Affective heritage embracement, a collective narrative of nostalgia, is identified at two popular music festivals. “MusicFest” embraces a tradition of “Red Dirt” country music through performance (music festival), whereas the “Walnut Valley Festival” embraces a bluegrass/folk musical heritage through performance and participation (musicians' festival). The symbolic importance of musical interaction is explored to highlight the experienced emotionality that leads to the affective ties that bind these otherwise temporary communities. This collective narrative reveals the various functions of nostalgia wherein collective sentiment both reflects and creates the perceived authentic experiences of festival attendees.

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In this article, I use ethnographic data and twenty-five interviews collected over a period of four years at the Walnut Valley Festival, an annual folk musicians' festival, to explore how attendees construct and maintain a meaningful sense of "place." I argue that place is created through the repetition of traditional rituals that both physically and symbolically transform space into what participants call "home." Of these, the most important are musical rituals in the form of "jams." As a cultural performance, and through repeated participation over the years, musical ritual synthesizes the past and present, a merging that generates shared, heightened emotions among participants that leads to states of liminality and communitas. It is through attendees' continued participation in musical, cultural performance, and the shared meaning, emotion, and memory that it provides that place is created and maintained at the festival.

I argue that the adherence to and reproduction of Western dualisms has rendered the sociology of emotion a hollow, stagnant, and incestuous subfield that privileges dichotomy over complexity, natural science over social science, discourse and display over experience and embodiment, and a single body of recycled, unidimensional mandates over “other” voices that we most desperately need to hear. In conclusion, I reiterate the material consequences brought about by an unyielding and unreflexive devotion to artificial dichotomies for “real” people in the “real” world (including sociologists of emotion.)

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