Performative Sacred. Modern festivity: between vitual and spectade

The main goal of the research is to develop an analytical framework for approaching modern festival events as spheres that allow for both the differentiation of meaning-making and the possibility of developing supra-individual representations. This is realized through combining the sociology of religion of Emile Durkheim and its continuators within cultural sociology, as well as the aesthetics of performance. The theoretical part of the study presents a critical revision of the chosen perspectives on festival within these fields. On this basis, festival is outlined as a form organized by the principle of participation. The festive form is further elaborated as consisting of a set of performative structures that facilitate diverse trajectories of development of the performative agency of festival attendants. The empirical part of the study is based on ethnographic research conducted in the period 2011-2016, and focuses on three festive events developed in Poland after the transformation of 1989: the Lednica Meetings, Polish Woodstock and Open'er Festival. On this basis, diverse modalities of attendance in festivals are differentiated and accompanied with diverse trajectories of democratization of grassroots meaning-making within the festival spaces. The research also allows the communal structures that can embrace the differentiated agencies of the attendants without requiring their uniformization to be distinguished: the atmosphere and the horizon of national community. The work concludes with an outline of the analytical model of festival as a communicative sphere and its consequences for the main categories of the Durkheimian paradigm and performance studies. It also outlines the role of the festive performance of nation in the Polish public sphere after 1989.