Pierre Bourdieu’s View of Ritual Celebrations

In Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, a holiday is a ritual understood as a particular social structure. It has elements such as time and ritual space, objects and interactions, as well as a body and a language. Describing and analysing the dynamic of social celebratory rituals allows the role they play in social life and culture to be revealed. It emerges that on the one hand, the integrating nature of rituals strengthens the social structure and maintains cultural values and norms, while on the other it influences the shaping of the habitus and its transformation. Bourdieu takes into account traditional and contemporary aspects of celebration - (1) religious and magic, etc., rites of passage in the society of Kabylia in Algeria, and (2) French culture, which is familiar to him. Celebratory rituals are subject to institutionalisation, differentiation and individualisation. A change in the meaning of the idea of the sacrum in celebrating entails new traits that are characteristic of lay rituals. Ritual - ‘the structuring structure’ and the ‘structured structure’ - reflects social transformation, as is captured in Bourdieu’s analysis of different cultures’ experience of celebrating, in different times and locations