Carnival Culture Research Articles

Humorous nature of carnival culture

Despite the widespread use of humour in carnivals, research in this area is limited. Therefore, this research seeks to address this gap and uncover the humorous nature of carnivals from a scientific perspective. The purpose of this research is to conduct a scientific analysis of the humorous nature of carnival culture, to clarify its origins and impact on society. The following methods were used to achieve the research purpose: observation, interviews, questionnaires, statistical method, and content analysis method. The research established that carnival is a significant mechanism for expressing social, political and cultural problems of society. This event is a kind of forum where citizens have the opportunity to express their thoughts, feelings and opinions on various aspects of life. The research confirmed that humour at carnivals is an essential means of communication and expression. It can acquire different forms, such as satire, parody and irony. These types of humour are used to expose social, political and cultural aspects through using ridicule, distortion and transformation of reality. Carnival humour has the potential to highlight the severity of problems and highlight the shortcomings of society. The research makes a significant contribution to the scientific understanding of the humorous nature of carnival culture. The results of the research will contribute to a deeper analysis and testing of concepts related to the impact of carnival and humour on modern society

Works by Andrii Levytskyi for the “Homage à trois” Project (Barcelona, Spain)

Andrii Levytskyi is a well-known Kyivan graphic artist, a recognized master of gravure printing (intaglio). The artist has been participating regularly in the “Homage à trois” (Tribute to Three) project, which takes place in Barcelona (Spain) on the initiative of the Duana de les Arts – AIDA International Association – since 2021. Only masters of graphic art can participate in the project. It should commemorate three literary figures on the occasion of their birthday anniversaries, and the artists should choose at least two of the three proposed personalities. Intaglio 2021, satisfying the conditions of the project, at the same time continues seamlessly the themes and motifs peculiar to Andrii Levytskyi’s heritage in general. Poem about a Henna Tree (Jean Lafontaine) is somewhat unexpected and paradoxical, but naturally connected with the artist’s favourite images of trees. In the Player the themes of confrontation, game, rivalry are developed. They are arisen, in particular, in the intaglio Motus Animi Continuus (2021). Three works of 2022, made in the computer design technique, are distinguished by a bright and at the same time elegant color solution. The artist is inspired by themes of the theater and, widely, carnival culture (Molière’s Mask), Japanese art (IchiyōHiguchi’s Stream). The work for the anniversary of the legendary German romantic Novalis (Ask Baron: Is Religion the Opium of the Peoples) is especially unexpected. In 2023, Andrii Levytskyi has returned to the intaglio technique again and at the same time abandoned color. The works dedicated to Federico García Lorca (At Five O’clock in the Afternoon) and Wisława Szymborska, winner of the Nobel Prize (Cat in an Empty Apartment), are the artist’s reflections on the theme of death, while the work Dream. My Ántonia (based on the novel by Willa Cather) softens their tragical essence. The Ukrainian artist’s works dedicated to Molière, Novalis and Willa Cather have been nominated and awarded by the organizers of “Homage à trois”. Taking part in the international artistic projects, and even more so winning in them, Ukrainian artists contribute actively to the creation of a positive image of the state. After all, the culture of Ukraine consists not only of the historical heritage, but also of the works of modern masters.

Texts from a carnivalesque time of change: four poems in Estonian Half-German

ABSTRACT This article focuses on four poems written in Half-German by three Baltic German authors: ‘Die Oberpahlsche Freundschaft’ (1818/1857) by Jakob Johann Malm, ‘Karluscha Tattelbaum’ (1903) and ‘Benjamin Paul Püttisepp’ (1909) by Arthur Usthal, and ‘Reise ins Ausland’ (1954) by Walter von Wistinghausen. Literature written in Half-German emerged in a particular socio-historical and linguistic context, which is outlined in the first part of the article. The focus of this article is on the nineteenth century – the heyday of this literary tradition. All four poems will be discussed in the context of carnival culture according to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of popular culture.

Carnival and urban space in Athens, 1834–1940

Abstract This article explores the spatial dimensions of Athens' carnival and their change in the course of a century. It is based on two polarities: first, that of the old city and the new city, which was related to the contrast between traditional and modern culture in the celebration of carnival. Both the old city and traditional culture were increasingly undervalued and denounced until the inter-war years, when nostalgia for old places and practices developed. The second major contrast is that between the centre of Athens and its periphery. There was a strong tendency towards the concentration of carnival events and crowds in the centre of Athens until the 1900s. This development is correlated with the reinforcement of the middle class and its cultural hegemony. A new autonomy of the neighbourhoods of the popular classes in the inter-war period did not result in the revival of popular carnival culture.

ЗАРУБЕЖНАЯ «КАРНАВАЛЬНАЯ» КУЛЬТУРА: МЕЖДУ ИДИОМОЙ И ВИРУСНЫМ КОНЦЕПТОМ

the article continues the series of studies by the author of modern carnival culture, in the theory and practice of which serious discrepancies are noticeable. The text focuses on the little-studied linguistic and cultural side of the common terms Laughtivism, Laughter resistance, Strategic humor, Humorous protest, Protestival, Clownfrontation, Tactical Carnival, Intentional carnival, Carnivalesque Protest, Carnivalized politics, the framework of which is built on the fusion of the nominations of laughterand seriousness. The practical subject of analysis is the communities, events and practices in relation to which this terminology is used. The movement “Carnival against capital” is considered; actions of the group “Rebel Army of Clowns”, the action “Occupy Wall Street”, actions of the movements “Reclaim the Streets”, creation of "Bread and puppet" theater etc. According to the first hypothesis, the above foreign terms used to characterize foreign carnival culture are idioms in which semantics cannot be derived from external construction of the lexeme itself. In the second hypothesis, these concepts can withstand verification if the theory of exaptation is applied to them, in line with which such hybrids of laughter and seriousness can act as a by-product of the development of carnival culture. As a result of the study, both hypotheses were partially confirmed. Foreign conceptual lexemes that claim the status of theoretical concepts of carnival culture do not stand up to verification, since they completely characterize a decarnivalized world, comparable to a viral formation on the body of the theory and practice of carnival.

Уличный театр в контексте зарубежных концепций карнавальной культуры

Background. The relevance of the study is due to the growing popularity of research into political and protest potential of carnival culture in foreign studies. Objective. The aim is to test the hypothesis that foreign concepts of carnival culture indirectly influenced the fact that street theatre is interpreted not as art but rather as an attribute of carnivalized protest. Methods. The study uses a theoretical method of analysis, which makes it possible to compare the current data of interdisciplinary studies of the nature of laughter and the comic with the interpretations of the carnival in the author's theories and concepts as well as to identify the inaccuracies in the definitions of humor and serious-laughter phenomena. Sample. The results of the analysis of a sample of studies published from 2006 to 2022 in foreign periodicals and non-periodicals devoted to the protest, political potential of carnival culture is presented. Results. On the example of several cases, it is shown that when in the process of analyzing carnival phenomena, irony and satire are considered by researchers within the category of humor, carnival culture is equated to a carnivalized protest. Street theatre is one of the forms of a carnivalized protest. Conclusion. Non-use of the latest data in the field of the nature of laughter phenomena in the study of carnival phenomena by foreign researchers leads to the growth of scientific works in which protest, carnival and street theatre are equelled without evidence. The categorical delimitation of humor and such serious-laughter phenomena as irony and satire reveals the groundlessness of the definitions in which carnival phenomena and street theatre refer to forms of non-violent protest practice.

Poetry and Dramatic Work of Alija Nametak

In the Bosnian-Herzegovinian literary field, Alija Nametak established himself as a storyteller and novelist, but not as a poet and playwright. In this paper, for the first time, the poetic and stylistic-formational features of Nametak's poetry published from 1925 to 1932 in the magazines Jugoslovenska njiva, Književnik and Novi Behar are fully presented. His youthful poetry, stratified into an intimate and social thematic-motive register, flirts with contemporary modernist and avant-garde poetic tendencies, which we find in the poetry of Muse Ćazim Ćatić and Hamza Huma. The second part of the paper deals with his dramatic work: from historical drama (Narodna vlada), to comedy (Omer za naćvama and Abdullah-paša u kasabi), all the way to the holy-historical legend (Jusuf and Zulejha). Except for the last play, which remained in the manuscript legacy, in all the others there is a critical attitude towards certain social deviations. While in the drama Narodna vlada Nametak develops a patriotic discourse as a form of anti-colonial resistance, in the comedies Omer za naćvama and Abdullah Paša u kasabi, in the spirit of folk and palanquin carnival culture, he undermines primitivism and stereotyped roles in society. In the drama Jusuf and Zulejha staged the Qur’anic-Biblical historical story about Yusuf a.s. (Joseph.) As a folklorist, Nametak introduced various elements from folk life and customs into the drama, not only to create a context for shaping the character of his characters but also to use their potential for popular, carnival, and subversive distortion of established social and cultural norms and patterns. The poetry and drama of Alija Nametka, in a literary-historical sense, are significant because they reveal this writer to us as the protagonist of a multiple literary identity – it is a kind of identity of resistance which, apart from the already established religious and ethnic one, is realized in the social and feminist dimension as well.

JOGO COMO UMA EXISTÊNCIA DIFERENTE'S CREATIVITY

Consideration is being given to the phenomenon of play, through which another, different from the existing, ontological layer is created, revealing the little-known facets of culture and aesthetic activity in the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin, the famous culturologist. The conducted research makes it possible to state the following. Play as a phenomenon is inextricably linked with the main themes of Bakhtin's work, being included in the concepts of dialogism, polylogue, carnival culture, and the theory of aesthetic activity. Play, in the aspect of interconnection with culture through art, stands as another being in which life is played out. In the carnival, the value space of the play is created; the play itself is complex and diverse. The ambivalence of the play is perceived as an attempt to express it in various planes of real life. The binarity of the play in the space of the carnival is revealed through the category of anti-structure. Play, in the space of the carnival, is defined as a play of life, is another being, declared by the author to be an extraterritorial space.

Carnival in Africa

Carnival in Africa

A Dialogue of Creative Systems of Nikolai Gogol and Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Context of Carnival Culture: Personality and Carnival

The article explores the specifics of the functioning and transformation of carnivalesque aesthetics in the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and in the “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” by Nikolai Gogol. The similarities in the transformations that are found in the works of the authors are revealed. The results obtained are conceptualized accounting global separation of the individual out of the community and nature as well as the specifics of the cultural situation.

Polemical Literature and Carnival Culture: Aspects of (not) an Intersection

Elements of culture of popular laughter (Mikhail Bakhtin) in the “Knyzhka” of the Ukrainian polemicist were the object of study in the works of Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Hrushevsky. Researchers have not yet distinguished between the concepts of humorous, ironic, and satirical. The third chapter of the “Knyzhka” is called by the Ukrainian historian the forerunner of Ukrainian comedy due to its humorous elements and simple language. However, Hrushevsky calls the descriptions of the image of a layman either ridicule or humor.Carnival elements are closely related to the nature of the genre. Polemical literature is mainly a synthesis of genres. Vyshensky’s texts were called syncretism (Igor Eremin) and the synthesis of genres (Petro Bilous). Bilous attributed most of the chapters of the “Knyzhka” to the genre of invective due to the dialogism and excessive expressiveness. According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition, a genre is representative of creative memory. Serio-comic genres, elements of which we explore in the “Knyzhka”, contain elements of carnival culture.In our opinion, such traces of carnival culture in the polemist’s texts include heterogeneous dialogic structures – “Socratic dialogue” and dialogue constructed on the type of catechism. And also these are methods of familiar everyday speech and vulgar common parlance (swearing, quarreling), active word-formation, considerable attention to the body, “grotesque realism” (according to Bakhtin’s definition). We trace in the “Knyzhka” the features of the ancient genres of diatribe (the genre of moral preaching) and mennipea. Similar techniques were used in medieval literature, for example in the works of Francois Rabelais.However, it is worth noting the complete difference between the goals set by the French writer and the Ukrainian polemicist. In Rabelais, artistic methods were aimed at restructuring the picture of the world, the liberation of the body. Instead, Vyshensky’s image of the body is no longer ambivalent, it belongs to a new canon, where the body has an individual character and is subject to church dogmas, and the connection with the universe is lost.Laughter’s elements in Vyshensky’s texts also lose its ambivalent character and become aspects of condemnation. Therefore, the archaic of seriously funny genres is preserved at the formal level, not at the semantic level.

The inverted logic as a source of carnival familiarity

In breaking away from the dominant rituals, the sanctioned church holidays, and traditional rules of behavior, the article analyzes the placement of carnival culture on the margins of official culture, the inversion of social principles introduced into a reality devoid of constitutive norms in normal life, eliminating any social division by reversing values and destroying the existing order. A historical perspective raises important questions about the unparalleled features of the carnival, including the combination of people, regardless of their social and intellectual differences. In line with the adoption of the culture of laughter and its tools, the dynamics of carnival managed to assume a reversal, degradation, grotesque, bottom-up logic in order to bring people together and facilitate their interpersonal relationships.

Notes on Contributing Authors

Michael A. Figueroa is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes in musics of the SWANA region and its diasporas, with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Arab diaspora in North America, and issues related to music, poetry, and multimedia. He is the author of City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2022), and co-editor of Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma (University of Michigan Press, 2020).Morgan James Luker is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He is author of The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and the founding director of Tango for Musicians at Reed College (www.reed.edu/tango).Althea SullyCole is an ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist from New York City. She has studied her primary instrument, the kora, a 21-stringed harp from the Mandé region of West Africa, for ten years, three of which were spent in Dakar, Senegal. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University and the Sylvan C. and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in the Musical Instruments Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Deonte L. Harris, assistant professor in the International Comparative Studies program at Duke University, holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include global Black studies, diaspora studies, critical race studies, and the anthropological study of value. These broader interests animate his current book-in-progress, which investigates the local, diasporic, and global dimensions of Caribbean carnival culture in postwar UK, and the value of carnival among Black Britons of Caribbean heritage. Harris is a past chair of the SEM Student Union (2014–2016); former member of the SEM Council and Diversity Action Committee (2017–2020); and current co-chair of the Gertrude Rivers Robinson Network of Black Ethnomusicologists (2020–2022).Katie Young is a postdoctoral research fellow based at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. At present, she is researching experiences of music at night for Black-Irish and Afrodiaporic musicians in Cork and Galway, Ireland, as part of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) NITE research project. She recently received her PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London.

In the Context of Transtextuality Relations Thematic Frame in Orhan Pamuk's Novels

Metinsel-Aşkınlık ilişkileri, yazınsal bir metnin kendisi dışındaki anlatılarla bir arada okunmasını mümkün kılan, büyük ölçüde eşsüremli gerçekleşen okuma edimine bağlı olarak ortaya çıkan ve bu okuma tecrübesine bağlı biçimde tespit edilen yazınsal ya da sanatsal ilgiler bütünüdür. Bu ilgiler, bilhassa Orta Çağ karnaval kültürünün edebiyata tezahürüyle edebiyatta söyleşim ve çokseslilik olgularıyla beraber izlenmekte; postmodernist metinlerle birlikte metinsel-aşkınlık ilişkilerinin estetik birer öge hâlini aldığı tespit edilmektedir. Metinsel-aşkınlık biçimleri, alıntılama, anıştırma, epigraf, içanlatı gibi göndergesellik eksenli ortakbirliktelik ilişkileri; öykünme (pastiş), yansılama (parodi), alaycı (gülünç) dönüştürüm gibi türev ilişkileri ve yenidenyazım çerçevesinde gerçekleşen metin-ötesi ilgilerden oluşmaktadır. Orhan Pamuk romanları, yenilikçi ve deneysel roman çizgisinde değerlendirilmektedir. Bu roman kuruluşunda metinsel-aşkınlık ve estetiksel-aşkınlık biçimleri birer estetik unsur olmanın yanında, kuramsal dayanaklar olarak romanların biçemsel çerçevelerini oluşturmaktadır. Gérard Genette’in metinsel-aşkınlık ilişkileri tasnifi temelinde ele alınan Orhan Pamuk romanlarında metinsel-aşkınlık ilişkileri, üst-metinsellik, yorumsal üst-metinsellik, ana-metinsellik ve göndergesellik ilişkisi ekseninde kurgulanmış ve bu eserler kanonlaşmış başka eserlerle anlamsal bir bütünü oluşturacak biçimde örüntülenmiş görünmektedir. Metni ve metin ötesini meydana getiren her bir ilginin, izleksel veya kuramsal bir anlamı teşkil edecek biçimde kurulduğu anlaşılmaktadır. Üst-metin ve yorumsal üst-metin çerçeveleriyle büyük ölçüde romancılığındaki kuramsal doğrultuyu sağlamakta olan Pamuk, göndergesellik ve ana-metinsellik uygulamalarıyla kendi roman kuramının izleksel çerçevesini oluşturur. Metinsel-aşkınlık biçimleriyle Pamuk, romanlarının temel izleklerini meydana getiren Doğu-Batı, eş-ruh ve baba-oğul izlekleri etrafında “kimlik” ve “kendilik” olgularını vurgular görünmektedir.

Protesting Venetians

Protest, in a multitude of forms, is increasingly present in the lived experience of Venetians and visitors to the city of Venice. The demands vary: limit tourism, no more cruise ships in the lagoon, protect the city, invest in infrastructure, promote new jobs, make the city liveable again. Such protests are highly performative, done as actions to be seen and noted: marches, graffiti, public letters, processions. Appropriately for a city synonymous with carnival, the repertoires of protest in Venice frequently include irreverent and fun elements of carnival culture, particularly dressing-up, eye-catching displays and participatory interactions. Restituted in 1980, today's Venice Carnival channels aspects of the bygone carnival of past centuries, with a particular emphasis on a visual aesthetics of opulence, beauty, mystery and decadence. A dominant narrative of the carnival as a staid and graceful affair has evolved, but this is challenged by grotesque realism, scabrousness and deliberate vulgarity during the event. The modern day Compagnie de Calza, I Antichi, established a Committee for the Abolition of the Venice Carnival in its current commercialized guise in 2021, and they simultaneously set up a Committee for the Rebirth of the Carnival of Theatre: a positive, forward-looking suggestion of how carnival could exist sustainably and in an enriching way for Venetians and tourists. This proposal alludes to the key role that theatre played in the re-establishment of carnival in the city. Reinvigorating theatre during carnival would give theatre and performance makers the impetus to address key issues, to speak to the community and to protest. A carnival of theatre could renew and embolden the carnival's ability to subvert in the twenty-first century.

Transformation of farcical representations in the absence of physical space and a specific location.

The subject of the study is the transformation of farcical performances and carnival culture in the absence of a physical location and their transfer to the Internet environment. The object of research is the farcical art of display, Internet video content, carnival culture. In this article, through the culturological prism of research, such a kind of display art as a farce is studied and analyzed. This visual art has had the greatest popularity among the audience of ordinary people, that is, the most numerous, throughout the entire time that theatrical creativity has existed. However, recently it is difficult to find something like this in the areal spaces and exteriors of cities, since the main audience attention has shifted to the Internet space. The main conclusions of the study are the following theses: -the farce has reincarnated in the Internet space as a kind of special entertainment video content -carnival has reincarnated as a way of communication within the Internet environment -the farce art also continues to have the function of moral discharge of viewers -The existence of the farce in virtual space deprives its sacred significance for the viewer, because of the loss of real and meaningful space, as well as because of the main goal - the vivid emotions of the crowd. A special contribution of the author to the research of the topic is an expanded bibliography, including 5 foreign sources. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the described situation in the Internet space related to screen culture has acquired its current form only in the last 10-15 years, respectively, research on this topic is usually quite new.

ФАЛЛОС, ФАЛЛИЦИЗМ И ФАЛЛИЧЕСКИЙ КУЛЬТ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ СИЦИЛИИ

The article studies the ideas about the human body in one of the most culturally conservative regions of Europe – Sicily; the focus is on the image of the phallus in the local culture and worldview. Basing on the ethnographic material collected in 2017–2020 and data from various sources, the author analyzes the current state of widespread phallic symbols, primarily in the folk environment, as well as behavioral norms, habits, customs associated with the phallus, many of which date back to the oldest, mainly ancient Greek phallic cults, which got a rebirth in the depths of the folk carnival culture of the Middle Ages. The wide prevalence of phallic themes and connotations in verbal language (exclamations, invectives, subcultural vocabulary, for example, gastronomic), in non-verbal means of communication (facial expressions, kinesics), iconography, artifacts, traditions, in everyday life is analyzed. The author comes to the conclusion that one can talk about the presence of a kind of phallicism in Sicily – an extremely important and widespread set of ideas, rituals and customs in local society, which flourishes despite the ethical norms of Catholicism. The bodily, corporeal representations and practices of Sicily, and primarily in the popular environment, are marked by the spirit of phallocentricity (Jacques Derrida’s term), patriarchy and gender dominance of men, and the phallus as a “sex sign” is surrounded by priority attention here

Неаполитанское королевство и Россия в начале XIX в.: на материале переписки братьев Булгаковых

The article examines the activities of the Russian diplomatic mission in Naples in 1802-1808 based on the correspondence between brothers Alexander and Konstantin Bulgakov. In accordance with the tropological methodology of the historian Hayden White, tragic and novel metanarratives are distinguished in describing the relationship between the Kingdom of Naples, Russia, and the countries of Western Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. The narration of the events in accordance with the tragic plot reveals the confrontation between the hero and the world, Napoleon and the coalition of European states led by Austria, Britain, and Russia. At the same time, the transformation of the tragedy into the novel in historical terms presupposes a change in the established world order after the end of the era of the Napoleonic Wars, which the decisions of the Congress of Vienna consolidated in 18141815. The basis of the plot in the selected metanarratives is the life of Ferdinand IV, the king of Naples, and his family; Napoleon’s military actions in Italy; diplomatic and military assistance to Naples from Russia and the life of Russians in Naples and Palermo; the events of the Patriotic War of 1812; the messianic role of Emperor Alexander in the victory over Napoleon’s army. The influence of the actions of the allied forces in 1813-1815 and the decisions of the Congress of Vienna on the emergence of national liberation movements in Italy and the subsequent unification of the country is revealed. The spatial centers of the Bulgakovs’ epistolary works are Naples, Palermo, Rome, the capitals of four empires (Paris, Vienna, London, Petersburg), and related historical figures (King Ferdinand IV and his wife Maria Carolina of Austria (sister of Marie Antoinette, the French queen), Napoleon, Joseph Bonaparte, Joachim Murat, Austrian Emperor Francis II, Russian Emperor Alexander I, Pope Pius VII, Admiral and Secretary of State of the Kingdom of Naples John Acton, Russian envoys in Naples and Rome A.Ya. Italinsky and sine, and others. The article analyzes the conceptual sphere and poetics of the “Neapolitan” text of Russian literature. In the letters, the image of Naples is presented through the situation of a meeting of Southern and Northern Europe, Naples and Petersburg, monarchy and republic, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, history and modernity. Naples is perceived as a special communicative space associated with the diplomatic activities of both brothers, with their circle of communication, and aesthetically with a private letter as a kind of an ego-document. The perception of Naples as an island state, as an “earthly paradise at the foot of a volcano”, as a city of the Lazzaroni and carnival culture brings the correspondence between the Bulgakov brothers close with descriptions of this city in Russian travelogues of the late 18th - first third of the 19th centuries. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

“Revering religion, you would not approve of relentless running”

The subject of this research is determination of the peculiarities of competitive running in the medieval sociocultural situation. The relevance of this article is substantiated by the importance of cognizing the socio-historical context of desacralization of athleticism (and running as its component), as well as the grounds and manifestations of its transition into the sphere of secular, humanistically oriented bodily practices. The author sets the following tasks: compare the sacred and profane components of running athleticism in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages; identify of the reasons for desacralization of running in this period, as well as new manifestations and trends of transformation of its profane component. The methodological framework is comprised of the laws and principles of dialectics, analysis, synthesis, deduction, induction, and analogy. The author reviews competitive running from the perspective of binary opposition sacred/profane. The acquired results can be applied in social philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of sports. The novelty of this research lies in identification of causes and consequences of the medieval desacralization of running and absence of institutionalization of running competitions; consideration of the peculiarities of running practices in the elite circles and commoners; examination of specificity of running competitions in the carnival culture; outlining the reasons of the applied use of endurance running in economic activity; as well as indication of the unique for theocentric Middle Ages humanistic orientation of running as a separate type of competition and the basis of athletic activity overall.

Rituals of the Librarians’ Community During the Soviet Era and the Period of Restored Independence

The aim of the article is to reveal the social and cultural relations between the professional librarian groups, which have existed from the seventies to the present day, through the prism of practiced rituals and celebrations. During the research, from 2019 to 2020, 30 librarians living and working in different parts of Lithuania were interviewed. In total, 23 currently working and 7 retired librarians were interviewed. Material from ethnographic works, yearbooks, chronicles, photo archives, and library histories found in the libraries was also analysed. The study revealed that events, celebrations, gatherings of the work cycle, and staff evaluations were popular in libraries and strongly encouraged by various government agencies. After Lithuania regained its independence and the Lithuanian Librarians’ Association was restored, new and more varied celebrations began to emerge, but some of the previous traditions, such as staff awards, interaction with seniors, and visiting the graves of former colleagues, remained. After the restoration of independence, librarians began celebrating Christmas and professional celebrations such as National Library Week and Culture Day. Features of urban carnival culture can also be found in the events of the librarian community. Some of these events are closed and intended only for members of this community, while others are for the public, and there are more directed and demonstrative elements for a mass audience. After analysing the research data, it can be seen that Lithuanian librarians create and maintain relations of the community at the personal, institutional, and interregional levels.