|
|
While setting rites and festivals in opposition to each other, Abrahams also notes that, in noncosmopolitan societies, rite and festival are often joined together. The division between the two types of celebrations is more the result of a modern, marketplace-driven separation of the sacred from the profane than it is an essential, fundamental, or objective difference between the two types of events. Indeed, festivals and rites are “part of the same human impulse the intensify time and space within the community and to reveal mysteries while being engaged in revels” (177). Moreover, despite the tendency to separate sacred and profane occasions, “rites in contemporary culture are still often accompanied by festivities, and festival often has a designating rite at its core” (177). One must therefore be careful in drawing too sharp a distinction between sacred rite and profane festival. These are two terms on a continuum of celebration terminology and not mutually exclusive polar oppositions. And, of course, other terms exist on this continuum.
Measured against these understandings of rite and festival, the five celebrations I investigate could be understood as rites. There is no doubt the five celebrations are traditional in Abrahams’ sense. They have accumulated many meanings and sentiments and often translated meanings into messages and lessons. They emphasize certain values and characteristics of the celebrating communities, and can be understood, in part, as strategies for dealing with current issues and problems caused by changes or disturbances in the world around the celebrating communities. At the same time, these events certainly do create disturbances, in the sense that they interrupt everyday life. Moreover, the five celebrations contain other characteristics of festivals as described by Abrahams. They open “the doors of the community” (“American Vocabulary” 178), inviting others in. Accordingly, they provide an opportunity for the celebrating community to display itself to the outside world by “taking to the streets,” quite literally, and transforming open spaces into festive spaces. Also, Abrahams says, festivals ask the celebrants and audience members to remember and reminisce (181), which each of the five Dutch-American celebrations certainly does. Each of the five is, fundamentally, an occasion for opening the community up and displaying it for an outside audience, and therefore is a festival.