“Traditions” from Folklore Studies to Media Product and the Beginnings of Broadcasting in Romania

Abstract

The rhetorical logic of the discourse which is currently building the image of the junction between tradition and nation (and of the concepts thus required) is also due to processing this discourse in the media. That is to say that the connection between media communication and the political instrumentalization of traditions as a domain of national constructs has offered proper soil for shaping the political and ideological narratives based on nation. The use of some concepts, such as nation, national culture, traditions and folklore in the first decades of the 20th century, and their instrumentalization as radio products, created the premises and particularly the pattern of some specific discursive constructions regarding the nation- state. These were meant to be integrated, embraced and, especially, reproduced on a large scale. Therefore, the discourse focused on national identity – with all its constitutive elements (the state, the language, the history and traditions) – could disseminate a unique hypostasis, shaped under political control, which thus legitimated it. From 1928, the year when the first radio programs were broadcast, until directly after the 1950s, when the recording of the radio programs on magnetic tape was a common professional practice, the only documents that could be considered today are the written texts of the radio programs (conferences, educational or informative programs, political, agricultural news, etc.). Between 1925, when The Romanian Society of Radiotelephony was established, and 1948, the year when the communist regime officially came into power, Romanian radio programs broadcast discourses on a broad range of topics and for a large audience. The present study focuses on the ethnological one. We are interested in how the ethnological discourse rooted in the aforementioned time period also built a media hypostasis for addressing the entire society, and in how programs dedicated to “traditions” bear the signs of this structuring process.