A methodology of celebration. Notes towards semiotic analysis of festive interaction.

Antti Maunu (Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies, University of Helsinki)

Methodology is the touchstone of empirical studies of celebration: How to grasp the concrete, changing and intensive occasions of festivity? In previous studies, celebration is often thought of as a proof of some deep socio-cultural structures (nationality, gender, class, subcultures); also as an example of societal transformations (individualisation, reflexive modernisation); or as a derivative of the material settings of celebration (bars and night clubs). In these cases, the situational and interactive nature of celebration is in danger of going unnoticed, and this may generate one-sided and blurred interpretations of festive action. My ongoing project is an ethnography of young adults' nightclub life in Finland, and in my presentation I present some guidelines for a systematic, semiotic analysis of celebration. I combine some of Goffman's foundational ideas on real-time interaction with Jukka Törrönen's and Pekka Sulkunen's more text-oriented semiotic sociology. On this basis, I put forward a model for analysing festive interaction within three main dimensions: i) positioning/ subject positions for analysing the interactive orderings of situational action; ii) sequences of action for analysing temporal unfoldings of events; and iii) focalisation for analysing the actors' subjective involvements in action as an observable variable. Some visual data from the Internet is used to illustrate the presented concepts.