Seemingly, the first modern questioning about this subject, or at least one of the most significant, is in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose reflection is significant for the discussions about the nature of societies and their institutions. In Lettre d'Alembert sur les spetacles, Rousseau (1962) condemns all imaginary representation of Men in general societies, and mainly in Europe in an institutional way, in the theater. Moreover, when explicitly condemning Men's imaginary representation, Rousseau does it proposing its substitution by a real social dramatization, which is the Feast, and inside it, according to him, an intense participation takes place; the coalition of individual consciences. In Lettre a d'Alembert, Rousseau "rejects" the theater (proposed by Voltaire) and in the Consideratións sur le governement de La Pologne he suggests that the new nations would discover the existential reality of the "social" contract in the course of feasts where the substratum of their union would be called into existence. One may wonder if Rousseau does not observe in the Feast a synthesis of all social institutions, it being a privileged activity, where the true "general will” would be elaborated. Rousseau opposes a permanent transformation to organized societies, based on the Feast, as such dissolves private life in an intense and wide communion. This "permanent " transformation should exclude, according to Rousseau, the resource to imaginary figuration, an "aberrant" sign of the slavery state and of arbitrary division.
 
 

Rousseau’s thinking acquired a new meaning when it was absorbed by the ideologists of the French Revolution, who tried to institute feasts without noticing that, in Rousseau, as in practice, feast is opposed to institution and that the "Dispute of the Feast", more than a politicians’ discussion is a debate about an ideal definition of civil society and, consequently, of revolution. If revolutionaries like Mirabeau, Thouret, Talleyrand admit projects of feasts with the purpose of reviving the civic spirit, historians and philosophers (as Condorcet, for instance), are firmly opposed to these abstract manifestations and they want to establish feasts which really engage the nation in its real activity (Ozouf, 1986). Danton, Robespierre and Hebert are also opposed to each other, on the content of the party, but, in a closer spirit of Rousseau’s, all of them try to return it a content that can be described as "mystic", as in Reason, Nation or other. Curious texts can  be found dealing with 'mass attack' and ' national war ' as parties, solvent of human institutions. It is easy to show that concrete problems (economical and social) are hidden by these divergences. But confronting each other to a definition of feast, these men confront each other to a definition (and an ideal) of society (Ozouf, 1986: 94).
 
 

The revolution of 1848 and the Commune can be seen, in this sense, also, as feasts, meaning that their happening would not have anything to do with the ideological incitements - which have not stopped criticisms. And does not this "lyrical" illusion, asks Mona Ozouf (1986), get confused with the exercise of this "social" contract? A contract that takes men beyond established institutions, gives men courage to destroy them and reveals a future that escapes, for some time, all definition?
 
 

The example of Brazilian feasts leads us to these roads, since it has been consolidated in the colonial period, when it was necessary to establish the Brazilian “social contract”. However, being  transplanted from Portuguese society to the New World, "our" Feast it is deeply marked by the medieval religiosity and culture. Put this together with the necessity of establishing mediations between local nature and the cultural means of the settlers, among ethnic groups, myths and several historical periods, which a feast had the power to do when developing a possible language for a dialogue among very different people. To establish the communication among cultures was the main task of feast in the colonial period; at the same time that, through this communication, it exercised and it established the Brazilian social contract and our sociability model, the one of a search for resemblance inside of diversity.
 
 

Among the several authors referring to the subject, it is evident that there exists something else, in the Feast, that prevents its " common essence " to be found in all cultures and at the same time common to all feasts. A feast does not allow itself to be mistaken for another, although it is easy to recognize their similarities. Some models stand out because of the spirit being seen as destructive or subversive of which feasts seem to be the bearer, since they seem to involve a real opening for the individual conscience. However, in spite of their contextual particularities, it is possible to speak of feasts as a phenomenon that occurs in all cultures, with various meanings and with a basis common to all of them: the one of mediation.
 
 

The Feast holds a powerful disorganization of the established rules. Not, as it was believed, as a game of some hours, but because of its transitory meaning attributed to the feast, which is the same imposed by nature ( life, therefore), as compared to reality. It is this reality that a feast can discover in the course of some collective manifestations. And it is perhaps to this self-destructive capacity - thesis of Duvignaud - that the said “simple societies” owe the perenniality (larger than the one of the great historical societies) in its organizational way and in which a sign of weakness or of inferiority was erroneously judged to have been observed. But if these observations are valid for "simple societies", whose established codes are recognizable and shared by almost all, it is necessary to understand what transformation the Feast suffered in the complex societies. Boas (1911) Malinowski (1922) and Mauss (1974) described such "agonistic" encounters in the course of which two rival groups proceed with a disordered consumption and destruction of wealth and accumulated provisions. The accumulative spirit is affronted, but this " consumption" can even be seen as the “dawn" of economic activity, because everywhere they are being held, the agonistic feasts exercise a positive action on the social and economical revival. Scarcity corresponds to abundance, but this consumption always treats in a corrosive way another group of whom a separation is wanted, or a group to be dominated or simply to obtain its symbolic decrease, in any way mediating the relationship between both. If all societies present rules, and if the rules oppose the human groups to nature, the feast moments are not simply the world “inside out". This would be the paroxystic phase of collective life during which the social group would discover nature, creator and also destructor. Ilíada, songs celebrating great deeds and others are replete of these manifestations where nature is “diminished" and substituted by an act that symbolizes the abstract nihilism of the cosmos (Lévi-Strauss, 1985).
 
 
 
 

Party is mediation
 

Being a language, as it was already observed (Leach, 1972; Lévi-Strauss, 1976; Da Matta, 1978; Brandão, 1973, 1985 and other), feasts are not only a social phenomenon: they constitute, simultaneously, a communication basis, one of the most complete and "perfect" expressions of utopias of equality, freedom and fraternity.
 
 

The privileged position of  Feast, as a universal phenomenon, turns it into a model of anthropological investigation: as phonemes in a language, the elements of feasts, in the same way as the terms of the relationship, are elements of significance and, like them, only acquire this significance under the condition of participating in a system. They are elaborations of the spirit in an unconscious level, expressed through the myths that are at the basis of party, through the music, food and dance, when it exists, and its repetition in areas geographically distant and even among different people, we may imagine, in similar way to the language’s case, the visible phenomena are the product of some general laws, although hidden.
 
 

In a distinct order of realities, as Lévi-Strauss would say, the phenomena of feasts are of the same type of the linguistic ones. Of course the closed mode of structural analysis is not to be transposed to the Feast's Anthropology, but its model can be used to understand the meaning of this universal phenomenon. In other words: it is much more about establishing an analogy than an identity; about looking for relationships between the universe of feast arguments and the non verbal reality, between thought and things, between significance and non significance; between celebration and silence. Lévi-Strauss, when establishing a distinction among control rites, historical or commemorative rites and mourning rites, separating them as each one integrates certain oppositions in itself, says:
 
 
 

So one perceives that the ritual system has as function to end and to integrate such oppositions: diachronic and synchronic; the one of the periodic characters or aperiodical that can present one and the other; finally, inside of the diachronic, the one of the reversible and irreversible time, since, although the present and the past are theoretically different, the historical rites transport the past to the present, and the mourning rites, the present to the past, and that both processes are not equivalent: of the mythical heroes it can really be said that they return, because all their reality is in their personification; but the humans die, in fact " (Lévi-Strauss, 1976:271/2).
 

Hence, as the basic characteristic of all mediation is to be engendered by myth and to reconcile the incompatible, it can be said that feasts are one of the privileged roads in the establishment of humanity's mediations. They seek to recover the immanence between creator and creatures, nature and culture, time and eternity, life and death, to be and not to be. The presence of music, food, dances, myths and masks attest this proposition with force. The feast is still a mediator between individual and collective longings, myth and history, fantasy and reality, past and present, present and future, us and the other ones, for that reason revealing and exalting the contradictions imposed upon human life by the dichotomy nature and culture, still mediating, in other spheres, such as the cultural encounters, absorbing, digesting and building bridges between the opposites, thought as incompatible.
 
 

In Brazil, several authors have treated feasts as a language and perceived its elements as communication’s terms which qualify, attribute meaning, movement and ask for answers continuously, pointing some aspects that shows the different mediations present at the Feast. Anyway, Feast, according to Brazilian authors (Goldwasser, 1975; Leopoldi, 1978; Da Matta, 1978; Magnani, 1984, Brandão, 1985, 1988 and other), is always positive, selective and edifying, more than destructive.
 
 

The ones that concentrated their efforts on the study of Brazilian feasts as a phenomenon in itself (not just using them to illustrate another theme), conclude that, contrarily to the destruction idea that permeates the theories, the Brazilian Feast has a positive, affirmative character. This can be noticed by the frequent use of the terms to emphasize, to express and to highlight, that appear in all their interpretations. These authors, who live in the "country of feasts", constantly remind that gestures and words are just a door to penetrate the meaning that is hidden behind feasts or any other ritual. This is how Roberto Da Matta thinks when he defines ritual as a symbolic speech that detaches certain aspects of reality and he classifies them through countless operations as junctions, oppositions, integrations and inhibitions. According to him, rituals (and parties among them) can be divided in three groups: separation’s ritual or reinforcement ritual, in which an ambiguous situation becomes clearly identified; inversion’s ritual, in which there is a break of daily roles and neutralization’s ritual, combining the two previous types (Da Matta, 1978). He considers the Brazilian Carnival as an inversion’s ritual in which the hierarchies momentarily are forgotten: poor people dress like princes, women dress like men and so on. The individual does not disappear in the group because, according to Da Matta (idem: 93), "the Brazilian project of society, with its rules and its rites, is to dissolve and to make the individual disappear”. In Carnival, thwarting the social project, the laws are minimum: It is " the buffoon that counts. It is the buffoon that will decide which way he will enjoy the Carnival " (idem, 1978: 115).
 
 

This perspective of inversion is criticized by Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, who observes that it just can happen on a level of feelings and expectations. However, she says, when adopting that perspective, one ends up leaving aside the fact that a feast, just as it is organized, presents structures and hierarchies that should be closely analyzed to verify if this vision that at the feast (in this case, Carnival), there are opposite orientations to the ones of daily life, is not merely a theoretical vision that can -or cannot- find a back-up in reality experienced by individuals. According to her, actually in terms of social structure, there is not any inversion in Carnival, be it on the streets, samba schools or even in clubs (Queiroz, 1992). She reminds us of the exploration of the image of the feminine body by the media and for publicity, the intense commercial use of Carnival, the ostensible presence of the Police, the high price collected in clubs etc.
 
 

For Maria Isaura, the Carnival feast should be understood as a rite of a myth about an ideal society:
 
 
 

"The concept of Carnival [...] is conceived as a result of aspirations, conscious or unconscious, guided for an “other” society, in which there would not be either injustices, or coercions; so, it would mobilize individuals' action in terms of installing a society of freedom and peace. Even if as the ideal has not ever been reached, in spite of the feast be repeated year after year, it is believed that the objective will one day be reached; anyway, the fact that it takes place again and again on fixed dates, shows that hope is always present, as well as the attachment and the taste for the rest: once the alternative society can last four days, why would it not be able to settle finally in a definitive way?” (Queiróz, 1992:182). 

 

Conclusion
 

From all this we can conclude that in the Brazilian case, both Queiróz and Da Matta, are right and, more, that under the perspective proposed by Maria Isaura, of the observations of what was experienced, the feast that accomplishes things can be discovered, a Feast that makes one become aware, a Feast that ponders and redistributes wealth, a Feast that supplies real needs and symbolic ones, at the same time. Feast vivifies history. Feast is popular history itself, distant from the official books. Feasts was so important in Brazil that can be even understood as the action and involvement model for the Brazilian people (Amaral, 1998). Or, if we want to go further, the experience of living an alternative citizenship. The Feast, as it happens in Brazil, seems to constitute the mediation between the two consolidated theories that try to understand it. The analysis of most of the Brazilian feasts leads to the conclusion that (or perhaps it is even possible to extend this statement to the feasts of countries in development, where the social rules are also in effervescent transformation) they constitute an intermediate model between the mentioned two, exercising simultaneously the role of denying and reiterating the way as how society organize itself selecting exactly, through the inclusion and exclusion, by popular will of what is needed or not to be present in it, what should be remembered and what should be forgotten; what should be transformed and what shouldn’t. Being presented as privileged mediation between dimensions and several structures, parties constitute a transcendent event, an ideal world, without time or space, where imagination can create anything, transform, remake. Facing the "Brazilian " dilemma, pointed by Roberto Da Matta - the difficulty of choosing between opposites, and always "to choose not to choose"--, the  Feast is shown as a possible symbolic solution because, when uniting the “being to the not being”, through the accomplishment of all utopias, although for brief periods, it "puts on stage", through its more dramatized aspects, collective and individual projects. It fulfils dreams, longings and fantasies at the same time; far from constituting an alienating phenomenon, separate and distant of real life, it also returns to the resolution of real problems. It constitutes a way of social action, through the organization of groups that obtain goods that the State has stopped providing, as can be evidenced in groups whose organizational genesis is the feast, as the Olodum (Bahia), the Estação Primeira de Mangueira (Rio de Janeiro), the habitants of Blumenau (Santa Catarina) with Oktoberfest, the Italians of the Bixiga (São Paulo City)  and hundreds of others who, to carry out their feasts ,(Amaral, 1998, 2000) rediscovered their power to reconstruct their world, relationships and of representing their culture as a whole.
 
 

Article originally published in TAE – Trabalhos de Antropologia e Etnologia -Revista inter e intradisciplinar de Ciências Sociais, vol. 40 (1-2). Sociedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia, Porto, 2000.
 

Notes

T. N: "Festa" (Portuguese word in the original text) was translated as “Feast”, although "festa" has a much larger inclusion in Portuguese than "feast" in English language. In Portuguese "festa" also means events as parties, fetes, festivals, festivities, holidays, celebrations, certain religious ceremonies, fairs and other, as will be perceived in this article. Once Feast also means "to feast" and religious festival,  the term Festa in  the sense used by the author is very close of  the festejar (to feast) verb. So the correspondence between both terms seems more apropos than Party, which has also the meaning of political group and more exclusive events. 
This article is part of the doctoral research results (Amaral, 1998) accomplished by me in the period between 1993 and 1997 in PPGAS of Universidade de São Paulo, with financing of the CNPq and of ANPOCS/FORD'S Budget Program, to which I am grateful.
T.N.: Passage translated from the Portuguese translation from the original French made by Rita Amaral. Name, date and pages indicated in quotations indicates the French edition.
Anthropologists were, since Morgan, more careful in looking for a system and a code of archaic societies than in examining uncommon moments of their usual existence. They seem to have, conscious or unconsciously, projected on foreign civilizations their desire to persuade their contemporaries that the groups studied were not, as was thought, despicable barbarians, since a society is respectable when it presents order. And anthropology seems to have found this " order " in the whole world. However, perhaps exactly because of this care in recomposing systems, it seems not to have taken parties into account except as the opposite of daily organization. The party disappeared, consequently, from the analysis. Or it only appears as a part of the ritual systems.
The use of quotation marks is because there are few studies that indeed hypothesize on feasts. They usually cogitate on religiosity or on several social aspects. In these studies, feast appears just as a component element of the analysis and not exactly as an object on which is speculated.
Huizinga, in "Homo Ludens" (1951) states that there are human activities that do not correspond to any function and that do not seek any effective goal. He includes amongst them the aesthetics and the Party. But the Party is not defined by its useless character or not functional one. This " no-functionality " would have a structural function, according to the types of societies where it appears. 
Agitation of the spirit; excitement, exaltation; commotion, disturbance, movement; agitation; inquietude.
The same happening, keeping due proportions, in the Party.
Regarding the mimetic processes in society, see the excellent work of Taussig (1992). Taussig sketches an anthropological theory that evidences the implications between imitation (mimesis) and differences, or the self and the other (alterity).
Recently the TV Cultura of São Paulo presented a cycle of documentaries on the typical festivals of Latin America where that is clearly demonstrated. The Party, although incorporating non-traditional elements (until that moment), is a point of contact of the cultures with their roots and extremely valued by most of the population.
In the candomblé parties, for instance, where the gods are praised (orixás) or there is a "birth" (initiation, conversion) of a new follower, there is always a concern with the decoration, with the food, a candied cake, souvenires, typical things of the profane parties. There are, also, specific groups (T.N.: the Brazilian term in this case is “terreiros”) that hire buffets (Amaral, 2000) as happens in the rest of many said profane parties.
The notion of total social fact refers to a certain type of ceremonial-materials and symbolic changes that simultaneously activate several spheres (religious, economic, juridical, moral, esthetic, and morphologic) within a society. According to the analytic point of view, the total social facts would be more than themes or elements from institutions; more than complex institutions or even systems from religious institutions, juridical, economical or others. The total social facts would represent the social system itself in operation. They would express the group of relationships, the total social dimension, that unites the social actors inside a society. Another decisive aspect in the concept of total social fact is its compulsory nature dimension: tribes, clans and fratrias, in the same way that each social actor, member of those social groups, is constrained in these situations, not only to accept what is offered to them as well as to retribute with increment what they receive. (Mauss, 1974).
From the Latin “commemorare” that means " to bring to memory, to remind ".
It is important to notice that Party appears as the resurrection of a dynamic activity that involves society in an innovation act. As a kind of history starting itself and conscious of its pulverization. Such as in the case of before "creating the history" and looking for its laws, the men had already lived this history in the Party " (Ozouf, 1986).
It does not seem an exaggeration to affirm that even if the Party is more restricted and supposedly of fruition and entertainment, it has the capacity to open the individual perception for the meaning of group life.
Duvignaud (1976, 1983) reminds that always most of the ritual behaviors were also defenses of collective life against the great events that threaten it with destruction and disorder - death, hunger, sexuality, the end. Ritual behaviors could be described as magical. And we could see in the set of the rituals an immense conspiration of nature.
 
 

Bibliography

AMARAL, Rita de Cássia. "O tempo de festa é sempre". In: TRAVESSIA - REVISTA DO MIGRANTE, CEM, ano VI, n.15, jan/abril, 1993
AMARAL, Rita. Povo-de-santo, povo-de-festa - Estudo antropológico do estilo de vida dos adeptos do candomblé paulista. Dissertação de mestrado em Antropologia Social. USP, São Paulo, 1992
AMARAL, Rita de Cássia. “Cidade em festa. - O povo de santo (e outros povos) comemora em São Paulo”, In: MAGNANI, José Guilherme & TORRES, Lilian de Lucca (orgs.) Na Metrópole. Textos de Antropologia Urbana. São Paulo, EDUSP, 1996. 
AMARAL, Rita. Festa à Brasileira - Significados do festejar, no país que “não é serio”. EbooksBrasil.com, Sao Paulo,  [1998] 2000.
AMARAL, Rita. Xirê!: o modo de crer e de viver do candomblé. Rio de Janeiro, Pallas Editora, 2002.
BALANDIER, Georges. Sens et Puissance: Les dinamiques sociales. Press Universitaires de France, Paris.1971 
BATAILLE, Georges. Theorie de la religión. Paris, Gallimard, 1973. 
BERGER, Peter L. O dossel sagrado: Elementos para uma teoria sociológica da religião. São Paulo, Paulinas, 1985.
BOAS, Franz, The mind of primitive man. New York, 1911.
BRANDÃO, Carlos R. Memória do sagrado. Estudos de religião e ritual. São Paulo, Paulinas, 1985. 
BRANDÃO, Carlos R. O Divino, O Santo e A Senhora. Rio de Janeiro, Campanha de Defesa do Folclore Brasileiro, (FUNARTE), 1973. 
CAILLOIS, Roger. L'Homme et le sacré. Paris, Gallimard, 1950. 
DA MATTA, Roberto. Carnavais, malandros e heróis - Para uma sociologia do dilema brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1978. 
CASCUDO, Luís da Câmara. Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro. (2 vols), Rio de Janeiro, Edições de Ouro, 1969. 
DEL PRIORE, Mary. Festas e utopias no Brasil colonial. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1994. 
DURKHEIM, Emile. Les formes élémentaires da la vie réligieuse. Paris, PUF, 1968.
DUVIGNAUD, Jean. Festas e civilizações. Rio de Janeiro, Tempo Brasileiro, 1983. 
ELIADE, Mircea. El mito del eterno retorno. Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1972. 
EWBANK, Thomas. Vida no Brasil. São Paulo, EDUSP/Itatiaia, 1976.
FREIRE, Gilberto. Casa Grande & Senzala. Rio de Janeiro, Record, 1995. 
FREUD, Sigmund. Totem e Tabu. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, 1974.
GIRARD, René. A violência e o sagrado. São Paulo, UNESP/Paz e Terra, 1990. 
GLUCKMAN, Max. "Les Rites de Passage". In: GLUCKMAN, Max (org) Essays on the ritual of social relations. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1966.
GLUCKMAN, Max. Rituais de rebelião no sudeste da África. In: CADERNOS DE ANTROPOLOGIA, n.4, Brasília, Universidade de Brasiília, 1974. 
GOLDWASSER, Maria Júlia. O palácio do samba - Estudo antropológico da escola de samba Estação Primeira de Mangueira, Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1975.
HUIZINGA, Johan. Homo Ludens . Paris, Gallimard, 1951. 
ISAMBERT, François-André. Le sens du sacré - fete et religión populaire. Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1982.
LEACH, Edmund. "Ritualization in Man in Relation to Conceptual and Social Development". In: LESSA, W. & VOGT, E. (org.) Reader in Comparative Religion. New York, Harper and How, 1972.
LEOPOLDI, José Sávio. Escola de samba, ritual e sociedade. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1978 
LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. O pensamento selvagem. São Paulo, Nacional, 1976. 
LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. "Histoire et Ethnologie". In: Annales E.S.C. Historie et Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1983. 
MAFFESOLI, Michel. A sombra de Dionísio - Contribuição a uma sociologia da orgia. Rio de Janeiro, Graal, 1985. 
MAGNANI, José Guilherme C. Festa no pedaço. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1984. 
MALINOWSKI, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York, Dutton, 1922. 
MAUSS, Marcel & HUBERT, Henry. "Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice" In: MAUSS, Marcel. Oeuvres. Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1968. 
MAUSS, Marcel. Sociologia e Antropologia. São Paulo, EPU/EDUSP, 1974. 
MORAES FILHO, Melo. A procissão de São Benedito no Lagarto. CADERNOS DE FOLCLORE SERGIPANO, n.6, Sergipe, Secretaria de Educação e Cultura/CDFB, s/d. 
OZOUF, Mona. La fete révolutionnaire - 1789-1799. Paris, Gallimard, 1986. 
QUEIROZ, Maria Isaura P. Carnaval brasileiro - O vivido e o mito. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1992.
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. Lettre a d"Alembert sur les spetacles et Consideratións sur le governement de la Pologne In: Ouvres Completes. Paris, Gallimard, 1962, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.
TAUSSIG, Michael. Mimesis and alterity - A particular history of the senses, Routlege, 1992.
TURNER, Victor. O processo ritual - estrutura a antiestrutura. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1974.