Celebrations in Cities— democratizing the national domestic

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A civil democracy is realized through actions taken by its citizenry.

The role of intimacy in public, and of “strangers” in the public sphere and “friends” in civil society are aspects of the study of democracy in late modernity that I will be pursuing directly in my own work. Mostly this line of inquiry takes me away from the well-traveled paths of anthropology and sociology. But I think that there may be no more important sociological work today than that which can bring us to understand the place of strangers in our cities, and no better ethnography that of friendship.

Let’s now return to the festival, and to the movement of people across national boundaries, and how festival production can loosen the grip that the nationally domesticated space holds over the city. A civil democracy is realized through actions taken by its citizenry. This use of the street for demonstrations of civic belonging and collective celebration or protest is not merely windowdressing for the mass media.

The protest in Belgrade is a prime example of democracy’s “sweat-equity.” When thousands of people will volunteer their time and their bodies every day for as long as it takes, they can push the government out of the buildings and into the streets. Take another look.

Simply consuming the spectacles of the state is not nearly sufficient to reproduce the ground for a democratic nation, and this ground—spatially and discursively—must be reproduced regularly. In particular, there must be room for the collective voice of crowds. We need to reimagine the street as a place of and for crowds participating in a variety of actions. The fear of crowds in a democracy marks a fundamental distrust of the public sphere. This lack of trust promotes the delegation of authority to representatives (or to unelected government officials)—authority that has to first be removed from venues such as crowds.

“Madang News 95 issue 2
Headline: PLANNING:
“The next planning committee meeting will be Monday August 21 at 7pm at the Sanno day nursery school.
We are now looking for advice about the contents of the festival program. Up to now we have had five meetings with over 100 (really!) people gathered. “What do you think about a Kimchee roll making contest” “Won’t it be difficult to cook that much rice? We’ll need 20-40 liters” “Yeah, right.”... “People expect to the rope competition this year, lots of people.” “That’s right, we’d better do it this year too.” These kinds of discussions went on forever. Now we need to get into the really interesting task of doing the actual planning. More and more we need to gather people who can do this together.”
Democracy is never easy

Places and crowds fill the histories¹ of democratic revolutions. Civic festivals are the reenactments of these founding moments, and civil societies are their offspring. Because there were crowds that used violence to protest social and economic circumstances, crowd control became another feature of the modern street. And again, this constraint was said to be aimed at others, at anarchists and gangs, but its effect was to preempt the crowd event as a regular forum for civic participation. By and large we can today track the disappearance of crowds on the streets of our cities. But then what are the effects of this absence on democracy and on the public sphere?

One effect is to separate the “founding moment” of civil rule as a uniquely special time, and so to forget that democracy is a primarily performative form of self-government. The heritage that needs to preserved is not the spectacle of some reenacted historical event, but the actual reenactment of democratic rule in everyday life. This is where the street becomes a site for democratic and public sphere participation.

The ongoing performance of democracy is perhaps most important to those who have only just now arrived from some other place, but who will be making their home here. Here in the street, in the events that reproduce democracy as a collective performance, newly landed immigrants enter into the public sphere not as spectators at someone else’s party, but as bona-fide players in this festival of democracy. Inclusion in democratic life, a voice in public debates, a place in the public square, a part in the festival pageantry: these are signs of true arrival. So too, a historicity that opens to the retellings of old narratives by new voices leverages new lodes of local culture and history into the popular imagination.

¹ From Boston to Philadelphia, to Paris and London, to Moscow and Warsaw and Tienanmen in Beijing: the places where the public acquires its legitimate claim to its self rule are places defined by crowds and by protests and festivals. Note here the absence of such events and such memorials in Kyoto.