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Feasts

Festivals obviously, are one of the ways to distance yourself from everyday life. But we cannot reduce the concept to the post-industrial need for vacation or confuse it with a kind of "alternative life". Festivals need the contrast of daily life to exist, so that both attitudes of living and moving away from life are yuxtaposed. Specialists define festivals as a total social phenomenon, as a type of "essence" of social life. This expression of the people of each civilization signals the breakdown of the established order, that provides a negative image of society, with social, religious, lay, political, aesthetic and playful features. The amalgam of these features cannot be neither fortuitous nor incidental; that is, festivals, in their distance from daily life, amasses a plurality of constants, components and anthropological functions. The most outstanding constants are the physical meeting of the members of a social group in particular streets, public squares and zones of the local area. Also, the habitual social order is disturbed and is ostentatiously broken down and, the squander and exemption are two characteristics of the new festive order, in conjunction with the permission for certain social taboos and vetoes. Lastly, the members of the social group undergo some physical numbness, very often caused by the combination of the culturally sacred drug and the ritual of chance. The unavoidable components are dancing, singing , eating and simultaneously the individual and ethnic affirmation and the contrastive yuxtaposition of the celebrations with respect to everyday life. The anthropological functions of festivals are the following. Firstly, festivals perform a phsychological. They produce a catharsis promoted by uninhibition and transformation. This is the point of view to understand its carnaval character. Similarly, they perform a sociopolitical purpose of ethnic reinforcement. They express religious, collective feelings, that during the rest of the year, remain secret and individual. Lastly, festivals have an entertaining function in search for fun. Finally, festivals are a dynamic phenomenon: its traditions are kept, are lost, reappear or are created as years go by. Within it, continous structuring, destructuring and resturcturing occur, since although they are celebrated in the present, they have conections with the past and the future. Traditional extinct or almost lost festivals have been retrieved; new festivals have been invented; and new social groups have gained a leading role. In general, and apparently, they have become secularized and having a more entertaining aim, identifying and supralocal. They have become much more espectacular and less ritual.

• Download PDF1 Study on the festivals
• Download PDF 2 Calendar of festivals in Navarre and Lower Navarre

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