A festival is a day or period set aside for commemoration, ritually celebrating or reenacting, or anticipating events and seasons—agricultural, religious, or sociocultural—that provide meaning and cohesion to an individual and/or community. They are steeped in tradition and culture, often involving ceremonies or rituals that can be performed by many people over a series of days and which usually include sacred community meals. Festivals are often associated with a specific location, historical or otherwise and can be public or private in nature. Examples include the Rio Carnival or Coachella music festivals.
Traditionally, festival has been seen as a kind of cultural event that is not just about celebration and community but also about re-connecting with the physicality of the natural environment. This sense of ‘community’ has recently come to be seen as wider than just a local ethnic group, geographical region or a shared language and practice and is now more generally about groups and activities, interests, passions, hobbies and lifestyles. This has meant that the programming and content of these cultural ‘events’, if they are to be considered as a type of festival, must reflect and celebrate this expanded sense of community and its practices.
One important thing that can be said about the nature of festival is that it tends to be highly participatory, in the form of games and contests that recur at regular intervals. These games and contests have been described as a form of ceremonial sport because they are regulated by rules, they involve the performance of roles, and they produce an outcome that is either binary (winners and losers) or ranked in a hierarchy by rank.
When we think of a festival we often think of a music festival or an art exhibition but there are also events that are focused on other kinds of culture like food, beer, gardening and even hot air balloons. These festivals are often very social in nature and based around practices of PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity and Respect) radical inclusion and gifting. There is a strong sense of community amongst these festivals and this can be seen in the fact that they often have ‘festival families’ that look out for one another at the events and in the way that they are run.
The nature of these festivals has long been of interest to scholars from the fields of comparative religion, anthropology and sociology. In more recent times they have also been the subject of the work of philosophers and anthropologists concerned with the study of religion in everyday life. This is because, as these scholars have recognised, the festivals of all cultures are an important dimension of human life and that their study enables us to see the common threads that link them together. They offer a glimpse into the universality of human behaviour and our capacity to create meaningful and beautiful things that can give a sense of purpose and belonging to human beings. In this way, the study of festival can reveal the deep underlying meanings of all religions and other cultural phenomena.