?Popular? has, in Ion Ionică?s view, at least four different meanings:

- what belongs to the people, to the nation as a social corpus, as a whole

- what belongs to the popular class, to the ?small people?

- what became a common good, or a common usage amongst the people, but has its origins elsewhere

- a thing or a deed with its finality in the people, e.g. a work of popular, social assistance (Ionică, 1996: 19).

What means then and how can be circumscribed a popular reality? Is in the same way popular the village life with the poor neighborhoods of the large or small towns? life? How homogenous is the field of phenomena called popular? In addition, finally, how can we legitimately extrapolate the cultural forms and practices of a social category to the level of the people-nation as a whole?

The answer to all these disturbing questions is to be found, for Ion Ionică, in ?the sociological point of view:?

?Folklore stopped at a few manifestations from the uncertainly determined field of ?popular? life, which were understood as cultural products of an inferior social stratum, valuable through their oldness (ancientness), their traditional character, then their collective or ?popular? traits; ethnography ? as it was understood in Romania ? oriented itself to the consistent artifacts of rural social life [?] sociology embraces in an organic way all these aspects, reaching deeper to the immensely complex and delicate interior network that sustains the whole superstructure of social manifestations an to the fluid processes of the social life? (Ionică, 1996: 20).

This ?sociological? answer to ethnographic troubles even if it sounds very good is, in itself, more like a verbal than a real solution.

We tend to believe that this sociological turn in ethnography is part of a larger and less well-articulated project. Ion Ionică is trying to create a hybrid sociology - ethnology that can be, in the same time, national and regional and, in close connection to this objective, to find out a way through which ?sound objectives and trends of the folkloric studies are organically integrated in the sociological approach? (Ionică, 1996: 21).

The sequences of facts and phenomena, torn apart from the social unit, in which they are functionally integrated, transform themselves into various typological sequences, connected to various units, ?circles? of social life. The correspondence between types and these larger social units is never perfect. Nevertheless, in Ion Ionica?s view, connecting typological sequences with various socio/cultural entities remains the only way we can, meaningfully, go, from small and very concrete social units, like the villages, to larger and more abstract ones, like ?ţări? or regions.

It seems that we are confronted with a special metaphysics of entitivity (Wolf, 2001). The social units, the entities, are broken into typological sequences just in order to be reconstructed, remerged into larger, more abstract and more fuzzy-bordered entities: the unities of regional life. This process of abstractization and progressive indetermination of the borders of social units has an implicit terminus ad quem: the nation and its synthetic science. Using the certitude of the national border grounded on national identity but also, implicitly on the state apparatus (Barth, 1969, Delanty, 2003) the regionalist fuzziness and incertitudes can be tamed from within.