The interdisciplinary Eight Annual Conference on Holidays, Ritual, Festival, Celebration and Public Display was held in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA, from June 3 to 5, 2004. The about thirty experts from the USA and Europe (folklorists, ethnologists, anthropologists, historians, geographers, religiologists, literary historians, sociologists, musicologists) who presented their papers focused on commemoration ceremonies connected with death, and on political events and demonstrations as they are manifested in rituals and at festivals. The conference was organised by the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University or, more accurately, by Dr. Jack Santino, a folklorist and professor of popular culture. The themes of the papers were divided into eleven sections: Emergent Traditions, Commemoration, Play, Place, and The Sacred, Ritual, Festival, and Politics, Performance and Ritual, Creating Ceremony, Traditions of Death, Invention and Reinvention, Holiday Celebrations in Changing Circumstances, Rites of Passage, The Uses of Holidays. The highly varied presentations, which mainly discussed North-American experiences and to a lesser extent also European and Asian 20th-century experiences, made it possible to find analytical connections and combinations of contents based on the premises contained in the conference’s title. The ambitious programmes of these conferences, which have been held since 1997, the collection of papers presented at the fourth conference, the only one not held in Bowling Green, but in Spain, and the publications on this theme by the participants confirm that both in terms of subject and approaches the theme is very much alive and topical today.