Festival

• 1. Introduction

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  A festival is an event a community celebrates, built around some aspect of that community and its religion or its cultures. It might be marked as an indigenous or national holiday, a mela, or an Eid. Food sits near the heart of the matter. Because food is such an essential resource, many festivals attach themselves to harvest time. Religious observation and thanksgiving for good harvests fold together in autumn events. Halloween does this in the northern hemisphere, Easter in the southern. So how did a word that began as a description of a religious holiday come to name a global tourist prospect? Why do so many of these gatherings end with people eating together? And what makes a festival a tool not only for prayer and play, but for politics, biodiversity, and belonging?

• 2. From Adjective To Noun

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  The word "festival" first arrived in English in the late fourteenth century, and it arrived as an adjective. It came from Latin by way of Old French. In Middle English, a "festival dai" meant a religious holiday. The leap to a noun took roughly two more centuries. The first recorded use of "festival" as a noun appears in 1589, spelled "Festifall". The related word "feast" had a head start. "Feast" came into usage as a noun around the year 1200, and its first recorded use as a verb dates to around 1300. A third word in this family travelled from much farther away. "Gala" comes from the Arabic word khil'a, meaning robe of honor. It once described festive dress, but starting in the 18th century it became a synonym for "festival". That migration from clothing to celebration hints at how tangled festival vocabulary really is.

• 3. Origins And Purpose

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  Religion and folklore are not the only roots of festivals. A significant origin is agricultural, and that origin explains the persistent link to the harvest. Ancient Greek and Roman societies leaned heavily on festivals, both communal and administrative. Saturnalia was likely an influence on Christmas and on Carnival. Patronal festivals show another purpose at work. These are festivals that commemorate or give thanks to gods, goddesses, or saints. Before mass-produced entertainment arrived, festivals also supplied something local communities badly needed: entertainment itself. Cultural and ethnic festivals carry a teaching purpose too. They inform community members of their traditions, and when elders share stories and experience, families find a means of unity. People come for reasons beyond the official one. Attendants are often motivated by a desire for avoidance, for socialization, and for camaraderie. The practice has been seen as a way of creating geographical connection, belonging, and adaptability.

• 4. A Modern Industry

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  Festivals prospered following the Second World War. Two events, both established in 1947, proved remarkable in shaping the modern model: the Avignon Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Some traditions reach back much further than that. Certain traditional festivals in Ghana predate the European colonisation of the 15th century. Art festivals grew more prominent by the turn of the 21st century. The modern model of music festivals began in the 1960s-70s and has become a lucrative global industry. Its predecessors run back to the 11th century, and a few survive, such as the Three Choirs Festival. Today festivals are offered to the public as a global tourist prospect, even though they are commonly public or not-for-profit. Scale varies widely. A festival may run from a local to a national level in both location and attendance. The "vast majority", however, are local, modest, and populist, so abundant that their total number is hard to quantify.

• 5. Sacred Calendars

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  Among many religions, a feast is a set of celebrations in honour of God or various deities, and "feast" and "festival" are historically interchangeable. Some observances are moveable feasts. Passover, Easter, and Eid al-Adha fall on dates set by lunar or agricultural cycles, or by the calendar in use at the time. The ancient Egyptian Sed festival marked the thirtieth year of a pharaoh's rule, then recurred every three years after that, with four years in one case. The Christian liturgical calendar centers on two principal feasts: the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord, which is Christmas, and the Feast of the Resurrection, which is Easter. Around these sit a great number of lesser feasts in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical Lutheran, and Anglican calendars, honouring saints, sacred events, or doctrines. Within Evangelical Lutheranism, "festival" is part of the ranking of feast days. Some festivals guard the land itself. Among the Ashantis, many traditional festivals are linked to gazetted sites believed to be sacred, holding rich biological resources in pristine form. Their annual commemoration helps maintain the conserved site, assisting in biodiversity conservation.

• 6. Faith Across Continents

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  Ganesh Chaturthi, dedicated to the god Ganesha, is celebrated throughout India and especially in Maharashtra. During the festival, idols of Ganesha, traditionally made of clay, are worshipped. On the same day or after 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, or 11 days, the idols are immersed in water. The festival's public form carried a political charge. Its public procession was promoted by Bal Gangadhar Tilak as a means of asserting a Hindu nationalist identity and providing Hindu solidarity during the British Raj in India. Hindus mark many others, among them Navaratri, Holi, Rama Navami, Karva Chauth, Diwali, Pongal, and Kartika Purnima, though most Hindu festivals are not celebrated by all Hindus. Beyond Hinduism, the calendar widens further. Buddhist festivals such as Esala Perahera are held in Sri Lanka and Thailand. The Sikh community celebrates Vaisakhi, marking the new year and the birth of the Khalsa. In Benin, Vodoun days is a festival of Vodoun that draws in surrounding countries like Togo and Ghana, where the culture and tradition are almost identical. In Togo, Godogbe za of Gblinkomegan is a traditional celebration based on ancestor worship.

• 7. Arts And Appetite

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  Science festivals, literary festivals, and music festivals all descend from general arts festivals, exhibiting intellectual or creative achievement. Their sub-categories run deep: comedy festivals, rock festivals, jazz festivals, buskers festivals, poetry festivals, theatre festivals, storytelling festivals, and re-enactment festivals such as Renaissance fairs. Film festivals screen many different films and usually run annually, with the Berlin International Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, and the Cannes Film Festival among the most significant. Food festivals turn the connection to feasting into the main event. They celebrate food or drink and often highlight the output of producers from a certain region. Some focus on a single item, such as the National Peanut Festival in the United States or the Galway International Oyster Festival in Ireland. Beverages get their own occasions, like Oktoberfest in Germany for beer. The arrival of Beaujolais nouveau is celebrated worldwide, with the new wine shipped around the globe for release on the third Thursday of November each year. Both Beaujolais nouveau and the Japanese rice wine sake are tied to harvest time. In the Philippines, at least two hundred festivals are dedicated to food and drinks.

• 8. Seasons, Politics, And Study

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  Beltane is a seasonal festival set by the solar and lunar calendars and by the cycle of the seasons, shaped above all by the food supply. The ancient Egyptians relied on the seasonal inundation of the Nile River, a form of irrigation that produced fertile land for crops. In the Alps, autumn brings Almabtrieb, the celebrated return of cattle from mountain pastures to valley stables. The Chinese New Year, set by the lunar calendar, falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice. The Dree Festival of the Apatanis in Lower Subansiri District of Arunachal Pradesh runs every year from July 4 to 7, with prayers for a bumper crop harvest. Festivals also carry political weight. Scholarly literature notes that they disseminate political values such as ownership of place, and that a festival may act as an antique letting citizens reach certain ideals of identity and ideology. Because festivals are ephemeral, their impact is often incorporeal, made of name, memory, and perception, and in deviating from routine they may reinforce convention. The subject even has its own fields of study. Festive ecology explores the symbolism and ecology of plants, fungi, and animals tied to cultural events. Heortology, once confined to Christian festivals, now studies religious festivals across all religions, including those of Ancient Greece.