Many books exist on various aspects of event management, reflecting growing academic and professional interest, but there has not been a book written on Event Studies until now. As the event management field expands, there is a growth in demand for advanced texts, particularly with a multidisciplinary research and theoretical orientation. Event Studies is the first text to embrace this new direction in the field of event management providing:
* Students and practitioners with an explanation of why planned events are important from a social/cultural, economic and environmental perspective.
* Readers with an understanding of how various disciplines and other professional fields view planned events, and the contributions they make to understanding events.
* Research students with a detailed evaluation of research issues and challenges, and of methodologies and theories applicable to event studies. The bibliography is extensive and numerous research examples are provided.
* Professionals with a tool to expand their knowledge well beyond the art and science of producing events to include the philosophical and scientific foundations of event studies.
For the event management student, and for professionals, Event Studies provides the necessary body of knowledge and theoretical /methodological underpinnings on the subject of planned events.
* The only comprehensive text on event studies, which includes theoretical and methodological discussion
* Provides a detailed overview of published research, an evaluation of research themes pertinent to events, disciplinary perspectives, and identification of research questions
* Provides a framework for understanding andcreating knowledge about special events

With a low rate of immigration and a high rate of interracial marriage, Japanese Americans today compose the Asian ethnic group with the largest proportion of mixed-race members. Within Japanese American communities, increased participation by mixed-race members, along with concerns about overassimilation, has led to a search for cultural authenticity, giving new answers to the question, Who is Japanese American? In Pure Beauty, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain tackles this question by studying a cultural institution: Japanese American community beauty pageants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu. King-O'Riain employs rich ethnographic fieldwork to discover how these pageants seek to maintain racial and ethnic purity amid shifting notions of cultural identity. She uses revealing in-depth interviews with candidates, queens, and community members, her experiences as a pageant committee member, and archival research--including Japanese and English newspapers, museum collections, private photo albums, and mementos--to establish both the importance and impossibility of racial purity. King-O'Riain examines racial eligibility rules and tests, which encompass not only ancestry but also residency, community service, and culture, and traces the history of pageants throughout the United States. Pure Beauty shows how racial and gendered meanings are enacted through the pageants, and reveals their impact on Japanese American men, women, and children. King-O'Riain concludes that the mixed-race challenge to racial understandings of Japanese Americanness does not necessarily mean an end to race as we know it and asserts that race is work--created and re-created in a social context.Ultimately, she determines that the concept of race, fragile though it may be, is still one of the categories by which Japanese Americans are judged. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain is lecturer in sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Do racial minorities in the United States assimilate to American values and institutions, or do they retain ethnic ties and cultures? In exploring the Japanese American experience, Lon Kurashige recasts this tangled debate by examining what assimilation and ethnic retention have meant to a particular community over a long period of time. This is an inner history, in which the group identity of one of America's most noteworthy racial minorities takes shape. From the 1930s, when Japanese immigrants controlled sizable ethnic enclaves, to the tragic wartime internment and postwar decades punctuated by dramatic class mobility, racial protest, and the influx of economic investment from Japan, the story is fraught with conflict.
The narrative centers on Nisei Week in Los Angeles, the largest annual Japanese celebration in the United States. The celebration is a critical site of political conflict, and the ways it has changed over the years reflect the ongoing competition over what it has meant to be Japanese American. Kurashige reveals, subtly and with attention to gender issues, the tensions that emerged at different moments, not only between those who emphasized Japanese ethnicity and those who stressed American orientation, but also between generations and classes in this complex community.

Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women. Exploring the cultural constructions and legitimations that go on during the long process of the pageant, Banet-Weiser depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed. The beauty pageant, she convincingly demonstrates, is a profoundly political arena deserving of serious study.
Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research, and interviews with pageant participants and officials, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" illustrates how contestants invent and reinvent themselves while articulating the female body as a national body. Banet-Weiser finds that most pageants are characterized by the ambivalence of contemporary "liberal" feminism, which encourages individual achievement, self-determination, and civic responsibility, while simultaneously promoting very conventional notions of beauty. The book explores the many different aspects of the Miss America pageant, including the swimsuit, the interview, and the talent competitions. It also takes a closer look at some extraordinary Miss Americas, such as Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America; Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America; and Heather Whitestone, the first Miss America with a disability.

The immensely entertaining history of the rise and fall of an American institution, the medicine show

The festivals of the Athenian sacred calendar constitute a vital key to classical Greek culture and religion. Erika Simon sets out here to explicate those complex and often obscure festivals. By careful marshalling of a variety of proofs from literary, historical, and archaeological sources, she is able to justify some startling conclusions and achieve a comprehensive and truly original synthesis that clarifies, as never before, the probable origins and meanings of the Attic cults.

For one year, Alma Guillermoprieto lived in Manguiera, a village near Rio de Janeiro, to learn the ritual of samba--the sensuous song and dance marked by a rapturous beat--and to take part in Rio's renowned carnivale parade.

Austria's renowned Salzburg Festival has from the outset engaged issues of cultural identity in a country that has difficulty coming to terms with its twentieth-century history. That this is the case was especially apparent in 1999, when the Austrian president opened the festival with a speech attacking its profile under the direction of Gerard Mortier and calling for a return to the ideals of its spiritual founder, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This proved the opening shot in a renewed debate about the direction of the Festival, which is in fact a debate about the identity of Austria itself. The issues posed foreshadowed the uproar that erupted several months later when Joerg Haider's right-wing Freedom Party joined a coalition with the conservative People's Party, wresting control of the government from the Socialists and provoking the wrath of Austria's partners within the European Union. What accounts for the profound intellectual and cultural ambivalences that have characterized Austrian history in the twentieth century?In this highly regarded book, Michael P. Steinberg investigates the goals and meanings of the Salzburg Festival from its origins in the wake of defeat in World War I and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. He focuses on those aspects that reveal with special clarity the interplay between the Festival's history and the larger problems of Austrian and German ideology and identity. At the heart of his analysis is the problem of "nationalist cosmopolitanism," which he sees as a central element of German and Austrian culture from the period of the German enlightenment on. He shows how the Festival sought to embody and extend this paradoxical tradition and, in the Preface to the Cornell Paperbacks edition, explores the latest chapter in the Austrian culture wars. Steinberg's book is at once a brilliant history of an important cultural institution and a work that deepens our understanding of the unstable relationship between culture and politics in Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

From massive raves sprouting around the London orbital at the turn of the 1990s to events operated under the control of corporate empires, EDM (Electronic Dance Music) festivals have developed into cross-genre, multi-city, transnational mega-events. From free party teknivals proliferating across Europe since the mid-1990s to colossal corporate attractions like Tomorrowland Electric Daisy Carnival and Stereosonic, and from transformational and participatory events like Burning Man and events in the UK outdoor psytrance circuit, to such digital arts and new media showcases as Barcelona's Sonar Festival and Montreal's MUTEK, dance festivals are platforms for a variety of arts, lifestyles, industries and policies. Growing ubiquitous in contemporary social life, and providing participants with independent sources of belonging, these festivals and their event-cultures are diverse in organization, intent and outcome. From ethically-charged and "boutique" events with commitments to local regions to subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates touring multiple nations, EDM festivals are expressions of "freedoms" revolutionary and recreational. Centres of "EDM pop", critical vectors in tourism industries, fields of racial distinction, or experiments in harm reduction, gifting culture, and co-created art, as this volume demonstrates, diversity is evident across management styles, performance legacies and modes of participation. Weekend Societies is a timely interdisciplinary volume from the emergent field of EDM festival and event-culture studies. Echoing an industry trend in world dance music culture from raves and clubs towards festivals, Weekend Societies features contributions from scholars of EDM festivals showcasing a diversity of methodological approaches, theoretical perspectives and representational styles. Organised in four sections: Dance Empires; Underground Networks; Urban Experiments; Global Flows, Weekend Societies illustrates how a complex array of regional, economic, social, cultural and political factors combine to determine the fate of EDM festivals that transpire at the intersections of the local and global.

A Mile of Make Believe examines the unique history of the Santa Claus parade in Canada. This volume focuses on the Eaton's sponsored parades that occurred in Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg as well as the shorter-lived parades in Calgary and Edmonton. There is also a discussion of small town alternatives, organized by civic groups, service clubs, and chambers of commerce. By focusing on the pioneering effort of the Eaton's department store Steve Penfold argues that the parade ultimately represented a paradoxical form of cultural power: it allowed Eaton's to press its image onto public life while also reflecting the decline of the once powerful retailer. Penfold's analysis reveals the "corporate fantastic" - a visual and narrative mix of meticulous organization and whimsical style- and its influence on parade traditions. Steve Penfold's considerable analytical skills have produced a work that is simultaneously a cultural history, history of business and commentary on consumerism. Professional historians and the general public alike would be remiss if this wasn't on their holiday wish list.

During the first half of the twentieth century military victory parades in New York became an iconic part of the American cultural memory--ticker tape and soldiers returning to their sweethearts symbolized the joy of a nation at peace. In this incisive new study, Sebastian Jobs approaches these events as political street theater. Focusing on organizers, spectators, and soldiers, Jobs explores each group's participation in the action, as well as the ways in which they interacted with each another. This book also demonstrates how abstract concepts, like the nation-state, were embodied in these events, and how these political performances made an impact on American culture and society.

Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop. Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.

Puck Fair, Ireland's oldest festival, was established by a royal patent in October 1613, granted to the Welsh planter, Jenkyn Conway, of Killorglin. It first became a famous, however, as a result of the parading and display of a male goat, which is awarded a crown and named as the King of the Town. 2013 saw the celebration of Puck Fair's 400 year anniversary, which was promoted and celebrated as part of The Gathering. This book was launched in August of that year, as part of these festivities.

In the summer of 2008, nearly fifty thousand people traveled to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to participate in the countercultural arts event Burning Man. Founded on a commitment to expression and community, the annual weeklong festival presents unique challenges to its organizers. Over four years Katherine K. Chen regularly participated in organizing efforts to safely and successfully create a temporary community in the middle of the desert under the hot August sun.

"Enabling Creative Chaos" tracks how a small, underfunded group of organizers transformed into an unconventional corporation with a ten-million-dollar budget and two thousand volunteers. Over the years, Burning Man's organizers have experimented with different management models; learned how to recruit, motivate, and retain volunteers; and developed strategies to handle regulatory agencies and respond to media coverage. This remarkable evolution, Chen reveals, offers important lessons for managers in any organization, particularly in uncertain times.

To students of Indian Culture interested in tracing the influence of India in the institutions of her Cultural Colonies, as also to Anthropologists, the Religious Festivals and Court Ceremonies, which still remain the most characteristic features of Siamese social life, offer an important field for research. Yet the subject has been little touched by scholars. Therefore a pioneer work of this nature can only be regarded as an attempt to lay a foundation for further studies, and the author hopes that other students-particularly those Siamese possessed of an extensive knowledge of their own literature and customs-may be encouraged to endeavour to fill those gaps which remain in our knowledge of most of the Siamese State Ceremonies. First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.