A Festive Bricolage: The Holiday Calendar in Slovenia Over the Last Century

Abstract

Over the last century, and especially after the Second World War, the festive landscape in Slovenia changed radically due to political upheavals and restructuring of the economy and society, and in recent decades due to increasing global integration. This article shows how changes in the public calendar before and after the socialist period are manifest in holidays, reflecting changes under four political systems. These changes have affected not only the official holiday calendar, which usually marks the events that the national community identi- fies itself with. The post-socialist decades have featured a festive bricolage of reinstituted religious holidays, new state holidays, popular cultural celebrations, revived folk or traditional holidays, and traces of socialist holidays. The meaning and relevance of holidays for individuals, groups, and communities is multilayered. The most emphasised and outstanding function of holiday and ritual efficacy 2 is social and symbolic cohesion that crisscrosses religious, politi- cal, territorial, generational, self-delimiting, and other dimensions of social life. Social cohesion is the outcome of the transformation of chaos into order, if one agrees that social life proceeds somewhere between the imaginary extremes of absolute order and absolute chaotic conflict and anarchic improvisation. There is an endless tension between the two, and also a remarkable synchrony. This idea is implicit in Victor Turner's phrase structure and anti-structure. He sees the two as existing in a perpetual dialectic relationship over time (Turner 1969: 112, 203). As Moore and Myerhoff have argued, with such a view of culture and social life in mind, collective ritual can be seen as an especially dramatic attempt to bring some particular part of life firmly and definitely into orderly control. It belongs to the structuring side of the cultural/historical process (Moore & Myerhoff 1977: 3).