The Worker for the Peasant, the Peasant for the Worker : the Transformation of Harvest Festival from a Traditional Folk Feast into a Tool of the Politics of Normalization in Czechoslovakia

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14210%2F19%3A00114310" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14210/19:00114310 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://revue.nulk.cz/pdf/r5-2019.pdf" target="_blank" >http://revue.nulk.cz/pdf/r5-2019.pdf</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Worker for the Peasant, the Peasant for the Worker : the Transformation of Harvest Festival from a Traditional Folk Feast into a Tool of the Politics of Normalization in Czechoslovakia

Original language description

In the past, harvest festival was a distinctive custom in the life of rural communities. Its visual attractiveness and the social context of its organization meant that since the eighteenth century it was exploited as a representative element of rural culture on diverse public occasions. From the late nineteenth century onwards, harvest festival underwent several transformations, and harvest festivals in the Central European village were increasingly organized by the local government or by civic associations and were thus no longer strictly tied to a particular farmstead. While in some places local forms of harvest festival remained safeguarded even after the social changes of 1948, the mid-twentieth century also witnessed the beginning of harvest festivals organized by the political regime. It was mainly national harvest festivals in the 1970s that were large in scale, besides district and regional harvest festivals. Their organizers maintained some elements that linked these festivals to the traditional form of the feast (the harvest wreath, thanksgiving speeches by agricultural workers, the involvement of people dressed in folk costumes). The schedule of events included at such festivals, however, was subject to the ideological needs of state socialism, and harvest festival became an instrument to celebrate the successes of socialist agriculture (and the related processing industries). It was mainly the entertainment events that displayed the loosening of ties to agriculture, whereby harvest festivals became largely based on mass forms of popular culture and consumption. Agricultural workers thus became participants in a grand theatre performance with ideological outlines, and for playing a role in this spectacle they received cultural and material rewards.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_SC - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the SCOPUS database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA19-10734S" target="_blank" >GA19-10734S: Constructs of the Village. A postcolonial approach to the study of Czech society in the 1970s.</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Národopisná revue

ISSN

0862-8351

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

29

Issue of the periodical within the volume

5

Country of publishing house

CZ - CZECH REPUBLIC

Number of pages

15

Pages from-to

3-17

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85084386983