"A hybrid that originated in the traditional peasant music, Romanian popular music (muzică populară), as it is known from radio broadcasts, TV shows or live performances from all around the country, was developed by mixing the village music of the twentieth century with techniques and principles borrowed from the classical repertoire and other light genres. Muzica populară emerged in the interwar years, but was perfected and regulated by the communist regime, becoming one of the favorite genres of the rural and urban working class and, nowadays, it continues to have a great appeal among all age categories. Our aim was to discover the motivations that lead the village youth of Romania to involve themselves in activities dealing with muzica populară, in particular, or with folklore and traditions, in general. To accomplish this, we conducted several interviews with young people from Sălaj county, from which a few patterns emerged: the rapid familiarization with the genre due to specific TV channels; the acquired taste due to grandparents raising their grandchildren in the absence of the parents who migrated in the 2000s; the expressed devotion to the local culture and their willingness and duty to preserve and promote it. We can also explain the success of muzică populară among young people by structural factors that are at work in the whole society, namely the lack of interest of post-communist authorities in building and/or maintaining a cultural and educational infrastructure in the rural areas. Thus, this paper aims to explore contemporary rural pop culture by considering the connection between the deterioration of the cultural infrastructure in rural areas, transnational migration and the exponential development of an industry devoted to the recent muzică populară. Keywords: muzică populară, folklore music, folk traditions, rural youth, cultural infrastructure, transnational migration, niche TV channels. "
his article discusses the ways in which the elites of Transylvanian Romanians living in the Habsburg Empire deployed claims to Roman heritage as both a key ingredient of nation building processes as well as a political instrument to secure political rights in a state in which Roman heritage enjoyed high symbolic value. Specifically, the article shows that several generations of intellectuals initially institutionalized in the Uniate (Greek-Catholic) Church, a politically well-situated institution, emphasized Romanians’ Roman (rather than Dacian) heritage to define the boundaries of the nation. Furthermore, they used the same ethnogenesis story to highlight Romanians’ prestigious status in the geocultural hierarchies of the empire following centuries of marginalization formulated in “civilizational” terms. At the same time, the choice for the Roman heritage also made sense from the perspective of political mobilization strategies to claim political rights denied to Romanians by the imperial status quo while expressing loyalty to the same imperial state itself until the moment it collapsed in the fall of 2018. In short, claims to Roman heritage were instrumentalized to serve nation building, political emancipation, and dynastic loyalty.
Along with 19 th-century folklore material, church documents from the 18 th and 19 th centuries emphasize the Păscălia as a book used in bibliomancy. In this study, I aim to explore the originally allowed and designated functions of this writing, and to provide an explanation for why this book was associated with the world of bibliomancy in both folklore and in the offi cially sanctioned culture of the Uniate clergy from Transylvania. Furthermore, by focusing on the specifi c case of the Uniate vicar Ioan Halmaghi, who was educated in Roman-Catholic institutions, I set out to explore the attitude of the elite clergy toward this text, and to highlight how a corpus of pre-modern and un-Western knowledge was simply ejected into the sphere of magic and superstition.
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