Posts in Ethnology (discussion)

Transylvania: Age of migrations

Just for fun a couple of decades ago I took the archaeology maps from “History of Transylvania” and overlaid the Romanian ethnographic regions (the celebrated areas with old layers of Romanian folklore) on to the maps of archaeology sites for the various waves of invaders. The history of Transylvania is particularly illusive, even though Transylvania was on the trade route from the Black Sea to Western Europe. There is a continuing (can never be proven) debate regarding the arrival of the Latin speaking Romanians; are they Romanised Dacians, or other Romanised peoples that moved there later, and if so, before …read more

Our rational for depiction of ethnographic zones

There are a few basic concepts behind our depiction of ethnographic zones based around our interest in traditional or folk cultures, not nation and national history. Music and dance in the community can change with fashions, however customs change less rapidly. So we are interested in the present and the not so distant past situations. We examine from the present into the past through an anthropological lens rather than tracing history from the past to the present. In the present time frame we are interested in the concept of ethnographic zones as some type of geographically bounded community and its …read more

Ethnography: presented as bounded geographic zones

Țara Oașului ethnographic zone

The concept of ‘ethnographic zones’ can be argued academically to be flawed in many respects in terms of cultural parameters and the reality of geographical borders. However geographically based cultural zones remain a concept that insiders use to position music and dance in terms of people’s locational identity and locational dependent ideas in music and dance styles. Traditional ethnography When considering ethnography of rural ‘traditions’ and ‘customs’ it is common to document the location of the observation. In some cases a ‘tradition’, or a particular version of a folk artefact, is attributed to that location, but more often ethnographers look …read more