The Dutch American Identity: Staging Memory and Ethnicity in Comm ...

To this point, I have been describing the foci of this study as “festivals” because that is the term their organizers and actors use: Holland Tulip Time Festival, Pella Tulip Time Festival, Orange City Tulip Festival, Edgerton Dutch Festival, and Fulton Dutch Days Festival. That having been said, other terms may just as effectively describe these five events. When compared to the terminology set out by Roger Abrahams in “An American Vocabulary of Celebrations,” each of these events certainly is a celebration, in that “people prepare and anticipate in common how they will act and feel” (“American Vocabulary” 177). It is less clear, however, if these five Dutch-American celebrations are best described as “rites” or “festivals” in the way Abrahams understands these terms. Abrahams characterizes “rite” and “ritual” as events that take place in sacralized spaces, whereas “festival” and “festivity” are events that take place in the playful and profane domain (175). More specifically, says Abrahams, “rites” are celebrations that

Through this reenactment, rites emphasize continuity and confirmation of certain values or characteristics of the celebrants. “Festivals,” by contrast, are “detached from confirmation and transformation” and “are often practiced ‘for the fun of it.’ ” Festivals, furthermore, “commonly operate in a manner that confronts and compounds cultural norms, and therefore operate for the moment in a way antagonistic to customary ritual confirmation” (177). Rites, according to Abrahams, are usually attached to ceremonial occasions, such as “marriages, funerals, or migrations,” whereas festivals “operate during those very times when the life of the group seems most stable, in the “flat” times of the year” (177–178). In sum, a rite reacts to sociocultural disturbances and emphasizes the community ties and continuity; a festival creates a disturbance and temporarily disrupts community ties and continuity (175–181).