‘Night falls but no one sleeps’: Festivals and Cultural Theory

Article by Thom Absalom. Edited by Zara Barua. Additional Research by Liz Goodwin.

Libanius (c.314-394), the Antiochene teacher of rhetoric, once described the festivities of New Year’s Eve in Antioch:

‘Night falls but no one sleeps. The common people engage in songs, wild dancing, and mocking jests. They do this even in the commercial district, barging in, pounding on doors, shouting in mockery. They make it impossible to sleep. And some people are angry with what they hear, but others consider it an occasion for laughter, and no one present is so sour and austere that he censure these goings-on: even he who is too self-controlled to laugh breaks out laughing.’

At first glance, this description of festivity does not seem too far away from what you can witness outside the Student’s Union most nights of the week! However, contemporary witnesses to the mischievous and carefree actions of the citizens recognised that the festivities played an important social role. The fifth-century thinker Isaac of Antioch observed that the festival ‘renews the ranks of the city.’

Many historians, anthropologists and sociologists interested in festivals and other celebrations have usually interpreted them in one of two ways. The first is the idea of the ‘safety-valve’: that by breaking social norms and behaving in ways that were inappropriate for the rest of the year, people could release their anxieties and grievances against their social superiors. The outrageous behaviour allowed at these festivals was a way of uniting a community, giving it a shared sense of identity, but also festivals were implicit in maintaining the social hierarchy.

The other line is that festivals and other celebrations were radical and socially oppositional. Stephen Justice’s work on the Peasant’s Revolt of the summer of 1381 in England has looked at the revolt in the context of seasonal festivals. He focused on the midsummer festivals, the Corpus Christi feast, and the meaning of the sacraments to the peasants. The midsummer festivals involved burning bonfires in the middle of village streets as part of a ritual of communal solidarity before the harvest season began, which would require the co-operation of all members of a community. The peasants instead burnt written records of their obligations to their landlords in great bonfires all across the southeast of England. Justice has argued that this represents the co-opting of festival rites as a form of social and political protest.

If we jump now several hundred years and several thousand miles away, to colonial North America, we find similar acts of protest, subversion and community solidarity in what Ira Berlin has termed ‘Negro election day’. In the pre-independence northern colonies, Creole (Afro-American) and newly arrived African slaves celebrated their West African heritage by reversing social norms. They elected kings, governors and judges. One observer in Newport said that ‘All the various languages of Africa, mixed with broken and ludicrous English, filled the air, accompanied with the music of the fiddle, tambourine, banjo, and drum’. This role-reversal and general celebration has been seen in terms of uniting black slave communities.

From this brief survey of festivals across three continents and more than a thousand years, some similarities emerge. All three involved entire communities or social groups. The events that occur demand co-operation. The subversion of established social order is common and behaviour normally frowned upon is accepted with little complaint. Given that the festivals discussed above come from three different cultures – one Hellenic and pagan, the second European and Catholic, and the third a mixture of West African and post-Reformation Protestant European – the similarities between them need some sort of explanation.

The analysis of festivals as means of social or political protest or as ways of binding communities is, perhaps, adequate for understanding specific chronological and regional events, such as Justice’s analysis of the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. However, the commonalities between festivals in very different times and places speak of a need for a more comparative approach to the writing of the history of festivals, and indeed, the history of culture in general. I am not trying to imply that there is any kind of ‘universal’ human culture that causes us to celebrate life in such a way. I follow Joan-Pau Rubiés in saying that culture is an historical abstraction; it is something we develop over time, not something we are born with. Festivals cannot be then labelled as part of a ‘universal’ human culture.

However, no culture is homogenous or independent from other cultures (any modern cultural historian could tell you that). Cultural history over the last few decades has seen the meeting of different cultures as not one of dominance and subjugation, but as transmission, exchange and the creation of new cultural forms at the meeting points. Cultural change and exchange is constantly occurring and there are regional variations in culture – for example, in our country, the north/south divide in pronunciation of certain words. For a better understanding of culture – of what it is, how it develops – scholars should perhaps focus on the mechanisms of transmission and exchange and on the commonalities between cultures – for example, in the means by which communities celebrate life and communal solidarity.

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