Stonehenge Solstice Festival

In a sociology/cultural geography PhD thesis, Kevin Hetherington (1993:Ch.5) renders Britain's Stonehenge as a significant site in the historical (re)production of 'New Age Traveller' identity.26 Between 1974 and 1984, travellers and other festival participants gathered at this ancient megalithic site on Salisbury Plain to celebrate the summer solstice and participate in a nearby rock festival (ibid:143-4). Hetherington maintains Stonehenge is heterotopic, arguing that there are 'few sites in the world that create such a heteroglossia of interpretation' (ibid:142; see also Hetherington 1996b). Among these, two general views hold sway: Stonehenge as 'order/heritage' (held by the National Trust and English Heritage) or 'mystery/festival' (held by new travellers). For new travellers, the site is 'a place of worship and renewal'. As 'a symbolic site of Otherness, associated with rejected knowledge in the form of Earth Mysteries' (Hetherington 1993:147), the rituals of festival performed there enhance the 'heteroclite' identities of travellers, that is marginal identities that are 'monstrous, anomalous and collage-like in composition' (Hetherington 1996a:43). Festival participants celebrated their identities via rites of inversion and 'enacted' their lifestyle through excessive consumption (Hetherington 1992:87). As grotesque harbingers of uncertainty and discontinuity, sources of pollution and anxiety, the traveller lifestyle was associated with sources of 'risk' to those (including locals) holding to the 'order/heritage' view. Their transgressive life-strategies are thought to have led to the ultimate suppression of their spectacularly utopic 'museum without walls' (Hetherington 1996b).

In this disquisition on marginal space, performance and identity, Hetherington draws heavily upon Victor Turner, and establishes a strong link between heterotopia and what Turner called liminal, or more precisely liminoidal, space-times. Heterotopic spaces are, like liminoidal space-times, both marginal and interstitial. As such, Stonehenge festivals were interstitial occasions occurring at a marginal space, which possessed the effect of reproducing the marginal identities of travellers. For Hetherington, such events are realms of performance, 'offering a carnivalesque and liminoid ethos or theatre of cruelty in which the Otherness and deliberate marginality of the Traveller lifestyle can be performed' (1993:192). Furthermore, such spaces, regarded as 'centres' on the margins for pilgrim/participants, are said to exemplify Turner's 'spontaneous communitas' (ibid:179).27

Hetherington's 'deliberately eclectic' (1993:294) project employed minimal ethnography. Besides extensive documentary research, ten semi-structured interviews were conducted (including five with Travellers in 1991). In defence of this small sample, the author cites the frequent mobility and geographical dispersal of his informants, and his own 'limited financial resources' (ibid). Since festivals, gatherings and protests are not infrequent occurrences, I am not altogether certain why field research should be restricted in this way. As Hetherington's 'participant observation' consisted of 'two and a half days' at the Forest Fayre - 'a small commercial festival organised by some of the Travellers and not exactly a free festival' in 1991 (ibid:292-4) - interviewing a greater number of experienced Stonehenge participants would have added weight to his ethnography.

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