Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 29/2. (2009)
Cultură spirituală
Etnograße 341 FUNERAL CUSTOMS FROM MURES COUNTY BETWEEN THE FAMILY AND RELATIVE STRUCTURE IN XIX th -XX th CENTURY- summary -The burial customs are one of the passage rites as was defined by Arnold van Gennep in 1909. After Gennep, the passage is not only for the dead but also for the survivors and from such perspective it could be useful to know not only the rites did for dead person but also those for the survivor. Today, the funeral is considered as a family problem, but in the traditional Romanian village it was a collective problem because the death of one people is important for all community. Pierre Chaunu wrote that, in the XVIII century, in Western World appeared a new style of the death: the affective retreat in the middle of the family, but this great change is visible in the only in the XIX century. Phillippe Ariés observed that, in the XIX century, we can see the isolation of the death in the family circle, the problem of the death is no long a collective problem but a family and an individual problem. Georg Weber also observed that the grief and the mourning rituals are not the same in the modern society like in the traditional society because they hadn't the same power of significations. That could be the evolution in the West World, but in the East the evolution of the funeral customs is different. In Romanian, for example, in the rural medium we assist on the same archaic interpretation of the problem of death until the second half of the XX century, the death continues to be a collective problem not only an individual or a family business. The funeral customs had been research by Romanian ethnography from a mythological point of view, not linked with the relative structure and the community structures: the neighbourhoods or the village community. The death is a crisis not only for the person but for the family, the relatives, the neighborhood and the whole community. The link between the dead and the livings remain very strong. The Church itself recognizes that is a large community of the livings and of the dead. In the Mures County there are more ethnographical areas: the Gurghiu Valley, the Beica Valley, the Superior Mures Vallley, the Transylvanian Plain, The Tárnává Plateau, and every area have a specific in the funeral customs. The funeral customs in Mures County are different not only by the ethnographical areas but also by different religions and nations.
