| Abstrakt: |
In the modern world, changes are happening with high speed, while traditions and cultural identity of communities are faced with forces that redefine them in many ways. We observe the journey that the tradition of sewing Romanian blouses is having from ancestral village to city life and modern online times. At first, this tradition was part of the mandatory activities that were happening in the Romanian village life back at the beginning of the 20th century, because of the conditions of small communities with homogeneous interests and occupations, and similar time conditions, but with a space limitation in terms of geographical area. Moving to the city, the tradition was lost at the level of common group activity, due to the context of big communities, with a big variety of people and interests, with a bigger space and time limitation, but was somehow re-enacted due to the new context of social media. Despite the existence of heterogeneous communities nowadays, Facebook groups are a perfect opportunity to display Romanian traditions through Facebook groups. In Romania, a special movement began in 2014 when Romanian women started to sew again the Romanian blouses in their homes, and moved the gathering from the village time in the online environment. The purposes of this article are to show how traditions are now subject to a new reinvention due to online communication, to highlight the importance of the active participation of the initiatior of the community and its members in the online discussion. They are creating a public discourse that is reshaping an old tradition in new modern ways. Using Beckstein's model of living tradition based on Hobsbawn's theory of invented tradition, I provide an insight into the characteristics of evening gatherings in Romania ("sezatoare") on the Facebook public group of "Semne Cusute in Actiune". Using qualitative content analysis of over 1500 comments, the research defines the main categories of messages that underline its functions, in comparison with the old historic model of evening gathering presented in ethnographic studies. While the economic function is clear in both cases, the social and spiritual functions are different due to the different contexts in which they took place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
