SOCIALITY - MUSIC - DANCE
Human Figurations in a Transylvanian Valley
Paul Nixon
636 + xxvii pp, 16 maps/diagrams, 77 photographs, 23 notated music
examples, 6 Appendices; audio and video materials available for loan. ISBN:
91 85974 49-8; ISSN: 0348-0879; Skrifter fran Institutionen för
Musikvetenskap 34, Göteborgs Universitet 1998.
Price 30 Pounds Sterling + p.& p.
Please send all orders to the author (address below)
This book is an attempt to break new ground in its appraisal of communist
and post-communist figurations: it acknowledges complex human interweavings
bound up in structures surrounding and supporting vernacular imaginative
expression; it identifies satisfactions, pleasures and frustrations, the
implementation and collapse of authoritarian designs on music-making and
dance in changing forms of personal relations, shifting power balances over
the period 1979-1995. It is written primarily for process-sociological,
anthropological, socio-musicological, and socio-choreological specialists,
though discussions hold something also for students of other
historically-sensitive disciplines.
The author seeks to combine regional investigation with illumination of
intricacies emanating from government and international relations.
First-hand experience of State Folklorism throughout 1979 led to a
countenancing of the dogmatic character of Marxist-Leninist social policy in
general, Romanian isolation from theoretical questions explored elsewhere,
and researchers' inabilities to investigate troubled
established-and-outsiders legacies between Hungarian-speaking and
Romanian-speaking villagers; and between those groups and settled
communities of Gypsies, providers of music-making at dances convened for
the pleasure of majority populations.
A multi-stranded enquiry is engaged in an attempt to achieve sociological
synthesis. Bridging macro levels of communist didacticisms and micro levels
of village life, tensions of power holds and mutual identification are
observed between interdependent groups. The approach amplifies ethnographic
materials from Béla Bartók and extends Norbert Elias's perceptions of
civilizing processes. Social adaptations are charted, far from uniform
ideals, expectations and tolerances that emerged during fieldwork. And
sentiments of aversion,
pride, envy, fear, collective self-love, hatred of other groups,
defensiveness of or contempt for varying attitudes to violence,
body-washing, dietary habits, excretory practices, amatory customs and
pair-formation, socially-approved excitement arousal, extrovert funerary
conventions. Communist Party edicts
receive operational attention, manipulative strategies which could not be
discussed with many Romanian and Western social scientists until the mid
1990s, for example, the politicisation of Folklore during the period
1948-1989, and distorted accounts of Transylvanian history.
This sociology-of-knowledge approach is little encountered in area-studies
reports of aesthetic activity; or accounts of Leninist societies and the
hectic flux which has characterised collapse of dictatorial structures. How
far this book achieves its ambitious objective in venturing across
specialist fields is
not something on which critics are likely to agree. It will have done much
of its work if it points the way for other non-idealising past-and-present
syntheses which address the dynamics of political centralism and
monopolistic demands on artistic expression as well as elucidating
multipersonal relations at face-to-face level.
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Please address all enquiries to:
Dr Paul J. Nixon
Faculty of Social and Political Sciences
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RQ
Tel. Ext. 40299
Tel.+44 (0)1223 360938
Fax +44 (0)1223 740299
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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