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Introduction
At the 2004 Amsterdam Roots Festival in the Oosterpark I was witness to an interesting social interaction. Whilst sitting on the grass and enjoying an Indian pastry with some friends four men were approaching and passing us nearby. They wore simple pants and T-shirts, but incongruously they had white chalk on their faces. They passed by, but were halted by a young woman in a long skirt, her hairstyle long and loose. With enormous enthusiasm she ran towards them, so as, it seemed to me, to express her appreciation for their presence and their ‘being’ as such. Just as my friend, who – unlike me – had been to Australia, she seemed to have recognized them as aboriginals. Within a minute a photographer also approached the men. He asked them to pose for him one by one, and took his time.
How might we understand this scene? Due to the woman’s and the photographer’s reactions, the men became a spectacle. And to me and my friends, subsequently all six together, the woman and the photographer as well as the men with their chalked faces, also became a performance. In this we as onlookers were not just passive. To put it more strongly, without our presence there would have been no performance; Because the key is in the combination, the interaction, and the changing roles of audience and performers that creates a performance (see e.g. Fischer-Lichte 2005, 23).
In the instance above, but also in the present article as a whole, my own role is unmistakable. Or rather, my roles are. Even before I decided to study multicultural festivals, I frequently attended them. In Amsterdam, where I live, and especially in the summer in the Oosterpark five hundred metres from my home, such festivals are fairly frequent.
The decision to do fieldwork at multicultural festivals added a role to my previous one as a visitor, and this also changed the latter. Thus all by myself, one very rainy day I went to Rotterdam to attend the Dunya Festival – something I would not have done had there been no research interest. But the other way round, my visitor’s role also influenced my researcher’s role. After all, my experiences in that role were the reason for my analysis.
For visitors, the festivals offer many sociocultural frameworks to guide my experiences and observations. Thus the multicultural festival is a genre that gives rise to expectations about all festivals in that genre. But of course such frameworks also cohere more broadly with the way in which in Dutch society ethnicity is defined, and with the mounting debates on multiculturalism and integration. In my role as researcher I have tried to describe exactly which frameworks play a part at the festivals, and which aspects of the festivals’ design are central to the transfer of these frames.
So as to arrive at a definition of multicultural festivals, one should first define the festival. Festivals always have a theme, for those discussed here for instance its ‘multiculti’ or world music. Besides, at the festival there always is a mixture of insiders and outsiders. Aside from the organizers, many visitors merely come to experience the festival. In addition, a wide range of performances is staged. Some are part of the official programme, others – such as the one described in the opening paragraph – are not. All these different performances, in which the audience as well as the performers have their own roles, intertwine, and together these form the festival. Looking at the festival from a performative perspective the spectator or consumer can acquire an active role, side to side with the performer or presenter; roles which are not fixed, however. The festival thus defined, can still take all kinds of forms. Also events not presented as festivals; carnivals for instance, such as the Summer Carnival, or markets such as the Pasar Malam, can share the characteristics mentioned. Of course this does not mean that all markets and carnivals are festivals.
The question central to the present article is how at the festival ethnic diversity is framed and which role consumption and commoditization play in this process. This is done from a performative perspective, in which the roles of spectators as well as ‘performers’ are taken seriously, so that a performance is not reduced merely to the spectacle or to what is shown. Consumption too, is considered in terms of this performance. In addition, a performative perspective implies attention paid to the physical experience of both players and audience.