Festival

A festival is a device for producing a surge of anima, and the timing named in the definition tells you what it is for. Festivals cluster before life threatening events such as war or winter, when a store is about to be needed, and around the creation of shared animus such as marriage or coronations, when a group animus is being formed. Both cases are about supply rather than celebration. The mechanism is aggregation. A festival gathers many sources at once, music, dance, food, beauty, communion with ancestors, spirits or an extended nation, and those who open themselves to shared anima may successfully create a shared animus out of it. Marsh draws out the diagnostic corollary, that a person with blocked or undeveloped primary anima conduits will quite likely be averse or antipathic to some or all of the elements of a festival, which reads a familiar discomfort as evidence about conduits rather than about temperament. The same technology is used deliberately by institutions. When states or corporations seek to increase morale during times of stress, what they mean by morale is endogroup solidarity, and the bonds created by national or corporate festival-like events will prevent members defecting even under great hardship. Festivals built around traumatic events, funerals and weddings among them, let a wider community help heal trauma and share anima, and Samhain and the Mexican Day of the Dead reconcile debt and credit for earthbound spirits through prayer and offerings.

Durkheim's collective effervescence is the closest existing account, describing the heightened energy of assembled groups and treating ritual as the source of social solidarity, and Victor Turner's communitas describes the same intensity in liminal phases of ritual. Randall Collins built interaction ritual chains on emotional energy generated in gatherings, which is nearer to Marsh's language than anything else in sociology. Carnival theory after Bakhtin reads festival as licensed inversion. Marsh's difference is the store. Durkheim's effervescence produces solidarity as an effect, whereas her festival produces a quantity that can be accumulated ahead of need and drawn down later, which is what accounts for the timing rather than the intensity.