Living Cultural Heritage
Social practices and festive events
Social practices, rituals and festive events are habitual activities that structure the lives of communities and groups and that are shared by and relevant to many of their members. They are significant because they reaffirm the identity of those who practise them as a group or a society and, whether performed in public or private, are closely linked to important events.
Social, ritual and festive practices may help to mark the passing of the seasons, events in the agricultural calendar or the stages of a person’s life. They are closely linked to a community’s worldview and perception of its own history and memory.
They vary from small gatherings to large-scale social celebrations and commemorations. Each of these sub-domains is vast but there is also a great deal of overlap between them.
Social practices, rituals and festive events are strongly affected by the changes communities undergo in modern societies because they depend so much on the broad participation of practitioners and others in the communities themselves. Processes such as migration, individualisation, the general introduction of formal education, the growing influence of major world religions and other effects of globalization have a particularly marked effect on these practices.