Czech Folk Music in the 1960s-80s from the Point of View of the Sociology of Religion

Abstract

The article provides an in-depth functional analysis of Czech folk music from the 1960s to the 1980s from the viewpoint of the sociology of religion. In this period folk music played an important ideological and socio-political role in Czechoslovakia due to the values it embodied which made it strongly critical of the communist regime. The author attempts to explain that a significant part of these values were of religious (usually Christian, but also Oriental) origin, and they evolved specific symbolic universes which can be understood in terms of syncretism and religious privatisation. Folk music in this sense used to play a role which is normally reserved for organised religions. The cause lay not just in the implicitly religious nature of communism, but also in the (post)modern culture of youth. One important conclusion is that folk singers in the former Czechoslovakia acted as weighty opinion leaders, who gathered the social communities of the unsatisfied of this world around themselves, and gave them an eternal or eschatological hope. During the concerts they created the context of participation through specific values for recipients, so the concerts were seen as real purificational events, with an acquired knowledge of symbolic purity from serving the 'normalisation' regime.

Religious Processes in Contemporary Czech Society

“…Czechs have long been suspicious about church-organised religion, but not about the 'neo-Durkheimian' forms of religiosity, transferring piety to ethnic, class or state entities [Taylor 2002: 78], and not about privatised religious matters. My recent research has shown that even in the period of communism many people searched for religion-like symbolic universes, which they found, for example, in what was expressed by so-called protest songs [Nešpor 2003]. intellectuals (L. Kunte, R. Máša, some of the so-called Catholic modernists) tried to establish a new religion, or initiated a certain revival of 'pure' Christianity [see Horyna and Pavlincová 1999: 197-223], while others actually succeeded in doing so (the founding fathers of Církev československá/Czechoslovak Church).…”

Transforming Dalit Identity: Ancient Drum Beat, New Song

“…Folk singers may also act as leaders, gathering oppressed peoples and providing them with hope through the messages and values which they espouse. This is the effect found by Nespor (2003) in research on Czech folk music from the 1960s to the 1980s which criticised the communist regime. In Nigeria, people from the Yoruba cultural area, the most active sector of civil society, used theatre, oratory and folk music to criticise Structural Adjustment Programmes and challenge the military during the authoritarian regime from 1988 to 1999 (Olukotun, 2002).…”

Transforming Dalit Identity: Ancient Drum Beat, New Song

“…Folk singers may also act as leaders, gathering oppressed peoples and providing them with hope through the messages and values which they espouse. This is the effect found by Nespor (2003) in research on Czech folk music from the 1960s to the 1980s which criticised the communist regime. In Nigeria, people from the Yoruba cultural area, the most active sector of civil society, used theatre, oratory and folk music to criticise Structural Adjustment Programmes and challenge the military during the authoritarian regime from 1988 to 1999 (Olukotun, 2002).…”