Date of publishing:
25.9.2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21104/CL.2026.3.02
The Český lid provides open access to all of its content under licenseCreative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
Abstract:
This article examines Štefanské hody, an autumn feast held since 2009 in Kamenná kolonie (Kamenka), a former quarry workers’ settlement in Brno, now an artistic, gentrifying neighbourhood. Drawing on fieldwork (2023–2025) and participant observation at the 2025 feast, it asks how residents turn part of the city into a place that, for a few October days, feels and functions like a village. Rather than measuring it against an imagined authentic original, it treats the tradition as a symbolic construction made in the present. The analysis draws on Lefebvre’s production of space and de Certeau’s tactics, while Turner’s communitas and Bey’s “temporary autonomous zone” explain the event’s social texture and political-affective effect. Alongside recent studies of invented urban carnivals in the Czech lands, Štefanské hody emerges not as degraded folklore but as functional, locally situated folklore, whose significance lies in its transmission and its capacity to bind a changing community.
Keywords
production of space, invented tradition, functional folklore, communitas, gentrification, urban festivity, Brno, hody
Article Text
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