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Paper short abstract

Current paper proposes a case study on how traditional storytelling evolved from authentic performance to recorded preservation, valorizing the voices and narratives of Banat’s last traditional storytellers.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a case study based on a collection of complementary audiovisual documents of an ethnographic nature, preserved in the Archive of the West University of Timișoara. The materials are the result of field research conducted between 1965 and 1975 in representative localities of Banat, a cross-border region in southwestern Romania. The collection is relevant to the current panel as it gathers elements defined as narrative structures belonging to canonical folklore genres, such as fairy tale, anecdote, story (basm, snoavă, povestire). The collection represents the sound and content corpus of the last traditional storytellers in the region. Each element corresponds to a clearly defined moment and results from the unique interaction between a storyteller, connoisseur of the local narrative repertoire, and a researcher (often accompanied by a small group of students) visiting the community, most often in the informant’s home. The villages of origin of these informants, and consequently the texts themselves, are well-known and regionally representative.

Building on this corpus, the present study aims to observe the regional evolution of performance style, from its authentic context, through the process of data recording during field research, to the preservation of the recorded voices of the region’s last storytellers.