Paper short abstract:

The question of belonging emerges in 1990s in Czech Republic after the socio-political changes. In urban settings the people are seeking for the possibility how to stimulate the live in a common space and the elements of carnival become helpful to create a scape for sharing.

Paper long abstract:

The process of carnivalization has its counterparts in many countries in Europe and beyond, and it is always interesting to see which elements of the carnival are instrumentalized to harmonize with the appropriate environment and time. Among the many polysemous elements of this polysemic form, those that can become part of the ritual language are deliberately selected.

The paper will focus on the observation of carnivals held since the 1990s in Prague, where their contemporary constructs become a tool for individual districts to make visible certain groups of inhabitants and their visions. The aim is usually to emphasize the connection to a given locality through the preservation of its memory. This is done by seeking out local sources of cultural memory, often embedded in traditional music and dance, sometimes by emphasizing sites of memory and local specificities, or by reinforcing collective memory through the creation of collectively selected and accepted rural cultural expressions of the pre-industrial period (masks, music, dance, food, clothing...).

We ask to what extent this expressive culture helps to form a strong attachment to a place, to possibly locate and satisfy the need to belong somewhere. At the same time, it raises the question of the ways in which the formation of a local community, which often becomes a kind of security, albeit a fluid one, in an uncertain world, takes place in this way, and how this community helps to counteract anomie and other consequences of the uncertainty and unsettledness of a mobile world.