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In jam festival music scenes, participants build elaborate networks that connect members formally and informally between music events. Largely regional in scope, participants form these networks to develop and perform scene identities and cultivate intimate social relationships. Emerging through cultivated “crews” and “camps,” members build hubs of interaction that sustain and persist well beyond the festival event to create a vital sense of belonging and place. While the affective relationships formed at music festival events tend to be temporary, diffuse, and episodic, scene networks provide a “portable” interactional infrastructure that promotes relational continuity and persistence. These networks also provide more pragmatic benefits to networked members in the form of social and subcultural capital exchanged for symbolic and material rewards within the scene. Drawing from nearly 20 years of formal and informal participant observation in festival scenes, I provide an analysis of these networks and articulate common practices that drive their formation and continuation.

Arts festivals use projects to showcase creative works, configuring a creative field, whether locally, regionally or internationally, by whom engages and attends to the arts festival: artists, funders, media and audiences. This study compares the Edinburgh and Berlin arts festivals founded after World War II. Each city began with a founding festival. Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama sought to reconcile and heal international relations whereas the Berlin International Film Festival sought to showcase free expression and democracy. Both founding festivals were internationally oriented, as seen in their names. Each city added festivals over time and engaged in distinct temporal strategies and configured different creative fields. Edinburgh’s additional festivals entrained to its founding festival, synchronizing in time and place five festivals which led to greater duration and intensity of the experience and configured an international creative field: artists, media, and audiences who attended and engaged with the city festivals. In contrast, Berlin’s founding Film festival, which was internationally oriented, was followed by festivals that were treated as distinct, scheduling each festival sequentially across a yearly calendar and configuring a creative field regionally oriented around Germanic language and culture. Thus, a city’s temporal strategies for arts festivals may configure international, regional and local creative fields, changing who comprises the field to interact.

The indigenous and sustainable knowledge possessed by the tribal people and communities plays an extremely important role in the conservation of the climate. As per the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), tribal communities play an important role in preserving traditional knowledge, culture, food practices and textiles. The remains of the Indus Valley civilisation highlight the importance of the culture and religion. Animism and the worship of nature to achieve success in routines and tasks have been practised by these tribes for centuries. India is a mosaic of more than 705 different colourful tribes, and each of these tribes has their own identity that differentiates it from the other tribes. With increasing ecological complexities, the knowledge owned by the tribes is extremely useful in the preservation of the climate. This chapter seeks to explore the various hues and colours that constitute the mosaic of Indian tribal culture.

A special event requiring little capital for development is regarded as a unique type of attractions. Art festival is a popular form among all special events, famous example including Edinburgh Festival in England. However, the literature on the measurement of successful factors of art festivals is limited. This study uses Chiayi International Band Festival for a case study to evaluate performance factors of art festivals. The performance attributes are developed based on Kotler's Three Levels of Product framework. Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) is used to evaluate the performance attributes perceived by the visitors. Further, a SWOT analysis is deployed to provide managerial strategies and implications.

Purpose: This chapter explores the practices underpinning the production of field-specific cultural capital at festivals, understood here as retail spaces that gather a plethora of distinct market actors.

Methodology/Approach: This research presents evidence from an ethnographic study employing an interpretative paradigm and multiple data collection processes. The empirical research has been undertaken in the context of food festivals associated with the foodie taste regime.

Findings: Three categories of practices that play a role in the production of field-specific cultural capital, namely representational, exchange, and experiential practices, are presented.

Practical Implications: Our chapter provides recommendations for food festival organizers and participants who need to improve their practices when facing challenges such as increasing international competition and costs or declining sponsorship.

Research Limitations/Implications: This chapter contributes to the growing body of field-level market analysis by showing how practices enabled by complex retail spaces contribute to the production of field-specific cultural capital. However, this chapter is limited by its focus on food festivals.

Originality/Value of the Paper: This chapter theorizes how practices enable the acceleration and diversification of field-specific capital exchange, as well as its integration with other forms of capital.

Festivals are conceptualised in this chapter as temporary organisations embedded in more permanent structures (e.g. festival lead organisation). Festivals face a series of paradoxical tensions common to temporary organisations in creative fields. These tensions arise, in part, from the diversity of actors involved in festivals and the distinctive values and priorities they bring to their festival organisational involvement. Lucca Comics & Games (LC&G), which is one of the biggest comic-cons in the world, operates in the intersection of different institutional contexts, which include a wide range of actors involved. Thus, tensions appear within the LC&G domain as a result of these actors’ different levels of involvement in the festival organisation and their diverse identities. These tensions and their resolutions will be analysed from the perspective of extant theory on paradox. A specific focus of this chapter is on the belonging paradox, which concerns the role of competing identities among different types of festival participants and how these competing identities are manifested in the organisational identity of LC&G, its structures and processes. Our study provides evidence of identity tensions as both/and relationships that are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic. The authors also suggest that ‘place identity’ requires further examination as a distinctive feature of temporary organising in festivals, considering its role in mediating tensions arising from the belonging paradox amongst festival main actors (exhibitors, artists, public bodies and lead organisation employees).

This chapter offers empirical evidence of the contribution of a local and popular festival to diversity and inclusion in the hosting territory. With this in mind, three impacts (economic, social, and cultural) are determined and measured from the triple perspective of the creation of value of cultural assets. We show the case of the XXII edition of the Petronio Álvarez Pacific Music Festival held in the city of Cali (Colombia) from August 15th to 20th, 2018. The estimates were taken from three sources: (i) an input–output model adapted for the economy of the city of Cali, (ii) A face-to-face survey of 1,030 festival attendees over 18 years old, and (iii) A face-to-face survey of a representatives of each of the 173 business positions that took part in the Festival (e.g., handicrafts, musical instruments, traditional beverages, cuisine, hairstyles, and cosmetics). The results show that the festival: (i) generates inclusive material wealth, which is measured through income and employment for Afro-colombian communities, traditionally marginalized and economically disadvantaged; (ii) is shown as an opportunity to promote intercultural dialogue and diversity for the local community and tourists; and (iii) the community attending the festival (both locals and tourists) contribute to the cultural enrichment of the territory. The applied method might be replicated for other festivals case of studies in other countries in order to generate evidence that can be used for designing cultural policies which encourage diversity and equity in a specific territory.

In recent years, festivals have become prominent events in many cities throughout Europe, playing a crucial role in improving the image of the host city and enhancing its attractiveness to tourists. Festivals are temporary organizations with a short-lived and intermittent nature. Such features could raise several challenges in terms of maintaining a festival’s identity and its attendees’ identification during the periods of inactivity. Drawing on the literature on temporary organizations, organizational identity, and social identification, this chapter investigates how festivals can communicate their central and stable characteristics to audiences by adopting Web 2.0-based communication strategies. To explore this issue, the chapter illustrates the case of an Italian festival, Fotografia Europea, which has changed its communication strategy from a more traditional approach to a Web 2.0-based one.

Rock festivals, as a part of global rock culture, disclose a domain of consumption that allows a multiplicity of activities and practices in Turkey, where modernity is entrenched, but not fully hegemonic. This provides the possibility of illuminating the conditions of being a contemporary consumer as well as the potentials for the future. This paper presents some preliminary findings from research at two major rock festivals in Turkey. Ideology emerges as an important factor in consumption of these festivals and illustrates possible grounds to interpret cultural production. These practices suggest aspirations for experiencing different modes of being in the world and provide signs of the future of culture(s).

This chapter reflects on xCHANGE, a month-long festival marking International Women's Day (IWD) at Birmingham City University, UK. The author first problematizes expectations of IWD and then outlines the origins of the festival, detailing both practical aspects and program content. The chapter then considers the festival through a lens of “power geometry” (Massey, 1993) in which female academics are positioned in distinct ways in relation to flows and interconnections of power within the university. Does the xCHANGE festival disrupt or merely reflect this power geometry? Does it create conditions for women to thrive in academia?