Take a Journey Through Festivity in Fiesta by Daniel Stables
Posted on 2025/08/14 , tagged as
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Fiesta: A Journey Through Festivity by Daniel Stables Sneak Peek
‘Daniel has the rare ability to seamlessly take fascinating anthropological and psychological perspectives and weave them into exciting travel narratives. A unique insight into the human condition through the lens of gatherings of all description – thought-provoking and inspiring.’
Levison Wood, author of Walking the Nile
In his engaging and reflective travel memoir, Daniel Stables turns his inquisitive eye on some of the world’s most eye-catching festivals to examine the human need for ritual and connection. Fiesta dives headfirst into the extraordinary lengths we go to in expressing our cultures; Daniel watched Taoists of Phuket mutilate their faces with skewers and knives, waded through pig blood at an animist funeral in the highlands of Sulawesi, and met the Dark Lord of the Underworld in a Lancashire garden shed.
Festivals themselves vary wildly, but the majority centre themselves on collective acts of ritual transcendence; the thing that they all share, which distinguishes them from other forms of ritual, is their communal nature. Discover how festivals help us forgo our individual identities for a stronger sense of kinship with something greater than ourselves: history, nation, nature, society at large, or something divine.
Shed light on these binding experiences with the extract below.
Everybody grieves privately in their own way, but communal mourning rituals – funerary festivals – represent their own vibrant spectrum in cultures across the world. Often, grief is dealt with through cultural customs which can seem incomprehensible to outsiders.
The Ilongot people of Luzon, Philippines, for example, were documented by the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo in 1993 as reacting to grief by embarking on a spree of decapitating rival villagers. While this may be taking venting to rather extreme lengths, Rosaldo’s work with the Ilongot highlights an important facet of grief: that it is often characterised as much by rage as by sadness.
The Igbo people of Nigeria, meanwhile, engage in highly dramatised funeral rites known as ikwa ozu – literally, ‘celebrating the dead’. Huge amounts of alcohol are consumed over several days, and a mock trial is held to determine who, if anybody, was responsible for the
death. On the death of a married man, the widow is expected to engage in a series of strange and seemingly demeaning rituals: to drink the water that was used to wash her husband’s corpse, to shave her head and sleep outdoors without a blanket for over a month, to fast for long periods, and, when she eats, only to do so with her unwashed left hand.
These are all mourning rituals – the collective cultural enactment of individual grief. The distinction between grieving and mourning is significant but subtle. Grief is a person’s internal, emotional response to loss. Mourning is the outward expression of that grief. Despite the maximalist examples I have listed above, mourning rituals are often simple gestures: they’re as likely to include a widow dressing in black or a family holding a quiet memorial service as they are to entail a whole community gathering to sacrifice hundreds of pigs and buffalo.
On first sight, the joyful aspect of the Torajan funeral-festival made me wonder if the Torajans had cracked some secret code, using festivity to overcome the sadness of grief. But it would be wrong to say that Torajans do not grieve or feel sadness when a loved one dies. The anthropologist Roxana Waterson, who has spent decades studying the Toraja, recounts in one of her papers a story of a recent widower holding his wife’s corpse, weeping all night long, and asking her permission to remarry.
‘Of course, at first when someone dies, the family may cry, because they’re not able to endure the feeling of loss,’ Paulus told me. ‘But we are very aware that we will all die, too. We believe that if the family cries too much, it makes it harder for the soul of the dead to travel to the hereafter.’
Waterson describes the Toraja as consciously recognising that the ritual aspects of their funerary ceremonies serve as a kind of replacement for their emotional sadness – a box in which to place their grief, which is dealt with once the animals are sacrificed. ‘The sacrificing of buffaloes at funerals is described as sonda pa’ di’ ki’, “taking the place of our pain (or sorrow)”,’ she writes. ‘I was once asked whether people in my country felt no grief at a death, since they neglected to kill any buffaloes?
Taking the place of sorrow. Whether through repression, replacement, distraction or delusion, funerary rituals are a way of dealing with something universally upsetting,
confusing, and, most of all, mysterious. Nobody knows what happens to us when we die, even if they think they do. The vast majority of people experience at least a small measure of doubt around this issue, whether their cultural context allows them to admit to it or not – see the atheist’s panicked deathbed conversion, and the fear of death exhibited by even the most devout believer in the afterlife. But that doesn’t mean that some cultures haven’t divined better coping methods than others. ‘It is a central paradox of any elaborate funeral that so much effort and activity on the part of the living should be expended ostensibly for the departed,’ Waterson writes. Why do we do it? Because funerals are not for the dead; they are for the living left behind.
Torajans view death not as a sudden full stop, but rather as a gradual process which is only just beginning at the moment that the heart stops and brain activity is extinguished. The purpose, ostensibly, of their extravagant funerary rites is to ensure that the spirit of the deceased makes the successful journey from ancestor spirit to mendeata, a deity-like being believed by the Torajans to bestow good harvests. This point is central to understanding Torajan mortuary rites: they are not only framed as being for the spiritual benefit of the dead themselves, but are perceived as serving a material purpose for the living world which they have departed.
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Fiesta: A Journey Through Festivity publishes 14th August 2025.
