After 2010, the study of present-day holidays established itself as an original tool for the study of society in Slovak ethnology. In the first stage, the research team of the Institute of Ethnology SAS focused on the empirical research of the specific contexts of the term holiday in Slovakia and mapped the range of situations which are designated by people as holidays today. The term holiday means the interruption of the daily routine, a moment commemorated on a cyclical basis or a period accompanied by normative or ritual acts and with an ascribed symbolic meaning. Our research showed that apart from identification, ritual and spiritual functions which are important for individuals or communities, as commonly studied by ethnology, holidays also fulfil a number of practical functions at present. After the discovery of the manifold overlaps of this phenomenon with the on-going social processes, the focus of ethnology has shifted to society as such and on its reflection in the mirror of holidays. Through an analysis of empirical materials from the observation and ethnographic description of the events in the public space during holidays, the study of the holiday legislation, the activities of various institutions, the production of printed and electronic media, business and advertising, which create the current content and the ways of celebrating holidays, it was possible to obtain a basis for a specific testimony about the present-day social processes in the Slovak Republic. In this context, this study is dedicated to the following relations: holidays and politics, holidays and economy, and holidays and citizens.
The contribution represents an ethnological analysis of historical and contemporary empirical research of viniculture tourism in the Little Carpathian region. The authoress explains developmental stages of the research in the context of post-socialistic transformation in the connection with local social structure and its historical development. Economic interests of vine dressers as well as qualitative characteristics and importance of the local and regional partnerships constitute the crucial point of the development.
This article presents the results of an ethnological study on the current forms of the Christian Easter holiday celebration to recall the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is based on an analysis of data from an exploratory online questionnaire survey conducted in Slovakia in spring 2020. The date of the holiday overlapped with the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research therefore aimed to explore whether and how preventative measures, physical distance, and social isolation influenced the holiday practice which, according to the author’s previous findings, includes not only religious rituals but also profane elements that can be empirically documented at the family, community, and commercial levels. The 2020 pandemic closed the Easter holiday behind the doors of houses and flats, and the analysis thus focuses only the practices related to the family or private space. The research mapped the holiday preparations, common customs practiced at home as well as those that could not be practiced there, custom innovations, and the emergence of new celebration practices. The data analysis is based on the concept of eventisation (Gebhardt, 2000), according to which secularised and individualised ways of spending holiday time influence the pluralisation of contents and the forms of “traditional” holidays. Thus, the survey also aimed to find out how people who do not celebrate it spent the Easter holiday. In addition to particular findings about people’s adaptation to the pandemic, the article also offers a wider ethnological perspective of the transformation of holidays as part of the cultural dimension of social processes in the late modernity period.
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