how connection developsA festival wristband can carry meaning before the first performance begins. It may announce an anticipated weekend, identify an experienced festivalgoer, or remain on a wrist afterward as a reminder of having been there. Yet the identity suggested by that small object does not tell us everything about what happens among the people wearing it.
In his 2017 paper, It wasn’t me, it was my festival me, Andrew Davis examined how festival identities took shape through the experience itself. His interest was in the relationship between the event people imagine, the behavior they share, and the values that make participation personally meaningful.
Davis interviewed attendees and took part in festival life at three multiday Scottish music festivals. He sought varied accounts, including those of newcomers and returning attendees, rather than a representative survey. The largest event offered international pop and dance headliners. The two smaller events included Scottish, Celtic, and local performers, with activities such as crafts and workshops. Across these settings, he explored how people recognized themselves as festivalgoers, joined a crowd’s activities, found affinities with particular people, and came to identify with an event.
A festival begins in the imagination
Davis found that people arrived with an idea of what being at a festival would involve. Music, websites, social media, previous experiences, and widely circulated images of festival life helped shape that idea. The expectation could include freedom from ordinary responsibilities, a particular way of dressing, or the pleasure of participating in something larger than everyday life.
He calls this a festival prototype identity. It is a personal image of the festival experience and of the person one might be within it. A large, culturally familiar festival could supply the template even for someone attending a different event. The imagined festival therefore came partly from the particular organizer and partly from a broader understanding of what festivals are like.
Objects made that anticipation visible. Merchandise, camping equipment, and wristbands could signal preparation or experience. An old wristband also allowed a previous festival to remain part of someone’s public identity after the event had ended. One participant described strangers recognizing his previous attendance through the wristbands he wore. Such signs gave people ways to recognize participation without requiring an introduction. They could also distinguish experienced attendees from newcomers, making someone’s history visible within a crowd that appeared to share one identity.
The importance of this stage is that people arrive prepared to notice some possibilities more readily than others. An expectation of uninhibited celebration, for instance, gives the event a different initial meaning from an expectation of enjoying local musicians with family. The actual setting then gives those expectations something to work with, and sometimes something to reconsider.
Sharing the life of the crowd
During the festivals, participants described entering a different rhythm of life. Ordinary professional roles became less prominent. Shared music, dancing, clothing, and routines gave people recognizable ways to participate. Davis describes this level as a festival collective identity, where the anticipated festival becomes a social experience enacted among others.
Some accounts involved an everyday generosity within the crowd. Participants described helping people or responding when someone needed assistance, including recollections from festivals beyond the three Davis studied. These accounts conveyed a sense that being part of an event brought expectations about how to behave toward fellow attendees. The festival identity included a social role as well as an opportunity for enjoyment.
Collective identification could also draw on wider affiliations. Scottish symbols and comparisons with other festivals helped participants describe who the gathering represented. A crowd could understand itself through a shared place or cultural identity, even when its members had never met before. Comparisons also drew boundaries. Some attendees defined their preferred festival partly through what they disliked about another event’s crowds, drinking, or atmosphere.
Going along with the group had several meanings. Participants described joining chants and dancing because others were doing so. One attendee also described drinking more than usual as part of joining in. Similar behavior could express pleasure, curiosity, or an effort to fit the occasion. Its meaning needed more explanation than the sight of people acting alike could provide.
At the same time, similar behavior did not always mean a wish for closer acquaintance. At the largest festival, some people enjoyed brief exchanges with strangers while remaining focused on their existing friends. They could participate enthusiastically in the same event without expecting those conversations to continue afterward. Other accounts included actively keeping a distance from people they judged unlike themselves. The crowd contained welcome and separation at the same time.
This distinction gives a fuller account of what a festival offers. Sharing a song, helping someone in a crowd, and forming a friendship are different social experiences. The visible unity of a performance can be meaningful on its own. Davis’s interviews make room for that experience alongside the more personal affinities that sometimes developed within it.
Finding a more personal fit
As people encountered the actual festival, their individual preferences and values continued to matter. Age, musical taste, accommodation, and expectations about behavior shaped where they felt comfortable and whom they wanted to spend time with. A collective identity did not erase these differences.
Accommodation made this especially concrete. A returning attendee described how his visits changed over the years, from late nights with a large group of friends to music during the day and a quieter night with his wife. A more comfortable camping option made their latest trip possible. Another attendee, aged 65, brought a caravan so that he could enjoy the weekend while giving up tent camping.
Davis interpreted different accommodation choices as one way the crowd divided into smaller groups. The accounts also reveal what those arrangements made possible. Comfort could help someone continue an activity they valued as their circumstances changed. Sharing an interest in the music did not require everyone to share the same way of spending the night.
At the smaller events, participants described conversations with unfamiliar people as a welcome part of the experience. Older attendees at one festival spoke about feeling comfortable among people of different ages. Their accounts identified something more specific than a friendly atmosphere. They felt able to participate without their age becoming a reason to stand apart.
Local involvement also provided recognizable routes into the event. One participant first attended because his son played in a school jazz band. Another described neighbors whose son’s performance brought the family to the festival, after which they returned the following year. The event became relevant through relationships and activities that already mattered to them.
Davis calls the more personally grounded level festival interpersonal identity. Here, people’s experiences begin to fit their own values and their affinities with others. A festival’s broad invitation becomes more particular through the people, activities, and interactions encountered there.
This level could also develop within a large event. Fans gathered around a particular band could find a more specific shared identity within the wider festival crowd. The relevant social group might be a small part of the event rather than the whole attendance. That allows for several meaningful experiences within the same festival, each organized around different interests.
When a festival expresses an existing community
Davis found the clearest examples of alignment between personal and collective identity in accounts of the festival with especially strong local roots. Local businesses, produce, traditions, musicians, and school performers made the surrounding community visible throughout the event. Attendees described pride in hosting something significant in their own area.
In this setting, the festival could intensify an existing identity. People’s involvement as parents, neighbors, local music supporters, and residents carried into the weekend. The event gave those affiliations a concentrated expression through performances, encounters, and shared enjoyment.
That finding complicates the familiar idea of a festival as an escape from ordinary life. For these participants, continuity with everyday relationships helped explain the event’s appeal. The festival mattered partly because it gathered together things they already valued and made them especially visible.
Davis describes festival identity as the level at which personal values and the collective character of the event fit together. Participants could recognize the festival as a place where their own priorities made sense. Its distinctiveness arose from what people experienced there, including its local relationships and intergenerational participation.
Some participants valued the festival’s scale because of the interactions and atmosphere they associated with it. Their attachment concerned the character of participation, rather than the number of attractions available. The three festivals differed in audience, programming, local ties, and size, so their accounts do not isolate smallness as the reason for feeling welcome. People already drawn to a local community event may also have been more likely to choose it.
Four forms of identification, with room for variation
Davis brought these observations together in a four-level model, moving from the imagined festivalgoer to shared crowd behavior, more personal affinities, and alignment with the event as a whole. He treated that final alignment as a desirable outcome. The accounts also leave room for people who value a particular performance, a small circle of friends, or a brief exchange without seeking an identity shared by the entire festival.
He proposes movement through these levels over the course of a festival. That sequence is an interpretation of the interviews and observations. Participants were not repeatedly interviewed before, during, and after the event, so the study does not establish that everyone moves through the same stages in the same order. The interviews also do not establish whether changes in identity persisted after the weekend. Davis identified longer-term research as a way to examine that development more closely.
The differences among the three festivals are also important. A large, varied event may offer several overlapping identities. A locally rooted event may communicate a more specific shared character. The research gives reasons to understand those arrangements on their own terms, including who finds them appealing and how people actually participate.
When the experience meets the invitation
The image of a festival gives someone an initial reason to go. The experience adds particulars that an image cannot supply. Conversations, performances, sleeping arrangements, and the people nearby give the weekend its actual character. Davis argued that expectations and experience fit more readily when the event’s public identity reflects what people encounter there.
The family who first came to hear a school musician makes this especially concrete. Their connection to the festival began with an existing relationship. In the account of the neighbors who returned the following year, the performance opened the way to an event they chose to attend again. Something they already cared about became the beginning of a further shared experience.
Sources
Davis, A. (2017). It wasn’t me, it was my festival me: The effect of event stimuli on attendee identity formation. Tourism Management, 61, 484–500. Read the accepted manuscript.