Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 30/1. (2013)
I. Studii şi articole
Cuväntul scris, semn si sens 7 У WRITTEN WORD, SIGN AND MEANING INTRODUCTION TO SYMBOLIC THINKING “In old times all things had a purpose, nothing was useless” {“Mos Luca a Toaderului Borzä” from Färägäu) Inspired by Erwin Panofski33 methodology, interpretation of image content as a symptom of cultural sensitivity, I started from the early twentieth century marking made on a photograph of a peasant Mures Valley34, offering me a peek into archaic and complex universe religious feeling which dominates the village in Transylvania. Knowing that over 90% of the current old Romanian books Mures Upper Valley area comes from the village, some questions appear to us natural human attitude towards traditional written book, meaning that they receive in the system of values oral culture, in what context are the writing and the book? What symbolic values are assigned? What gestures are associated? What place has the collective imagination? Fascinated by the depth of thought of a simple man, with a value system structured symbolic thinking, I tried to enter the mental universe of traditional world and discover the meaning of the “relational alchemy” that semioticizes everything but especially to understand the role of the written word generates the context of this type of symbolic communication. The statement that “... all things had a purpose...” symbolic thinking reveals that the rationality of modernity declared barely manages to penetrate, causing us to ask questions of the role of ritual (where everything makes sense) Romanian traditional society, to reconstruct the “symbolic grammar” a somewhat archaeological research. Analyzing the structure of religious ritual devices, we find that is based on a symbolic action, requiring something physical to be secredicize and then found socially integrated35. Notice somewhat nostalgic: “nothing was useless” seems to suggest a symptom of some losses, “unspells (unlocks) the magic of the world”. 33 Erwin Panofski, Ideea. Contribution to the history of art theory, Bucharest, Univers, 1975. 34 Photo of “Mos Luca a Toaderului Borzá” (Father Luke Toader Borza) is at the entry in the Ethnographic Museum in Reghin. 35 Pascal Lardellier, op. cit., p. 27. 163
