Feasts and Celebrations in North American Ethnic Communities.

Edited by Ramon A. Gutierrez and Genevieve Fabre. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. xiv + 195 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $30.00.

This work is essentially a collection of eleven revised English language papers given at an international conference held in Paris in 1989, at the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. Its purpose was to show the importance of festivals and parades as "total social facts" expressing the sentiments of its ethnic participants under three general categories. They are spectacles as resistance; rituals of renewal and return; and celebrations as creations of identities. Overall, the essays are of high quality and hence do …