Current outlook upon ethnography
| Author | Codrina Sandru |
| Position | Faculty of Law and Sociology, Transilvania University of Brasov |
| Pages | 61-68 |
Page 61
Within everyday communication or in mass-media, we often hear about ethnography and folklore, about museums of ethnography or about great ethnographers. In a vision specific to common sense, ethnography stands for a field that deals with the description or with the study of mankind's lifestyles in different cultures. This is true but not exhaustive.
Ethnography is connected to folklore and this fact makes us think about our ancestors' cultural productions or about those of other people who lived during pre- modern times. This is why we have numerous museums of ethnography. They comprise elements of material and non- material culture pertaining to the past, however, unlike the museums of history, where the main exhibits highlight outstanding events and historical personalities, in an ethnography museum we rather find out regular life facts, specific to a certain population: which was the epoch's garment, which were the main production means, how the events in the lifecycle unfolded (baptism, wedding, funeral) and even what happened during leisure time.
Etymologically, ethnography comes from the Greek words "ethnos" / people and "graphein" - to describe. For a long time, the terms of ethnography and ethnology had undifferentiated use, with reference to the study of primitive societies. However, after the Second World War, the two branches of anthropology were defined in a different manner. Ethnography was attributed the task to collect data and ethnology the task to interpret them, to the purpose of carrying out the comparative analyses among the different communities and societies.
This way, "in contemporary vision, ethnography stands for the first step of cultural anthropology - which is the empirical step of picking up the concrete data and of illustrating the enunciationsPage 62with pretension of generality" (Geana, G., 1993).
Ethnographers are those professionals who pick up information about the culture of communities, through the method of the ethnographical survey, which implies carrying out direct observations and collecting the data directly from the community members. The main techniques used by the ethnographer are the participative observation and the semi- structured interview. In both cases, the collected information is audio and/or video recorded.
Folklore is integrant part of the data collected by the ethnographers. Folklore is defined as "the totality of the artistic, literary, musical, plastic etc. creations, of the popular customs and traditions of a country or of a region." (source: DEX, 1998).
Ovidiu Densusianu (1873-1938), Romanian linguist and folklorist, stated that ,folklore has to show us how the different manifestations of life reflect the basic people's soul, how this one feels and thinks either under the influence of the ideas, of the beliefs, of the superstitions inherited from the past, or under the one of the impressions that the everyday occurrences arouse" (apud Pop, 2006, p. 12)
In this part of the article, I will submit an ethnographic study that I performed during the 90-ies, with a rather weird theme in the scenery of the specialized literature. It is about a comparison between two events with no apparent connection: New-Year's Eve and death watch. However, at a close analysis, the two events have many common elements. They are connected by the people's very belief in renewal and the manner in which they perceive the lapse of time.
Older researches have shown that the Romanian people used as unit for measuring time not only the calendar time, with its multiples and submultiples, but also another unit: "human life" or "human epoch", expressed not necessarily through a number of years, but through indicators that marked "the biological and social- cultural fulfillment or non-fulfillment of life: marriage, birth, children's upbringing and education, including their marriage" (Ghinoiu, 1992).
Starting from the two fundamental dimensions of time present in Romanian popular culture - annual time and human time - we will note that New Year's Eve and death watch embody, in fact, the same idea, but they are constructed, each if them, on a certain dimension of time. If New Year's Eve means death and rebirth of annual time, death watch expresses death and rebirth of human time.
In traditional culture, human being has personified not only nature, but also time. However, time is not absolutely seen as an arrow with irreversible trajectory, which means the linear representation of time is not a pure one. There will be added the cyclical representation, time seen as a circle, undergoing the logic of a perpetual return. Annual tine swiftly dies and is reborn, after 365 or 366 days. Human time dwindles and is rekindled in the rhythm of the "human life": every death is accompanied by a birth; a man disappears but another one takes his place.
To the purpose of illustrating the idea which brings together New-Year's Eve and death watch, we will make a short stop in the space full of significations of these two popular manifestations, the way they appear within Romanian culture.
First of all, what is New-Year's Eve and what particularizes it? New-Year's Eve is the feast which marks the moment of aPage 63year's closing and of another calendar year's beginning. The Old Year is old and dies; the New Year barely opens its eyes towards the world. On this occasion, people are practicing rituals for the time restoration. This restoration process comprises a period of several days: the last of the old year and the first of the year that just begins. At midnight on the New- Year's Eve, time experiences a spiritual breakage, renewing itself. It is the night of huge energy unchaining, the night when the control upon behavior diminishes, when...
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