Etno-istoria şi artizanatul popular în variabilitatea etno-culturală din România
Ethno-history and Handicraft Arts within the Conditions of the Ethno-cultural Variability from Romania

Summary/Abstract: In describing folk cultures, documentary resources such as the oral traditions and craft artifacts appear generally to be forms of „saying” and, respectively, „making” one’s ethnic identity. Thus, the hypothesis according to which vernacular evocations could contribute to the restoring of some specific community origins (either legendary, or historical ones) is accompanied by the assumption that artifacts would reflect certain cycles of events responsible for cultural developments and trajectories of the ethnic groups, once the founding of them – mythical or historical – would have occurred. Narratives and the material culture are obviously interdependent with each other, within either historical or ethnographic contextualization, since the legends and the life histories come to be „illustrated” in the ornamental artisanship, while the techniques of traditional arts are learned and passed on by „word of mouth” and by an ethno-folkloric recognition of past craftsmen’s contributions. In my paper, ethno-cultural belongingness has, therefore, to be validated based on the local coherence and substantiation of ethnicity, first in the framework of several minority groups that have been investigated in the course of our current research (the Căldărars, the Lipovans, the Rudars, the Saxons, the Szeklers, the Tatars, and the Turks), and then in the cross-cultural interpretation of them.

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