For Us Country Folk Every Visit to Prague Is Sacred: Imaginaries and Policy in the Recreational Activities of Agricultural Workers in the Late 1940s and Early 1950s

Abstract

This study deals with the overnight tourist trips that the United Union of Czech Agricultural Workers organized for agricultural workers in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It examines how two groups of ideas influenced how such recreational trips unfolded. The first centered around the effects of organizers’ efforts to make recreation a social-constructive tool of the Czechoslovak state and an ideological tool of the Communist regime. Imaginaries of the countryside and its inhabitants also influenced the planning of these trips. This study understands both groups of ideas as a part of the period under study’s social imagination, which according to Charles Taylor encompasses ideas about the arrangement of society and expectations about how it functions. The view from the other side, that is, how the vacationers experienced their holidays, demonstrates how successful the organizers were in meeting their goals and also reveals the sources of contemporary imaginaries of the countryside and its inhabitants.