ETHNOGRAPHY AND FOLKLORE IN THE WORKS OF DIMITRIE CANTEMIR
ETHNOGRAPHY AND FOLKLORE IN THE WORKS OF DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

Summary/Abstract: Dimitrie Cantemir is popular in Romanian culture due to the fact that he kept alive the national traditions by passing them into the documents of the time. He emphasized the Romanian culture from ethnological, folkloric perspective, with all its parts: heroes, mythology, symbols, rituals, rites, etc. He is a pioneer in the field of preserving Romanian traditions and folklore, because until now he has not written about it. Cantemir's works on Romanian folklore are real sources of national culture. Historiographical arguments from folklore are more varied than ethnographic ones, without being much more numerous. It is a series of oral expressions related to the customs: the wedding city, the mourning, the carol, the proverbs (Romanian and Turkish) and the sayings, the parables, the metaphorical expressions in popular style. Writing folk culture as well as its pragmatic interpretation led, over time, to the emergence of a discipline, folklore. Critic Al. Bistriţeanu makes the following appreciation: " With Dimitrie Cantemir, the notion of folk creation begins to gain an outline in our culture: the collective production of the masses is a distinct domain, distinct from that of the scholarly thinking (...). The folklore material serves the psychology of folk masses. "

• Details
• Contents