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Since its emergence in the 19th century, ethnic nationalism has had a significant impact on both state policies and the social sphere in Greece. The Greek Church and education system played a significant role in the consolidation of ethnic nationalist understanding in society and the state apparatus. The constitution also recognizes orthodoxy as an integral part of Greek identity, which makes non-Orthodox Greek citizens a secondary citizen. Also, Article 19 of the Greek citizenship law, which was in force until 1998, divided Greek citizens into two categories: “Greeks” and “non-Greeks”. Since the 1990s, this ethnic nationalist approach has been criticized by Greece’s Western European partners and European institutions. In the same period, Greece underwent a rapid Europeanization process and there were positive developments in minority rights such as the abolishment of Article 19. This study aims to analyze the impact of Europeanization in Greece on ethnic nationalism, which is decisive at the state and social levels. In doing so, it is to analyze the relationship between Greek nationalism and Europeanization within the framework of Kohn’s classification of ethnic-social (civic) nationalism. This research aims to answer the question of whether there is a shift from ethnic nationalism to a civic (inclusive) understanding of nationalism in Greece due to the Europeanization efforts since the second half of the 1990s.
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The objective of this article is to articulate some of the common topics, intersections, common grounds and parallels between the phenomena of gender and everyday life. Using relevant literature, the authors have substantiated their opinion that adoption and application of an integralist perspective are of substantial importance for scientific research of the phenomena in question.
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The rural community is a complex social and cultural system, integrator of various roles, statutes, relationships that the members of the community distribute to each other. The plurivalence of these social, spiritual realities finds its connection center, today and in the past, within well-structured, organized, governed institutions, based on legal, moral and social norms. Among these, an important role the “Gura satului” [literally, “the mouth of the village”] institution has (what the people from villages think and talk about something), which represents the public opinion, quite democratic and free of expression. It judges, criticizes, punishes through defamation and appreciates through praise all actions of the community members, regardless of age, social status, who are contrary to the good behavior, the communitary rules, to the norms preordained by tradition and society. Maneuvering with tools such as gossip, intrigue, interpreted words, news „passed from mouth to mouth”, which knew deep distortions, “Gura satului” continues, even today, but under other forms and impacts, to be an opinion former, to exercise a social and moral control, to reordonate the life of the community, and to express one of the socio-ethnographic manifestations of democracy.
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The cross is an object that can take many forms and meanings depending on the country where it was made, the ethnographic area to which it relates, or the people who used it. This study offers a diachronic perspective of the cross. Its polyvalent character is also illustrated by its uses as an object which marks a certain space or as a funeral mark for the deceased. The significance of this object is explained by the studies of the reasearchers who studied them, but also by the testimonies of the craftsmen who make crosses as memorial monuments in the villages of Urşi from Vâlcea county and Pietriș from Olt county, Romania.
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The paper The Romanian Fairy-Tale and the Energetic Structures of the Human Being argues for the spiritual dimension of the Romanian fairy-tale, as well as the convergence of the symbols of Eastern origin which it features. It stresses the correspondences between the energy centers of the subtle body and the heroes’ quests that culminate in one’s attaining of a supreme state of awareness and identification with one’s being. The fairy-tale fully reveals thus a unity in diversity, along with human aspiration toward genuine, total, unbounded happiness, which accounts for one’s communion with the highest level of vibration, the divine Light.
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Materials and techniques used in peasant houses in Vâlcea County. The materials and techniques used in buildings are the basic criteria in defining this type of architecture. The materials used by local traditional builders down the centuries had solved the problem of the building and the place where it had been built. It is well known that in Vâlcea County, timber was the most important material for building, especially in the northern mountainous areas. Brick has been used mostly in the southern part of the country, only in recent times. In Vâlcea, traditional buildings are an integral part of the landscape.
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Ernest Bernea made a truly ethnological synthesis regarding time in Romanian peasant society. However, we noticed that E. Bernea used field dates gathered from villages with a mainly agricultural character. In this paper we try to bring some additions to the question of time using dates from a pastoral community, Poiana Sibiului (Sibiu County). In the same time, we also make a few references to Poiana Mărului, a locality intensely studied by E. Bernea.
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This text proposes an analysis of apocalyptic scenarios articulated in traditional Romanian culture, from beliefs, superstitions and myths, notes in archives, ethnographic studies and popular literature. The eschatological image of Romanian traditional culture is dominated by pictures of fire (rain of fire), but the apocalypse can take place by land subsidence or by the installation of cosmic night. A very important aspect of Romanian eschatology is the possibility of postponing the end with 100 years, equivalent to the life of a generation.
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Saxon neighbourhood groups from Transylvania are the only local groups in Europe, still alive in modern times, which never became feudal and always interacted with the state. According to Regulations from 1376, between 25th of December and the 1st of January the heads were elected. It was then that they handed over the guild symbols: the guild chest, the neighbourhood badge, the guild flag and the jug. The last one was in the administration of the “father”, head of the journeymen who organized their meetings four times a year and who took part to the leading of young men Association. The jug had an important role because it was used for collecting the sinners’ wine (the wine was always considered the punishment for their mistakes towards the Regulations of the guild). The Museum collection contains almost 30 neighbourhood jugs made in the ceramic workshops of Sibiu, Sighişoara, Făgăraş, Drăuşeni, Ocna Sibiului. They are dated and some of them are even marked with the neighbourhood “father’s” name.
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In April 2006 we conducted fieldwork in the Romanati ethnographical area (Olt County, in south-east Romania) and we shot the custom and practice hora de poamana (the round dance offered as tribute to the dead). The circulation of this custom and practice is testified as ritual post-funeral practice in similar variants in two other Romanian areas (Banat and Oltenia), as well as in the vlahi communities in Valea Timocului. It is dedicated to the young people dead (either married or unmarried) whose death happened earlier than 3 years ago. It is performed in a communitarian place (in the cemetery and on the grazing ground) and in a moment with religious significance (Easter hollydays). Its main actors are the closest family members, and its significance as tribute is emphasized by a lot of ritual formulas and by ritual food contextualized by the holy day. The ritual proves itself to be a communication channel and a channel to insure the social mediation, an apparatus for establishing rules and for symbolically treasuring the present and the future which enables the reproduction of the social order through the participation of the youngest representatives of the society.
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On the eastern side of the Poiana Rusca Mountains, the Padureni County has a distinct ethnographic character where one could still find alive a number of customs, practices and menthalities from immemorial times. The topic of this paper is the “passage customs”/”rituri de trecere” also called “opposing rituals”. Prof. Mircea Lac’s students from “Palatul Copiilor” Deva, Hunedoara researched the subject under the scientific supervision of prof. univ. doc./Phd Ilie Moise from the University “Lucian Blaga” Sibiu. The origins and purposes of some of the “opposing practices” are known to the academia but they are quite difficult to understand and not well publicized by and to the masses. According to the passage/opposing percepts the “malefic spirits” were attracted by positive attitudes and wellbeing but they could be misguided and led astray by certain protocols and habits. The common thread in the opposing/resisting tradition was the offering of a negative/passive impression to the “bad spirits”. Along with the symmetric “positive routines” they consistitute a complex, comprehensive and whole set of rituals. In Padureni, the believes and occult misguiding rituals of the “bad omens” (“hale rele/duhuri rele”) take shape and are followed starting with the birth and adolescence, following with marriage and death.
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In the paper Andrei Şaguna and the Romanian Weddings there is a novel document (underlined and commented) from the Haşfalău and Paloş villages, Braşov county, dating from 1851, that has been preserved in the archive of the Mitropolitan Seat of Adreal in Sibiu, adressed to Andrei Şaguna where we find a description of the celebrations of romanian weddings in this sudtransilvan multicultural area. Edited to incriminate moments "that damage christian and social morality" there are detailed specific customs, the origin of their old "pagan" roots, the place it occupies in the collective consciousness and how they were handled by ecclesiastical administration. Here have been outlined (documented) manifestations of the popular spirit during festive moments in family and group, inventiveness and spontaneity of the folk creators, music’s place in these moments of life etc. But also the caution woth which they could be offset by other rules, including religious, which, in everyone’s opinion can only have a limited character. For cultural and patriotic reasons, but also for realistic considerents, nobody ever thought of their abolition.
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Together with the other ethnographical areas of Brasov County – Barsa County and Fagaras County – Rupea area has a few ethnographical characteristics. The Romanian, German and Magyar cohabitation determined the appearance of several cultural interferences, very obvious nowadays in the manner of development of certain customs. All these interferences were revealed in the researches on the two summer celebrations the Whitsuntide (Rusaliile) and the Midsummer Day (Sanzienele) are the most important celebrations of the summer when energies accumulate, vitality is at its maximal level and the time is right for rituals of purification and the protection against the released spirits. Before Christianity the Whitsuntide was a celebration dedicated to the blooming of the roses which became (after Christ) the Christian celebration which commemorates the Descent of the Holly Spirit. It is a celebration dedicated to the cult of the ancient, to fertility and life. The Midsummer Day is the day when the sky opens, the time is right for predictions about the people’s chance, marriage, the spirits are released and they “spread” either beneficent things, or they punish those who disobey the rules. All these beliefs and customs used to be part of n unwritten code which meant equilibrium and unity for the members of the traditional community. They are nowadays practiced partially, less and less and only where the elders live who keep taking into account “What God had created”. Now they are the only “keepers” of the formerly customs who can reveal parts of the image of the old times village.
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Sumedru is an important god of the Romanian pantheon, an agrarian divinity and the protector of the shepherds. The beliefs and the customs related to this agrarian divinity, replaced during Christianity by Saint Demetrius (celebrated on October 26th), and are specific to the areas where the animal breeding is the main occupation.Sumedru is associated with the death of the nature, the winter’s and the cold’s arrival. The celebration of Saint Demetrius stored several practices and rituals (of purification, fertilization and of protection) related to the cult of the ancestors (the commemoration of their souls). In Bran area, in the village named Sirnea, the inhabitants start the preparations for Sumedru’s celebration two or even three weeks before. In the evening of October 25th they set a big wood pile on fire and all the inhabitants gather around it and they sing and dance until dawn. Saint Demetrius’ day is the right time to make premonitions about the weather and the next year’s harvest. Sumedru’s fire is a “living” custom, preserved in many areas of Romania, not only in Bran, but also in the northern part of Arges, Dambovita, Valcea and in the mountainous areas of Moldavia, Oltenia and Muntenia, although its initial significances are lost.
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A characteristic of the Romanians’ nutrition is that in order to ensure the fats the body needs, they chose to drink milk and to eat cheese rather than meat. Thus, they provide the body the animal fats that are important for its good working. The gustative and physiological need of sour is satisfied by the fermented products obtained of milk and of fruit. Another characteristic of the Romanians’ nutrition is, before taking over the American cultures, the presence of the millet porridge which was the most important food until the introduction of the corn cultures. In the evolution of the Romanian alimentary system the changes occur only in the 18th century, when the corn and the potato penetrate in the culture. The transition from the basic foods – the millet or corn porridge – to the bread (made of wheat flour) happens gradually, towards the end of the 19th century. The bread becomes the basic food in the plain and the hilly areas. But in the mountainous area the corn flour porridge and the milk kept remaining basic foods up to the present.
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The team of researchers from Brasov County Center for Preserving and Promoting Traditional Culture that I am part of, undertook an ample campaign of investigations in the villages of Tara Barsei area. Its purpose was to prospect and to collect data about nutrition and traditional cooking, both in the past and the present. The history of nutrition identifies its stages and its main components with the mankind’s history. The nutrition depended, many years, on the environment, on the climatic conditions, on the communities’ social and economical structure, on the spiritual beliefs that influenced and dimensioned the specific connotations and significances. The progress of science and of technique is obvious everywhere and the former times lifestyle is different from the contemporary one; the difference is also noticeable in the past nutritional system and the present one. The food is artificially enriched nowadays, and the people’s malnutrition effects are noticeable in their poorer and poorer health. The nutrition in former times was of different categories and quantities, depending on the historic and social conditions, from the vegetal-animal types of food from the past, to the mixed foods from the present. The meals are more plentiful nowadays, but they keep the specific traditional character. The Romanian cuisine is unanimously recognized for its well-known food that made us famous all over the world. The visitors take with them when they leave the country the taste of the traditional Romanian food, served with the well-known hospitality, a gesture which adds the food that unforgettable “something”.
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The goal of the article “Svenskhet som gräns, Swedishness as a border” is to present problems with the concept of Swedishness from another perspective than it has been discussed in the Swedish media. Th e article analyses responses from Swedish political parties with regard to “Swedishness” and democracy, and it provides an insight to the contemporary situation in Sweden.
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We live in a time when the number of anthropological studies dealing with the way in which certain categories of identity – social or ethnical – are represented in the human imagery is quite important. Although the peasant is a rather familiar figure in our vital space, having a specific cultural and social identity, he is a social actor who did not have the privilege of constituting the object of any of these studies. Even though the present paper does not claim to be an extensive research, it does propose a few indicators for drawing a veridical profile of a character that belongs to a social group that lacks any concerns for its own identity. This is the reason why we had to use the discourse of the other actors on the social scene or the clichés extracted from stereotypical thinking. As we are going to prove later on, the resulting figure will not be homogenous, fluctuating between a positive and a negative pole of evaluation. Its contradictory character shows a common fact, that reality cannot be reduced to some concepts and that while elaborating the theories, we cannot ignore the social and psychological frames. It would be interesting to see to what extent the peasant Ion would be able to recognize himself in the portrait drawn by the ethnologists for the author of Miorita. Also, it should be analyzed why the latter received excessive attention, while the former was accused of anachronism, caring the fault for the fact that the Romanian culture was stuck in the Middle Ages. The following article is an invitation to improve the mechanisms of perception of a character who, whether we like it or not, is still present on the scene of our social life.
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In this study I aim to define and compare lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBTQ) media representation in Hungary and Ireland. The analysis was carried out on television reports about the Pride Parade. News reports were analyzed between 2009 and 2016 on two Hungarian (M1 and RTL Klub) and one Irish (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) television channel. The bases of the comparison were the differences in political discourse and the level of acceptance of LGBTQ people. To analyze this media portrayal, two methods were used: code-based content analysis, and critical discourse analysis. With the two methods, the media frames in which Pride was represented could be defined. RTÉ turned out to be the most accepting of the media under analysis, while RTL Klub emphasized the support of multinational companies, celebrities, and ambassadors for Pride. From 2014, the latter channel’s frame shifted towards sensitization. M1’s framing was the least accepting; by 2013 the distant representation had become hostile and explicitly alienating.
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