ABSTRACT
Contemporary humanities and social studies related to the meaning of festivals are based on two obvious presuppositions. One is that the meaning of festivals is generally recognised through typical expressions, such as that festivals can ‘make’ meaning (Holloway, Brown & Shipway 2010; Knight, Freeman, Stuart, Griggs & O’Reilly 2014), and meaning can be ‘attached to’ (Crespi-Vallbona & Richards 2007; Getz 2010), ‘identified with’ (Versnel 1992) or ‘offered by’ festivals (Lucas 2014). The other presupposition, which is based on the previous one, is that the meaning of festivals may be classified into various sorts, either according to the social representation system it has its roots in, for example, social meaning (Lewis 1997), cultural meaning (Quinn 2003) and political meaning (Waterman 1998), or according to the relationship between a festival and its host – individual meaning (Stadler, Reid & Fullagar 2013) and group meaning (Getz 2010).
