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A festival is an extraordinary event celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. A festival constitutes typical cases of glocalization, as well as the high culture-low culture interrelationship. Next to religion and folklore, a significant origin is agricultural. Food is such a vital resource that many festivals are associated with harvest time. Religious commemoration and thanksgiving for good harvests are blended in events that take place in autumn, such as Halloween in the northern hemisphere and Easter in the southern. Festivals often serve to fulfill specific communal purposes, especially in regard to commemoration or thanking to the gods, goddesses or saints: they are called patronal festivals. They may also provide entertainment, which was particularly important to local communities before the advent of mass-produced entertainment. Festivals that focus on cultural or ethnic topics also seek to inform community members of their traditions; the involvement of elders sharing stories and experience provides a means for unity among families. Attendants of festivals are often motivated by a desire for escapism, socialization and camaraderie; the practice has been seen as a means of creating geographical connection, belonging and adaptability. The word "festival" was originally used as an adjective from the late fourteenth century, deriving from Latin via Old French. In Middle English, a "festival dai" was a religious holiday. Its first recorded used as a noun was in 1589 (as "Festifall"). Feast first came into usage as a noun 1200, and its first recorded use as a verb was circa 1300. The word gala comes from Arabic word khil'a, meaning robe of honor. The word gala was initially used to describe "festive dress", but came to be a synonym of "festival" starting in the 18th century. Festivals have long been significant in human culture and are found in virtually all cultures.

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Ritual

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or revered objects. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized, but not defined, by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance. Rituals are a feature of all known human societies. They include not only the worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages, funerals and more.

Festival

Holiday

A holiday is a day or other period of time set aside for festivals or recreation. Public holidays are set by public authorities and vary by state or region. Religious holidays are set by religious organisations for their members and are often also observed as public holidays in religious majority countries. Some religious holidays, such as Christmas, have become or are becoming secularised by part or all of those who observe them. In addition to secularisation, many holidays have become commercialised due to the growth of industry.

Developing Employees: Team Projects MGT-468: Leading and managing in a global context

Emphasizes developing employees through team projects and explores leadership, management, corporate culture, and the 70/20/10 development model.

Le dehors de toute fête : une sociologie urbaine de la sécurité au Montreux Jazz Festival

Lucien Jean Delley

This thesis is the result of four years of investigation carried out as « security coordinator » of the Monteux Jazz Festival. From this operational commitment, I sought to understand : how the festival is integrated into the city ; what affects the safety of the public and disturbs the urban order ; the apparatus implemented for risk management. The analyses focus on two spatial figures: the club and the park. The first part retraces the difficult adoption of electronic music in the 1990s, before raising questions pertaining to the Strobe Klub in situ, in particular the conditions of production of clubbing - an experience now largely integrated into the regulated and profitable system of urban leisure. The second part focuses on the festive occupation of a public park located outside the perimeter of the event; from a night that degenerates between young people and the police, to the development and implementation of an urban mediation project. The results of this research allow to draw a sociological framework for the festive space by highlighting three urban security regimes (tension, domestication, taming) which correspond to specific ways of dealing with risk (fear, suspicion, relationship) and are part of a dialectic of outside/inside (exclusion, selection, inclusion). These are both personal and collective ways of engaging and experiencing disorder, of preparing spaces or implementing practices. The importance of social work in the management of large public events and other crowd moments also emerges. The «outside of any party» is not only a spatial outside, but the unpredictable part which, in the perspective of hospitality, allows us to reexamine urban security policies.

EPFL2022

A group of 12 architecture students from EPFL returned from the London Festival of Architecture (19 June-19 July 08), where their contribution, "Overflow", a structure that reacts to tides in the Thames River, was chosen as the best overall project among all the student installations, as well as the best at "signposting" the festival to passersby…

EPFL2008