Viaţa morală în Ungurenii Botoşanilor
The article presents Eugen D. Neculau's vision on the moral life of people of Ungureni, a village in Botoşani region.
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The article presents Eugen D. Neculau's vision on the moral life of people of Ungureni, a village in Botoşani region.
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L’auteur nous propose de passer en revue la recherche scientifique sur les rituels funéraires accomplie pendant quatre décennies par l’ethnologue Ion H. Ciubotaru. Avec la thèse de doctorat, Le chant funéraire et son contexte ethnographique sur la Vallée du Grand Șomuz (1978) et avec le septième volume des „Cahiers de l’Archive de Folklore” (Folklore des coutumes familiales de Moldavie. Le Grand Passage, 1986), il a donné une nouvelle perspective sur ce problème. La seconde contribution majeure est constituée par l’ouvrage Le Grand Passage. Repères ethnologiques dans le cérémonial funèbre de Moldavie (1999). Ce travail s’individualise par le fait de représenter la première approche monographique des coutumes funèbres de Moldavie. L’entière problématique est suivie dans le cadre de certains groupes de coutumes ordonnées non seulement dans leur succession naturelle dans la structure de la cérémonie, mais aussi en fonction des significations qu’elles révèlent. Avec le deuxième volume du Les Catholiques de Moldavie. L’univers de la culture populaire (2002), l’ethnologue a continué l’investigation de ce compartiment du cycle familial. Très intéressant est l’usage d’introduire le cercueil du défunt célibataire dans une tente ou une hutte dressée sur la civière – construction qui évoque en même temps la maison du mort et la voûte nuptiale. Le couronnement de cet ample projet de recherche, fruit de longues et minutieuses investigations scientifiques sera la typologie Les coutumes funèbres de Moldavie dans le contexte national (2014). Respectant une méthodologie unitaire, l’œuvre met en valeur toutes le collections de l’Archive de Folklore de Moldavie et Bucovine: les réponses aux 102 questions concernant l’enterrement, consignes dans plus de 800 localités, les enregistrements sur des bandes magnétiques (créations folkloriques ou récits d’intérêt anthropologique). À ces sources on a ajouté une précieuse sélection d’informations concernant les funérailles des non-mariés en Moldavie, extraites de la Collection „Petru Caraman”, constituée au milieu de la quatrième décennie du siècle passé. Ce volume contient une typologie des rituels du Grand Passage, aussi bien qu’un corpus qui inclut 440 textes, le plus riche de notre littérature de spécialité sur ce thème. Dans l’étude afférente, la sphère des croyances populaires s’entrelace avec la philosophie, la psychologie et la littérature culte. On peut observer, plus d’une fois, que certains motifs ou thèmes rituels-poétiques du folklore funèbre autochtone concourent et même dépassent les productions similaires les plus belles de la sphère du topos universel.
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We discuss an extraordinary volume dedicated to the folktales of Moldova by two celebrated researchers – Ion H. Ciubotaru and Silvia Ciubotaru –, both deeply implicated in the creation and development of the Folklore Archive of Moldova and Bucovina. In so doing, we concentrate on three groups of essential agents – the previous researchers of the subject; the research group of seven that collected the Archive tales (from which 112 representative narratives, organized according to the Aarne-Thompson typology, were included in the published Corpus) and the 62 rural narrators of the tales, whose lively portraits are innovatively presented in a special (and rich) section of the volume. Comments on the fascinating interpretation of the imaginary universe of the folktales of Moldova by the authors conclude the paper.
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Born during the Roman occupation of the Jewish people, Saint John stands out by offering free access, for all who came to listen him and who wanted to follow the path traced by his sermons, to a ritual that had become an expensive practice. It’s baptism, and because of it, Christianity named him the Baptist. The icons from the collection of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant surprise us with some atypical representations (like a person with sober clothing or like an angel with wings). The artisan, anonymous or known, insists on the moment of the saint’s beheading, sequence which he illustrates the best he can. In addition to the story presented, he leaves his personal mark, adding not only elements that he found in the local landscape, but also visual information that refers to the foreign occupation of the Romanian territories, fact highlighted by the clothing of the negative characters. Placed in the “beautiful room”, the icon have the role of protecting the house but also mark some historical moments that left deep traces in the life of the Romanian peasant.
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We tried to illustrate the first steps of ethnographic museography in Romania, especially in Transylvania, the way in which the permanent exhibitions were conceived, without neglecting aspects related to the first steps taken in the direction of the practices of conservation for ethnographic objects. We have examined different stages of different political moments, in order to illustrate the efforts of ethnographers.
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To a large extent, Ion Muşlea’s institutional work as Director of the Folklore Archive of the Romanian Academy in Cluj included a massive correspondence with his collaborators and associates with the purpose of collecting folklore, as well as with peers from the field from Romania and abroad. The present paper regards the correspondence Muşlea had with foreign folklore researchers and institutes between 1926-1966. The largest part of these letters in foreign languages are preserved today in the named archive and are yet to be published. We present an overview of the content and character of this corpus of letters and we illustrate it with 25 relevant letter examples in the appendices.
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The present paper concerns an important project of Romanian Folklore studies, namely The Corpus of the Romanian Ballad, as reflected in letters written between 1947-1965 by professor Dumitru Caracostea, the president of The Folklore Commission of the Romanian Academy, and Ion Mușlea, the founder of The Folklore Archive of the Romanian Academy. We are pursuing the following aspects: the dynamics of the institutional structures in charge of folklore research between 1947-1949, professional networks within the discipline at that time, the main texts and theories elaborated by the two authors during the correspondence.
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The worldwide spread cosmogonic myth of the creation of the World from the primordial Waters is encountered in the Romanian folklore as well. When God decided to create the World, he sent Satan at the bottom of the sea to take soil from there and bring it to the surface. Satan succeeded in doing so on its third attempt, bringing some soil under his nails, and God made a little bread out of it and sat on it to get some rest. Satan, thinking that God felt asleep, wanted to drown God, but the closer he pushed God to the water, the bigger the ground became. That’s how the World came to be. A part that has remained unknown so far to the researchers would be the time and place of this legend within a ritual scenario, which can be identified in a variant version of the cosmogonic myth recited during the wedding ritual recorded in 1975 in a village located on Tutova Valley, in the southern part of Moldavia. The ritual text recited at the wedding marks the beginning of a new life for the recently formed family, and the unpublished variant presented in this paper contains very old ritual reminiscences, sign of a remarkable religious syncretism in this dynamic geographic and historical space from south-eastern Europe, where different cultural and religious movements intercross.
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The article presents the first-of-its-kind discussion of shared meals practice through the prism of the Chuvash culture. Eating together at the inter-village, all-village, generic and family levels is analyzed in the context of traditional ritual actions and prayers. The purpose of the study is to reveal the role of shared meals in uniting people and keeping the ancestral traditions. The work is based on a broad set of primary sources, including the author’s field notes (made in Saratov, Orenburg and Kuibyshev regions), archival sources (from the Saint Petersburg Branch of the RAS Archive and the Scholarly Archive of Chuvash State Institute for Humanitarian Research), various published materials, and previous research works. The research results suggest that the Chuvash people have always supported each other, and shared meals helped uniting them. The ritual meals brought people together on an intimate level. Special attention has been paid to the feeble old people and late relatives. The similar attitude was expressed to the deities. Therefore, the conclusion can be made about the existence of some food-based feeling of affinity or kinship.
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Imagology is a cultural science paradigm, the insights of which are utilized not only in comparative literature but also in historical science, mental history, political science, anthropology, and social psychology. After a general, historical introduction, the article provides an insight into the imagological research underway at Sapientia – Hungarian University of Transylvania, Faculty of Economics, Socio-Human Sciences and Engineering of Miercurea Ciuc.
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This article deals with symbolic goods in posters in Israel from the period before the establishment of the state to the present day. The poster and the symbolic goods that appear in it, serve as an agent of ideological companies. In this study, I will examine the nature of the relationship between the symbolic goods and the Zionist-Israeli ideology, by comparing the symbolic goods represented in them over time and space. The questions the research asks are: What are the contribution and importance of symbolic goods as an ideological tool in Israeli posters? Has the world of symbolic goods that served Zionist ideology origin or been borrowed from other ideologies? The methodology is Qualitative research by: study case, Visual – genealogical. The conclusions of the study indicate the importance of the symbolic goods in the foundation of the State of Israel by posters and other media. The symbolic goods that characterize the posters in Israel, consist in part of content related to Jewish tradition and religion (Bible stories and myths) and its other part is influenced by the symbolic goods appropriated from ideologies around the globe.
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Traditional ecological knowledge of plants is an important aspect of scholarship in relation to land use and contributes to the sustainable use and management of natural resources as well as to the monitoring of changes in the natural environment. The aim of the present paper was to examine traditional ecological knowledge in Hungarian communities in Slovenia in connection with knowledge of the plants growing in the region, their local names, and their uses. We quantified the earlier role of the utilized plant species in order to determine the former significance of certain species. We carried out structured interviews with a total of 20 individuals in three studied settlements. In the Hungarian communities in Slovenia, we uncovered knowledge of a total of 130 folk taxa. Of these, 123 taxa have local names. The majority of the folk taxa can be correlated with a single biological species. A significant proportion of the known species were utilized in some way, most of them as medicinal plants, wild edible plants, or ornamental plants. As in other farming communities, the most important species are mainly woody plants, which include the common hornbeam, the common juniper, and the silver birch. Among the herbaceous plants, utilization of the dandelion, nettle, and bulrush was significant. Members of the older generations living in the Hungarian communities in Slovenia still retain knowledge of plants that were once used on a daily basis, along with their local names and the traditional ecological knowledge connected with their earlier use.
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This paper presents an asymmetry of meanings and values that different human agents who occupy the same geographical space ascribe to distinct wildlife species. This asymmetry is the result of these agents’ roles in the area and their contrasting epistemologies. The agents in question comprise the Goričko Nature Park as a conservation institution and inhabitants of the park, especially farmers. In most parks, the relationship between professionals and inhabitants is crucial to the park’s sustainability. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to point at a selected neuralgic point which divides the two. At stake is that both agents ascribe importance to wildlife species, but to different ones and for different reasons. While the park focuses on protected species, inhabitants are occupied with non-protected ones. Whereas the park projects positive values on species of its concern, inhabitants ascribe negative characteristics to species of their concern. The paper illustrates these disparate attitudes to wildlife and calls for a less biased park agenda which could benefit the park’s conservation project, yet it also acknowledges the lack of resources which hinders the park in properly fulfilling its role in the local web of relationships.
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The aim of the present study is to demonstrate the usefulness of, and the lessons that can be learned from, a type of source that has been insufficiently analyzed and used to date — that is, the minutes of local councils, and of public hearings in particular. Data from 29 sets of minutes from four neighboring small settlements in the Hungarian-Slovenian border region (Apátistvánfalva, Kétvölgy, Kondorfa, and Orfalu) suggest that the use and inclusion in research of the text corpus that comprises the large available quantities of such sources can effectively supplement, although not replace, ethnographic fieldwork based on participant observation. At the same time, the examination of this text corpus, along with other internal sources belonging to the local public sphere, makes it possible to construct an image of the internal workings of a settlement and the dynamics of its power relations that would not otherwise be accessible for study.
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