Criza valorilor în România si reprezentarea culturală a mitocăniei in Atlas de Mitocănie Urbană
The Crisis of Values in Romania and the Cultural Representation of Churlishness in Atlas of Urban Rudeness

Summary/Abstract: After December 1989, Romania entered a long dark period of transition, that from communism to capitalism and democracy. Unfortunately, it seems that this intermediary stage has not ended yet (Pleşu 1996; Pasti 1995), and has turned into a carnival where every one of us is inevitably trapped into a mask-game, groping our way in the darkness of social, cultural, economic and political crises. Our paper takes special interest in the cultural crisis censured by the recent national campaign against urban rudeness initiated by Propaganda Agency and Guerilla Radio, between March 15 and May 15 2009, interactively engaging diversified media activism: radio broadcasting, print, TV, cinema, and even online. The media campaign aimed at denouncing the major types of “urban fauna” circumscribing the label of urban rudeness, with its female and male subtypes tagged in slang, although the language describing them is tele-encyclopaedic. We intend to address questions related to why the collection of “urban species” was printed in the format of an Atlas of Urban Rudeness, reasons why the collection itself forms an atlas, or why the species described form the contemporary urban “fauna”. We will also analyse the sources for launching such negative generalizations, the criteria taken into consideration when systematizing the species or the goals of cultural criticism. In the first part of our paper we briefly refer to the Romanian crisis of cultural values in the so-called period of transition and post-transition. The next step entails some theoretical considerations regarding categorization, stereotyping and generalization with both positive and negative ideological implications for social groups. The portrayal of rudeness is also considered, having in view its definitions through the ages, from Ion L. Caragiale’s hero to the type populating the contemporary Romanian society. The last part of the article attempts to answer questions related to the linguistic level of the articles from the Atlas, looking into the type of journalistic text, metaphorization processes, the linguistic instantiation of the forms without foundation/substance theory, or the sources of humour. Stereotypes are embedded in culture, so the media campaign, by way of its sharp moral penalty, called for cultural agency that would gradually substitute moral degradation with moral worthiness.

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