Instead of Conclusions. A Romanian Case Study

Probably the most interesting Romanian work[2] that we could integrate into this ambiguous neo-Humboldtian (Bunzl, 1996) national-ethnological trend mentioned above belongs to Ion I. Ionică and it is called Dealul Mohului. Ceremonia agrară a cununii în Ţara Oltului, a complex research into the intricacies of a sewing rite from Ţara Oltului.

This work is important, from my point of view, as it is situated, theoretically, in between the context of German Völkerkunde and Volkskunde, and it shows the power of the national solution in apparently solving the uncertainties opened by the counter-enlightment version of the alterity paradigm and in ?closing? scientific discourses.

It his work Ion Ionică is trying, not on an entirely new path to be sure, to fuse the Kulturkreise method of W. Foy, Fr. Graebner and W. Schmidt to the Morphologie der Kultur method of L. Frobenius and O. Spengler. However, there is an important difference. His aim does not consist in building ethnology as a ?histoire des peoples sans histoire,? as quite poignantly M. Mauss was defining the German Volkskunde tradition?s main goal (Mauss, 1974), but in understanding European cultural regions, as part of modern political societies.

Therefore, these organic areas are actually the countries (ţări, pays) differentiated among themselves by objective features, economic, cultural and spiritual functions but, most important, by the existence of a ?local conscience.?

The unitary life of regions appears under two different registers:

- At first, it is about the ?regional collective participation facts,? i.e. the pilgrimages to sacred places, the big annual fairs, nedei, and the life of the most important regional towns.

- Secondly, there are ?regional facts of repetition,? i.e. homogenous series of economic, technological, cultural, religious, ritual facts that reveal the uniformity of the regional life, or patterns of change (Ionică, 1996: 12).

This series of facts, more exactly, series of ?clusters of facts,? have different connections with the region?s centre or nucleus. It is not very clear what Ion Ionică understands by this nucleus that is sometimes defined as ?the meaning nucleus of regional unity? and other times as ?the principle of the unity of regional life? (Ionică, 1996: 13). The fuzziness of this concept has to do, I believe, with the dual way of constructing the regional types who are exterior cartographic intersections of series of social facts, on one side, and originary forms of the same intersections on the other side.

[2]We chose a Romanian case study as the author is more familiar with Romanian folklore studies than with other East European cases.