“For a While They Live a Few Feet Off the Ground”

Abstract

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.

Residents’ Motivation and Place Meanings in a Hallmark Event: How to Develop a Sustainable Event in the Hosting Destination

“…(1) We defined residents' place meaning during hallmark events and developed a scale of residents' place meaning at hallmark events containing fifteen items. (2) We applied SDT to place theory and confirmed the effects of autonomous and controlled motivation on place satisfaction and place meaning from a SDT perspective.…”

“…Events create unique places through rituals, cultural performances, etc. [2], that make experiences differ from those in daily life. From the perspective of place theory, only when places made in events are meaningful, positive [3], and without conflicts [1] can events be sustainable at the hosting destination.…”