Social practices and placemaking: the case of the Bons Sons festival, in Portugal
International Journal of Event and Festival Management
ISSN: 1758-2954
Article publication date: 26 December 2023
Issue publication date: 15 March 2024
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to understand the meaning of event-based and place-based community practices, as well as the resulting social impacts.
Design/methodology/approach
An ethnomethodological approach was followed (participant observation and interviews were supplemented by secondary data), with the analysis being exploratory and interpretative.
Findings
The festival and the place reinforce the community’s social practices, which have impacts beyond the festival, benefiting individuals, the community and the place, becoming a means for valorisation and diffusion of the rural way of life, and placemaking.
Research limitations/implications
In this study the authors focus on social practices in the context of an event and of a place (the village where the event occurs). The authors connect to theories of practice, which they apply in the analysis. The value of the study lies on the underlying mechanisms (how communities exercise social practices in the context of festivals, and what social impacts may lead to) rather than its context-dependent specific results.
Practical implications
National and regional authorities can play a role in providing local communities with adequate tools to overcome the challenges they encounter. This can be done by issuing appropriate (events) plans and policies while giving room for the locals to voice their opinions.
Social implications
Community-based festivals are key social practices that can strategically impact placemaking, strengthening community bonding, forging connections with outsiders and promoting well-being practices that discourage rural depopulation.
Originality/value
There is a scarcity of research that deepens the understanding of the role of festivals in placemaking and their social impacts, particularly in the rural context. This study contributes to closing this gap by focussing on the social practices of a community-based festival in a village in the interior of Portugal.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The first author would like to thank Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), the Brazilian research foundation that funded the first author's stay abroad to collect data and carry out the research, via the Capes/NUFFIC Program and supported by, and in collaboration with, Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUAS) in the Netherlands and Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) in Brazil. The authors thank the festival organisers for having given permission to the first author to conduct interviews for her research, side by side with volunteering for the festival, back in 2017. The authors thank all of them for their patience in answering clarifying questions and for their availability for interviews in the years that followed. The authors would like to thank Dr Herminia Sol, a scholar at the Polytechnical Institute of Tomar for copyediting the manuscript, in the spirit of exchange and without financial compensation.
Citation
De Almeida, M.L., de Brito, M.P. and Wanderley, L.S.O. (2024), "Social practices and placemaking: the case of the
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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