Title: 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.