Festival Carnival Research In The Perspective Of Humanism

In modern society,the fast pace,heavy pressure and fragmentation of daily life is damaging human’s physical and mental health,instrumental rationality causes the alienation of people and mass communication brings fragmented and single dimension person.People who live in such social environment have the need of relaxation,releasing and creating social contacts with others through group activities.Festival has such functions and it can help people release pressure,build nice relationship with others, enhance the sense of group belonging and so on.In festival activities,carnival is an important way to realize these functions.It is human being’s positive state of experiencing the freedom and happiness of life and the affirmation of emotional happiness and free human nature.It always exists in global famous festivals such as Brazil Carnival,Edinburgh FestivalSpain Tomato Festival, Lantern Festival in ancient China,Qingdao International Beer Festival as well as Water-splashing Festival.This paper takes festival as the research object, focusing on analysing the group communication features in festival carnival activities, such as communication environment of cerntain field,equal communication relationship,ritual communication form,immediate feedback and non-utilitarian communication purpose.At the same time,this paper analyses the special experience and function of festival carnival and finds out the reason why festival can meet people’s need of irrational emotional release based on Thresholds Theory.The conclusion is that the festival world is a relatively independent system and special space-time which is quite different from our daily life.In this liminal area,people can take part in unusual activities and get special experience,such as experiencing freedom and happiness of collective carnival,releasing the pressure and troubles, getting rid of constraints of daily behavior standards,getting back to the real self,achieving equal, natural and intimate interpersonal relationship and so on.After finishing this experience,people will return to daily life with totally fresh state.As a result,the social structure will become more mature and stable.In this way,formally irrational carnival actually have constructive rationality value.Actually,Festival carnival becomes an adjustment mechanism of daily life as well as a system of respecting life and adding the meaning of life.In the end,the paper discusses carnival’s applicability and inspiration for our festivals based on China’s specific context and actual situation.