ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

Ethnology „Revisited” oportunities and challenges for the 21 st century 195Recent studies focus on the need of aligning to the necessity of studyingsocial, cultural changes. This also raises a lot of new issues: Sabina Ispas said it iscompulsory that contemporary Ethnology has to continue to collect elementsspecific to oral culture, in this way ensuring a fond of documents for furtherresearches. Certain deontological norms should be respected. These are meant toprotect the dignity of a person, its right to freedom of speech. We find the need toavoid presenting some valuable judgments as absolute scientific truths in the samework. These risk to be “valued” by certain Political decision factors 23 , in otherwords, the situations of creating a re-ideology in Ethnology 24 have to be avoided.These imperatives in research that contemporary Ethnology tries toassume open the way to new debates concerning aesthetic, artistic value of thepresented ethnographical/ethnological material to be selected and interpreted.Sabina Ispas emphasizes the presence of certain changes in the cultural space:either the disappearance of genres and species of oral culture that lost theirfunction in contemporary society, or the appearance of innovations considered“subculture” or “kitsch”. The author focuses on the relativity of the “aestheticalvalue” 25 of some contemporary folkloric works, on the difficulty of justlyappreciating them from the aesthetical point of view. In the same direction, thatof the necessity of assessing the contemporary “ethnographical documents”through the ethnologist’s grid and respectively to that of the anthropologist’s andnot to that of the aesthetician meant to obtain pertinent results of the conductedresearches, we can also mention Vintilă Mihăilescu that criticized that “weconsider only the old and well-preserved as object of study” and because of that23 Sabina Ispas, Ethnology, Ethnography, Folkloristics: Disciplines in Co-operation-Disciplines in Competition, in “Symposia. Workbooks of Ethnology and Anthropology”, 2003,Craiova, Aius, p. 26. taking into consideration the fact that the study partly resumes the mainobjectives of contemporary Ethnology, we will further present an essential excerpt of the abovementionedstudy: “Present-day (folkloristic, ethnography, musicology) ethnological research hasseveral objectives, such as working out documents for every element of the oral culture, from theangle of every type of language which expresses it. Documents should meet the requirement of theoutmost objectivity. They should be made so that “data banks” could integrate them, close to nonconventionalsound and image archives of folklore and ethnography. These “data banks” willprovide typologically processes and systematized information on the present culture and on theprocess undergone by it, aimed at those interested, in the next millennium. The ethnologist shouldobserve the right to privacy, dignity, freedom of speech of an individual of a group; his role shouldbe a positive one, mediating between groups or individuals and the rest of society, in moments ofgreat diversification (…) If a specialist exceeds his qualification, or if he states value judgmentspretending that they are absolute truths of a scientific authority concerning some aspects of the“intangible”, “profound” culture, which he is not entitled to do, a subjective angle may bedetrimental not only to the results of research, but especially to the subsequent stages of datataking over and turning to account, undertaken by other specialists or by the political or economicdecision factors”.24 Also see Vintilă Mihăilescu, The difficult de-construction of the staffed cabbage.Discourse on tradition, in “Anthropological research in Romania. Ethnological and HistoricalPerspectives”, Cluj, Clusium, 2004, (Coordinators Cristina Papa, Giovanni Pizza, FilippoM. Zerilli), p. 203.25 Sabina Ispas, op. cit., p.43.