Massachusetts Festival Alamanac

So, I've been working this summer with the Massachusetts Cultural Council's Folk Arts & Heritage program, and I wanted to share what I've been doing. The initial idea behind this internship was to compile a listing of annual Massachusetts public celebrations, as comprehensive as possible. This project stemmed from a paper assignment from David Guss' Festival and Politics in Latin America class - we were asked to write an ethnography of a local festival, and as my classmates and I tried finding festivals to attend (in October) we realized how difficult it was to find a non-commerical festival that would be of interest to document. A year or so ago, a project called WorldFest was sponsored by the Mass Govt. to try and do this very thing, but only for the summer months. My professor and I discussed at length the need for a comprehensive festival calendar - not only would it be a service to the public who attend, as well as the communities and organizations that put on these festivals, but it would be of great service to people like me and him who are interested in documenting local custom and practice and sharing it with others for posterity and to gain a better understanding of that which surrounds us.

As of now, the calendar has become a much smaller part of the internship than I initially expected. The gears started turning and we realized we'd be better to expend our energy on documenting festivals that haven't been researched by the MCC yet. While I'm stoked on being able to actually go out and get my feet wet with fieldwork, I'm still determined to get this calendar fully fleshed out and worthwhile. For now, since I don't know how else to share what I find, I've made a google calendar that will detail all the celebrations I discover. It's a lot of work to get all the details up about everything, but I'm determined to do it. We're hoping to find some funding to produce a full-color wall calendar, featuring the full year's listings as well as photographs from festivals my partner Signe and I have attended throughout the summer.

So, I'm going to embed the calendar in this post. I gotta try and figure out some way to keep it up on the front page of this blog - but I'll figure that out later. In the meantime - here it is! Please look around and let me know what I'm missing! I know there are hundreds of festivals I have yet to discover, and while I'm still searching, any leads would be AMAZING!