The V Festival has been held since 1996, and was the first large-scale outdoor rock and pop music festival in Britain to be held at two sites simultaneously over one weekend. Developed as a mainstream alternative to the Glastonbury and Reading Festivals, it struggled to create a distinctive\n identity or gain critical acceptance, especially among the more radical or countercultural of festival-goers and press. Managed by a consortium of highly successful concert promoters, it actively embraces commercialism, sponsorship deals, and a forward-thinking ethos of quality and customer\n service. However, rather than escaping the countercultural and carnivalseque imagery and meanings historically associated with outdoor rock and pop music festivals it has, to varying degrees, commodified, modernized, or subverted them. In the process, it has gained considerable popularity\n among festival-goers and secured the plaudits of music industry professionals. The event is at the forefront of initiatives regarding festival policing and safety, and offers a role model for the many new commercial events that are established each year. This article considers how the concept\n of the countercultural carnivalesque has been used in relation to large-scale outdoor music festivals, before examining the V Festival through a cultural economic focus. It demonstrates how the beliefs and backgrounds of its organizers have influenced the management and image of the event,\n and how it has helped to transform the large-scale outdoor music festival market more generally.

The authors propose that cultural frame shifting—shifting between two culturally based interpretative lenses in response to cultural cues—is moderated by perceived compatibility (vs. opposition) between the two cultural orientations, or bicultural identity integration (BII). Three studies found that Chinese American biculturals who perceived their cultural identities as compatible (high BII) responded in culturally congruent ways to cultural cues: They made more external attributions (a characteristically Asian behavior) after being exposed to Chinese primes and more internal attributions (a characteristically Western behavior) after being exposed to American primes. However, Chinese American biculturals who perceived their cultural identities as oppositional (low BII) exhibited a reverse priming effect. This trend was not apparent for noncultural primes. The results show that individual differences in bicultural identity affect how cultural knowledge is used to interpret social events.

This paper is part of a wider research project on Paradoxical Spaces: Encountering the Other in Public Space that explores how cultural difference is practiced and negotiated in different public spaces in Copenhagen. The present case focus on encounters at two urban festivals: Kulturhavn (Cultural Harbur) and Smag Verden (Taste the World)—both multicultural and both initiated by the Municipality of Copenhagen. The festivals are seen as sites for ongoing dialogue and negotiation of identity and belonging. The celebration, performances, and pleasure of festivals can empower the body, break down social and cultural distance, and for a moment suspend everyday life. They are related to laughter and freedom, but can also be exclusive, alienating, and a vehicle of the inserting of the hegemonic order. The aim of the paper is to discover how the festivals work as social and material mediators of cross-cultural encounters—how they give rise to different modes of encounters and how they balance between liberation and similarities. They are both organized by the municipality of Copenhagen, who invite voluntary organizations and cultural associations every year to participate in organizing the two festivals. They both cover a broad range of cultural activities such as dance, music, food, sport, and theatre, and they share the vision of celebrating the cultural diversity of the city. We chose these two festivals in order to explore variations in the way the festivals are experienced and encountered; the focus of the analysis is on how festivals with many similarities in location and formal conditions can give rise to rather different modes of encounters. The aim of the paper is to explore how the festivals work as social and material mediators of cross-cultural encounters. How do the two festivals give rise to different modes of encounters? How do they balance between liberation and domination in a differential way? Drawing on empirical material obtained through participant observation and framed by theoretical conceptualization of cross-cultural encounters, multicultural festivals, and aesthetic politics, the paper explores embodied encounters at the two festivals. It focuses on the role of the festivals as social and material mediators of encounters and negotiation of identities. The paper concludes on the paradoxical character of the festivals, involving antagonistic embodiments of performance, pleasure, and politics.