Aspects of the Analysis of Calendrical Events
When we narrow our horizon to look at Bhaktapur's various calendrical events in themselves and in their similarities and contrasts to each other, we must seek appropriate and relevant aspects for analysis and contrast. We must attend to the social and spatial units involved. What are the static and dynamic uses of those units? Which deities are made use of? Is the deity or deities moved; do people move? Where? To what purpose? Who are the human actors and audiences? What are the different sorts of actions? What are the themes and narratives portrayed and recounted? Are there narrative "plots," with conflicts, tensions, climaxes, resolutions? What kinds of symbolic forms and rhetoric are used to contribute to meaning? What kinds of themes are there in various events? What problems seem to be dealt with? How do participants seem not only to act in but also to respond to particular calendrical events? How are various city units tied together—through "parallel" devices (with various units doing the same sorts of things at the same time) or through "serial" or "interactive" devices, with some sort of meaningful movements and encounters systematically interrelating different kinds of actors and social units in the course of the event?
Such questions are in the background of our considerations of calendrical events, but we have not dealt with these issues explicitly in relation to all the calendrical events noted in the following chapters, for many minor festivals many of them are irrelevant. These various elements of festival meaning become fully relevant only in the more developed festivals, those that are more important to Bhaktapur by various criteria, which we will present in the following chapters.
A catalogue of their potential resources for generating and expressing order and meaning, in fact, is liable to make the annual events seem more exhaustively integrative and constitutive of the city's symbolic system than they really are. That task falls on selected ones. The question of which potential resources are, in fact, used or neglected by particular individual events and throughout the course of the annual cycle is an empirical one.
We will see that the events vary in importance from "trivial" to what we call "focal" events, events of central importance to the city,[10] and we will make an estimate of the relative importance of the various calendrical events as being of minor, moderate, or major importance. In the next three chapters we will lose ourselves among the trees of the annual cycle. In chapter 16 we will return to the view of the forest, and
the consideration of its differential contributions to urban order. What do these annual events do for Bhaktapur and its people? How do they do whatever it is that they do?