Abstract
The chapter provides an outline of “ordinary celebrations,” the outcomes of the 1989 transformation to democracy in Poland, manifested through new cultural practices and their rising visibility. The book examines aspects of the new social imaginary in which aspirations of “catching up” with the West are mixed with religious conservatism and the persistence of a national tradition of struggles for a sovereign nation-state. The author investigates three new sites of religious, cultural, civic and political engagement as these ordinary celebrations: shared, practiced expressions of larger imagined narratives and viewed by the participants as self-evident. The introduction briefly describes the three new sites: a religious sanctuary, centered around the currently biggest Roman Catholic church in Poland; a charity-based rock music festival, one of the biggest of its kind in Europe; and grassroots nationwide pro-voting campaigns and small-town government monitoring websites, created by ordinary citizens, both of which encourage civic monitoring of authorities.
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This term was introduced by the Polish sociologist Jerzy Szacki (1997, p. 23).
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The period lasted from 1795 until 1989 , with an exception for the years 1918–1939, between the two world wars when Poland temporarily regained its independence.
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According to a 2017 study, while 40% of Poles are satisfied with democratic performance, 52% are not. See CBOS (2017).
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The magazine, created by the writer Jerzy Giedroyc, was published from 1947 and closed in 2000, after the death of its founder.
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According to recent reports (see e.g. Przewłocka et al. 2012), there are around 80,000 registered non-governmental organizations, out of which 60,000 are active. Over one-third are more than ten years old. The majority concentrate on local communities, and their most popular areas of focus are sports, tourism, and recreation (38%); culture and art (17%); and education (14%).
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It is worth noting that, according to a recent report, more than 55.6% of the people in rural areas, 64.7% in towns with up to 20,000 residents, 65.4% in cities from 20,000 to 100,000 residents, almost 71.5% of the people in cities from 100,000 to 200,000 residents, 75% in cities from 200,000 to 500,000 residents, and 81.7% of the people in cities with more than 500,000 residents had access to the internet in Poland in 2015. See Czapiński and Panek (2015, p. 32).
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Chmielewska-Szlajfer, H. (2019). Introduction. In: Reshaping Poland’s Community after Communism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78735-0_1
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