What is an event?

To begin with, events could simply be seen as something which happens. However, some events are more significant than others (Shipley & Zacks, 2008, Chapter 3). In an intro-duction to an “evental approach to the study of events”, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Por-ter (2016) qualify this by making a distinction between events as “things” and events as

“events”. To see an event simply as something that happens, i.e. an action or occurrence within a limited time and space, is to see the event as a thing. An event as an “event” is a

“phenomenon that contain within them so to speak, a novelty-bearing quality” (MacKen-zie & Porter, 2016, p. 25; cf. Žižek, 2014). Whereas things are states, events are the changes between states. MacKenzie and Porter explicitly contrast this idea with the event management’s view of the events in question as “things in the service of competitive advantage” for the stakeholder (2016, p. 25).

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Research on event management however has had an eye for the events as events too, borrowing from a “classical discourse” of “myth, ritual and symbolism; ceremony and cel-ebration; spectacle [and] communitas” (Getz, 2012a, p. 37). The findings of sociologist Émile Durkheim function as a prominent example. Durkheim’s classic studies of the abo-riginals’ religious practice in Australia from the beginning of the 20^th century was just as much as study of a society as of religion, which makes it useful for current event research when explaining the relevance of events today. Durkheim showed that it is through soci-ety that the individual becomes something more than itself. He also describes how this happens through rituals (events in event research). They bring a rhythm to society through which the individuals confirm their relations (Durkheim, 1912/1995). Anthropol-ogist Victor Turner’s works are another important source of inspiration. He too drew on Durkheim when considering the close connection between events and rituals as “’collec-tive representations’, symbols having a common intellectual and emotional meaning for all the members of the group” (Turner, 1982, p. 54). Turner also developed a distinction between the liminal and limonoid ritual. The first is “centrally integrated into the total social process, forming with all its other aspects a complete whole”. The limonoid ritual is the opposite and tends:

to be more idiosyncratic, quirky, to be generated by specific names in-dividuals and in particular groups – “schools,” circles, and coteries – they have to compete with one another for general recognition and

are thought of at first as ludic offerings placed for sale on the free market. (Turner, 1982, p. 54)

Donald Getz exemplifies this concept when developing the idea of the current events as a move from reoccurring, structuring liminal events to playful, commodified limonoid events (2012b).

Regarding sport events, some research on sports fans interprets the fans’ relation to a sport or team as a “secular religion” and in that way the sport event too can be a way for the audience to transgress into a collective similar to Turner’s rituals (Giulianotti, 2015b, pp. 6–7; 136–144). However, as described by Durkheim, a religion has two levels. The

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first is the immediate sense of community provoked in the moment of effervescence. It seems evident that spectators can experience this at a match, where the fans, like the participants in rituals, often engage in carnival-like activities such as moving in sync, cos-tuming, singing, and experiencing a “moral community” (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 42; cf.

Ehrenreich, 2007, sec. 11.2). According to Durkheim, the second level of religion is the sense of belonging to something bigger (cf. the totem as a prism and the imagination of an “ideal” world through the ritual (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 424)).

2.5.1.1 Contemporary events

MacKenzie and Porter defined events as bearers of novelties. For Durkheim, rituals helped members of a society making sense of the world. Durkheim’s rituals were based on long-running traditions which were nevertheless staged, and MacKenzie and Porter’s idea of an event suggests they can be used to provoke a change. In contemporary defini-tions of cultural events, this makes the events something willed and with a targeted im-pact, similar to the limonoid rituals described by Turner.³⁷ Indeed, in a study of staged events Britta Timm Knudsen and Dorthe Refslund Christensen suggest that:

[f]or [staged] events to become ‘events’ they have to encompass this dual ideal: they have to evoke events in their users – enhancing their feeling of aliveness – and they have to open time for their users and ideally for mankind in general. Events can point to and open a ‘not yet’

world beyond actual worlds. (B. T. Knudsen & Christensen, 2014, p.

123; cf. Derrida, 2007)

In another Danish study on the role of events from 2008, the political scientist Jens Niel-sen defined an event as:

37 Some research questions whether this happens at sport events (Rojek, 2013, p. 139). With reference to Turner, it questions whether this community is as deeply felt in comparison to the experience of true liminal ritual, arguing that a sport match is ‘just’ a limonoid commodity (cf. above and Andreasen, 2009).

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a single or periodically reoccurring occasion [begivenhed], which is planned and staged individually with the attendance or participation

of a target group in mind, with the purpose – by the use of symbolic expressions and actions and through effervescence – of giving this

tar-get group a specific experience of new insights, confirmation and transformation. (2008, p. 33)

With reference to Durkheim, Nielsen saw events as totems, i.e. what designated the clan in Durkheim’s study or, in Nielsen’s wording, are “the prisms through which the life of the clan and surroundings are understood” (Nielsen, 2008, p. 42; cf. Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 100). Both Nielsen and Knudsen and Christensen believed that events should evoke

“events” in the sense of MacKenzie and Porter. However, their study objects, suggesting that this could happen with events which are products of the culture industry’s “event making” (B. T. Knudsen & Christensen, 2014, pp. 123–125).

These definitions of staged events make the interdependence between the event as an instrument and as an event clear in the case of the contemporary staged event. This in-terdependence lead to my suggestion that the current event discourse has two funda-mental elements (cf. the thesis’ first objective relating to the general event discourse):

firstly, events are spectacular as they allow individual to experience a new community or sense through participating in the event comparable to the ritual described above; sec-ondly, they are speculative when designed to give the stakeholders access to new or in-creased amounts of resources. The following section elaborates on these two spectacular and speculative elements to show how some general trends in society could make events especially interesting now as a basis for further analysis in the empirical chapters.