ABSTRACT
The chapter aims at investigating the role of the festival in shaping and developing some socially manufactured meanings that are adhered to the rituals of the Arabian market street experience. Accordingly, the chapter will explore how Arabian market street festivals are far from being a chaotic set of events, amassing a plethora of accumulated prejudices and cultural objects that tie the Arabian people to their urban space, on social, religious, and political levels. Based on the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer, the chapter will attempt to demonstrate that the recurrence of the festival allows not only the physical immersion of the individual flâneur into the event, but also positions him within an evolving socio-urban discourse and re-asserts his belonging to a larger community of meaning. According to Gadamer, rituals constitute the totality of our acting, thinking, and speaking, embodying, as such, a community’s mutually binding agreements in terms of morals and customs. In other words, rituals, whether in religious, national, or social festivals, remind us that we belong to something ‘larger than oneself’, and that our role in this experience is not one of mere observation but is intrinsically one of sharing and participation. Through the temporal experience of the festival, the urban space presents itself as a physical stage of events and as a mental embodiment of society’s shared values. Based on this proposition, the chapter will cross-examine several cultural artefacts, such as architectural elements, Pre-Islamic poetry, contemporary literature and media productions, that would assist in identifying a ‘texture of reciprocal events’ that led to the development of the Arabian market street’s urban/architectural setting in conjunction with communal rituals and festive events. In other words, the chapter will aim to uncover the methods through which the festival once allowed the development of a genuine socio-urban discourse, and in the consolidation of people’s conception of self and of their respective communities within the boundaries of a specific spatial and temporal space.
