The carpathian folk fairs and the origins of national consciousness among Romanians

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Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), in the workshop “Rethinking Primordialism,” Krakow, 26–29 July 2000. I am grateful to the EASA's Executive Committee for supporting my participation, to the two convenors Josep Llobera and Joan Bestard and the other colleagues in workshop for their comments, to Edda Binder-Iijima, Shoji Iijima, Richard Rus, Alin Casapu, and Marin Constantin for bibliographical help, to Steven Grosby for his invaluable suggestions and moral support, and to the two anonymous reviewers from the journal for their stimulating criticism. Ultimate responsibility for the assertions made remains mine.

1. The natural and logical trend of becoming from ethnie to nation and further on to state is not always actualised, but the analysis of this problem goes beyond the goal of the present paper. On the relationship between nation and state see Liebich (2003), who, in spite of scepticism regarding the universalising of the nation state, recognises the coincidence of cultural (read: national) identity with political one as real in some cases and as aspiration in others.

2. The highest peaks are Moldoveanu (2,544 m) and Negoiu (2,535 m), both of them in the Făgăraş Mountains (Southern Carpathians).

3. Following Penrose's observations about territory, the Romanian anthropogeographical unit ţară may be considered illustrative for the availability of territories to be “conceptualized and promoted as ‘natural’ divisions of the earth's surface” (2002, p. 280). This “naturalness” concerns not only the territory in itself, but also “the relationships between specific groups of human beings and the territories that sustain them” (p. 281). Ţară has been compared to the jupa of the Serbs, pagus of the ancient Gauls and Germans, and pays of the inhabitants of medieval France (see Conea, 1938; Chelcea, 1978; Stahl, 1998).

4. The continuity of worldview is implied by the similarity between the Dacians' belief in Zalmoxis—with his doctrine of immortality (see Eliade, 1970, pp. 31–80)—and Christianity, adopted by the Romanians at the same time as the beginning of their crystallisation as a people, between the second and the fourth centuries ad. See the whole argument in Mehedinţi (1941), where the Dacians are characterised as “almost Christians before Christianity” (p. 40).

5. In so far as the idea of Daco-Roman-Romanian continuity implied Transylvania's belonging to the Romanian State, the (pro)Hungarian historiography refuted it. I do not discuss this controversy in detail, because it is not its stake that makes up the subject of the present article.

6. Having origins in the cult of dead, the Panhellenic games consisted of complex (mainly athletic, but also musical and poetical) competitions and performances. Along with the social, ethic, and technical conditions (participants had to be, respectively, free, moral, and specifically prepared people), ethnic (Greek) origin was included among the criteria for participation (Petecel, 2002, p. 73). The Panhellenic games made possible the periodical meeting (agon) of all the Greeks at the great Panhellenic sacred sites—Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and the Isthmus of Corinth—in a cordial atmosphere of “sacred peace” (ekekheiria). In short, the Panhellenic games constituted “an emblematic institution in the life of the ancient Greek polis” (Petecel, 2002, p. 43).

7. The pleonastic aspect which appears after the etymological decodification of the phrase mons Wegsaghauasa (mountain Feast Mountain) is masked by the belonging of the two terms to different languages. This pleonasm is, however, irrelevant in this context.

8. Grammatically, in Romanian, Nedeia is feminine and Nedeiul masculine; to continue, Nedeuţa (Little Nedeia) is a diminutive from Nedeia, and Nedeuţul (Little Nedeiul) a diminutive from Nedeiul.

9. Romanian is a language of Latin structure, but it integrated also foreign terms, most of them of Slavonic origin.

10. In the Slavonic language, ne is the proclitic particle of negation, and the verb delati means “to make,” “to do.” Thus, ne delati means “not to work,” i.e. “to keep a holiday.”

11. In Romania, Midsummer Day is celebrated by the folk feast of Sânziene. These latter were fairies, attendants of the goddess Diana (Sancta Diana, a that by by linguistic transformations became Sandiana, and finally Sânziana). On their night (23–24 June), while walking on earth or flying over it, these fairies sing and dance, giving aroma to flowers and remedy to plants, dealing out fruit to the cornfield and married women, etc. At the same time, people collect medicinal herbs, the maidens and young women bathe in the river or roll over the dewy grass in order to be beautiful and loved throughout the year, all kind of noises are produced to send away the evil ghosts, practices are performed in the memory of the dead, etc.

12. The toponyms that appears in the title of the cited article represent: (1) the name of the locality (Vidra) where the described folk fair took place, and (2) the name of the district (Putna, the then name of the present district of Vrancea; it should be said that the district, as an administrative unit, is larger than the traditional Ţara Vrancei: unlike the district, which integrates also a zone of plain, Ţara Vrancei covers only the mountain zone).

13. The Hungarian authorities manifested hostility towards the fairs on the heights. Thus, in 1852, the government's soldiers tried to prevent the moţi (this being a regional name for the Romanians of the Western Carpathians) reaching the fair on the Găina Mountain. A violent conflict occurred at the end of which the soldiers' action failed and the motji reached the fair (cf. Rusu Abrudeanu, 1928, pp. 135–136).

14. Hora is the most popular among the Romanian folk dances. By its round form (Martonne, 1902, p. 112; see a picture of hora in New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1992b, p. 57), “[i]t is a metaphor for the community: the circle opens to admit nubile women, adolescent boys entering manhood, and those ending mourning; conversely, it shuts out anyone who has violated local moral standards” (p. 57). Hora has an emblematic value in the phrase “hora of the village,” which designates the traditional party of the young people in the village. This took place every week on Sunday, as well as on the religious feasts, and was the occasion for lads and maidens to dance and pay court to one another under the supervising eyes of their parents and co-villagers. Hora of the village was an institutional form of entertainment spread throughout the Romanian traditional villages.

15. Among Romanian exegetes, it was Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu—an European figure of philology in the nineteenth century—who sought the origin of the designation nedeie in the Latin word nundina, -ae (cf. Marian, 1901, pp. 337–338). About Hasdeu see New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1992a).

16. The term is taken over from the Romanian anthropogeographer Simion Mehedinţi, who, following his master Friedrich Ratzel, said that geographical description must be “hologeic” and “holochronic,” i.e. a geographical phenomenon is to be described in terms of its spreading over the whole planet and along the whole axis of time (Mehedinţi, 1931, pp. 205–243).

17. Vasile Pârvan has no doubt in this respect: “First of all, Dacia was a great kingdom based on a solid and homogeneous ethnic foundation: its historical traditions were already old, its social and economic structure was well marked, and it possessed an advanced culture, which, influenced at first by the forms of Celtic civilisation, had for two centuries before Trajan felt the impress of the Roman. Here was a worthy rival even for Rome. This was no mere agglomeration of a number of savages tribes with a shifting population, scattered loosely over an extended territory with a complete lack of political and national cohesion such as the Romans founded in Dalmatia or Thrace or Pannonia or Moesia; here was a nation, organized, powerful, conscious of itself” (Pârvan, 1928, p. 189).

18. Strabo used for Dacians the designation Getae (singular Geta), according to the Greek usage.

19. This assertation can be strengthened by comparison: “[I]t was with the emergence of the first city-states and patrimonial kingdoms in the early third millenium bc, and the first use of bronze weaponry in inter-state warfare, that we find a growing sense of a more-than-local ethnic consciousness and sentiment, notably among Egyptians and Sumerians” (Smith, 1986, p. 45). The same author speaks about “ethnic states” in antiquity, and is inclined even “to admit the possibility of nations and nationalisms” in ancient Egypt, Japan, Greece, and Israel (Smith, 1991, pp. 43–50).

20. The relief of Romania, with the arc of the Carpathian Mountains through the middle, favoured the pastoral life, including transhumance. “It is like spokes of a wheel that the roads of Romanian transhumance branch out from the central citadel of mountains towards all the horizons” (Conea, 1940, p. 17). Romanians and their ancestors practised transhumance on a large scale (Martonne, 1902, pp. 114–118). While keeping their permanent residence in the native village, they reached with their sheep the Dniester River in the east, the Balkan Peninsula in the south, and Moravia in the west of the country. By wandering with the flocks, each shepherd could have a vivid and comparative perception over people of his own and other ethnic groups; he could also internalise an image of his homeland differentiated from other lands. Thus, like the folk fairs, transhumance also fulfilled an ethnic function.

21. This attribute is not far-fetched; it was also used with reference to some French fairs that were still going at the beginning of the twentieth century (Weber, 1976, p. 408).

22. Space is an abstract notion; “space is present whether anyone knows about it or not, but space only becomes a place when it acquires a ‘perceptual unity,’ and it only becomes a territory when it is delimited in some way” (Penrose, 2002, p. 279).

23. I am aware that with the term “instinct” I have brought into my discussion the “ineffable,” as it was termed by Geertz (1973). By doing so, I join Grosby's reply to the anti-primordialists' radical critique: some primordial powers “remain beyond our manipulation;” they are “ineffable and coercive,” like charisma (Grosby, 1994, pp. 169–170). Not every cause can be touched. Could geneticists give a positivistic explanation of the profoundness of the mechanism that regulates the sex ratio? Could anthropologists offer other than ineffable answers to the question how (not why) the most primitive societies created rules against incest? Unfortunately, social scientists have forgotten the principal lesson learned from the Geisteswissenschaften's philosophers: there are causal links that escape positivistic epistemology.

24. Similar “marriage fairs” and foires des jeunes et des jeunesses are mentioned by Weber, too, in his previously mentioned book about the modernisation of rural France (1976, p. 410). “In this case, as in others, the fairs provided the chief or only opportunity for contact with the external world” (ibid.).

25. How important language is as an ethnic marker can be illustrated indirectly, too, by the procedure of “absence,” or “weak presence.” Thus, in describing the contemporary Ukrainian case, Wilson finds that “Ukraine remains an amorphous society with a weak sense of national identity” (2002, p. 31). This weakness fits convincingly with the situation of Ukraine as “an emphatically bilingual country” (p. 34), in which many native Ukrainians are Russophone (pp. 33–36).

26. The Protoromanians (or Daco-Romans, the Romanians' ancestors) were christianised early enough. Saint Andrew, one of Christ's 12 apostles, preached in Scythia Minor (Romanian Dobroudja of today). During the fourth century some Christians passed away as martyrs on the territory of the Romanised Dacia. After the Schism of 1054, the Romanians of all the provinces showed loyalty to the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, in Transylvania, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, under circumstances of Austro-Hungarian rule, some Romanians became Greco-Catholics: institutionally, they adhered to the Catholic Church, but went on to behave in conformity with the Byzantine rite. However, the feasts that served as occasions for folk fairs were respected by the whole of Christendom, so that the distinction Orthodox/Catholic has had no significance for the development of the fairs.

27. In French, in the original: “[T]oute conscience est conscience perceptive, même la conscience de nous-mêmes” (Merleau-Ponty, 1996, p. 42).

28. This demographic quantum is taken from sources of the 1920s.

29. See note 30.

30. This lack of ethnic potential, correlated with the absence of the perceptive pattern, as well as with linguistic heterogeneity, may be understood (as a primary explanation) by the chorographic structure of territory. In France, the arrangement of mountains has not predisposed people to flock together. In contrast, the Romanian Carpathians have done so. On account of their anthropogeographical role, they were metaphorically considered “the vertebral column for their [the Romanians'] essence as a people” (Grothe, 1907, p. 19; in German, in the original: “das Rückgrat für ihr Volkstum”).