WithWinter Carnival in a Western Town: Identity, Change, and the Good of the Community, by Lisa Gabbert, Utah State University Press initiates a new book series titled Ritual, Festival, and Celebration. The literature on ritual and festival continues to grow as scholars find these subjects very rich ground for research. The study of ritual and festival is genuinely interdisciplinary. Not only are scholars from many, varied scholarly perspectives researching festivity, ritual, and other examples of patterned symbolic behavior, they are reading each other’s works and engaging in dialogue. Folklorists, anthropologists, historians, religious studies and performance studies scholars, and other...

At 8:00 A.M. on Friday of the last weekend of January, the mountainous, snowbound, and remote village of McCall, Idaho (approximately 2,554 residents in 2009) is cold and silent.¹ The temperature is eleven degrees below zero, and all signs of activity have ceased. The early morning sun casts long shadows on strange objects, sparkling and glinting in the pale light. Drawing closer, one realizes they are sculptures made of snow, the results of preparations by local people for their annual Winter Carnival, which officially begins that evening. Some sculptures are gigantic, as tall and long as the buildings in front...

Local people in the Payette Lakes area had a range of feelings about and responses to Winter Carnival. Some people loved it, others loved to hate it, but hardly anyone had no opinion about it. Simon Bronner (1981) notes that in Indiana, people were ambivalent about turtle hunting, butchering, and eating, yet they did these activities anyway for a variety of reasons that sometimes were contradictory. The McCall case is similar. Many people in the McCall area supported Winter Carnival because they thought it was important, they thought it was good for something they imagined as the community, and they...

Snow sculptures were a primary attraction of Winter Carnival and constituted the area’s most visible and developed form of public art. Two separate kinds of snow-sculpting events took place: the local competition and the Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship, both of which were formal competitions where sculptures were judged and winners were chosen. The local event was the older of the two. It began with the revival of Winter Carnival in 1965. The Idaho championship was a more formally regulated event that led to integration into higher levels; winners could go on to participate in national and international competitions. It was...

Snow sculptures were arguably Winter Carnival’s biggest attraction, but the two parades, the main Mardi Gras Parade and the Children’s Neon Light Parade, were also core elements. Parades are gathering events or happenings (Casey 1996, 24–27) that accomplish their communicative functions by assembling festival participants in predetermined spaces and then moving bodies in particular ways. Winter Carnival parades transformed and redirected collective festival energy as marchers placed themselves on display through costumes, masks, makeup, dancing, and noise. Other people became spectators who were obliged to demonstrate their appreciation and admiration by shouting, clapping, and whistling. The relationship between marchers...

The dramatization of an identity split between inward-and outward-facing poles illustrated in the snow-sculpting competitions and the parades also was also evident in Winter Carnivals of the past. During the 1920s, organizers used Winter Carnival as a means of inserting local players into a nationally developing winter-sports scene. Winter-sports competitions were first held under the rubric of the festival, and local people made history: world records were broken, people experimented with skiing technologies, and gender norms were pushed. This outward focus apparently strained social relations between McCall and the county seat of Cascade, and Winter Carnival split into two festivals....

Images of Sharlie, the serpentine monster that allegedly lives in Payette Lake, permeated McCall’s Winter Carnival, yet the festival was not specifically about Sharlie, and the chamber of commerce did not purposefully map her onto the event. The residents decided that Sharlie was appropriate, and they incorporated her in various ways. This chapter suggests that Sharlie was an important, complex symbol of identity that mediated both inward and outward dimensions of community and encompassed a broad range of meanings. She manifested locally in memorates and legends; she also was tied to international folklore complexes, national ideologies, and the mass media...

Winter carnivals historically have been, and continue to be, common across the Northern Hemisphere. They are important to areas that have developed a winter-oriented culture, but, relative to the frequency of their occurrence, they are neglected in cultural scholarship. The study of McCall’s Winter Carnival contributes to a better understanding of northern and mountainous snow cultures, where a cyclical seasonally-based identity is perhaps a more salient feature than ethnic or regional factors. Such a study also contributes to the existing body of festival scholarship by providing an examination of an underrepresented festival type.

Festivals have long been associated with community,...