ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

196Gabriela Boangiuit becomes the object of a healing piety. This value judgment precedes andorients the analysis of facts in massively rejecting what is happening in thecontemporary rural world not being object of Ethnology, under the aestheticpretext of Kitsch. There comes an important methodological handicap thatresides in an inability or even inappetence against the social changes” 26 . This is anew issue raised by the epistemological system of the ethnographical document,creating a bridge between the “incipient period of Ethnology” when exhibitionsfascinated through their exoticism, just as the documents referring to habits,rituals, and holidays, and “the contemporary period” in which reason does notneed the notice of the aesthetician in order to be awake. François Laplantineobserved that “ethnographical perception does not fall into the category ofimmediate, medium perception, of rapid knowledge through intuition, but in thatof seeing (and consequently of knowing) that implies mediation, distance in timeand space, re-evaluation, (...), and, in all cases, re-shaping through the means ofwriting 27 . He also quotes Pierre Francastel, that noticed that “we only see whatwe know or at least what we can integrate into a coherent system” 28 .“The content of the ethnographical document exists independently of theobservation it constitutes as a proof, but it does not acceed to the dignity ofethnographical document only in the extent in which the ethnologist is capableof using it as a clue, that means to be made both intelligible and significant,through the raised question (...); in its quality of a document, it is createdthrough the question that excites it and through the operation that isloates it frompractice, with the aim of promoting it as an instrument of knowledge 29 .These are only a few new directions in contemporary Ethnology underthe influence of a more and more challenging reality through its dynamics. Wedid not intend to cover the whole area of the actual issues of this young but stillrich -through its debates- field, but on one hand to emphasize the methodologicaland conceptual earning generated by a “permanent dialogue” among the sociohumanesciences: Ethnology/Anthropology/Sociology, and to direct theethnological researches to new cultural spaces on the other hand.26 Vintilă Mihăilescu, op. cit., p. 203-204.27 François Laplantine, op. cit., p. 43.28 Pierre Francastel, Etudes de sociologie de l’ art, Paris, Denoel/Gonthier, 1970, p. 60apud François Laplantine, op. cit., p. 40.29 Pierre Bonte, Michel Izard (coordinators), op. cit., p.434-435.