Power and Charm. Interaction of Adolescent Men and Women in Traditional Settings of Transylvania

Abstract

In the mid 1970s, during field research carried out in the villages of Breb and Sirbi in Maramure*2 (northern Transylvania), I was confronted with a socio-cultural life where rituals and ceremonials centred around birth, puberty, marriage and death had preserved their viability due to the people's belief in their capacity of relating fundamental conceptual values (defining rules of social interaction) to the random present (Karnoouh 1983: 37). Puberty and marital rites and ceremonials build coherent and meaningful ensembles. The processes which make them up interrelate and interact by completing and/or opposing each other not only on one but several levels of sense. The power of dance, as part of these ensembles, rests only in acts of performance, in the people's of making sense of and in linking experience to other sets of ideas and social experiences (Blacking 1984: 20). Thus, the focus of my inquiries shifted from the dance object to the dance process and finally to the dancing people. The double orientation of the research towards the people and towards the unitary ensemble of their practices, contribute to disclose the meaning of the symbol and its function for young men's and women's social interaction, social status differences and balance of power in the pre-marital stage of life.