Paper short abstract:

After WW2, the festive landscape in Slovenia changed radically due to restructuring of society, politics, economy and the ever closer global integration. The paper will attempt to show how the changes in the official festive calendar in socialism and after have inscribed itself in festive practices.

Paper long abstract:

After WW2, the festive landscape in Slovenia changed radically due to restructuring of society, politics, economy and the ever closer global integration. The paper will attempt to show how the changes in the public festive calendar in socialism and after have inscribed itself in the enacted festive map. The changes not only affected the official holiday calendar which usually marks the events the national community should identify itself with. In the post-socialist decades, some religious holidays regained their position as red calendar days; some have been withdrawn from the calendar of public holidays and were replaced and joined by other state holidays and European holidays. Many festive practices are novel and related to the flows of globalisation mediated by popular and consumer culture. On the other side, on the local level we are faced with former folk or "traditional" holidays. Moreover, some of the significant days of the socialist system are unofficially being celebrated. Thus, holidays are conquering new venues, touch different generations and acquire fresh meanings. They are constitutive at the level of politics, local, generational and other layers of social and cultural identity, but not uniformly and with the same intensity. They can be related to processes of inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting, uses of cultural heritage, socialization / enculturation, rural-urban boundaries, the imposed and the creative aspects; and above all, to the holiday/ritual actors that are involved in the production of social meaning and values (e.g. patriotism, nationalism, religion, love, happiness, pleasure, entertainment).