The Feast: sense and fullness in the experience of finite

Slovenský Národopis, 2017

What is it that makes rites important in our individual and community lives? What can this role be? Is it to make occasions more festive? What makes an occasion festive? Does celebrating mean to live with rites and use rites? How does the use of rites or rituals make an occasion more festive? What is the role of the feast and celebration at the level and in the life of the individual and the group (family, settlement, state, nation)? Why is it that we can feel our times to be an age of festivals (=special feasts)? What does this increase mean? These questions already point to the possible direction for answers, namely that rites can be the vehicles of important elements of content that make them necessary in all ages and all social systems: this content characteristic at the same time also emphasises the social role and function of rites. At this point the world of rites and feasts is connected to the levels of public life, power and politics. Rites and feasts are in constant moveme...

Interrupting Time: Feast as Play and Art, in D. Džalto (ed.) Religion and Realism, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge 2016, 159-175.

Managing and Developing Communities, Festivals and Events, 2015

Liutikas D. Indulgence feasts: manifestation of religious and communal identity // In: Managing and Developing Communities, Festivals and Events, editors; A. Jepson, A. Clarke, 2015. P. 148-164. Palgrave Macmillan.

ESTONIA AND POLAND. Creativity and tradition in cultural communication II. Perspectives on national and regional identity. Liisi Laineste & Dorota Brzozowska & Władysław Chłopicki (eds.), 2013

Calendar feast system, the changes within the system and factors responsible for them present an important research topic in the study of the contemporary societies in the Soviet-influenced area. This paper elaborates on the trends of invention and reinvention of feasts in the first Republic of Estonia (1918–1940), after World War II (in the Soviet Socialist Estonian Republic) and since the re-establishment of the independent Republic of Estonia (1991). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the structure of feasts in Estonia underwent profound changes due to modernisation and urbanisation. The article describes some important feasts (disguise traditions, student feasts, Christmas, etc.), and invented holidays like for example Mother’s Day. In the 1920s, a system of state, national and public holidays was created; after 1946, national feasts established during the first republic were banned, Christian feasts were excluded from public holidays, and invented feasts were inserted from the common communist calendar (Women’s Day, Red Army Day). In the 1960s, fairs, international days dedicated to certain professions (fishermen, miners, etc.) and public festive days emerged. The 1990s saw media-propagated newcomers (Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween), and a reinvention of Walpurgis Night (volbripäev) and Mother’s Day. The present study of the calendar feast system reveals that 1) the celebration of feasts follows a nonlinear model of behaviour (as seen in continuing celebration of unofficial feasts among one’s family), 2) the contemporary system of feasts is highly institutionalised; the celebration of official feasts is canonised, and 3) the importance of church feasts has constantly decreased under the influence of the secularised society. Continuously introducing new holidays which aimed at constructing identity and fostering humane values was characteristic of the 20th century. Significantly, people yearned to take part in entertaining holidays and festivities. The demand brought about village days and local gatherings, including fairs, festivals, celebrations of new holidays, and other events.

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law (JETLaw), 2021

Festive behavior is a basic characteristic of human life, as evidenced from ancient times. Humans need to use ceremony and ritual in specific places and times to mark their triumphs, joys, and sorrows. However, some categories of individuals are harmed because they cannot celebrate the most important highlights of their lives through such festive feasts: prisoners, mariners at sea, soldiers on the frontlines, workers subject to the pressures of ungenerous employers, towns occupied by oppressive invaders, and impoverished individuals who cannot afford customary celebrations, among others. When feasts and festivals are restricted, societies lose well-being, communities lose identity, and individuals lose freedom of expression. This normative Article helps fill a gap in the legal literature, which overlooks feasts as a right based on reason, some constitutions, laws, and international human rights. This Article calls for formal recognition and robust and coherent protection of a general right to feast, in constitutional law and in the international framework of human rights. This Article provides three kinds of foundational arguments—factual, rational, and legal—explaining why feasts must be protected, and what must be protected.

2019

International Review of Mission, 2020

This article explores the symbol of the feast, as proposed by the 2012 World Council of Churches’ affirmation Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL). The feast is introduced as an appropriate hermeneutic tool to account for the multi‐layered and dynamic reality of human life in the presence of others and in the presence of God. Interpreting the feast, together with TTL, as a symbol of the liberation and reconciliation of the whole creation and of the celebration of life in response to the outreaching love of God, the article reflects on some contemporary theological voices arguing that God’s invitation to the feast of God’s kingdom is a central element of Christian existence. Such feasting is, among other things, characterized by the dynamics of facing, the presence of the other, the awareness of human corporeality, and the particularization of the other that can overcome the idolatrous power of death. Entering this conversation, the present article will argue that the symbol of the feast can helpfully be understood in its two‐fold dynamics of promise and resistance. While giving assurance about the transformation of all reality in the coming reign of justice and peace, the symbol of the feast, with its emphasis on inclusiveness and equality, also empowers people to resist all life‐denying forces. Walking with the rest of the creation “together towards a banquet,” Christians are thus enabled, it will be asserted, to discern and actively live their vocation.

RAPHISA REVISTA DE ANTROPOLOGÍA Y FILOSOFÍA DE LO SAGRADO, 2019

Using the guise of a simple supper of commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of a charismatic Protestant pastor, who had gathered around him a community of devoted disciples in a small village in Norway, Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen shows us a banquet in which, through the food prepared with the eye of an artist, the senses are awakened for the first time to a kind of experience where what is corporal and what is spiritual cease to be at odds with each other. Thus, a reconciliation of a lost unity between the body and the soul, matter and spirit, is celebrated and achieved. From this first step, with which the fundamental internal fragmentation is overcome, the other levels of unity (unity with others, with the cosmos, and with God) occur in a chain sequence, so to speak. As in all religious situations, there occurs here the coming together of two orders that seem unreconciliable: the temporal and the eternal, the limited and the infinite, the profane and the sacred. The mediator between both orders is Babette, who takes on a genuine sacerdotal function. However, there is an unexpected inversion, and paradoxically what is profane and mundane comes to the rescue of what is spiritual and sacred.

Archaeologists often interpret the physical evidence for large-scale consumption of food and beverages as the remains of feasts that successfully enhanced personal reputations, consolidated power, or ensured community solidarity. However, ethnographic accounts illustrate the potential for "feast failure”: people may or may not contribute, may or may not come to the feast, may or may not be satisfied, and may or may not repay the feast-giver in labor or obeisance. Because they involve so many logistical and material components before, during, and after the event, feasts almost always exhibit some shortcomings. These failures paradoxically provide both hosts and guests the opportunity to demonstrate their managerial skills, a factor that would have been increasingly important with the development of multiple and overlapping groups at the inception of social complexity. The use of failure-prone events as testing grounds for social integration also may explain the increased amount and diversity of feasting behavior over time.

In Nietzsche’s thought in the middle to late period concerning the relation between life, knowledge and art, the festival or feast forms an intersection of several issues of importance. Focusing on ‘Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft’ (FW) and the late Nachlass, this paper will attempt to trace the meanings that are attached to the festive aspect of art in order to provide a fresh angle on Nietzsche’s philosophical endeavour to reconfigure the central values of modernity.

Building on Erwin Goffman’s (1974) notion of frame, the article approaches the ‘festive’ as a socially produced conceptual structure by means of which people organize their perception of and participation in the world. Picking up on the epistemic threats initially developed in early French sociology, it explores the ability of different elements and forms of the ‘festive’ to act as mediator for social change.

Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 2011

The traditional ritual year which was characterized by Christian feasts for centuries on one hand, and the cosmological, agrarian (economic), individual, family, and local communal holidays on the other, has been rapidly changing between 1945 and 1956 during the first Socialist/Communist years. A new system of the ritual year was established according to the new ideology and power situation: the so-called Socialist ritual year. It was characterized by international, Soviet and national-communist feasts, refusing the religious holidays. Some softening were introduced only after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The main Christian feasts were again accepted (Christmas, Easter). This Socialist period with its Socialist feasts lasted for 45 years when in 1989/1990 the legal power system was changed. After the elction in 1990 the totalitarian Socialist ideology with its symbolic holidays has mostly disappeared. New national feasts were created e.g. the memorial day of the 1956 revolution which was a prohibited alternative feast during the Socialist period. Patriotic holidays have regained their importance. The symbols of the feasts have been totally changed. The traditional Christian ritual year has been partly restored, but in a rather secularized society. Christmas, Easter have been commercionalized. Local feasts have emerged which serve first of all the restoration of the civil society and express the local identity. The paper deals with the process of changes in Hungary showing the role of the holidays and the ritual year in society.

Lyubomir Kutin, 2015

Festivals create and promote works of art in the conditions of globalization, mobility of artists and exchange of cultural values. Furthermore, festivals are forums of debating about the life of modern society. Through festivals human, financial and material resources are being mobilized and governed. They are the subject of transnational, state, regional and local policies. Festival events actively contribute to the development of cultural and creative industries and as such they are part of the local economy.

The World of Festivals, 2018

Why “The World of Festivals”? Because answers are sought of the question what leads to the multiplying number of festivals in Bulgaria and abroad. On the other hand, an attempt has been made at clarifying the festival events which create their own autonomous world, comparatively barely rationalized by the contemporary liberal arts, public administration and the very organizers. A similar multi-faceted task is unachievable in the modest volume of the edition, but it systematizes a large part of the ideas shared on different occasions during the last years. Part of the ideas are presented thesis-like and would justifiably cause disagreement. In this case, it is more important to outline problematic fields which give ground for debating. The presented text aims at orienting the contemporary reader in the galloping diversity of different in kind aesthetic holidays. Furthermore, it is intended to support the work of experts, organizers, managers of festivals for whom the finding of competent, sustainable and plausible solutions is a serious challenge in their routine work.

DAIS: The Aegean Feast, Proceedings of the 12th International Aegean Conference University of Melbourne, Cemtre for Classics and Archaeology, 25-29 March 2008. Aegaeum 29, 2008

What does architecture have to do with feasting? As an embodied social practice occurring in lived time, the context of the feast is spatially defined by cultural modification of the natural and built environment. These modifications are recursive as they are both shaped by and shape human behavior through the orchestration of physical activities. This paper is inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodiment, and Georges Bataille’s concepts of heterology (the world of otherness and the sacred), purposeful formlessness (architectural excessiveness manifested in complexity), and the accursed share (that which is made sacred through sacrifice, excessive consumption, and perceived as wasteful in a modern world driven by use-value). The concepts of both of these philosophers can serve to illuminate the role of architecture and sacrifice in Bronze Age feasting activities. My long-time interest in and focus on architecture, stems from an interest in the role architecturally defined spaces played in how people in the past carried out their daily routines and lived their lives. Then as now, buildings and other architectural features created the context in which people organized their lives, and thereby formulated their identities, thus architecture frequently defines the context of feasting, an embodied and sensuous experience. This paper will highlight the architectural contexts of feasting in the Aegean, but will ultimately focus on the site of Myrtou-Pighades in Cyprus. Myrtou Pighades contains features associated with ritual sacrifice: tethering blocks, a sump, drainage, and an altar. These features find a modern counterpart in the feasting area of the Samaritans at Mt. Gerizim, a site where the traditional practice of ritual sacrifice illuminates the role of the excessive and intangible in feasting rituals: heat, fire, sound, large-scale consumption, pollution and purity, and overwhelming aromas.