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Despite the ongoing research into visitor motivation in the live events and tourism industries, only a limited amount of research has examined the motivational factors exhibited in individual segments of society. The purpose of this paper was to identify a relationship between visitor demographics and visitor motivation, for the purpose of enhanced market research at folk festivals in the UK.

In this research, a qualitative study of visitor demographics and their accompanying motivation to attend Purbeck Folk Festival is reported. The study was conducted in the form of interviews, which investigated the underlying motivation behind visitor attendance to Purbeck Folk Festival in 2014. The research process, guided by the literature of Robson (2011) and Bryman (2012), aimed to establish the extent to which visitor demographics did or did not impact visitor motivation to attend the event.

The study revealed five motivational dimensions, and from this devised five core audience segments including: the escapists, the socialites, the family type, the experience seekers and the folkniks. This study highlights the correlation between visitor demographics and visitor motivation and suggests further applications of this research and similar research in the field of live events. The study contributes an insight into the audience of Purbeck Folk Festival and may be used to provide an understanding of audience profile and behaviour at folk festivals within the UK.

Due to the nature of the research, participants will be secured through non-probability quota sampling, which is a method of convenience. This approach may place limitations on the validity of the findings, as researcher bias may occur when selecting participants, for example, avoiding visitors who look intimidating or abnormal (Robson, 2011). The use of open-ended questions in the capacity of a greenfield event was identified as a potential difficulty, as participants are required to think about their answers and provide opinions, unlike a closed question method, which although quicker and easier, may not be as effective (Kumar, 2014). Therefore, to keep participants engaged and willing to provide further information, the interview design was kept short and questions are easily comprehendible.

The research study reflects early the work of Mayo (Dickson, 1973), Maslow (1954) and Herzberg (1966), and builds on more recent literature by Kruger and Saayman (2012), which analysed the relationship between audience profile and motivation to attend.

In this chapter, I discuss the artistic representation of the musical illustration of funeral rites and ceremonies in contemporary Poland. The death of a person in many cultures is perceived as an important point in the life of a given community, especially a family; hence, people tend to express feelings stemming from these circumstances through art. Songs sung at funerals and during the mourning period have been used for centuries as a way for the living to express their grief for the person who has died. From an anthropological point of view, the main function of music accompanying funeral rites is to help family and friends of the deceased recover from their loss.

To illustrate my argument, I analyse the recording of folk songs by Adam Strug and Kwadrofonik: ‘Requiem Ludowe’ (‘The Folk Requiem’), released on CD in 2013. The musical motifs and lyrical themes are based on original folk tunes of Eastern Poland (Podlasie and Lubelszczyzna regions) that are still used in the villages during the bereavement period. The songs on the CD, which are: ‘Czemu tak rychło, Panie’ (‘Why is it So Soon, my Lord’); ‘Żegnam cię mój świecie wesoły’ (‘Goodbye my Merry World’); ‘Żegnam was mitry i korony’ (‘Goodbye to you Mithra and Crowns’); ‘Żegnam was wszystkie elementa’ (‘Goodbye to you all the Elements’); ‘Powiem prawdę świecie tobie’ (‘I Shall Tell you the Truth, my World’); ‘Piekło’ (‘The Hell’); ‘Czyściec’ (‘The Purgatory’); ‘Niebo’ (‘The Heaven’); and ‘Wieczność’ (‘The Eternity’) are rooted in Christian funeral traditions and they are supplemented by elements of Slavic folklore.

The lyrics of the mourning songs published on the recording display a specific attitude to the mythology of death and bereavement present in the culture of Polish peasants. The main themes of these folk songs, namely, the praise of the deceased, the grief of the remaining family, the preparation of the dead one for eternal life or the attempts to cross the threshold of life and death, are presented by the artists as the soul’s journey from the Earth to the Underworld, and through Purgatory to Eternal life as a final stage of a person’s destination. They show how the rural people imagine death itself and express their feelings of loss and grief in art to overcome the fear of the unknown.

The author investigates and debates around authenticity in relation to the heritage communities of a Chinese intangible cultural heritage (ICH) item ‘Nüshu’. Nüshu is a monosyllabic phonetic system of writing created and used by women in the Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, in Southern China. Drawing on insights from both online and offline ethnographies, this study argues that in the field of ICH, disputes over heritage authenticity are fiercely negotiated by different stakeholders, including powerful state and supra-state actors. However, the emergence of digital platform has become a way for Nüshu participants to perform their identity and competence and lay claim to their own heritage authenticity.

This study aims to explore the relationship between folk religious place-making and the development of urban public spaces and summarize its influence on community network construction and daily behavior to discover the authentic practices and role of folk faith culture in social space.

Taking Macau's Shi Gandang Temple and its belief culture as an example, on-site research, historical evidence and interviews were used to elaborate and analyze the processes of place-making, social functions, management mechanisms and folk culture to establish a new perception of folk religious place-making in contemporary urban spaces.

The article argues that the culture of folk beliefs profoundly influences urban spaces and the social management system of Macau and has a positive significance in building the local community and geopolitical relations. In addition, it suggests that the participation of folk religious places in local practices is important as key nodes and emotional hubs of local networks, reconciling conflicts between communities of different backgrounds and driving urban spaces toward diversity while forming a positive interaction and friendly cooperation between regional development and self-contained management mechanisms, governance models and cultural orientations.

This study takes an architectural and anthropological perspective of the impact of faith on urban spaces and local governance, using the Shi Gandang Temple in Macau as an example, to complement related studies.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the potential of rural and ethnographic tourism for the sustainable socio-economic development of Russian regions.

A system approach was used as a method to study this problem, which allowed the authors to identify the main trends in the development of rural and ethnographic tourism in Russian regions.

The research results were obtained using predictive analysis and by determining the prospects for the further development of recreational services and the forms of their territorial organization. The paper claims that it is viable to use the sites famous for traditional folk crafts in combination with rural tourism when creating tourist clusters as this is beneficial for promising large-scale tourism investment projects.

The relevance of the problem stems from the fact that the comprehensive interaction of rural and ethnographic tourism can become an additional “growth area” of domestic travel in Russian regions. This may be possible because of a certain combination of conditions and factors on the territory of the region, the availability of natural, recreational and ethno-cultural resources.

Abundance of cultural resources is a typical feature of traditional villages. It is particularly important to explore the development path of traditional villages from the perspective of cultural resources.

Based on symbiosis theory, establish a symbiotic development mechanism of traditional village characteristic cultural elements and use grey relation analysis (GRA) to evaluate the resource advantages of different cultural attributes. This paper proposes the traditional village development model of different symbiotic units in the county. An empirical study is conducted in conjunction with the national historical and cultural city of Xunxian County, Henan, China.

The results show that (1) according to the different attributes of humanistic cultural resources, artificial cultural resources and natural cultural resources in traditional villages, different symbiotic units can be divided, and advantageous resources can be shared through the symbiotic interface; (2) using GRA to calculate the grey relational degree between cultural resources sequence of different attributes and the sum of cultural resources sequence in the county and define as the active degree of humanistic culture, the inheritance degree of artificial culture and the integrity of natural cultural resources are shown to reflect the status of the inheritance of humanistic cultural resources, the existence of artificial cultural resources, and the protection of natural cultural resources; and (3) a comparative analysis of the active degree, inheritance, and integrity of each symbiotic unit leads to the proposal of three symbiotic models of folklore vitality, characteristic space, and natural ecology, all of which are beneficial to promote the formation of a symbiotic environment.

The main innovation of this paper is to put forward the research scale of symbiosis theory in the field of urban and rural planning at the county level, delimit the symbiosis units of traditional villages at the county level, complete the quantitatively evaluate cultural resources in different symbiotic units with GRA, revealing the symbiotic development mechanism of cultural resources characteristic elements in traditional villages.

This paper aims to discuss the notion of carnival laughter in Bakhtin's examination of Rabelais's literary works. The paper suggests that what may be called, after Rabelais, the agélaste ethos, the ethos of the men and women without laughter, remains a strong influence in some domains of critical management studies (CMS) as well as mainstream organization theory.

The literature review discusses Russian literature theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of the writings of François Rabelais and related his concept of the agélaste to contemporary social and organization theory.

Some proponents of CMS praise the critical thinking and the outlook on society established by its foundational writers Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. As a consequence, CMS tends to exclude the sources of joy, laughter and transgression and regard such social and human gestures and events as being frivolous and ephemeral. Therefore, CMS remains trapped within its own sphere of critical thinking and fails to address and understand significant components of everyday life.

The paper suggests that the notion of “critique” needs to be explored within the community of CMS researchers.

Discusses the concept of critique so central for both the CMS tradition of thinking and other domains of management studies in new terms.

This paper explores how consumers use the media products of mass culture to co-create the meanings of popular culture. Specifically, we examine both why and how Harry Potter fans utilize the primary texts written by J. K. Rowling to co-create their own fan fiction. Towards this end, we utilize Kenneth Burke's dramatistic method to explore the pattern of literary elements in both the original texts and the fan fiction. We argue that the primary impetus for consumers to engage in the co-creation of these texts is found in their ability to emphasize different ratios of literary elements in order to express their individual and collective desires. Through this process, fans utilize and contribute to the meta-textual meaning surrounding these primary focal texts and propel the original products of mass culture to the cultural texts of popular culture.

China is primarily a nonreligious country with less than 10% of people following Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, or other religions. Two major communication paths, the land and sea Silk Roads, directly affected the distribution and development of Muslim tourism and attractions. The combination of Islam with local custom and culture is a unique feature in China, and contributes to its development as a form of ethnic rather than religious tourism. As a result, research in China focuses on ethnic product development, minority sports and anthropological tourism, themed events, and intangible cultural heritage.