ABSTRACT
The relatively scarce social science material on contemporary festivals is on the whole dominated by a fundamental narrative of falling from grace with respect to pre-modern (temporally or conceptually) festivals. Implicitly or explicitly, it draws on master narratives of modernization as secularization and disenchantment, or, even more critically, commodification and one-dimensionality. When not exclusively focused on ‘impact evaluation’ and management issues, this literature has mainly posited a directly proportional relationship between the growing professionalization, commercialization and basically popular success of festivals and their becoming both less critical and less significant in terms of their role within wider social life. The exponential growth of festivals in recent decades and their enduring relationship with their location and, in particular, with urban settings lies behind a still timid, but growing, academic interest. However, this is still hardly attuned, if not in open contrast, to the substantial literature on traditional, often rural, festivals, developed especially by anthropology and folklore studies, which instead conceives of festivals as organic expressions of so-called traditional societies and platforms for the representation and reproduction of their cultural repertoires and, thus, identities.
