This book is about how the living use their social life to express the past. People relive and reinterpret the past. The writer thinks society tends to diminish the memory of the dead and shows how cemeteries in the eighteenth century were moved not merely for for health reasons to the edges of cities.
Festivals reenact the lives of the dead.
He focusses on the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Amidst the mixtures of shadows and symbols he sees the efforts of the dominant social group to reenact the antebellum world of slavery that had died. Yet the integration of the parades lead to more complicated shared experiences. In fact the parade seems to have been a place and time to act out racial conflict. Yet it remains a festival.