7 Introduction: Feast as a Mirror of Social and Cultural Changes How far have we gone astray from the primeval idea of celebrating the feast, from understanding tradition in terms of the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade or the French sociologist Émile Durkheim? Are there still any traditional—in the very meaning of the term—feasts? And if not—if they are invented (Hobsbawm & Ranger [1983] 1992)—why are they called “traditional”? What elements have changed and why? What has had the greatest impact on celebrating feasts? What are the new factors influencing the course of a feast’s celebration? The term “traditional” indicates the sustained and transmitted old lore of a certain social group, which, among others, is manifested in rituals, ceremonies, and feasts that very often take the form of spectacles—spectacle et mise en scène (cf. Duvignaud [1977] 2011: 204). That old lore is usually called folklore. It is this form of culture that best “resists the destructive power of time and the impression of leaders’ personalities” (Heers [1983] 1995: 19). Numerous discussions regarding the scope of such terms as “folklore,” “folkloristics,” “ethnology,” “ethnography,” “anthropology,” and “folklorism,”5 which have changed in the course of time (cf. Emrich 1946; Krzyżanowski 1965a, 1965b, 1965c; Klimaszewska 1966; Burszta 1966, 1974, 1978, 1987a, 1987b; Dorson 1963, 1972; Dundes 1980; Gusiew [1967] 1974), must be left aside. It has to be underlined that very often “folk” is understood as country people, while the term also includes town and city people (cf. Gusiew [1967] 1974: 36–61), and in terms of quality, the urban folklore is richer than the rural, although it can be less durable (Krzyżanowski 1965b: 106). It is worth mentioning that one country can accommodate a range of local cultures that are specific to their regions, regions which were shaped by particular historical and geographical environments (cf. Burszta 1974: 134). In the 1970s, the most often listed factors influencing the transformation of society and its culture were: industrialization, urbanization, the progress of techno-civilization, the development of education, and the dissemination of “prying” and “ubiquitous” mass culture (cf. Burszta 1974: 132, 340, 346). In the context of creating national cultures from local cultures, the Polish ethnographer Józef Burszta indicated two opposite processes that dominated the world scene (1974: 346–347; cf. Misztal 2000, 151–157): one was the “cosmopolitization of the world’s culture” (1974: 314) and the other—“extracting fromwithin national and state organisms the best cultural 5 The American folklorist Richard M. Dorson (1963: 101) called it “fakelore,” and the Polish ethnographer Józef Burszta (1974: 338, 1978: 263)—“applied folklore.”
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