ABSTRACT
Despite the rhetoric and mythologies which surround them, folk festivals, horse races and car-racing ultimately address a finite and specialized community of interest. The economic goals of the state are promoted, though with varying success, as the personal and individual goals of all citizens, of both community and society, of the nation-in-concert. The Show is an occasion for blurring the difference between town and country, for negating their oppositions and celebrating an ideal of the formalized and officially defined nation as community, as the 'natural' construction of a people whose differences are less important than their similarities. The Show is presented as a co-operative endeavour on the part of all the 'ordinary' people of the nation. Both the Woodchop and the Show identify, celebrate and continually mythologize a culture and an ideology which keep alive the ideals of community and equality.
