The Festive State Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance [Paperback]

If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive, andThe Festive Stateis an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates the ideology of tradition, combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined.

In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the neo-Indian Day of the Monkey, themestizoritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.

David M. Gussis Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and author ofTo Weave and Sing(California, 1989).

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Variations on a Venezuelan Quartet
2. The Selling of San Juan: The Performance of History in an Afro-Venezuelan Community
3. Indianness and the Construction of Ethnicity in the Day of the Monkey
4. Full Speed Ahead with Venezuela : The Tobacco Industry, Nationalism, and the Business of Popular Culture
5. From Village Square to Opera House: Tamunangue and the Theater of Domination

Notes
Bibliography
Index

The most important work to come out of Latin Americanist scholarship in years. . . . Festivity presents the cultural arena wherein the power of oneness of a people, and the forces of diversity and contestation, are played outl³(