The Edible Monument considers the elaborate architecture, sculpture, and floats designed for court and civic celebrations in early modern Europe, including popular festivals such as Carnival and the Italian Cuccagna. Like illuminations and fireworks, ephemeral artworks made of food were not well documented and were difficult to describe because they were perishable and thus quickly consumed or destroyed. In times before photography and cookbooks, there were neither literary models nor iconography for how food and its preparation should be explained or depicted. Drawing on books, prints, and scrolls that document festival arts, elaborate banquets, and street feasts, the essays in this volume examine the mythic themes and personas employed to honor and celebrate rulers; the methods, materials, and wares used to prepare, depict, and serve food; and how foods such as sugar were transformed to express political goals or accomplishments. Although made for consumption, food could also be a work of art, both a special attraction and an expression of power. Formal occasions and spontaneous celebrations drew communities together, while special foods and seasonal menus revived ancient legends, evoking memories and recalling shared histories, values, and tastes. This book is published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Getty Research Center from October 13, 2015, to March 23, 2016.

America's Favorite Holidays explores how five of America's culturally important holidays - Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Thanksgiving - came to be what they are today, seasonal and religious celebrations heavily influenced by modern popular culture. Deftly distilling information from a wide range of sources, Bruce David Forbes reveals often-surprising answers to questions about each holiday's traditions. Was Christmas always as commercialized as it is today? Is Thanksgiving a religious or secular holiday? When did we begin trick-or-treating on Halloween? Appealing and insightful, America's Favorite Holidays satisfies our curiosity about the origins of our holidays and the fascinating ways in which religion and culture mix.

!Viva Mexico! !Viva la Independencia! Celebrations of September 16 examines the Independence holiday, exploring how this most important public festival in the civic calendar has given Mexicans a rich tradition of national celebration that is part creation myth, part official pomp, and part popular merrymaking. The editors examine how Independence Day festivities have provided a medium for informal education, sketching on the canvas of the public sphere national values, glorifying specific historical events and individuals, and celebrating government plans and achievements. Since 1823, this festival has served as an essential contribution to the conversion of Mexicans to common ideals, as people across the country express their national identity with the cry, '!Viva Mexico! !Viva la Independencia!'

One of Us Is Lying meets Lord of the Flies meets Fyre Fest in this wickedly addictive and funny YA thriller. Rafi Francisco needs something really special to put her true crime podcast on the map. She sets her sights on River Stone, the hearthrob musician who rose to stardom after the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend. Rafi lands herself a ticket to the exclusive Fly Fest, where River will be the headliner. But when Rafi arrives on the Caribbean island location of Fly Fest with hundreds of other influencers and (very minor) celebrities, they quickly discover that the dream trip is more of a nightmare. And it's not just confronting beauty gurus-gone-wild and spotty WiFi. Soon, Rafi goes from fighting for an interview to fighting for her life. And, as she gets closer to River, she discovers that he might be hiding even darker secrets than she suspected . . .

"The entire town is disguised," declared a French tourist of eighteenth-century Venice. And, indeed, maskers of all ranks--nobles, clergy, imposters, seducers, con men--could be found mixing at every level of Venetian society. Even a pious nun donned a mask and male attire for her liaison with the libertine Casanova. In Venice Incognito, James H. Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He draws on a wealth of material to explore the world view of maskers, both during and outside of carnival, and reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history. This vivid account goes beyond common views that masking was about forgetting the past and minding the muse of pleasure to offer fresh insight into the historical construction of identity.

The Glastonbury Festival is the largest performing arts festival in the world, situated in the mythic Vale of Avalon, England. Now in its thirty-ninth year, up to two hundred thousand festivalgoers from all over the world will attend the festival over a four-day period.

Venetia Dearden has been documenting the people of the Glastonbury Festival since 2004. With the help of a professional portable photographic studio, her aim was to single out individuals and groups to capture the motives and personas that make up the fabric of Glastonbury. The result is an intimate and unique set of portraits that includes festivalgoers, stall holders, charity workers, organizers, and many of the celebrity performers. The huge volume of portraits generated over four years brilliantly captures fleeting moments of serenity amidst the surreal, swirling insanity that is Glastonbury.

The selection of performing artists in the book includes: Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, Paolo Nutini, James Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Jay-Z, Shakin' Stevens, Jimmy Cliff, Joan Armatrading, Duffy, Richard Ashcroft, Paul Weller, The Who, Manic Street Preachers, Goldfrapp, Martha Wainwright, and many more.

Venetia Dearden, born 1975 in Somerset, England, has studied anthropology at Edinburgh University and photojournalism at the London College of Printing. She has documented social and humanitarian issues, producing features and facilitating workshops as a consultant for "Photovoice." Her work is published worldwide in such publications as "Vogue," "Wallpaper," "The Sunday Times Magazine," "W Magazine," "Harpers Bazaar," and "Stern," among many others. In 2008, she published her first book, "Somerset Stories Fivepenny Dreams" (Kehrer Verlag), portraying the region where she grew up.

It's party time in Europe! Bestselling author Rick Steves explores the best festivals in Europe, from the Running of the Bulls in Spain to Carnival in Venice. There will be no museums! And no art galleries! Just Europeans having lots of fun. Across Europe, festival traditions go back centuries and are filled with time honored pageantry and ritual. Entire communities hurl themselves with abandon into the craziness. We'll careen all over Europe: the Palio horse races in Siena, the Highland games near Edinburgh, the colourful masquerade of Carnival in Venice, Slovenia, and Luzern, Easter festivities in Andalucia, Tuscany, and Greece, the springtime April Fair in Sevilla, Bastille Day in Paris, the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Oktoberfest in Munich, and Christmas markets and traditions in Nurnberg and Switzerland. With fascinating insights, rich history, and vivid photos, this great gift book captures the spirit of Europe's rich and fun-loving heritage. Hang on to your party hats!

This book deals with post-war culture and society and the Edinburgh Festivals. The Edinburgh Festival is the world's largest arts festival. It has also been the site of numerous 'culture wars' since it began in 1947. Key debates that took place across the western world about the place of culture in society, the practice and significance of the arts, censorship, the role of organised religion, and meanings of morality were all reflected in contest over culture in the Festival City. This book explores the 'culture wars' of 1945-1970 and is the first major study of the origins and development of this leading annual arts extravaganza. This is the first critical history of the first 25 years of the world's biggest arts festival. It uses festivals (and key theatre ventures) in Edinburgh as a lens for understanding wider social and cultural change in post-war Britain. It draws upon a range of archival sources, including original oral history interviews with key players in the arts scene of Edinburgh and beyond.

Book XIV of Martial's epigrams, the Apophoreta, derives its name from the presents hosts gave 'to be carried away' by their guests at the Roman Saturnalia. The book comprises poetic couplets designed to accompany such presents and arranged so as to describe, alternately, the gifts of rich and poor. It is a unique source of information about one of the principal Roman festivals and about many of the everyday objects of first-century Roman life; yet until now it has attracted scant attention. This edition, while dealing comprehensively with matters of literary, linguistic and textual note, concerns itself also with the social context of the Apophoreta and the gifts it describes. It is a rich source of information not only for specialists in Latin epigram and the literature of the Flavian period, but also for historians and archaeologists, and indeed anyone with an interest in the life and customs of Imperial Rome.

Each year in the weeks preceding the deprivations of Lent, the Andalusian region of southern Spain erupts into madcap depravity, during a February carnival of riotous celebration. Carnival features subversive songs, burlesques and skits, transvestite parades, and public persecution of communal offenders, along with mournful elegies and heartfelt panegyrics. In this lively book, anthropologist David D. Gilmore explores the meanings of Andalusian carnival, focusing particular attention on the songs, or coplas. He offers translations of many of these carnival productions and mines the rich vein of oral literature for a new understanding of the ways in which the Andalusian people interpret and negotiate their world. Not only does carnival provide many insights into ritual behavior and folk art in Spain but, Gilmore shows, the festival also offers similar insights into rituals of revelry and disinhibition elsewhere, whether mumming, Mardi Gras, Fasching, or Walpurgisnacht. In a fresh perspective on carnival, he reveals that in Spain the lower classes mix abuse of elites with a surprising degree of respect and even veneration. Gilmore concludes that Andalusian carnival is less about revolution or politics per se than about the inescapable ambivalence of all human feeling.

This publication commemorates the 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh and collects views and perspectives on the way the Folk Revival has evolved over the past sixty years. 'Tis Sixty Years Since: The 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh and the Scottish Folk Revival -Sixty years ago, in 1951, the first Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh at Oddfellows' Hall kick-started the modern Scottish Folk Revival. It was presided over by Hamish Henderson and recorded by Alan Lomax. Sixty years ago, the School of Scottish Studies was founded at the University of Edinburgh. The 10th Carrying Stream Festival in November 2011, organised by Edinburgh Folk Club in cooperation with the School of Scottish Studies and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, celebrated these anniversaries.

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.

Main Street America is kicking up its heels—and you're invited to the party!

Goodbye sprawl-and-mall—hello downtown! Long-neglected town centers are coming to life once again, and the buzz is back on main streets all across the country. Come celebrate their rebirth with this one-of-a-kind guide to over 700 local festivals and events nationwide. From the weird and wacky to the wild and wonderful, the fun starts with Main Street Festivals. Which will you do first?

Enter a rubber duck race . . . Join a "walk of art" scavenger hunt . . .

Find hot-rod heaven . . . Play cow patty bingo . . .

See antiques and heirloom displays . . .

Discover "bullistic" bull riding . . . Go to a hog slopping contest . . .

Eat black dirt cake . . . Hear blues, bluegrass, and brass bands . . .

Watch a Little Miss National Peanut Pageant . . .

Inside you'll also learn where to find: an onion rodeo, cornstalk shooting, a beautiful baby bagel contest, arts and crafts demonstrations, the perfect-pierogie cookoff, a slugburger fest, quilting exhibitions, farmer olympics, and more. . . . There's something for everyone in Main Street Festivals.

'The entire town is disguised', declared a French tourist of eighteenth-century Venice. And, indeed, maskers of all ranks - nobles, clergy, imposters, seducers, con men - could be found mixing at every level of Venetian society. Even a pious nun donned a mask and male attire for her liaison with the libertine Casanova. In "Venice Incognito", James H. Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He draws on a wealth of material to explore the world view of maskers, both during and outside of carnival, and reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history. This vivid account goes beyond common views that masking was about forgetting the past and minding the muse of pleasure to offer fresh insight into the historical construction of identity.

Germany's cultural glory and for a time Germany's political shame: the operatic festival established by Richard Wagner in 1876 is one of the most intriguing phenomena in modern European intellectual history. The oldest and best known of all musical festivals, Bayreuth soon after Wagner's death in 1883 became the center of a reactionary and nationalistic ideological cult. This book is the first to provide a frank and fully rounded account of the institution and the way it operates. The focus of the study is a critical analysis of the performances and productions, brought alive with photographs and sketches of stage settings, conductors, singers, and costumes from 1876 to 1990. Around this artistic history is woven the remarkable story of why, against tremendous odds, Wagner built his famous Festspielhaus and established his controversial festival and of how his descendants have managed to keep it alive. At the same time, the book traces the institution's association with nationalism and racism, its eventual debasement into "Hitler's court theatre," and its postwar liberation from its chauvinist, anti-Semitic past. With its own form of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk-linking art, the personalities of the Wagner family, and German ideological development-this provocative study will be compelling reading not only for Wagner enthusiasts but also for anyone interested in European intellectual history since 1876.

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.

The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil--the devil that dances--turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions." Festive Devils of the Americas" is the first volume to present a transnational and performance-centered approach to this fascinating, feared, and revered character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South America. As produced and performed in both rural and urban communities and among neighborhood groups and councils, festive devils challenge the principles of colonialism and nation-states reliant on the straight and narrow opposition between good and evil, black and white, and us and them.
Each section of this volume opens with regional maps ranging from the Andes, Afro-Atlantic, and Caribbean, to Central and North America. However, festive devils defy geographical as well as moral boundaries. From Brazil's Candomble to New Mexico's dance halls, festive devils and their stories sustain and transform ancestral memory, recast historical narratives, and present political, social, and cultural alternatives in many guises. Within economic, political, and religious cross-currents, these paradoxical figures affirm the spirit of community within the framework of subversion and inversion found at the heart of the festival world.

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.

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.