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At the same time, each of the five is very much concerned with transmitting messages in reaction to changes taking place in the surrounding world, and therefore a rite. Arguably, then, each of these celebrations is a festival, but a festival preoccupied with ritual concerns to such an extent that any meaningful division between festival and rite is frequently blurred to the point of obliteration. This overlap is hardly surprising; again, Abrahams explicitly states that it is common, if not usual, for rites to include festival elements and festivals to include ritual elements (177).
Further complicating the terminological picture, Abrahams provides another term that also accurately describes these five celebrations: “display event” (“Shouting Match” 303). In her study of Lindsborg, Kansas’ Svensk Hyllningsfest, Lizette Graden states that she finds “display event” the most useful term for analyzing phenomena like the Svensk Hyllningsfest (10). The festivals I am studying are very much analogous in form and character to Svensk Hyllningsfest (no surprise, since a Dutch-American doctor familiar with Holland’s Tulip Time Festival was instrumental in starting Svensk Hyllningsfest), and I agree with Graden that “display event” is a useful, and perhaps more accurate, term for analyzing and understanding these festivals. Abrahams defines display events as “planned-for public occasions…in which actions and objects are invested with meaning and values are put ‘on display’ ” (“Shouting Match” 303). Display events “require participation of a substantial group in the preparation and performance and in that they presuppose an audience” (Graden 10). Moreover, a display event “provides the occasion whereby a group or community may call attention to itself?” (Abrahams, “Shouting Match,” qtd. in Graden 10) and wishes to display itself (Graden 10). Yet another overlapping, and equally useful, concept is Don Handelman’s “public events,” events that are “culturally designed forms that select out, concentrate, and interrelate themes of existence—lived and imagined—that are more diffused, dissipated and obscured in the everyday” (15–16).