A festival is an event ordinarily staged by a community and which centers on some theme, sometimes on some unique aspect of the community. Often, it involves food and drink and is a public occasion. A festival may also be a religious celebration or a commemoration of important historical events, such as the anniversary of a significant battle or victory.
Festivals occur in almost all cultures, and they are a central element of many religions. In modern culture, the word is often used to refer to an event that centers on music or art, but it can also be applied to other areas of cultural activity. It may also refer to any recurring event of cultural significance, such as a holiday or a fair.
Originally, the term festival referred to the feasts of the gods. As Christianity developed, however, it came to encompass a more wide range of observances. The liturgical calendar of the Church, for example, contains a number of festivals celebrating saints, sacred events, doctrines and other aspects of religious life. Many of these are celebrated in conjunction with a commemoration of the death or resurrection of Christ, although there are a number of other feasts throughout the year celebrating other themes and other Christian beliefs and practices.
The idea of a festival as a public, community-based event that celebrates some particular aspect of the culture has gained increasing popularity in recent years. The festival concept has been applied to everything from local music events to the Olympics, and to major festivals such as Coachella or EDC. There are even festivals that focus on one particular type of food, such as cheese or wine.
In the case of the Estonian festival discussed here, the aim is to present and celebrate folk heritage. Various groups from Byelorussia and Ukraine have been invited to participate in the festival and perform their own traditional songs and dances, seasonal or family customs and rites, as well as folk costumes. All the performers carefully use their native language while communicating with the audience, obviously addressing their own ethnic group.
As a cultural phenomenon, the festival represents a highly structured and semiotically complex series of performance events. It is a socially interactive experience that enfolds both a celebration of tradition and the working out of innovation in the communicative situation. In addition, it is a public event with purposes and motivations that are rooted in the cultural history of the group. According to Beverly J. Stoeltje, a festival is “a cultural system that is scheduled, temporally and spatially bounded, programmatic, characterized by co-ordinated public occasions and heightened occasions of aesthetic expression” (Stoeltje 1992:261). It is this combination of participation and performance which makes the festival an interesting and valuable sociological study.