THE SOCIOLOGICAL MEANING OF LOCAL FESTIVALS IN POSTMODERN CONDITIONS

Abstract

The article focuses on theoretical study of the sociological meaning of local festivals in postmodern societies. Festivals are usually studied with the methods of sciences such as anthropology, ethnography, cultural studies, tourism studies, economic sciences, etc. Local festivals are understood above all as the embodiment of traditions, and therefore in social sciences and humanities their study is primarily related to questions such as their authenticity or invention, preservation or modification in the context of the development of our day societies. In our opinion, the sociological approach requires that they be studied as related to a certain type of relationship between different social group subjects: the institutions that support and finance them, the organizers and participants of the events, the local people, the guests of the holidays, etc. The proactive local social group actors in the form of administrators, businessmen and the intelligentsia have a leading role in the organization and conduct of the festivals. They use local resources to achieve socially significant goals. The study is based on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Mike Featherstone, Frederic Jamieson and other authors. As a result of the postmodernization of societies, structural changes occur in the lifestyle, in which the consumer culture begins to dominate. Some socio professional groups are losing their former influence as ‘taste legislators’ and ‘cultural entrepreneurs’, with other social groups taking their place. This changes the face of festivals, as they lose part of the social role they played in the past and become increasingly commercialized. The study of local festivals with the sociological method, which is in the field of social stratification theories, allows to characterize not only the changes in them, but also their impact on the development of local communities. The study of local festivals, following Featherstone, is a search for an answer to the „basic sociological questions who, when, where, how much?“ In the article are presented some of the results of theoretical analysis of the sociological meaning of local festivals, carried out within the project „Local festivals: a resource of local communities to deal with crises“ financed by the Scientific Research Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Bulgaria (KP 06 H45/5 of 30.11.2020).