Holiday Culture in Modern Conditions: Main Vectors of Development

Abstract

In the context of the emerging new geopolitical and socio-economic reality, a serious transformation of culture and its values is taking place. One of these values is the phenomenon of the holiday. Firstly, the holiday is an important recreational factor in people's lives and, secondly, it acts as a translator of tradition from one generation to another. The article is devoted to investigating the issues of the essence and role of the holiday in the life of an individual and society. The holiday phenomenon as an object of philosophical and cultural analysis is characterized by a rich morphology. The article proposes the authors’ original classification of holidays based on the comparison of private and public festive spaces and the ratio of sacred and secular content in the structure of the holiday. On the basis of available publications and practical research conducted by the authors, the system, hierarchy, and features of the motivation of festive culture subjects are revealed. With the help of program-targeted, structural-functional, hermeneutic, and sociological methods, the main features of the holiday, its features and functions have been studied. This framework made it possible to carry out a theoretical and methodological reconstruction of the phenomenon of the holiday, analyze its scenario and identify its structure, algorithm, order, and influence on people. The holiday phenomenon is considered in the context of the dialectical contradiction between the labor and leisure contexts of human existence. By utilizing the method of nomothetic diagnostics, the system of motivation of different age groups of the population participating in the holidays is generalized and specified. The authors suggest a hypothesis about the essential transformation and formal metamorphosis of the holiday phenomenon, taking place in the context of growing socio-economic, geopolitical, and cultural instability and uncertainty in the modern world.

Keywords

• holiday culture
• mythology
• motivation
• custom
• rite
• ritual
• folklore