EXTENDED CALL FOR PAPERS: SOCIOLOGY OF CELEBRATION

2016

Temporality, spatiality, sociality: The coordinates of celebrationWhatever their particular nature - political commemorations, religious holidays, family anniversaries or other festive occasions - celebrations are the salt-n-pepper of social life. Celebrations bring a burst of flavor to the otherwise dry and dull routine of ordinary daily life of a community. They punctuate the endless routine into which everyday social living is cast with festive occasions that break the dominion of affective neutrality governing human relations and spark an outburst of collective emotions.3Although not figuring explicitly on Donald E. Brown's list of human universals, a compelling case could be argued for including celebrations among anthropological constants (Brown 1991). True enough, celebration cannot be found as such in Brown's index of cultural universals. However, the constituents of celebration, such as ritual and symbolic behavior, a notion of the sacred and some forms of religion,...

Temporality, spatiality, sociality: The coordinates of celebration Whatever their particular nature – political commemorations, religious holidays, family anniversaries or other festive occasions – celebrations are the salt-n-pepper of social life. Celebrations bring a burst of flavor to the otherwise dry and dull routine of ordinary daily life of a community. They punctuate the endless routine into which everyday social living is cast with festive occasions that break the dominion of affective neutrality governing human relations and spark an outburst of collective emotions.

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, 2019

Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 2012

Religion is an extremely complex phenomenon, created of different elements-notions, myths, rituals, taboos, ethical principles, and thus it belongs to different genres. On the other hand, the religious feeling is a special experience related to a human need to give sense to existence. It is doubtless that in the basis of today's value systems we can fi nd strong foundations of religious moral teachings. However, it is also clear that their relation to religion has been weakened, changed or canceled. Religion and social changes have always been interrelated, and thus the changes of the economic base induce changes in the higher strata, including religion. The article focuses upon the situation with the "Christian" religious celebrations among rural and urban population in the Republic of Macedonia, during socialistic times and today. Based upon concrete celebrations, it encapsulates phenomena and changes concerning the collective festivities of Orthodox Christian Macedonians. Those are beliefs in non-baptized days, the Easter holidays, as well as ritual plays under masks. Though a continuous analysis, the changes that are part of contemporary life are followed, at the same time mixed with pre-Christian elements. Urban elements are mixed with traditional customs related to Christian holidays, as a contemporary and acceptable way of celebrating among people that have migrated from different areas, above all to the capital city, but also include completely new elements that have not been a part of the celebrations and everyday life ten years ago.

2019

The post-1989 period came with new regimes of memory and contested genealogies of identity. Suppressed memories and marginalised identities of the previous system gained the public space to reclaim acknowledgement. The festive culture was the most often reclaimed public context where individuals and communities were able to renegotiate allegiances and meanings. Active performances and the performative dimension were used as a medium in which cultural identity was not only expressed, but also enacted. The authors argue that the festive culture in the ex-socialist countries represents a mixture of the legacy of socialist celebrations, holidays introduced slightly before or after 1989-1991, and religious revivals in the form of both pagan/ancestral and Church festivities. Many of the festive forms assert the re-invigoration of the pre-socialist national identity of the new regimes. Trough this edited volume – published with the financial assistance of Konrad Adenauer Foundation at Chişinău – we aim to offer the reader a comparative approach to the transformation of festive culture from the socialist period till recent times. The investigations concern the actors and agencies, stage settings, festive practices, and negotiation of new and old meanings in public celebrations; the contributors consider how celebrations offered space and created time for resistance, loyalty or escape; how they served as frames for hope, solidarity and remembrance; how socialist performances changed people’s views of their own pasts and identities; and how the propagandistic traits of festive culture have been revived, forgotten or marginalised since 1991.

2016

The Serbian Orthodox tradition devotes 78 different days of the year to patron saints to be celebrated according to an elaborate ritual, the Slava, or Krsna Slava. The name of the ritual can be properly translated as celebration, or christened celebration. In the following, we will discuss the changing meaning and institutional position of that celebration. Our discussion will refer to media reports on, and personal participation in the events; to literature on this particular tradition, on Serbian religion and ethnicity, and on the PostSocialist, Post-Yugoslav political change; and as to the theoretical level, to issues about relationships between institutions of different types, resources, and degrees of formality.3 We will demonstrate how in the Post-Socialist Serbia a private, religious ceremony has been transformed into a public celebration of Serbian ethnicity.Traditionally, the Slava is understood as a family's celebration of a particular saint recognized as the bringer o...

Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019

Festivities not always are taken seriously as objects of study, but they have long attracted the attention of social scientists and other researchers. However, its analysis tends to be restricted and enclosed in some classical conceptions that, although relevant and useful, have become mere buzzwords and do not live up to the richness and complexity of this field of study. This article aims to provide some insights for the analysis of the festivities, focusing particularly on carnival and the way it has been treated by Social Sciences. It begins by exposing and discussing some theoretical recurrences -namely the theories of inversion, escape valve, resistance and communitas -and then presents other analytical perspectives that look at different facets of the festivities -cultural, social, economic and political -thus suggesting more in-depth and committed approaches to social reality and less hostage to the abstraction and dryness of theoretical models.

Building on Erwin Goffman’s (1974) notion of frame, the article approaches the ‘festive’ as a socially produced conceptual structure by means of which people organize their perception of and participation in the world. Picking up on the epistemic threats initially developed in early French sociology, it explores the ability of different elements and forms of the ‘festive’ to act as mediator for social change.