Issue 3, Vol. 108 (2021)

This article focuses on a three-day town celebration called Vinobranie (Grape Harvest), which takes place in the public space of the town of Pezinok in Western Slovakia. This eventis over eighty years old and was established the representatives of the town in collaboration with the local wine-growing association, organised with the support of the state railway company. The grape harvest festival is a mosaic of various elements with symbolic contents, representing an impressive whole wrapped in an offer of a varied programme and consumption.
The study observes the changing form and structure of the festival from its origins up until the present day, as well as the dynamics of the range of its functions in the local community.
The author follows an ethnological perspective. She draws on historical archive documents and ethnographic materials. In her analysis, she applies the concept of festival (Waldemar Cudny’s ‘Festivalisation of Urban Spaces’, 2016).

The quality of social networks influences the quality of life in old age because the absence of them leads to social exclusion and loneliness), which are, according to the literature, the most serious concerns perceived by seniors.
We focused on the social networks of seniors and loneliness in the urban environment. We were interested in how seniors reflect their social networks. Do they place emphasis on family or community networks? The paper was based on a mixed-method with a questionnaire on a sample of 1,026 seniors living in cities in Slovakia in combination with in-depth interviews.
In connection to the assumption of the influence of long-term patterns of family structures on intergenerational relationship and relationships with friends, it was found that there is a preference for family networks. Friendship networks are long-lasting, transforming and, unlike kinship networks, do not extend geographically beyond city boundaries.

The article is a comparative analysis of Stavíme Stalinův Pomník and the Polish translation of it. This games refers to the world’s largest monument to Stalin in Prague, whose short history seems to summarize the specific character of the epoch. Drawing attention to the period when these games were created, which dates back to the early 1990s, the author tries to answer the question of whether the creators wanted to show something with this game, or whether it was only a matter of the satirical presentation of Stalin’s communism and the worship of him. A comparison of the components of versions of the game, such as the board, the rules of the game, the characters and the event cards highlights the icons of the communist era that are common for both countries, suggesting what belongs to the common experience of all Eastern Bloc countries. It also shows the differences which, in the author’s view, illustrate a slightly different social mentality, culture, and history.

Border studies (currently also cross-border cooperation issues) is an interdisciplinary direction of research. The aim of the article is to present the spatial proximity influence of the state border on the everyday life reality of Kysuce the region inhabitants in the 20th Century (with an overlap to the present), both in the local and supra-local context. It focuses on the Slovak state borders with Poland and the Czech Republic in the intentions of the theory of the Irish sociologist Liam O'Dowd as a possible barrier, but also a bridge, a source of opportunities and a symbol of identity. It points out that in the villages bordering the Polish and Czech territories there has always been a more or less intensive mutual cultural transfer and contact of the population, therefore the borders cannot be perceived as an exclusively geopolitical phenomenon; their social and cultural dimension must be taken into account.

The submitted text is an example of an interdisciplinary study that uses the means of ethnology and materials science. This approach is rather exceptional in our circumstances. Specifically, it concerns detailed materials analyses of samples taken from plasters which were acquired during ethnological research on selected recent buildings in southern Moravia. The studied plasters from vernacular buildings in the Znojmo area probably come mostly from the twentieth century. It cannot be, however, excluded that the buildings are older. In addition to traditional and mostly inorganic pigments, the plasters were also coloured using synthetic pigments, which corresponded to their availability on the market. Besides the description of the set of samples, the treatise also demonstrates the potential of natural-scientific methods applied to analyse the plasters and their pigments for ethnology. Currently, these methods are usual in materials engineering and they are used for restoration works.