Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

All religious festivals evolve as mechanisms to propitiate the gods and celebrate their divine actions, but they also serve a social purpose and in the process offer a good insight into the cultural and social dynamics of a community. McKim Marriott, on observing the village of Kishan Garhi through ordinary routines and also during the festival of Holi, sees a complete contrast in the behavior and interactions of the members However, it is unique in that it also gives the people license to temporarily discard the roles they play in an otherwise strictly ordered and stratified society and assume different ones – a process of reversal. In his article “The Feast of Love”, Marriott describes the “tightly ranked and compartmentalized order” observed by the villagers in terms of a social and economic hierarchy. On the basis of relative pollution and purity, the village was separated into castes and the conditions of intercaste interactions were clearly defined. The subordinacy of the women to the men in generic relationships as well as husband-wife interactions was equally stressed and the servility and deference of the women to all males senior to them was expected at all levels. As the structural anthropolog