The celebration itself has lasted fro two days during the weekend and included a great number of events. There was something for each and everyone. The youth centre hosted a pageant “Miss Kasimov 850”, in the stadium the two days where filled with athletic competitions and shows of local martial arts clubs. In the mosque an exhibition depicting ethnography of Kasimov’s Tatars was held. While minor celebrations were held in almost every yard and district, the major events of the celebration where widely publicised and shown on local TV and they constituted the official part of the celebrations.
The official part of the celebrations was the most prepared and feared for. All the events were conducted in strict order and were extremely ritual-like in their appearance. The celebrations started with the arrival of important guests from Moscow and Ryazan (the regional centre to which Kasimov belongs). Members of local and regional administration together with ministers and members of the presidential administration were present at the event. The day started with the laying of the flowers to the monument of the Town’s heroes that have died in the Great Patriotic War, followed by a military parade, another event of the morning was the opening of a monument to academic Utkin, a native of Kasimov who has invented a range of atomic weapons, the opening of the monument was also followed by a small military parade. After these ceremonies the important guests were shown the renovated objects in the city and the official celebration proceeded with the mass meeting in the local House of Culture. A tradition of the mass meeting goes back to the Soviet time and Karen Petrone (2000:15) provides a good description for the understanding of the event. “While the contents of Soviet celebrations varied, almost all celebratory events were modelled on mass meeting. During such meetings, groups of Soviet citizens, usually at their school or workplace but sometimes in communal living quarters gathered together to hear Soviet officials articulate the meaning of the holiday and its connection to current political situation, praise and possibly reward those who had achieved something significant for the Soviet state, and exhort the crowd to even greater achievements in the future. These meetings were usually followed by entertainment and refreshments”. The mass meeting in Kasimov was almost an exact copy of Petrone’s Soviet model. Nowadays this type of celebration is not typical for Russia anymore, but it has regained its importance in the provinces. It is interesting to note that the meeting was over laden by symbols. Newly acquired symbols of Kasimov were constantly displayed and also the Russian flag was displayed during all the speeches on a giant TV screen and a melody of the national anthem was played after every speech. The meeting was televised and the majority of the town’s people engaged in watching the celebration on TV while having a festive dinner and drink in honour of their native town. The meeting consisted of congratulations and the reading aloud of the telegrams from the president and members of government who could not be present themselves, each congratulation speech continued with a gift to the town, either symbolic or material. That day Kasimov in the face of its administration has received a number of paintings, carpets, and state symbols embroided in gold, a truck and significant sums of money. The day concluded with the concert on the main, Cathedral Square of the town. The concert was constructed so that the first part of it was a symbolical story of the history of the town; the anthem and the coat of arms of Kasimov were presented to the public once again. There were a variety of local performers displaying traditional songs and dances, a special show was devoted to the interrelation of the town and nature and there was a military show, where soldiers displayed their martial arts skills. The concert was followed by a grand firework display, something that was never experienced by the majority of the locals before. It was the first time in the town’s history that it has seen something like this.
On the second day of festivities something completely different from the events of the previous day happened. On the Cathedral Square nothing reminded of the concert, drunken fun and fireworks. Everything was cleared up and early in the morning everything was ready for the arrival of the Patriarch of the whole Russia to consecrate the main cathedral of the town. The cathedral was partially ruined during the 1930’s and during the Soviet times accommodated a sports school for children. In the past five years the cathedral was completely rebuild and ready to serve the believers. The consecration ceremony lasted the whole morning and the procession around all the churches on the Cathedral Square was held. Services were held in all other churches of the town, which is an extremely rare occasion for them to be open at the same time, because usually they take turns in conducting services. No other events were held that day on the Cathedral Square but the holiday continued with a historical show on the river, a carnival show with participants from the town’s organisations, factories and clubs, sports competitions were held at the stadium, festivals for children took place in Town’s parks. The celebrations concluded with a fireworks display on the river.
The Celebration as a Ritual-like activity.
Looking at the celebration description above it is possible to think that many of the events described have nothing to do with ritual. To prove that it is not necessarily so, here I would like to elaborate on the common features of celebrations and rituals and how the former can be interpreted in the terms of the latter. According to Lewis (1980), the word ‘ritual’ just like the word ‘art’ has no commonly agreed definition. Lewis (ibid.:8) proposes to view ritual not as a concept, but as an aspect of many different actions. To judge a performance as ritual an anthropologist will respond to certain qualities of it, such as the fixity of a ritual that is strictly bound by rules, which govern the order and sequence of the performance, the public attention, the colour and excitement of solemnity that go with such performance are the features capturing an anthropologist’s attention. In this way a great variety of events can be perceived as ritual.
Catherine Bell in "Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions" (1997:139) proposes not to list ritual as an essentially different activity or a separate category, but instead to look at how different actions can be ritualised. Bell lists several characteristics of rituallike activities that can be helpful in analysing celebrations in the ritual context: formality, traditionalisation, invariance, rulegovernance, sacral symbolism and performative qualities. These categories can be examined in how they would fit into the context of urban celebration and thus will make it a ritualised activity. According to Bell (1999:144) formal activities set a sharp contrast with informal ones, show the speciality of the situation and define social roles and hierarchy. From the above description of the celebration it is possible to see that it can be clearly divided into an official and unofficial parts. If the unofficial part is more close to a carnival and can be analysed in its terms, here I’m more concerned with the official part. In this part everything is done according to the scenario and special signs of distinction are worn by the participants, such as the war veterans wearing their medals, the clergy their robes and the city mayor a chain defining his status. The formality of the events of the official celebration comes to its climax during the mass meeting where every speaker is addressed by the title and the order of appearance is distinctively hierarchical.
A ritual always looks to tradition to legitimise it, because if there is no connection with any tradition, than the ritual "is apt to be found anomalous, inauthentic, or unsatisfying by most people"(Bell 1997:145). It is interesting that such forms of celebration as the mass meeting were traditionalised in the Soviet time. Even though it is not used nowadays centrally or in the big cities, the provinces have retained this tradition. If we look closer at the Town’s Day it is possible to see that the celebration encompasses many traditions, some of them originating in pre-Revolutionary times, some in the Soviet and some appearing anew. A new element that has traditionalised in the past decade is the presence of a high-ranked priest or church official at almost any celebration. Even in the beginning of the 1990’s this would be still considered as a violation of tradition.
The ritual quality of invariance is characterised by a clearly defined set of actions marked by precise repetition and physical control. One of the examples Bell is listing is singing the national anthem, when everyone knows exactly when to rise and sing the words. (ibid.: 152). This of course is not always the case true for Russia. The feature of ritual invariance applied to Russian celebrations involving singing the national anthem perhaps demonstrates at its best the change the society is going through. Even though the music of the anthem is familiar to everyone, nobody knows the right words. The situation with the anthem is the same as with many post Soviet rituals, the form might have remained the same but the filling has changed and so the situation is quite ambiguous.
Rulegovernance and orchestration are features applying to the celebration as well as to other ritualised action. From the start of the day to the fireworks, everything is in strict order and is governed by an invisible hand of many rules and regulations.
Sacral symbolism is perhaps one of the most important ritual facts in the Russian context. As Bell (ibid.: 159) states" national flags and monuments are routinely regarded as more than mere signs representing a country or an idea; they are symbols that embody values, feelings, and histories of national ideas and loyalty". In Russia and in the Soviet Union the whole science dedicated to the festive decoration of the city was thought of (Nemiro 1987). It reached its peak during the Soviet era in the use of symbols, but tradition continues nowadays and in my opinion it is possible to say that the decorative tradition is in many ways surviving from the Soviet time. During the festive weekend Kasimov was decorated both with national symbols as well as with local ones. During both the mass meeting and all the concerts the flag, the coat of arms of Kasimov and the anthem were displayed several times. Because they are new, invented symbols, an attempt is made to legitimise them through display and explanation of meaning. Also the symbols are not invented from empty space, but stress tradition and connection to the roots through their design, and in case of the local anthem, historical connections.
The last feature of ritualised action are performative qualities, in Bell's words "...power of performance lies in its heightened multisensory experience"(1997: 16 1). She brings an example of American historical pageants, which proves to be absolutely true for the same kind of show during Town Day celebrations in Russia "a medium through which these communities created images of the past that gave form to a particular sense of history and tradition. ...they located a community in historical time and in the social fabric of a larger world, articulating the difference between timeless values and more contingent ones."(ibid.: 164) The concert closing the first day of the celebrations is a vivid illustration to the statement above. The concert did show both the history of the place, its people, connections with nature and the sacred. The military show is thought to heighten the sense of patriotism. It is notable that the events such as laying the flowers to the heroes’ monument and opening of the new monument had small military parades following them. Young local men serving in the army are showing the connection of the place to the whole country and inevitably produce responses with feelings of pride and patriotism. In Lewis' (1980:33) opinion a ritual performance can be also likened to a play in terms of the emotional response produced on the viewers and participants. Actually ritual action is more a stimulation than a performance, the participants are affected by it and it sets the people thinking. Rituals, like plays, are contrived usually as a very special sort of sequence of events, and designed to produce an effect at those present at their performance.
The word celebration itself is derived from Latin celeber “numerous, much frequented”, and relates to vivacity and exuberance compared to “effervescence”, a term coined by Durkheim, a condition generated by a crowd of people with shared purposes and common values. (Turner 1982: 16). Both rituals and urban celebrations are social events and for their analysis Durkheirn's classic "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life"(1964) would provide a good framework. The reason for studying celebrations in the light of ritual theory can be taken straight from Durkheim:
... The very idea of religious ceremony of some importance awakens idea of the feast. Inversely, every feast, even when it has purely lay origins, has certain characteristics of the religious ceremony, for in every case its effect is to bring men together, to put the masses into movement and thus to excite a state of effervescence and sometimes even of delirium, which is not without a certain kinship with the religious state. A man is carried outside himself and diverted from his ordinary occupations and preoccupations. Thus the same manifestations are to be observed in each case: cries, songs, music, violent movements, dances, the search for exciteans, which raise the vital level. It has frequently been marked that popular feasts lead to excesses, and cause men to lose sight of the distinctions separating the licit from the illicit; there are also religious ceremonies which make it almost necessary to violate the rules which are ordinarily most respected. Distinction between simple merry making and religious activity is that the religion has an important end while simple gaiety has no serious object ... still it is to be remembered that there is perhaps no merrymaking in which the serious life does not have some echo. The difference consists rather in the unequal proportions in which the two elements are combined. (1964:382 383)
The main difference between religious ceremony and a secular festival for Durkheim lies in the place where it takes place for the proper religious ceremony must take place on consecrated ground, while the celebration does not necessarily do so. To take Russian urban celebrations, I have already mentioned the importance of the square as a centre for celebrations. On one hand the square is a secular place while on the other it is a space highly charged with religious context. In the majority of Russian cities and towns the main square is called "The Cathedral Square" and it is there where the main places of worship are situated. Kasimov is of no exception in this respect. Central squares of towns are divided from other town space by the opposition of sacred and profane. The central square is sacralised and is representative of a city as a whole. Hrenov (2000: 288 289) proposes that a central square is a place where sacrifices were held in ancient times. Even though sacrifices are made no more in their material form, the celebrations taking place can be considered as a form of symbolical sacrifice necessary for renewal of cosmos. The cathedral or church on the square is a "home of God"; in prechristian times it was a place where sacrifices were held. The church is built on the place of death or a grave. Initially places for ritual performances and graves were located in the same place, later this space became transformed into main square. The connection between festive space and sacrifice became forgotten, and the festivities happening there became happy and joyous, not involving weeping, sadness and mourning. When we take a look at the Kasimov’s 850th anniversary there is a certain cosmological scheme underlying the celebration. During the first day of celebration the square is a place hosting a concert, it is a place of festivity where music is played loudly, people dance, drink and have fun. After all of this is over the grand fireworks display is taking place. On the second day nothing reminds of what was going on the day before, the square is cleaned and redecorated. Everything is ready for the sacred ritual of consecration of the cathedral and arrival of the Patriarch. Of all the noises there is only the sound of church bells and the songs sung by the church chorus. If we look at the transformations that took place on the square it is possible to see that they have gone through a certain rite of territorial passage (Van Gennep 1960). During the Soviet time the square was secularised and called Soviet Square. Before the celebrations it was renamed back to Cathedral, the cathedral itself was rebuilt and consecrated as a place of worship. During the celebration the square is transformed on the first day from its normal state to the ambiguous, liminal place such as a concert ground. After the festivities are over the fireworks are like a cleansing fire that purifies the place to bring out new sacred purpose. On the second day the square serves its purpose of a sacred space. In these events we can see three stages of transitional rites described by Van Gennep (1960:21): “the rites of separation from a previous world - preliminal rites, those executed during the transitional stage liminal (or threshold) rites, and the ceremonies of incorporation into the new world - postliminal rites”.
To come back to Durkheim, it is possible to see a connection between the square and ritual sacrificial space. In his description of ritual activity, Durkheim distinguishes between two kinds of ritual action: negative or ascetic rituals and positive rituals. The positive rituals are the ones that I'm going to be concerned with here because there the ones mostly related to the celebrations. Among the positive rituals Durkheim distinguishes rites of sacrifice, imitative and representative rites and piacular rites. The main concern here is with the two above because piacular rites are mortuary rites and are celebrated in a state of sadness and mourning, otherwise positive rites have a common characteristic, that they are all performed in a joyous and confident state of mind. (Durkheim 1964: 389). Positive cults take periodic forms because 'feasts have long been associated with the seasons", since the seasonal changes are critical periods for nature they are a natural occasion for assembling and consequently for religious ceremonies (ibid.: 388389).
To begin with, the first positive rites Durkheim examines are the rites of sacrifice, of course, one might think of what common can be found in a modern urban celebration and an ancient ritual of slaughtering an animal and consuming it. What Durkheim proposes (ibid.:337) , however, the main event of a sacrifice is not a killing itself but a communal meal following it, where people share the same substance of food between themselves and with the gods. In my opinion in modern celebrations the fireworks display can serve as a form of sacrifice. It is a feast for eyes bringing great delight to everyone participating in it. Watching the fireworks unites people in their feeling of happiness and joy; it is a sensory experience lived through by everyone present at the celebration.
According to Durkheim (ibid.:348) the main function of sacrifice is social :"... religious ceremonies put the group into action; the groups assemble to celebrate them ... their thoughts are centred upon their common beliefs, their common traditions, the memory of great ancestors, the collective ideal of which they are the incarnation; in a word upon social things. Even the material interests which these great religious ceremonies are designed to satisfy concern the public order and are therefore social”.
Other types of positive ritual that can be connected to festivals are representative or commemorative rites. As it is seen from their name, these rites usually commemorate or represent the mythical history of a group or celebrate a common ancestor. These rites are "recollecting the past and making it present by means of avertable dramatic presentation" (Durkheim 1964:371372). In explaining why these rituals have come into being it is often said that it is because of the tradition and the authority of the ancestors who always did it in a certain fashion (ibid.:382). In Kasimov’s celebration the common ancestors are commemorated both during the concert, but especially in the ceremony of remembering the heroes that have died in Great Patriotic War and laying the flowers to their monument. The moment of remembering the heroes is also present during the mass meeting where a minute of silence takes place to remember the local heroes.
Among the important elements in any holiday or celebration is a ritual of gift- giving. Gift giving is always a ritualised action because otherwise it would not be a gift, but a simple economic transaction or exchange of goods. In Kasimov’s anniversary gift giving was among the underlying themes of the celebration. A celebration can be considered a total social phenomena if to take the words of Marcel Mauss (1969). The phenomenon of total prestation carries with it an obligation to repay the gifts received and two equally important obligations to give the gifts and to receive them. “To refuse to give, or to fail to invite, is like – refusing to accept – the equivalent of declaration a war; it is a refusal of friendship and intercourse. This is first and foremost the pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent parts of persons, and persons and groups that behave in some measure as if they were things”. (Mauss 1969:11). The exchange of things serves to tie a social bond, which is true of gift –giving between families and friends in the modern society. The ritual of gift giving also holds true on the town scale. During the celebration in Kasimov, the town in the face of its administration was given gifts from other regions, from the state and from Moscow. This gift giving created a relationship of friendship between towns and the relationship of dependence to the state and Moscow. If in the first case the gifts are symbolic and can be repaid at the similar celebrations elsewhere, in the second case they are financial aid which is not repayable.
Conclusion.
In this paper I have tried to analyse an urban celebration of the town’s anniversary in the light of ritual theory. Although the definition of a term ritual is not entirely agreed on by anthropologists there are certain characteristics that make an activity ritualised. Town’s Day celebration is an all-encompassing happening consisting of many smaller events that are ritual in their nature and thus can be analysed as rituals. Rituals are often thought to be actions of religious nature, but in modern society, where religion is less important than in traditional ones, secular celebrations can serve the ritual function of organising people’s experience, socialisation and producing meaning for events in a changing world.
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