Every Day's a Festival!: Diversity on Show - Tapa dura

Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, the academic study of arts festivals has long been neglected. The burgeoning festivals industry is, however, firmly embedded in both the arts funding and weekly calendar of European cities, and there is no doubt that festivals are fast becoming a defining feature of urban life in the twenty-first century. An assessment of their nature and impact is more pressing than ever before. The contributors to this volume explore the modern urban festival and the difference it makes to the experience and management of diversity in the city. Their research reveals an unsettling coupling of the celebration of local diversity with institutional amnesia, in which the memory of a festival hardly ever outlasts its funding. This book documents a key phenomenon of our time, the supplanting of community-based remembering with the repetitive structures of events whose historic and interpretative depth is lost amid a spiraling velocity of 'festivalization'.

Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology at University College London, Department of Anthropology and one of the scientific leaders for the Sustainable Development in a Diverse World (SUSDIV) project funded by the Sixth Network of Excellence (NoE) Programme. László Kürti teaches at the University of Miskolc, and the Karoli Gaspar University in Budapest, Hungary and has conducted fieldwork in North America, Romania and Hungary. From 2001 to 2006 he served as the Secretary of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Hisham Elkadi, also a scientific leader for the SUSDIV project funded by the Sixth Network of Excellence Programme, is Head of The School of Architecture and Building at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Contributors: Alaknanda Patel, Monica Stroe, Mirjana Lozanovska, Rossella Lo Conte, David Beynon, Manuela Hernández Sánchez and Ljiljana Simic.