Reshaping Heritage and Identity through Contemporary Festive Events: Romanian Blouse Day
Reshaping Heritage and Identity through Contemporary Festive Events: Romanian Blouse Day

Summary/Abstract: This study examines, from an anthropological perspective, a festive event created in 2013: Romanian Blouse Day (also known as the Universal Day of the Romanian Blouse). Through processes of cultural codification, an item of traditional peasant clothing – the blouse – was transformed into a symbol of Romanian identity, around which a complex social practice has been constructed. The article explores this event both as part of the pan-European memory-heritage-identity complex described by Sharon Macdonald, and as a total social fact, in the sense proposed by Marcel Mauss. It also analyses the factors that may account for the event’s remarkable popularity: the social imaginary theorised by Charles Taylor, through which large groups of people construct alternative “worlds” by drawing on selected elements from the past, and the concept of Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) formulated by Laurajane Smith, disseminated by social elites and ethnographers.

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