The Festive State

Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance

Bibliographic Data

ID2546876
AuthorsAnastasia N Panagakos, Anastasia Panagakos, David M Gu
Year2002
Volume44
Issue2
Pages325
Publication date2002-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeREVIEW
Review ofThe Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance, David M Guss, 2000
VenueAnthropologica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0254-9212 • E-ISSN: 2224-6428
PublisherUniversity of Victoria Libraries (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/25606098
OpenAlexW1588042066
LanguageEN

David M. Guss, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 239 pages (paper).Reviewer: Anastasia N. PanagakosUniversity of CaliforniaIn The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance, author David M. Guss explores how festivals, rituals, andcultural performances exemplify ways in which culture and identity become sites of contestation in Venezuela. This point is well illustrated in opening vignette of book in which people of small village of Catuaro are faced with a most unusual dilemma. Over years people from area had formed strong bonds with a statue of Dolorosa, or Sorrowful Mary, to whom promises would be made to in return for protection. During an attempt to clean statue, a specialist sent in by government (which had developed an interest in preserving national heritage) discovered that underneath her wig and multiple layers of paint, Dolorosa was actually youthful of San Juan Bautista. At first people of Catuaro panicked, particularly devotees of Dolorosa who had bonded with as a gentle female, not as a male who evoked other feelings and meanings. Much discussion was generated with revelation of transvestite saint including a public meeting at which it was decided that statue's true nature as San Juan Bautista must be honoured. For Guss, intervention of government-sponsored specialist represented a phenomenon happening all over country--that interference by tourists, media, political parties, or discovery of oil was now common in even most isolated of villages and that so-called local traditions were now a part of national and even global interests.Guss frames his ethnography by beginning with a discussion about cultural performance and how dramatizations allow participants and observers to understand, criticize and change world in which they live. Like other scholars studying cultural performance, such as Mary Crain and David Cahill, Guss recognizes importance of a discursive approach that acknowledges how actors use events to debate, challenge, argue and negotiate. Thus cultural performance becomes a field of action where both elites and oppressed can express competing claims and where media have potential to become an authority. Guss pinpoints beginning of a national interest in folk culture to 1947, after Venezuela's first democratic election, when of was held to celebrate new nation's unique heritage. Juan Liscano, director of National Folklore Service, which had been established year before, gathered sixteen different groups from rural communities throughout Venezuela to perform. The performers who until this time had only considered their music and dances as acts of religious devotion found themselves transformed into active participants of a tradition. For urban audiences festival changed way they viewed Venezuela and as Guss writes, the folklorization process had begun...permanently suspended between worlds of ritual obligation and national spectacle, these festive forms now began to negotiate a new and complex reality (p. 20).With this brief history of Festival of Tradition and others with similar themes, Guss devotes remainder of his book to four independent case studies depicting how political, commercial and cultural interests have melded to promote certain festivals that contest and reinvent Venezuelan identity. The four case studies are Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, seemingly indigenous Day of Monkey, production and dissemination of cultural by a multinational tobacco company, and mestizo ritual dances of Tamunangue. While each case represents one facet of Venezuelan culture with a distinct history and cultural meaning, Guss's narrative highlights features common to all four sub-plots; be it contested history of actual performance, appropriation of tradition to serve national and corporate interests, or how very nature of these diverse performances exposes contradictions inherent in Venezuelan identity--African, European, indigenous, Catholic, colonial, slave, poor, elite, urban, rural, Black, White or Brown

Ethnic group · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropology · Cultural and political discourse analysis · Gender Studies · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Politics and Society in Latin America

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