Festival Tourism

Verbal Performances Ladakh Festival

by Valerio Simoni

CELEBRATING THE EDGES OF THE WORLD: TOURISM AND FESTIVALS OF THE COAST AND SEA

by Gudrun Helgadottir

co-authored with Anna Karlsdóttir and Philip Long

Entertainment Tourism: Musicals at the Stratford Festival in Canada

by Lauren Acton

Festivals and Community Development chapt final

by Allan Jepson

Community Involvement in Festivals: Exploring Ways of Increasing Local Participation

by Constantia Anastasiadou

Co-authored with Phil Rogers published in Event Management 15(4)

Despite the existence of measurement indicators for the social impacts of festivals, there has been limited research... more Despite the existence of measurement indicators for the social impacts of festivals, there has been limited research on how communities feel part of and contribute to the festival experience. This study examines how festivals involve local people and identifies ways of appraising and widening community participation. To this end, the organizers of four community-based festivals in Edinburgh were interviewed and a focus group discussion featuring members of the public with a community interest was held. By combining relevant literature with the primary research findings, a framework to assess community involvement in festivals is proposed consisting of five indicators: involvement of schools; volunteering opportunities; participation in decision making; accessibility; and business cooperation. After further development and testing, the proposed framework could help organizers, councils, and tourism bodies improve their understanding and identify better ways of involving local people in the festivals that impact on their communities.

A study of stakeholders in reference to the production of performing arts festivals: the case of the “Music Village”.

by George Zifkos

Zifkos, G. (2011) 'A study of stakeholders in reference to the production of performing arts festivals: the case of the “Music Village”'. M.A. dissertation, University of Leeds.

Festivals are dependent entities which are brought about and sustained by individuals or groups of stakeholders who... more Festivals are dependent entities which are brought about and sustained by individuals or groups of stakeholders who perform - collaborate and compete - towards the attainment of their own objectives. Festivals, thus, as “synergistic group processes” have recently been at the centre of interest among scholars in the field of events/arts management, in particular, the study of their stakeholders. Many of these studies, however, have been theoretical and rather descriptive, lacking organisational modelling. The present study aims to develop a conceptual framework, as well as a stakeholder network model, in relation to actors involved in the production of performing arts festivals. A case study will be employed in order to identify and categorise the stakeholders of the Music Village festival as well as explore their relative importance, from a managerial perspective, as a tool to draw meaningful implications for festival management research.

- Konsola D., Karachalis N. (2009), “Arts festivals and urban cultural policies: the case of medium sized and small cities in Greece”, Cultural Policy and Management Yearbook 2009, pp.51-63, Istanbul Bilgi University Press, Boekman Publications, Amsterdam - Istanbul (ISSN/ISBN:978-90-6650-095-2)

by Nicholas Karachalis

La gestió dels festivals musicals amb finalitat turística a Catalunya

by Francesc González Reverté

Draft. Co-authored with Oriol MIralbell

Managing music festivals for tourism purposes in Catalonia (Spain)


The purpose of this study is to... more Managing music festivals for tourism purposes in Catalonia (Spain)


The purpose of this study is to assess the touristic potential of music festivals in Catalonia. It is an opportune goal because even though this region is experiencing an important increase of new festivals and cultural events, there’s a lack of adequate coordinating and guiding tourism policies
The data was gathered with a survey to managers of music festivals that provided information about their management structure and economic results. The study findings are the result of an analysis done with a statistical multivariate technique and constructing indicators of event economic feasibility and tourism specialisation Data reveals the coexistence of two different types of festivals in Catalonia, depending on their cultural or touristic orientation, and with clear differences in their management style. Both types have a professionalized management structure and an economic self-sufficiency when compared with the rest of Catalan cultural events, so they can be considered as an asset for regional tourism development. Nevertheless some problems are detected in management practices that should be improved when implementing a specific tourism event policy.
The research has built a unique event data base that can be useful for tourism public administration in decisions’ taking. The paper suggests that local and regional administration should consider music festivals and cultural events, in general, as excellent resources to create new tourism products. Some of the characteristics of festivals like the important potential as tourism attractions; their cultural identity or the economical success, are critical assets to their high potential in local tourism development. These findings should justify a more resolute public policy of events and music festivals in Catalonia.

Key words. Events, Culture, Music festivals, Catalonia, Regional development

Socio - Cultural Impacts and Festival Tourism .

by Pinky Jacob

Presented at ICLBH 2011 at Annamalai University, a joint paper by Dr. Suja John and Pinky Jacob

Tourism worldwide is gaining popularity. Tourism is used as a tool for synergizing conservation of Biodiversity and... more Tourism worldwide is gaining popularity. Tourism is used as a tool for synergizing conservation of Biodiversity and also community development. Festivals and events can help promote tourist destination and attract tourists. There is an extensive literature and research done on tourists but very few on local residents and its socio-cultural as well as environmental impacts due to tourism activities. This paper tries to brings forth the impact of tourism in a destination and also the ways in which the local residents or the community plays a major role in achieving sustainable development in that place .
Keywords: Namdapha eco-cultural, socio-cultural, local residents, Festival tourism, sustainability

Spectacles of Ethnicity: Festivals and the Commodification of Culture among Louisiana Cajuns

by Carl L Bankston

co-authored with Jacques Henry

The impact of festivals on the promotion and communication of a city: A comparative study of Turkish and Swedish Festivals 

by Solmaz Filiz Karabag

Karabağ S.F., Yavuz M.C. and Berggren C. (2009),

The Role of University Student Volunteers in Festival-based Public Engagement

by Eric Jensen

Published by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, University of Cambridge and University of Warwick

The growth and increasing popularity of science and arts festivals around Britain is only possible with the help of an... more The growth and increasing popularity of science and arts festivals around Britain is only possible with the help of an army of willing, but unpaid university student volunteers. Research for the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) reveals that despite the lack of remuneration, 92% of students surveyed say that they would volunteer again and 75% believe that the skills and experience they got from volunteering will benefit them in their future careers.

The research was conducted by Dr Eric Jensen at the University of Warwick working with Nicola Buckley of the University of Cambridge and explores the role of university students in festival-based public engagement. A total of 155 student volunteers and festival-organisers were questioned about their experience of student volunteering across science and arts festivals.

The findings show that UK universities are active supporters of science and arts festivals for the public.  Festival organisers reported that the enthusiasm and expertise of volunteering students and staff comprised the most valuable aspect of engaging with universities in delivering their festivals.

Two-thirds of festival organisers work with universities and more than half (56%) are given access to university premises free of charge. For 60% of festival-organisers the benefit of working with a university includes access to a wide range of expert speakers and artists, and for the majority (69%), the primary benefit is access to human resource in the form of unpaid student volunteers.

The majority (55%) of festivals surveyed operated with just five paid members of staff.  Seventy-five percent of the jobs performed by student volunteers provided some interaction with the public such as meeting and greeting, manning stands or discussing science, art and other topics with publics. 

Sophie Duncan, Deputy Director, NCCPE said: “Festivals are an excellent introduction to public engagement for university students and offer experiences and skills that will benefit them throughout their careers. The majority of volunteers in our sample are post-graduate students, some of whom will go on to be researchers. With impact now part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the value of publicly-funded universities in the spotlight, it is increasingly important for academics as well as universities to embrace public engagement.  Hopefully what we are witnessing is a new generation of researchers, lecturers and future vice-chancellors that are introduced to public engagement early in their careers and remain open and enthusiastic about the mutual benefits it can bring.”

The most challenging aspect of using student volunteers in festivals is the high level of training required. A number of festival organisers have had to adjust their expectations of student volunteers’ prior practical knowledge, and now provide training at a fundamental level.

Lead researcher Dr Eric Jensen at the University of Warwick commented: “It is important for both universities and funding bodies to understand that the provision of volunteering opportunities within festivals is resource-intensive. Despite how it might seem, student volunteers are not free labour. If they are to be used most effectively staff time, training and resources are required and these activities require funding and careful planning and attention.”

Festivals, Tourism and Social Change: Remaking Worlds (edited book)

by David Picard

co-edited with Mike Robinson

This book explores the linkages between tourism and festivals and the various ways in which each mobilises the other... more This book explores the linkages 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.

"Public interest anthropology, political market squares, and re-scripting dominance: from swallows to ‘race’ in San Juan Capistrano, CA"

by Kathleen Adams

Author Posting. (c) Taylor and Francis, 2011.
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Taylor and Francis for personal use, not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, Volume 3 Issue 2, July 2011.
doi:10.1080/19407963.2011.555457

This article explores a disturbing irony of certain touristic festivals and heritage sites: although these festivals... more This article explores a disturbing irony of certain touristic festivals and heritage sites: although these festivals and sites tend to draw heavily on the language of shared heritage and community, the dominant narratives and cultural symbols
embodied in these venues sometimes celebrate more traditional and problematic‘racial,’ ethnic, and gender hierarchies. Via a case study of the annual swallows festival held in the California Mission town of San Juan Capistrano, this article offers an illustration of the value of embracing a public interest anthropology (PIA) framework for identifying and addressing the hidden racisms underlying some heritage tourism sites. Moreover, the article suggests that the political market square metaphor for conceptualizing tourism festival management could
be productively reframed and paired with a PIA approach to facilitate more inclusive, color-blind approaches to developing tourism policy.

Rendez-vous en ville ! Urbanisme temporaire et urbanité évènementielle : les nouveaux rythmes collectifs / Let' meet in the city ! Temporary urbanisme and event sociability : new shared rhythms

by Benjamin Pradel

My Ph.D memory in pdf / texte complet de ma thèse en pdf

Si la métropole est polychronique, l'isolement d'un de ses rythmes permet de nuancer les théories de la modernité... more Si la métropole est polychronique, l'isolement d'un de ses rythmes permet de nuancer les théories de la modernité liquide et de la ville en continu. À travers l'étude diachronique de trois événements festifs métropolitains à Paris et Bruxelles, nous proposons une lecture de l'histoire des villes par ses temps partagés, une description des mécanismes par lesquels les rythmes sociaux émergent et une analyse du rôle qu'ils jouent dans la production de l'espace et de la société. Réinterrogé par le concept de rendez-vous collectifs, les rythmes sociaux urbains apparaissent comme une co-production entre un urbanisme temporaire et une urbanité événementielle. Ces deux éléments forment le couple explicatif du rôle spatial et social des rythmes événementiels dans la métropole. Les institutions municipales instrumentalisent l'urbanisme temporaire pour signifier des unités du temps social qui permettent d'organiser le rassemblement et de produire matériellement du lieu. L'urbanité événementielle est le résultat collectif des interprétations individuelles des événements comme signe temporel. Elle produit du lien social et construit un sens commun des lieux.

La répétition calendaire de la rencontre entre l'urbanisme temporaire et l'urbanité événementielle provient d'une part, de la décision politique de maintenir et d'instrumentaliser le rendez-vous dans l'organisation de la métropole, d'autre part de la synchronisation rythmique des individus qui organisent leurs temps sociaux pour participer au rassemblement. La rationalité axiologique qui anime les participants est motivée par la valorisation des interactions de face-à-face et la production de liens sociaux associatifs, dans une société interrogée par la différenciation et la désynchronisation des modes de vie quotidiens. L'individu ne se passe toujours pas de rassemblements rituels, dans des lieux précis et selon des temporalités saisonnières. En dépit de leurs racines historiques profondes, ces rythmes collectifs sont adaptés à la métropole, à la complexification de ses territoires, à l'hybridation de ses représentations culturelles et à l'individualisation de ses temporalités sociales.

Au-delà, le concept de rythme est une théorie de morphologie sociale qui rend compte du fonctionnement des sociétés de façon multiscalaire et dynamique. Cette approche rythmique s'inscrit dans les théories sociologiques intermédiaires qui lient l'individu et le collectif, l'usager et l'habitant des villes et ses institutions, la morphologie spatiale et temporelle de groupements humains de toutes tailles. Le fait métropolitain, :influençant et influencé par l'individu et le global, constitue une échelle mésociale heuristique pour l'analyse des sociétés modernes.

Mots clés : métropolisation du temps, rythme social, rendez-vous collectif, urbanise temporaire, urbanité
événementielle

Let' meet in the city ! Temporary urbanisme and event sociability : new shared rhythms

The city is polychronic. We qualify liquid modernity theory and the twenty-four hour city model by isolating one of its rhythms. Based on a diachronic study of three festive urban events in Paris and Brussels, we propose a new reading of urban history through planned gatherings, a description of the mechanisms by which social rhythms emerge and the role they play in building urban space and society. The planned gathering concept is applied to urban social rhythms, which are seen as the product of an interaction between temporary urbanism and event sociability. Institutions instrumentalise temporary urbanism to signify units of social time, and implicitly plan gatherings by producing a onducive physical place. Event sociability is the collective result of individual interpretations of this sign, which produce social ties and create a corresponding social place. These places become periodic through political decisions to reproduce the sign, as well as individuals' efforts to organize and synchronize their time to participate. The resultant planned gatherings are in turn instrumentalized to organize the metropolis.

In a society whose groups are increasingly differentiated and desynchronized, face-to-face interaction and the production of discretionary social ties are highly valued. Individuals apply value rationality and thus continue to participate in ritual, seasonal gatherings at fixed places and times. Despite historical continuities, these rhythms are specifically modern in that they have adapted to the contemporary city's territorial complexity, cultural hybridization, and idividualized temporality. Using the semantic duality of rhythm (flowing /periodic) we outline a more general theory of social morphology which provides a multiscale, dynamic account of societies, covering interactions between the individual and the collective, inhabitants and institutions, the spatial and temporal patterns in human groups of varying size. The mesosocial metropolitan scale is situated between the indivual and the global. Keywords: metropolization of time, social rhythms, planned gatherings, temporary urbanism, event sociability

The Festival As Carnivalesque: Social Governance and Control at Pamplonas San Fermin Fiesta

by Xavier Matteucci

If interested in the full paper, please request a copy.

Using empirical data from a questionnaire survey of residents and visitors attending the 1998 San Fermin fiesta in... more Using empirical data from a questionnaire survey of residents and visitors attending the 1998 San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona, Spain, this article offers a critique of the contemporary construction of festivals as interpretive devices. Informed by the work of Bakhtin, this article makes the case that festivals should be understood as carnivalesque inversions of the everyday, deployed to maintain and reinforce social order and, thus, the discipline of bodies. This is achieved, it is argued, by creating "liminal zones" in which people can engage in "deviant" practices, safe in the knowledge that they are not transgressing the wider social structure they encounter in everyday life. It is suggested that the attraction of visitors is crucial, in providing a "cover" for this activity, as well as a conduit for the gradual legitimation of new and revised social values. The article concludes by arguing that this need for tourists (local and outsiders) is both recognized and embraced by residents and visitors alike, with neither fraction naive enough to believe that authenticity resides in representation, or even cultural (re)production.

Music festivals and local identities

by Paolo Magaudda

co-authored with Marco Solaroli, Jasper Chalcraft and Marco Santoro; in European Arts Festivals: Strengthening cultural diversity, Luxembourg, Office of the European Union, pp. 57-67.

Sound makes places, and as organised sound music contributes to the sonic organisation of place. Some sounds, some... more Sound makes places, and as organised sound music contributes to the sonic organisation of place. Some sounds, some music genres, make places more than others. Think of folk or ethnic music. As they emanate from shops, cars, or radios, the sounds of folk and traditional music genres typ- ically demarcate neighbourhoods, cities, even whole countries, by signalling that these places ‘belong’ to a specific cultural space (Stokes 1995). Also life-style subcultures often work in this way, that is, by demarcating places in different urban settings. Venues for youth are often char- acterised by the loud music associated with their subcultures, which in this way reclaim certain urban places as their ’natural’ habitat (Bennet 2000; Connell and Gibson 2002). In sum, we can say that music works as a cultural tool in the construction of locality, in the domestication of space, transforming it into a place that could be associated with, and claimed to belong to, par- ticular groups – be they age groups, ethnic groups, or social classes. Anthropologists, ethnomu- sicologists, geographers and sociologists have documented how music can help define the cultural ownership of space by ethnic, regional, generational, national and even economically based groups (e.g. Mitchell 1996; Leyshon, Matless, Revill 1998; Connell and Gibson 2002; Krims 2007). We suggest that with respect to place, music works like architecture or public art: while build- ings, posters or graffiti create particular semiotic spaces, loading them with special meanings, music can function as a marker of specific meaningful places inside geographical spaces...
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Here Lies Mr. Farsang: A Magyar Carnival Eulogy in Transylvania

by Colin Quigley

Published in Dance: Tradition and Transmission [Tanchagomany: Atadas es Atvetel], (ed.) Barna Gabor, Neprajzi es Kulturalis Antropologiai Tanszek, Szeged, 2007, pp. 177-217. This 'Festschrift for Laszlo Felfoldi' is hard to find in print.

The Torocko farsangtemetes--the carnival funeral--is an important outlet for relatively uninhibited uncensored... more The Torocko farsangtemetes--the carnival funeral--is an important outlet for relatively uninhibited uncensored commentary on the post-socialist progress of life in the village. It makes explicit the mood of challenge to authority that is performed in the processional parody of authority figures and the social order. The text addresses social tensions both directly and indirectly, with wry humor and self-deprecating irony that make its harsh judgements more palatable.