Paper presented at the conference Museums and Communities, held at the International Center of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, March 21-23, 1990, and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Smithsonian.

The author bases this paper on 18 Minnesota festivals he researched from 1981-1990. Yet the public culture that Minnesota festivals produce does not simply emerge out of the collective unconscious of a single-voiced, organic community. The voices of most of the people out for a good time on a Saturday night in a small Minnesota town do not influence the design of the festival; rather, as I will show, it is carefully constructed by the local middle class. An exercise in impression management, a Minnesota community festival is the more or less self-aware celebration of the values of its middle-class organizers, made in the name of the community as a whole.

The appropriation of our community by these organizers in small towns is generally (but not always) accepted by other segments of the local population who share their vision of a harmonious community of mutually supportive equals. The tension between this ideal and the daily experiences of uninvolved individuals who are linked by fragile, contingent social ties in the town endangers the characteristic earnest and nonironic official voice of the small-town festival. (p. 77)

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Notes [bibliography].