In Brief

Abstract

The local communities of Eastern Europe, regarded up to the beginning of the 1990s as a rich reserve of peasant culture, have over the past twenty years been falling apart before our very eyes. Under the pressure of migration to work abroad and of the effects of globalisation – multiple, obvious and, in particular, subversive of the ways they functioned until not long ago – cultural alterations of all kinds have generated phenomena of hybridisation and cultural fusion. At the same time, the need to preserve traditions, on various levels, in their role of cultural history of local specifics, appears to be growing in importance, not only for those charged with this duty as a political project (“places of memory” institutions that society has “delegated” as keepers of cultural memory) but also for the local performers of those cultures that we have been accustomed to call traditional. The theme of this 22nd issue of the Martor journal, “Back to the Future. Creative Traditions in the 21st Century”, has proved to be the occasion for a discussion of the complex and frequently hard-to-formulate implications of the existence of local traditional cultures in contemporary societies.