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The majority of nowadays researchers of the religious phenomenon agree that, in the long run, the traditional church has known a decline in the majority of western countries. The key concept used when these changes are analyzed is secularization. Still, in this debate there are sufficient arguments that could either support or deny secularization. Nevertheless it seems sufficiently evident that secularization as a concept is more useful in explaining the changes that appear inside nowadays traditional church supporting both the decline of its power and influence as well as the processes of internal secularization. The modernizing forces extant on the level of the entire society are present (or act) inside many traditional religious institutions. The modern world's religions, beyond the dispute concerning certain concepts, should be analyzed outside the background marked by rapid changes, instability, and diversity. Even if the traditional forms of religion are losing from their power, religion still remains an important force in our social world. The interest for religion both in its traditional and recent forms seems to last. Religion offers to many people answers to complex questions about life and fate, questions that reason cannot explain satisfactorily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along the millennia the questions about the Universe have been constantly present in human thinking. Man tried to understand the great mysteries connected to his own being as well as that of the world he lives in, elaborating concepts, theories and models to help him in the attempt to describe in an as intelligible as possible way the Great Mystery of the Universe. From the time of Democritus man had already known that everything around is made of atoms, moreover, that even the soul is made of similar type of particles. Since then, along the more than two thousand years, human thinking has gone through a long and extremely difficult process, that of knowledge, the information achieved being amazing, to this contributing science, philosophy as well as mystical experiences. At the end of this interval we have reached the stage to believe with justification that the new theories of physics are in consonance with the spiritual traditions, the oriental and occidental mystical experiences. All this huge effort of man's intelligence and spirituality has ultimately a single aim: namely, the human being's re-encounter with Universal Harmony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper, based on an imagological type of analysis, tries to set into relief the necessity and importace of the dialogue in relation with the Other starting from the discussion of the mechanism of self-revealment. Using this mechanism the social corpus benefits of the opportunity to offer its audience the essential elements defining one's own identity so that the effect should be that of a total opening of the channels of communication with the Other (perceived as stranger), but also of articulating and harmonizing the relational patterns in society. Thus, the negative stereotypal images could gradually lose from their capacity of being transmitted over generations, slowly fading in a process that finally leads to the loss of their penetreating force in the collective mindscaspe, leading to repositioning and behavioural adjustments towards the other. Taking as point of departure in discussion an already „classical" example of negative stereotype, namely the image of the Jew, we have underlined once again the condamnable ease with which a whole nation can be stigmatized and subjected to incredible imagological pressure up to total diabolization. And its effects during a two thousand year history have been devastating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the three characteristics of postmodernity, the intention of this paper is to sketch an image of the profound transformations in the contemporary world, including (especially) the attitude towards death. The fear of death, that is actually the fear of life, determined the human being to construct a strategy through which to "evade" from the real world into a world of fiction where it is possible to enjoy a total liberty of choice, the thought without boundary. Hence there is only one step that the postmodern man takes in order to think of immortality. The essence of this strategy has in its center the human body, especially the sexual instinct. Finally, a stage is reached when the human body is given an extremely important role in its dispute with death: the body opposes death becoming sacred, i.e. transforming itself into a real "narcissistic object of cult". Beauty and eroticism become thus imperative and a leitmotif in postmodern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For modern man time is due to its implacable passage stressful and producing anguish. Without being coupled in the sacred-profane binomial and missing the periodical insertion of a feast (an event that set order into the rhythms of time in ancient communities) time is perceived by contemporary man as a mathematical sum of the stages of life, useless sequences in an unconscious marathon towards nothingness. On the other hand, in the case of traditional man, mythical time presupposes a return towards the origins by means of a ritual re-enactment of the past. The present study tries to demonstrate that mythical time is bi-dimensional, contemplative (past oriented) and anticipatory (looking towards the future). It also demonstrates that in the traditional mentality there is no break or brutal separation between profane and sacred time. Both contribute in a perfect complementarity to the spatial-temporal structure in which the individual and collective existence develop, in an uninterrupted alternative of thresholds meant to essentialize duration and counteract its permanent etropic tendency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the approaches of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud) as well as those of ethology (Konrad Lorenz) aggressivity has endogenous conditioning being consequently an instinct. Even though as concerns the instinctual character of aggressivity the two sciences agree, they clearly diverge in formulating their conclusions. The first among these divergences refers to the meaning attached to aggressivity. Namely, if in Freud's view aggressivity is simply a transformation of death drive, its meaning being actually destructiveness, according to Konrad Lorenz, aggressivity becomes an element in the organization of living beings, thus resulting a completely different function, i. e. the conservation of life. Starting from this premise, the present paper intends an analysis in order to show that corresponding to the Freudian Eros and Thanatos dualism there is an aggressivity and counter aggressivity dualism in ethology. Thus, while in psychoanalysis the two drives have totally opposed characters (conservation and respectively destruction of life), they have a common aim in ethology: the conservation of species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the last century, one of the most important preoccupations of humanistic sciences was that of solving the matter of their scientific quality, which had been directly linked to the methods of investigation used. The reform of methodology became, thus, an essential aim of the epistemologic modernisation. Unlike the case of the Anglo-Saxon scientists, methodological unity became in France a major objective of the intellectual renewal only towards the end of the century. Starting from linguistics, structuralism becomes an endeavour of fighting against local epistemological lack of synchronization, as a French variant of a unifying project, that wanted to develop a general kind of science, semiology, which might re-group all humanistic sciences around the study of language and of the sign. The first to formulate such a unifying project was Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). The French anthropologist, during his years spent in the United States, came into contact with the work of such authors as F. Boas, A. Kroeber or R. Benedict, in which they exposed certain basic ideas of the American cultural anthropology. Essentially American anthropologists maintained that the various cultures were defined by a certain model, and the number of possible types of culture was limited. Starting from here, Lévi-Strauss sketched the model promoted by structuralism, which would finally impose its methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the larger framework of cultural anthropology, a renewal of interest for the quotidian has provoked an extremely substantial series of discussions (even controversies). The direct consequence of disputes around this issue was that researchers started to express with more and more clarity their intention to foreground and bring to the light of intense interest everything that used to be set aside, neglected, or considered of no importance by official scientific research. This paradigmatic change also suggests a manifest lack of interest for studies related to homogeneous national issues, which are perennial and representative, which almost exclusively constituted the domain of analysis of our national ethnology. A positioning within the quotidian is expressly opposed to an almost exclusive observation of behaviours during celebrations and feasts, which are the essential moments of interest for national ethnology. The general trend of a "national deconstruction" is at the basis for this new general trend to programmatically concentrate on urban ethnology, that has the quotidian as its centre of attention; researchers, though, come from a totally opposing direction of research. Such regimentation of Romanian researchers under the flag of anthropological deconstructivism does not only allow new epistemological and methodological perspectives, but it also brings new themes and subjects in the field of discussion; such themes have been simply neglected until now, or, they have been looked down upon and considered as derisory. This paper tries a very succinct presentation of a few important landmarks that have to be debated upon by those interested in the domain of urban ethnology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reason why the archaic man tried to create (or imagine) the Other Side comes from his wish to elude the chaos, the unknown, the unpredictible, as well as to eliminate indeterminacy; this impulse was supported by a profound psychological resort - the temptation to descipher the hidden reality (therefore the horrible reality) by figurative, known representations. The result they obtained was diverse, in accordance with the specific of their cultural and religious contexts: people either sketched frightening images of death, or, on the contrary, sought a "rhetorics of death" by the metaphoric force of the transposition of meaning. At the end of the day, the two options did not mean anything else but the wish to render the unknown destiny, this rendering constituting a means to dominate it. Thus, images of the Other Side have been able to coexist, their function being that of attenuating fear by, deliberately, removing chaos and drawing a picture of a familiar "other side" (the dead eat, drink, work, etc.), with images of fear of a dangerous relativization of the threshold between the two worlds and the coming back to the everyday life of those who have departed to the "world of the sorrowful". This paper is focused precisely on this ambivalence of the images of the Other Side, which can be explained if we start from the hypothesis that each such endeavour implies an acknowledgement of the risks that appear once with the autonomization of this imaginary topographics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with the 50s of the previous century, the phenomena that marked traditional culture intensely (and, if we may add, irreversibly) the villages in which Ukrainian ethnic groups lived, in the north of Maramureş, were related to the collectivization of agriculture, and, especially in the past two decades, the accelerated contact with Western Europe. It is important that we mention that several researchers have identified the major, essential changes as to the performance of various customs, noting, especially, their "simplification" (especially in the first part of the previously indicated interval), and a painful and un-welcomed schematization - a direct result of the process of global uniformization, respectively (in the latter part of the interval, especially starting with 1989). When we refer to the wedding ceremonial, field investigations confirm the fact that it has been kept alive, but in a faded form, but having all traditional attributes, until the moment of the great social transformation, when an un-repairable "fracture" was produced in the symbolic order of the Ukrainian village. This ceremonial, and everything it entails, the social and keen relationships, as well as the complex system of thresholds that lead from one age to another, or from one status and social role to another status and social role, can be identified even today, even if they do not observe strictly the well-known archaic frames. The present paper will highlight a few ritualistic elements and magic characteristics that may, still, be identified in the main sequences of the wedding ceremonial, performed within these ethnic groups in Maramureş. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ritual communication in a group, or, generally, at the level of a well-defined community is realized through words, gestures and action. Nevertheless, we should not draw the conclusion that by communication we will just mean words, as there are certain rituals which have as main interdiction the very use of words. This paper will take into consideration a form of ritual communication that uses word, that is, we will specifically deal with the funerary songs, which are an important component of the funerary ceremonial performed in Maramureş county. Funerary songs transmit suffering, anger and crying in the ritualistic form of a series of rhythmical sequences, thus synchronizing complex verbal structures with specific gestures. Focusing on these complex verbal structures, our goal is to identify, from a stylistic perspective, certain constants of expression which may be encountered in the Maramureş funerary songs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Maramureş county of today, the funerary rhymes are still performed in certain villages on the Iza, Mara and Cosău Valleys, as well as in the Lăpuş county. In the Codru and Chioar counties this moment of the funerary ceremonial is present only rarely. A general characteristic for the entire Maramureş, the area we are interested in, is that researchers have not identified in their field research ceremonial funerary rhymes that could be considered very old or very important in our folklore (in a list that C. Brailoiu, and others have drawn in the past century). Nevertheless, such rhymes are wide spread, and they accompany the family of the defunct during the three days of the ceremonial funeral. We must underline, though, that in the funerary rhymes in this area we can identify imagery that is generally present in ceremonial songs, and this indicates that such rhymes used to be present on a much larger area than we witness today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the traditional story called myth which is a complex form of a symbolic language and was classified by Gianni Vattimo into three types such as archaism, cultural relativism and temperate irrationalism.

An introduction to this issue of "Memoria Ethnologica" is presented.

A message to the reader is presented wherein the author discusses analyses in the sphere of cultural studies and their impact in the way people structure their practical activities.

The article offers insights on efforts by the journal to understand the world of symbols in human society.