Archive for: Текстови објављени у часопису Култура на српском накнадно преведени на стране језике

Festivals have always been present in the social life, their rhythm being periodical or cyclic. By anthropological inertion, each mass public performance becomes a pattern or reflection of a social order, or rather its expression, reflection, creation and transformation. The performative character of culture is one of the basis of spectacle studies. The spectacle turns permanence of festival into a situation by means of attaining effects of wholeness and edited visualization.

The ancient and medieval comic culture which implies a grotesque mix of fantastic and real ties original mythology (ritual) to high literature. Menipea has always been one of the major bearers and transmitters of the carneval feeling of the world in literature. Scenes of scandals and various breaches of the usual course of events characterize Menipean literary tradition, especially in Dostoevski. Elements of carneval representation are to be fund in the works of Rablais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dostoevski. The very emergence of contemporary cultural manifestations is inseparable from festivals, i.e. ancient archaic mythological tradition. The festival was a time break connected to the sphere of sacral. From the very beginning it influenced the emergence and development of art and esthetic consciousness.In the context of everyday life culture, festivals have been essentially transformed at the expense of their ritual elements.

The topic in focus encompasses the spaces in which the gatherings of tango dancers occur and where people of different nationalities and identities practice this dance, using Argentina as a powerful referent point, but at the same time constituting various tango expressions. New information technologies, changes in mass media, increased mobility and flow of people, changing practices of subjectivity together with intensive and occasionally confronted life “cultural poetics”– all become part of what makes possible the formation of authentic tango social practice. What are the possibilities in the given situation for the movement and the speed of the tango dancers’ bodies in the most intimate space they share, expressed through a particular notion of the embrace as well as of the walk / the steps? What are the circumstances and environments in which the embrace is being actualized? How does the public expression of the embrace open the space for the semi-private embodiment of the embrace in the social arena? This paper is about to research the transnational “dynamics” of tango as well as the ontological dimensions of this dance.

The spectacular exhibition Body Worlds (advertised by the slogan “Phenomenal look at the human-body phenomenon”, which the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens used to commercialize his invention of plastination – process for preserving dead bodies which he ‘sculpted’ by coating them with plastic), is the paradigm for the understanding of objective reality, manifested in the spectacle of placing human corpses in the world of entertainment and show business. 

Body Worlds is a concretized inversion of life, and the last consequence of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. This exhibition renders visible the ambitions of industrial bio-technology to reduce human specimens to the state that can not endanger the existing order. Body Worlds, materialized in the exhibited plastic, zombified forms, might reveal the truth about the anthropological destiny of the western man, in a ritual that ‘liberates’ the human body whose death is preserved and celebrated, by the means of the same perverted science that elsewhere, even more profitably, works to destroy life.

In the past, rituals, ceremonies, festivals, spectacles, social dramas and mythological symbolism were strenghtening social connections between members of the same clan, tribe or community. In the same time, they were preparing people to solve problems of survival, how to change social regulations and laws in evitable social development.

Deeper symbolism of this “journey” of the man through time and space with his rituals and public events represent the moving from Chaos to Logos. Rhytm of social activities and human consciousness needs harmonising and control of constant changes of thoughts and emotions. Social dramatising, public events, also secret rituals and ceremonies are moderating the consequences of this transfer from archaic and mythical man to “new” rational and logical member of social order.

The concept of game and playing helps people and society to meet the problems of traditional and modern rules and regulations. Two basic kinds of rituals and public events are relevant – events-that-model and events-that-represent; these extend social communications and connections between the individuals, and improve or destruct old and new structures of society and political system.

The ancient principles of ritualization, mythological symbolism or techniques of magical, religious and social control also live in the modern world, tied to positioning of power and one`s place in the hierarchy of the community. Mythological and ritual symbolism today can be a very strong manipulator and controller of the mass and groups, but also can facilitate the change of unnatural or inequitable social relationship. Modern social and political experience can be enriched and improved with the mythological symbolism and ritual interpretations, it can help us to overcome our perception of contradiction between the rational and irrational world in ourselves and around us.