The work discusses the place of folk culture in contemporary mass culure. The point of departure is an analysis of the model of traditional folk culture, functioning in science /ethnography, sociology, the humanities/. The analysis unveils various limitations and simplifications of this model /archaism, conservatism, simplicity and naturality as “immanent” features of folk culture perceaiving this culture rather as a sum than a structure of objects, seeing only its products and not its values and meanings/ its also points to the presence of attitudonal assumptions of an ideological character /folk culture, the treasury of everlasting aesthetical and ethnical values/.
The second part is devoted to the recognition of folk culture as it functions in popular thinking /on the examples of the mass press – dailies, illustrated weeklies/. The analysis od content /957 publications – articles, photo reports, interviews, notices etc. – collected from ten magazines in a period of four years/leads one to discover the four main „images” of folk culture. These are: folk culture as a manifestation of the individual, as an expression of social life, as a response of man to the order of nature and as a collection of products. It is characteristic that the above are accompanied by normative social models, showing the norms of human behaviour in contemporary life. This is due to the strong persuasiveness of mass culture texts. Comparing the idealized image of the past /traditional folk culture/ with an equally schematic image of today /alienating conditions of life in an urbanized and industrialized society, loneliness of the individual lost in a crowd, facing overpowering cognitive and attitudonal problems/, it is quite clear that they suggest turning to the essence of folk culture of the past as an antidote for all difficulties. Thus arise questions about the functioning of elements of traditional folk culture in mass culture. This issue is discussed in the third part. Traditional notions, i.g: stylization, paraphrase, transcription, do not reflect the specific features of occuring phenomena. Therefore, I suggest to adopt a convenient category for their description, i.e. the notion of a “cultural quotation”, for designating the situation in which the particular elements are arbitrarily extracted from the sphere of certain tradition and included into a new context. In my opinion, mass culture constitutes an example of a type of cultural quotation. Its contents are heterogeneous, it is a cluster of various values which do not make a uniforn whole. The mechanism of such "quoting" brings to mind the technique of bricolage, described by Levi-Strauss. This notion may be another category accuratly illustrating the specific functioning fs contemporary culture and may prove particularly convenient for its description.