Contiene: Culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the uniform expresion of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive and the festive state is a eyeopening guide to its workings. Guss investigates the ideology of tradition combining four case studies in a radical multi-site ethnography, to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, etnicity, history, gender and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. Although the focus of this study is Venezuela, the processof appropriating religious and local celebrations to serve new secular and national meanings is relevant to emerging nations the world over. The most important work to come out of Latin Americanist scholarship in years... Festivity presents the cultural arena wherein the power of oneness of a people, and the forces of diversity and contestation, are played out. To illustrate how this is so by reference to national political economies global economic powers, shifting and sliding racialized markers of identity and the cultural production of representation is extremely difficult. But the author pulls it off with literary verve and academic alacrity in clear, readable and engaging prose.

Ingles.