6 Bożena Gierek nonetheless, often mocking or insulting, and aggressive—depending on the society and a complex of factors that have shaped it. The feast might be also a measure of popularity of the real power of its organizers who not only want to consolidate their prestige, but also strive to control the moods of street crowds, and to use them in their own political or social actions against an opposite party or fraction (cf. Heers [1983] 1995). The feast is a kind of a social obligation, often an order and a sanctioned coercion. The obligation to celebrate ensues from the affiliation to the group and from sharing common values, including celebrating feasts, which is an index of internalization of common cultural values by an individual (cf. Żygulski 1981). On the one hand, the obligation can be accepted and internalized, which in this case is not felt as an imposition, on the other, it can be exacted and those who do not want to subordinate are punished. When the sanctions weaken, those who do not share belief in the feast’s value abandon feasting. Mostly, it is the result of changes in a person’s ideology and philosophy of life. According to a Polish sociologist and theoretician of culture, Kazimierz Żygulski (1981), generally the same factors that determine the place of an individual in the social structure influence the individual’s attitude to the feast. In his opinion, celebrating is a cultural need, therefore “the need of the feast […] must be […] awakened in each new generation” (1981: 156). If no new feast is born in the place of the feast that disappeared, the vacuum is filled with various substitutes. The phenomenon of the feast and its analysis provides exceptionally precious material for researching social and cultural changes, including the influence of urbanization on rural feasts. Therefore, it can be perceived as a mirror that reflects those changes. The French historian Jacques Heers calls it “a mirror of civilization” ([1983] 1995: 7), because it is always placed in the social context in which it “springs up and determines its vital shapes and colors” ([1983] 1995: 21). In order to attract people to the feast, it is necessary to adapt to “the taste and the interest of the epoch” ([1983] 1995: 39) that constantly evolves ([1983] 1995: 158). The feast allows us to look, at the same time, at traditional and new elements of a particular culture that coexist next to each other or with each other. The changes in the feasts are “sensitive indexes” of the changes of values, ideas and ideologies, social and political structures, their functioning, and cultural creativity (cf. Żygulski 1981; Heers [1983] 1995: 6–7, 208–213). The proposed volume consists of original, previously unpublished texts in which their Authors search for the answers to the following questions:
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