Ostoja tradycjonalizmu w procesie modernizacji

The subject of this article is the village understood both as a settlement and an extra-urban area, but primarily as a rural collectivity and, especially, the village community. The village understood in this way has traditionally been considered a mainstay of traditionalism. The latter is basically derived from pre-modern societies dominated by the culture of the past. The village was traditionally considered as an agricultural space and a mainstay of Polish traditions, related to the peasant ethos of pre-literate local communities. This resulted from the practices and ideologies that make up rural traditionalism, assuming the transmission of social norms through “socialization through life”. Early modernisation of the village was associated with the opening of horizontal and vertical mobility channels and limiting consciousness isolation. Due to the development of education and the progress of the literacy process, the process of peasants' entering the nation began by transforming the peasant into a citizen rather than a parishioner. The late modernisation of the village was the result of its urbanisation and industrialisation, and was associated with the replacement of rural rationality with urban rationality, while the mechanisation of agriculture resulted in the transformation of the peasant estate into the farmer's social and professional position. In the second half of the twentieth century, the village was reached by exogenous mass culture. The process of the late modernisation of the village is based on its depreciation. One result of globalisation is the de-traditionalisation of the village, within which the mediated tradition appears. The spread of the internet was the turning point. Cultural homogenisation is progressing, local specificity is disappearing by adapting it to the national culture in its modernisation version, identified with the urban one. In this context, nostalgia appears for the old good times when life was simpler. At present, one can notice only relics of peasant traditionalism in the Polish post-war national culture, in which many features of the peasant ethos function as a “peasant filter”.