Festivals and Events Culture and Identity in Leisure, Sport and Tourism

Like the 2005 Leisure Studies Association conference, Festivals and Events: Beyond Economic Impacts, which gave rise to this volume, the chapters collected here seek to go beyond the established discourse of festivals and events 'management' to create a more critical and nuanced form of festivals and events 'studies'. A similar shift has been witnessed recently in relation to tourism studies where new critical and cultural approaches to tourism management have given rise to what, in some quarters, has become known as 'critical tourism studies' (Ateljevic, Morgan and Pritchard, 2007).Drawing on established paradigms of materialist critiques, but also embracing elements of more recently developed discourses advanced by poststructuralist writings, these critical or cultural 'turns' have refocused attention from the macro and global to the micro and local and, perhaps even more significantly, to the increasingly complex relations between the global and the local (Aitchison, 2006). This volume contributes to these emerging discourses of critical and cultural tourism studies by examining festivals and events as significant cultural sites and sights that produce, reproduce and rework culture and identity in spaces and places ranging from international tourism to local leisure. The chapters engage with a range of cultural forms embodied within festivals and events that celebrate music, dance, visual art, literature, heritage and food.Within the book analyses of these particular cultural forms are prefaced by two chapters that explore the wider role of festivals and events in developing both national identity and national entrepreneurship through cultural activities. It was an obvious choice to select Jarman's 'Mirror of the nation: The Edinburgh festivals and Scottish national identity', as the opening chapter to the volume. Providing an expanded insight into the cultural politics of the city that hosted the conference behind this volume, Jarman offers a historical critique of the development of the Edinburgh International Festival in relation to the portrayal of Scottish National identity.By examining the complex development of the festival since its inception in 1947 Jarman highlights the ways in which diverse identities have been portrayed and debated through a variety of festival formats. He concludes that a major benefit of the festival has been that a 'truer understanding of Scotland was possible, because Scottish identity was not an Act of Parliament, but a complex discussion of what united and divided its communities'. In chapter 2 'Cultural identity and festivity: generating Singapore through citizenship and enterprise in events activity' Foley, McPherson and Matheson examine the role that festivals and events policy has played in contributing to a wider national cultural strategy designed to promote longer stay tourism by international visitors and a more cohesive sense of identity among national citizens.Foley et al. argue that a fusion of west and east has been managed and marketed in a deliberate strategy to create Singapore as a destination offering a 'sanitised' Asian experience that uses 'events to create an image that generates 'self-orientalisation' via commoditisation and interpretation within festivity strategies'. Chapter 3 presents the first of a series of case studies of cultural forms and their role in the formation of identity. Music is perhaps the best established cultural form organised into festivals and chapters three and four both explore the Casa de Mateus Music festival in northern Portugal.In chapter three Correia and Rebelo examine the influence of a set of socio-economic variables on festival participation in 'Attendance at serious music festivals: experience from a Portuguese rural region' and LourenAo and Rodrigues then explore ways of attracting non-participants to the festival in 'The Casa de Mateus Music Festival: public and non-public characterisation'.In chapters 5 and 6 we turn our attenti