Holidays and Celebrations as a Way of Communicating the Country’s Past: The Case of Poland

Abstract

Creating the symbolic space of the state is one of the most important responsibilities of those in power. This authority is manifested, among other things, by creating memory maps, erecting monuments, properly naming streets, squares, and public institutions, and organizing the calendar of holidays. Holidays and celebrations are an excellent tool for communicating with society and an important element of the state’s politics of memory. One of the fundamental questions its creators ask themselves is: How should society learn about a past it has not experienced?
The study of symbolic space requires a methodological approach that combines many aspects. One of these is the analysis of a specific example: holidays and anniversaries in two dimensions: national and local, as well as the ways in which they are celebrated. The primary methods include content analysis, rooted in cultural studies, and an anthropological approach to examining holiday ritualization processes. In practice, this means combining approaches from various research areas in the process of observing the phenomena in question. This is due to the fact that national holidays, anniversaries of historically significant events and the ways of celebrating them, are specific communication activities characterized by multi-codes and a variety of – often difficult to capture – indicators. The most crucial issue here is the analysis of the communication process itself and the context of this activity along the lines: sender – content – medium – recipient. In the case of holidays and important anniversaries, this means the following relationships: those in power – narrative of the past – holiday – society.

The aim of the study is to show – using the example of the Polish calendar of holidays, containing national anniversaries in the 20th and 21st centuries – the mechanisms and tools used by those in power to build an appropriate historical narrative.