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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses the Straw Bear procession held in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire (UK), where a bear-like costume made from dry straw stomps about town and parades along with traditional dancers, discussing the rediscovery of the festival's sensuous aspects and its socioeconomic realities.

Paper Abstract:

Across the UK, masked processions with zoo-anthropomorphic figures have been revived. This paper presents one-year fieldwork results on the Straw Bear procession held in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire–a market town in the marshy East Anglian Fens (Frampton 1989) where a bear-like costume made from dry straw stomps about town and parades along with traditional Molly dancers (Needham/Peck 1933) as the celebration is accompanied by drums, fiddles, melodeons, and pipes. Drawing on anthropological conceptualisations of “ritual” (Turner 1969, Ackerman 1991, Quack/ Töbelmann 2010) and on studies on British and Whittlesey’s folk revivalism (Boyes 1993, Cornish 2016, Irvine 2018), this paper interrogates the material and sensuous festive realities of the revival as well as their socio-economic coordinates, from three perspectives. First, I focus on the material “rediscovery” of the festival by non-Whittleseyan “mastermind” Brian Kell in the 1980s, involving the material re-engineering of a straw costume that the local community had failed at preserving, and the process of reconstruction of the elements that underpin performances. Second, I focus on the everyday realities of the festival’s steering committee, on the labour challenges of participants and activists working towards annual iterations. In the Straw Bear, continuous reinvention is subject to intergenerational disruptions due to ageing residents, as youths leave town to pursue employment. Third, I focus on the economic dimension of the festival, interrogating the insider/outsider dynamics of my presence in Whittlesey and the assumptions that informed my initial engagement with communities through the inescapable academic requirements of “impact” and "innovation" that facilitated my fieldwork.