Res Humanitariae

The article describes and analyses the Shrovetide celebrations that took place in the village of Grūšlaukė, in the Kretinga district, during the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century. The aim of the article is to describe and analyse the Shrovetide celebrations in Grūšlaukė during this period, and to reveal their transformation and the reasons for these changes. The article employs the theoretical approach of interpretive anthropology from Clifford Geertz, a member of the social-interpretive school of anthropology, and is based on the carnival structure model proposed by the British historian Peter Burke.

The article is devoted to the problem of time value in the context of contemporary Western culture and societies. This problem is put into context of whole contemporary culture and civilization. The main attention author gives to the general studies of social norms, values, stereotypes and traditions, known in contemporary Western societies. He points the raising importance of rational time organization of daily needs here. The actualities of real differentiation of daily time allocation are described here as well. The personal abilities to organize the actual time are named as high values in industrialized Western societies, year by year leaving less and less time for the same needs. The everyday stresses, unstable emotions became as the results of such process for a great number of individuals of Western culture. This situation is not so relevant just for less industrialized Eastern World cultures and societies.