Festivals & Ritual
The obligations of a host
Hospitality customs across many societies impose duties on the host that are far more demanding than politeness, and the reasons are practical.
Festivals & Ritual
What communities mark, and how.
Festivals & Ritual
The gift that has to be returned
Gift exchange looks generous and functions as an obligation system, and the anthropology of it explains a good deal of behaviour that otherwise seems irrational.
Festivals & Ritual
Fire festivals: the ones that survived everything
Communal fires at fixed points in the year persist in places where nearly every other traditional observance has lapsed, and the reasons appear to be practical as much as symbolic.
Festivals & Ritual
Music that is not for listening to
A great deal of the world’s music exists to accompany work, ritual or dance, and treating it as concert material misses what it is doing.
Festivals & Ritual
Weddings: the negotiation, the display and the transfer
Wedding ceremonies across the world contain the same handful of elements because they are solving the same handful of problems, most of which are about property and kinship rather than romance.
Festivals & Ritual
The mask is not a disguise
In masquerade traditions across the world, the masked figure is generally not understood as a person pretending. Something else is present, and the distinction matters.
Festivals & Ritual
Walking somewhere on purpose: what pilgrimage does
Journeys undertaken as an end in themselves appear in most religious traditions, and the routes have shaped economies, languages and landscapes along their length.
Festivals & Ritual
Days for the dead: how communities keep the calendar with them
Annual observances for the dead exist in most societies, and they cluster in the same parts of the year for reasons that are partly agricultural and partly about what a community needs.
Festivals & Ritual
New Year happens all year: how calendars disagree
The year begins in January, in March, in April, in September, and on dates that move — depending on whether a calendar follows the sun, the moon, or a negotiation between them.
Festivals & Ritual
Coming of age: the rituals that make an adult
Initiation ceremonies share a structure that a Belgian anthropologist described a century ago, and the structure turns out to hold across an enormous range of societies.
Festivals & Ritual
Carnival: the season when the rules are formally suspended
Inversion festivals — where servants command, fools are crowned and authority is mocked — appear across many societies, and the arguments about what they are for have run for a century.
Festivals & Ritual
Why harvest festivals cluster, and what they were actually for
Across unrelated cultures, the biggest celebrations of the year fall at roughly the same agricultural moments. The reasons are practical before they are spiritual.