Community Festivals and Their Spaces: Relational Practice and the Production of a Relational Good?

This chapter focuses on how, as part of the mutually cooperative practices of organising an annual festival event, a local community group co-produce the space used to celebrate the festival as a form of relational good. It explores using ethnographic data from the author's own research, the nature of relational practices and the goods which are produced and consumed through volunteer involvement in the organisation and delivery of a community festival. The chapter shows how the four discourses of community festival—ritual, festivity, tradition, and place identity—are evident in the production of a festival site by a single group of community volunteers engaged in the organisation of their festival contribution. The resolution of these divergent discourses demands the establishment of relational practices amongst community members, which simultaneously produce and consume a collaborative, discursive text, which they know as the community festival space