture and identity in European public rituals
• 7 Performing identities and communicating ICH: from local to international strategies
• 8 Memory, pride and politics on parade: The Durham Miners’ Gala
• 9 Sound structure as political structure in the European folk festival orchestra La Banda Europa
• 10 Performing Scots-European heritage, ‘For A’ That!’
• 11 European capitals of culture: Discourses of Europeanness in Valletta, Plovdiv and Galway
• 12 Negotiating contested heritages through theatre and storytelling
• 13 Commemorating vanished ‘homelands’: Displaced Germans and their Heimat Europa
• 14 Afterword: Festival as heritage / heritage as festival
• Index