Festivals, Conformity and Socialisation

In the 1970s and 1980s festivals in Eastern Europe were rare but important meeting places for young people and the youth culture movement. However, following the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, cultural festivals in ‘countries in transition’ began to play a more visible role in social and economic affairs. Although the largest summer festivals (e.g. Exit in Serbia, Sziget in Hungary) are for-profit festivals driven by economic/commercial factors and attract several hundred thousand people, the majority of festivals are not-for-profit events which fulfil important societal functions. The main aim of this chapter is to present a social science perspective on festivals. The research methodology employed in this research was developed during international meetings of the European Festival Research Project and the monitoring practice (registration and audit – a joint project of five festival unions) of festivals in Hungary 1 . The principal sources were i) a literature review and ii) field research based on a survey of festival organisers 2 and interviews. The interviews were completed with 16 directors of cultural festivals in Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia during 2010-2012. This chapter reports on two aspects of the research project. One part examined the socialisation processes that audiences can experience at cultural festivals, where the features selected for examination were: cultural conformism, community and social networks and learning. The other part focused on the social functions of cultural festivals and their economic efficiency.