Akin to new theatre or other contemporary performance arenas, events and cultural productions (e.g. mega-events and multicultural celebrations), in the words of Edith Turner, ConFest may very well have:
taken over the liminal space that belonged to ritual ... [and it may have] freed the community of performance from its mundane bonds, so that a level of symbolic power can be generated, effective in its own right, which feeds back into the social body. (E. Turner 1985:10)
Further to this, I suggest that the ConFest PAZ is a stage for 'the community of performance' to pursue and perfect authentic states of human being. Over the past few decades, it has been apparent that cultural productions, both external and internal to home nations, have become popular destinations for disillusioned 'traveller-tourists' desiring alterity. At such event-spaces, it is said that a lost 'spirit of festivity' (Manning 1983:26), an authentic 'return', may be experienced. Various ACEs, especially ALEs, are unique and diverse manifestations of the westerner's quest for 'the way out', for 'real experiences', for 'natural' rendezvous, sanctity, community. As was related in Chapter 1, since the 1960s, a host of counter-spatial pilgrimage centres have appeared inside the borders of advanced capitalist societies - playing host to popularly desired valuations (play, healing, primitivity, ecology and a sense of belonging in a dystopian world). ConFest is itself a manifestly unique instance of such a centre.
ConFest accomplishes Edith Turner's 'take over', and conditions authentication, in distinctively hyper, carnal and contested patterns. It does not possess a 'performative structure' per se. Not possessing a formal ritual frame with a 'structure of practice' (Kapferer 1983:9; 1984a:195), or a recognisable telos indexing predictable transitions via the successful resolution of contradictions and inconsistencies (as in many passage rites),31 this is an indeterminate threshold of condensed experience out of which there are manifold possible outcomes. ConFest, I argue, is manifestly hyper-liminal - via an organic switchboard device it exposes participants to multifarious alternate embodiments, sacra, TAZs - authentica.
In this final section, I wish to accomplish two concurrent objectives. (1) I will introduce the three modalities of meaningful action by which the liminal self is engaged, thereby excavating the authentica potentiating processes at the heart of the Turnerian paradigm. (2) I will advance upon this paradigm by outlining each modality's unique expression in what is a hyper-performative context.
This is the abandonment of form, the dissolution of fixed categories and the licensed approximation of a predominantly 'subjunctive mood': the 'mood' or 'world' of 'wish, desire, possibility or hypothesis', of 'maybe', 'could be' and 'as if', a mood ranging from 'scientific hypothesis to festive fantasy', the mood of were, in 'if I were you' (Turner 1982c:83; 1984:20-21; 1992:149). This is what Turner has in mind when he says liminality is the depths ('the abyss') 'of pure possibility'; it engenders ludism which could be construed as a playing with otherness, or othering. This re-creative modality is predominant in festivals, especially seasonal/calendar celebrations; such social paroxysms in which the distortion and recombination of familiar symbols and normative behaviour transpire. Events may be characterised by the symbolic inversion and role reversal of Gluckman's 'rituals of rebellion' (1954), the momentary overturning and lampooning of hierarchy in Rabelaisian 'carnivalesque' (Bakhtin 1968), the transgressive paroxysm of sensuality in Maffesoli's 'orgiasm' (1993), or the radical wish for presence and difference in Bey's insurrectionary TAZ (1991a).
In its seasonal/subjunctive atmosphere ConFest permits and conditions alterity. Yet, I will expand on Turner's exposition of play to investigate an on-site alterity that is corporeal and multiple - indeed common aspects of the festival or carnival (which, it should be admitted, were not studied in any depth by Turner). I attempt to redress Turner's neglect of the body and carnality (his 'abyss' of 'pure possibility' was not the 'abyss of the womb'), and address the complications of identification. Therefore, like other ACEs (e.g. Rainbow Gatherings, Aquarius), which encourage the subjunctive, transgressive body, alternate identities are (re)created in a radically indeterminate fashion. In an immediate, sensual space where a profusion, indeed excess, of protean symbolic forms are encountered, appropriated and performed, participants become familiarised with a vertiginous tableau of otherness/othering.
This is the performative reception, exploration and expression of socio-cultural reality, especially the 'sacra' or 'ultimate concerns'. The enactment of 'cultural dramas' inform participants (actors and audience) of society's most cherished symbols, beliefs and discourse. The cultural drama is like a 'ritual frame' (Bateson 1958) or 'metasocial commentary' (Geertz 1972:26), a performative genre facilitating collective inquiry into the historical and daily exigencies, conflicts and contradictions of social existence. Performers become the object of their own subjective awareness. Not merely reflecting culture, they are reflexive or evaluative of their life-worlds. And, through 'collective reflexology', society is imminent. In a discursive socio-cultural event-space 'a society looks honestly at itself', people are encouraged 'to think about how they think, about the terms in which they conduct their thinking, or to feel about how they feel in daily life [and wherein] a given group strive to see their own reality in new ways' (Turner 1984:22). Therefore, performances are themselves active agencies of change, 'representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting "designs for living"' (Turner 1987:22,24).32
ConFest is a multi-cultural drama. It facilitates collective inquiry into the diverse sacra of the ACM via a dense simultaneity of 'ramified' performance genres and venues. Passage rituals, healing rites, community dance and percussion, games and parades, interactive theatre, techno-trance events and entertaining spectacles coincide, and are juxtaposed, to the market-place, workshop exhibitions, demonstrations and educational forums. A festive calendar event, it also features many 'crisis', 'cycle' and affliction/curative rites. 'Events that present' (mirror) and 'events that model' the lived-in world are accommodated here. It is a vast meta-performative school of consciousness.
This is the spontaneous (re)formation of affectual relationships with co-liminaries. Communitas is a social modality within which people inter-relate relatively unobstructed by socio-cultural divisions of role, status, reputation, class, caste, sex, age and other structural niches (Turner 1982b:48). A Latin term meaning 'a relatively undifferentiated community, or even communion of equal individuals' (Turner 1969:96), communitas refers to a feeling of sacred community, homogeneity, and may involve the sharing of special knowledge and understanding - 'a flash of mutual understanding on the existential level, and a "gut" understanding of synchronicity' (Turner 1982b:48). This immediate and 'total confrontation of human identities', occurs between fixed social categories (in liminality), on the edges of structured social life (in marginality) and beneath structure (in inferiority). It approximates a 'religious experience': it is 'almost everywhere held to be sacred or 'holy' [since] it is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency' (Turner 1969:128). It is a 'mood' wherein a high value is placed on personal honesty, openness, a lack of pretensions or pretentiousness (Turner 1982b:48).
Paralleling recent work on pilgrimage and other public events, the reality of the ConFest community challenges a purist definition of 'communitas'. ConFest is a heterotopic counter-community, an alternate social gathering invested with multiple meanings, variously conflictual and complementary, carried by diverse 'constituencies' communing around different centralities clustered under its vast marquee. I question Turner's 'non-sensual' orientation to spontaneous community by exploring the profile and significance of the event's intercorporeality. As a community, ConFest is characterised by (dis)unity. Its constituency is concurrently homogeneous and heterogeneous, it accommodates ideologies of inclusivity and exclusivity, its distinct identity depends upon the classification of similarity and difference, and its contested 'boundaries' are subject to shifting tides of consensus and dispute. Therefore, despite the 'miraculous' realisation of community, I find an unqualified application of 'communitas' naive and problematical.
< BACK
NEXT >
Footnotes
Appendices
Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
References: A-L
References: M-Z
Chapter One Contents
Thesis Contents