Festivals, tourism and social change : remaking worlds / edited by David Picard and Mike Robinson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book explores the links between tourism and festivals and the various ways in which each mobilises the other to make social realities meaningful. Drawing upon a series of international cases, festivals are examined as ways of responding to various forms of crisis - social, political, economic - and as a way of re-making and re-animating spaces and social life. Importantly, this book locates festivals in the constantly changing, socio-economic and political contexts that they always operate in and respond to - contexts that are both historical and modern at the same time. Tourism is bound closely together with such contexts; feeding and challenging festivals with audiences that are increasingly transient and transnational. Tourism interrogates notions of ritual and tradition, shapes new spaces and creates, and renews, relationships between participants and observers. No longer can we dismiss tourists simply as value neutral and crass consumers of spectacle, nor tourism as some inevitable commercial force. Tourism is increasingly complicit in the festival processes of re-invention, and in forming new patterns of social existence.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 Remaking Worlds: Festivals, Tourism and Change
• 2 La Cavalcata Sarda: Performing Identities in a Contemporary Sardinian Festival
• 3 Gardening the Past and Being in the World: A Popular Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery in La Réunion
• 4 Becoming All Indian: Gauchos, Pachamama Queens and Tourists in the Remaking of an Andean Festival
• 5 The 'Freedom of the Slaves to Walk the Streets': Celebration, Spontaneity and Revelry versus Logistics at the Notting Hill Carnival
• 6 The Making of Community Identity through Historic Festive Practice: The Case of Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football
• 7 'Days of Radunica': A Street Festival in the Croatian Town of Split
• 8 Enhancing Vitality or Compromising Integrity? Festivals, Tourism and the Complexities of Performing Culture
• 9 Creating the 'Rainbow Nation': The National Women's Art Festival in Durban, South Africa
• 10 Kyrgyzstan's Manas Epos Millennium Celebrations: Post-Colonial Resurgence of Turkic Culture and the Marketing of Cultural Tourism
• 11 The Camp Oven Festival and Australian Identity
• 12 Christmas Markets in the Tyrolean Alps: Representing Regional Traditions in a Newly Created World of Christmas
• 13 The Placeless Festival: Identity and Place in the Post-Modern Festival
• 14 Gay and Lesbian Festivals: Tourism in the Change from Politics to Party
• 15 Mobility, Diaspora and the Hybridisation of Festivity: The Case of the Edinburgh Mela
• 16 Taking Quebec City: Protest, Carnival and Tourism at the Summit of the Americas

Author notes provided by Syndetics

David Picard is an anthropologist (PhD, University of La Reunion, France) and is currently working as a research fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. His research interests focus on the cultural economics of international tourism, especially spaces and forms of exchange between hosts and guests. David's previous research has focused on the transformation of transnational contact zones and strategies of accommodating strangers in the post-plantation context of the island of La Réunion, Indian Ocean.

Mike Robinson is Professor of Tourism and Culture and Director of the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University Leeds, UK. Mike has research interests in the way that festivals are mobilised to animate spaces and re-invigorate societies and in the ways in which tourists encounter and experience festivity within cross-cultural contexts.