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Poslední úprava: Mgr. Martin Pehal, Ph.D. (03.10.2019)
Festivals have a unique ability to “allow people to mediate different forms of life crises. This can include anything from the readjustments required through pivotal changes in the life cycle, to the shock of migration, environmental disaster, or revolution.” We now understand that festivals are occasions to collectively and cathartically express not only joy, but the whole gamut of human emotions, from sorrow to piety. Festivals confirm and redefine social roles, enhance local identities, and foster attachment to place by creating cherished memories. They are uniquely poised to establish new ideas, values, and practices, or retrieve forgotten ones. It is a broadly shared assumption that because festivals are public and inherently reflexive, they can be used as catalysts for enacting various kinds of change – festivals are often conceived as creative social tools to be deployed in working a host of social, political and cultural challenges and problems. But we are in need of a better understanding of the general phenomenon of festival creativity and the dynamics an efficacy of festivals as agents of social transformation—festival cultures are often surrounded by big claims for their value, but these claims require theoretical grounding and assessment. Lecturers: Martin Pehal (Charles University) contributions from Barry Stephenson (Memorial University, Canada) Dr. Stephenson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Memorial University (St. John’s, Canada). His research and teaching focus on ritual studies, religion and the arts, and religion-secularization debates. He has published three books and numerous articles, book chapters and reviews. The former co-chair of the Ritual Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion, Dr. Stephenson is co-editor of the Ritual Studies Series, published by Oxford University Press. As a Research Fellow in Charles University’s Creative Lab, Dr. Stephenson is studying Creativity in Contemporary Festival Cultures. |
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Poslední úprava: Mgr. Martin Pehal, Ph.D. (14.09.2019)
The course aims at providing a theoretical framework which will enable the study of various forms of public festivity (“special events”) and expose students to festival creativity and criticism through foundational readings and basic field-work. |
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Poslední úprava: Mgr. Martin Pehal, Ph.D. (14.09.2019)
This is an advanced and partly a performatively experimental course (you must be willing to both physically engage in exercises with other students and perform fieldwork outside the classroom). As the course will be in English, we expect you not only to be able to read (you will be assigned approx. 50–60 pages of text every week to read and—more importantly—reflect upon in depth + at least one presentation/semester based on further reading of approx. 30–50 pages) and discuss relatively complex issues in this language, but also complete writing assignments. You will also have previously been acquainted with basic theoretical and methodological approaches of anthropology (of religion) in some form. This means that the course is primarily intended for MA students—or BA students who have attended (and passed) the Anthropology of Religion course (and Seminar). Students of the Religious Studies programme will be given preference. If you have a background in another relevant field (such as theatre studies, sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc.) and would like to attend, you are welcome to contact Martin Pehal (martin.pehal@ff.cuni.cz). The course will be intensive and can therefore accommodate a maximum of 15 students. |
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Poslední úprava: Mgr. Martin Pehal, Ph.D. (29.11.2019)
Lesson plan 1) 4.10. 2) 11.10. 3) 18.10. [Johana] Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998, p. 3–21 („Premises and prepossessions“) 4) 25.10. We will finish reading Handelman from last lesson and start looking into the three types of public festivities he identifies. Reading: Homework (in written form, upload until Wednesady 30th midgnight into SIS): 5) 1.11. We will go through your materials and try and get more acquanited with Handelman's typology and the criteria of PF we discussed previous lesson. In the remaining time, we shall have a look at Testa's article: Alessandro Testa, “Rethinking the Festival: Power and Politics.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 26, no. 1 (2014): 44–73 (only pp. 58–68). 6) 8.11. Reading: Homework: You may also have a look at a film "Ritualizing the Czech Velvet Revolution" by Ronald Grimes about the Velvet Carnival – an annual event taking place on November 17 since 2012. I am also attaching two extremely interesting monographs in English contextualising the Velvet Revolution: Holy, Ladislav. 1996. The Little Czech Man and the Great Czech Nation: National Identity and the Post-Communist Transformation of Society. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Krapfl, James. 2013. Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Preparation for November 17 + discussing Grimes and Stephenson. 7) 15.11. Barry: Quick-course in ritual field-work as preparation for the November 17 events. 8) 22.11. Course is not taking place as Martin is away at the annual AAR conference. 9) 29.11. Student presentations of November 17 fieldwork We would like you to reate a relatively short (15 mins) presentation of your fieldwork during the 17 November festivities. You should have a Powerpoint presentation that will include: 1) Your area of interest/focus/research question; 2) description of events you chose and why; 3) data gathering method (participant observation? interviews? etc.; 4) data presentation (attempt to organise your primary data according to some system which you deem appropriate to the data gathered); 4) conlusion – especially related to your intial focus/research question. We will spend the whole lesson discussing your presentations and the field-work process. 10) 6.12. We will build on Johana, Darcy and Roman's presentations of their November 17 research. Each one of them chose a different type of event. Their research methods also differed to some extent. During this lesson, we would like to paste together the individual observations so as to get a sense of what exactly is happening during 17 November in terms of public festivities. What are people doing? Why are they doing that? Are they successful? How are the events related? We would like you to write an essay (2–5 pages) in which you will address the following issues (due 4 November the latest, through SIS, upload slot: "17 November event analysis"): You can also have a look at the presentations/texts of others which I upload to SIS (17 November presentation_NAME). 11) 13.12. In the remaining lessons we will focus on the question of the ability of public festivities to affect (social) change. Do festivals help redefine personal, gender, and familial identity; enhance artistic creativity; encourage environmental responsibility; facilitate interreligious trust and interethnic conviviality? Or do they freeze identity definitions, inhibit creativity, reinforce habits of consumption, breed suspicion, and reinforce social divisions? Are public festivals/carnivals primarily a space for radical transgression/communitas or an emotional escape valve which fortifies the status quo? Can a public festivity achieve both at the same time? Outside of reading the assigned texts (see below), it will be useful if you start thinking about these questions in relatin to the public festivities you have already had chance to observe (17 November mainly, possibly also the Karel Gott funeral). Text to read for this lesson: 12) 20.12. Texts to read for this lesson: 13) 10.1. to be specified
Areas of inquiry 1) Ritual, Ritual Studies and Festive Genres 2) Studying Ritual, Studying Festivals Readings: 3) Performing the sacred: festivals as ritually borderline phenomena 4) Festivals and social change 5) Festivals and public space 6) Festival creativity: creating new festivals, commoditizing
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