Празници, обреди и ритуали
Feast Days, Ceremonies, Rituals

Summary/Abstract: Three sets of questions are dealt with in this study. The first is devoted to the conceptual and categorizational definition of the triad 'feast day-ceremony-ritual'. A critical review is first made of the old (bourgeois historical and ethnographic) definitions. The contradictory definition of the feast days is then indicated and particularly of the ceremonies and rituals in contemporary Marxist authors. A thesis is formulated, according to which the conceptual and categorizational definitions should be built up upontheimmanent nature of the feasts, ceremonies and rituals, upon their content, form of realization and objective social and functional charge and significance. Ceremonies are considered as the completion of customs, regulated by them and chiefly serving them, while rituals are interpreted as the supreme expression of the festal and ceremonial needs, realized in a strictly regulated manner, which is increasingly taken over by the customary institutions being raised to the object of state and social (political, trade union, etc.) organization and management. The second set of questions concerns the substantial characterization of feast days, ceremonies and rituals, which is drawn from the social nature of man and the specifically human needs of associating and experiencing together a special complex of ideas, feelings, moods, etc., corresponding to this characterization, on the occasion of definite 'key moments' in the personal and particularly in the social life of people. Emphasis is laid on the circumstance that feast days, ceremonies and rituals do not themselves create ideas, feelings and moods, but only express them in their own way, these being born of the respective, 'key moments' in the life of man and society. On this basis they are interpreted as a social and technological mechanism for the preservation and translation of given ideas, feelings, moods, etc. from epoch to epoch, from generation to generation in connection with which they play a stabilizing role in the way of life, mentality and culture of the various ethnical formations. The third set of questions elucidates the dialectics of the national and the international elements in feast days, ceremonies and rituals, drawn from the mutually connected influence of the natural and social factor on the way of life, mentality and culture of people against the background of its historical (economic, political, etc.) realization. At the same time the contradictory nature of the national colour and significance of the feast days, ceremonies and rituals is shown in connection with the social and class stratification of the large ethnoses (nationality and the nation), in which the initial history of the dialectical link up of the national and the international is sought. The special features of the proletarian, and after it of the socialist development of the dialectics of the national and the international elements in the feast days, ceremonies and rituals is examined in this.

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