Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 29/2. (2009)

Cultură spirituală

Etnografie

183

Indeed, communism contributed in a great part at the dissolution of the traditional holiday, by prohibiting any manifestation in people's religious beliefs and by promoting the so-called "scientific atheism". The traditional customs, which were respected as a law, get, during the communist years, more and more relaxed, being kept in less and less numerous milieus.

After 1990, I notice a progressive loose of this rule; or endangered by different other rules belonging to closer or farther cultures: from the Romanian urban culture, from foreign cultures (German, Canadian, Slovenian, in the above examples). The directly known cultural patterns (and the new rules brought about by them) are joined by some indirectly known cultural patterns throughout television and personal aerials. According to Maria C.'s words, 38 years old, "now that we have got Digi [a TV aerial company], there is no more difference between Saturday and Sunday. Children are always watching TV." When people used to obey to a single cultural pattern, the traditional one, their behaviour and their way of relating to Sundays, considered to be a festive, sacred time, were relatively homogeneous. The tradition split and the different range of cultural patterns brought to diverse options.

I notice, nevertheless, that Sunday has the meaning and the value of a holiday on a discursive level for most of my interlocutors, which points to the connection with a certain traditional ideology, partly inherited, partly acquired. On the praxis level, however, I can notice an extremely wide range of relation to Sundays.

The metamorphosis of Sunday from a holiday into a week-end day, which also implies the metamorphosis of the sacred time in resting time (in front of the TV), in social time (in a pub or near the gate in front of the house) or just festive (di-sacred) represents a long and complex process. And this field research which took place in 2007 in Vii§oara village, Mure§ County, illustrates only a sequence from this extremely intricate process.

Bibliography

Báncila, Vasile, 1996, The Spirit of Holidays [Duhid särbätorii], Publishing House Anastasia, Bucharest;

Bernea, Ernest, 1985, Framework of Romanian Folk Thinking [Cadre ale gandirii populäre romäneßi], Publishing House Cartea Romäneascä, Bucharest;

Eliade, Mircea, 1992, Treat of the History of Religions [Tratat de istorie a religiilor], Publishing House Humanitas, Bucharest;