Space

Anyone can become a collector, and anything can be collected: matchboxes, pipes, candy bag stickers, paintings, traditional items, arms, books, and so forth. It seems that the Aztec king Montezuma collected and/or collected people with various malformations which he kept

Have you noticed the relaxed way in which we actually re-create ourselves in our times off? Dem lieben Gott die Tage stehlen – Germans refer to the waste of time as to a theft committed in the face of God. I remember an episode during my student years, when, at the close

 I have never associated bohemia with physical misery. In my opinion poverty and lack of comfort don't necessarily have physiological consequences. Bohemia is an act one takes responsibility for as long as it doesn't diminish the dignity of the individual. For

excerptclick here to see film preview Heeler produced from a slit of his belt an unopened package of smokes, casually took place on a stump and began rolling a cigar. Moromete squatted down and rolled one from Heeler's pack, after which he stretched his arm to laggardly

One might think that all men desire pleasure because they all aim at life (…). Pleasure completes (…) life, which they desire (…). But whether we choose life for the sake of pleasure or pleasure for the sake of life is a question we may dismiss for the present. For

It seems almost provocative to launch such an issue on the local pleasures, pastimes and delights, while nowadays a troublesome Romania appears as plunged into unending economic and social difficulties, striving to cope with various shortcomings and weaknesses. However,

European travelers such as Antonio Maria del Chiaro were struck long time ago by the uncommon abundance of woolen carpets in each Romanian home, be it aristocratic, bourgeois or peasant. Carpets were laid mainly onto the walls of the rooms, but they also covered the beds,

The relevance of iconography for the study of the history of mentalities has been uncontested in the Western cultural space for the last few decades. The seminars organized in Aix-en-Provence on the relationship between iconography and the history of mentalities as far back

In the field of iconography the rhetoric of the end manifested itself initially as a history of silences, the absence of the motif being possibly equally significant as its presence since, as Michel Vovelle demonstrated, images interest us as expression of a selective, oblique

excerpts The cosmic tree, whose root, trunk and branches uphold – by dividing yet uniting – the three cosmic levels, is the same as the funeral tree, because, to the folk mentality, the cosmic tree is the only passageway to the other realm that the soul of the dead

Myth as a source of folkloric artistic manifestations continually delineates new territories waiting to be re-discovered. In the moments of mythological reconstruction a process of sifting the essences is kindled, which fascinates and re-sizes the participants in a meta-real

In the true spirit, these three concentric spaces – the village border, the village margin and the household enclosure – are in harmony with each other and with the cosmic order as well.  Romanian Folk Culture, 1999 by Nicolae Constantinescu