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THOUGH RARELY a subject of study in ethnomusicology, “festival” as concept and action has been extensively explored by anthropologists and folklorists. To my mind, the available literature divides into two camps: one defines festival as cultural representation revealing deeply held ethos and belief (following the lead of Victor Turner), and the other views it as public display mediating cultural or subaltern expressions or identities that may be ethnic, sexual, political, or any combination of these. This division arises not only from different methodologies but also from distinctive types of festivals. The former festivals tend to be “older,” nurtured over decades or even centuries, rural, and may be religious in tone; the latter tend to be “newer” or in position to accommodate sociocultural change and often intended to reflect popular culture or contemporary life. Before 2001, I placed the Lingsar festival exclusively into the former; I see it now reflected in the latter as well. I suspect that an interaction between poles of concepts like “sacred” and “secular” occurs in most other festivals, as religious festivals “have evident secular implications, and secular ones almost invariably resort to metaphysics to gain solemnity and sanction for their events or for their sponsors” (Falassi 1987:3). This chapter addresses the notion of festival as it pertains to Lingsar, discusses festivals in Bali and Lombok, and situates the Lingsar festival as an event that bridges the two islands and helps to define both. Festivals, particularly those more religious in orientation, are major ritual events and cultural performances that articulate concepts of identity and value. 16 C h a p t e r T w o Festivals and Cultures of Lombok They may involve a single family, clan, congregation, community, or an entire nation, and will embody a number of individual, interrelated rites or ritual performances (liturgies) within their structures. Festivals are closely related to the conception of celebration. When any social group celebrates a particular event or occasion, such as birth, harvest, or national independence, “it also celebrates itself ” and creates “frames” for understanding symbolic objects and behaviors that express culture (Turner 1982:16). Such festivals are generally connected to specific phenomena or experience: the life cycle (birth, marriage, death), work (planting and harvesting), seasons of the year (solstice), religious beliefs (Muhammad’s birthday), upward shifts in social status (potlatch), or shared community celebrations (Thanksgiving). Most kinds of festivals come to be associated with special types of attire, music, dance, food, drink, staging, physical and cultural environment , and sometimes masks and shrines—what Turner calls the “properties” of a festival (ibid.:12). Festivals symbolically restate the arrangement of the natural or social world. These statements, which may be realized as rites within a festival, become memorable and repeatable. Festivals and other ritual events are part of the human impulse to intensify time and space within the community and to reveal mysteries while being engaged in revels (Abrahams 1987:177). Falassi (1987:2) presents an encompassing definition: . . . festival commonly means a periodically recurrent, social occasion in which, through a multiplicity of forms and a series of coordinated events, participate directly or indirectly and to various degrees, all members of a whole community, united by ethnic, linguistic, religious, historical bonds, and sharing a worldview. Both the social function and the symbolic meaning of the festival are closely related to a series of overt values that the community recognizes as essential to its ideology and worldview, to its social identity , its historical continuity, and to its physical survival, which is ultimately what festival celebrates. While secular festivals reveal a culture’s “mood of feeling, willing, and desiring , its mood of fantasizing” (Turner 1987:77), and tend to challenge the normal social order with antistructural behavior, religious festivals tend to reenact a mythic event, make a community “contemporary with the gods” (Eliade 1959:91), and help confirm a sense of primordial order. These festivals underscore the harmonies and continuities of a culture, “emphasizing the wholeness of the world’s fabric,” and the “deepest values of the group are simultaneously revealed and made mysterious” (Abrahams 1987:176–177). They may arise out of shared apprehensions in the face of somatic or social change, provide cultural definitions in response, and define the borders of transitions and transformations. These festivals sometimes rely on divine powers as served (or controlled) by ritual officers to activate the transformations. Although specialists such as priests assume leadership at religious festivals, collective action at some festivals...

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