Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance

The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance

Guss, David M.

Paperback

AnthropologyMythology & FolkloreGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

ISBN10: 0520223314
ISBN13: 9780520223318
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: Jan 2 2001
Pages: 252
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.68 Width: 6.02 Depth: 8.94
Language: English
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, and The Festive State is 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, the mestizo ritual 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.

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