Paper short abstract:

The paper approaches the processes and phenomena which shape the written and oral dimensions of the local culture from the northern part of Buzau (Eastern Romania) department, in order to grasp the way traditions are perceived today, focusing on the narratives attached to territories.

Paper long abstract:

Concerned with the narratives of spaces, and based on a fieldwork in norther area of Buzău department, the paper will cover two topics: (a) the way local memory is culturally transmitted through written and oral narratives, and through the interaction between different generations (by means of collective memory - see Halbwachs 2007; and narrations of life experiences lived by the interlocutors), and (b) the way the living memory becomes "secondary" ("mediated") memory, as it is filtered through the written culture and re-collected through "sites of memory/lieux de mémoire" (Nora 1987). It is a process highlighted especially within the cultural actions initiated by local actors, or by outsiders, in order to attach meaning to a territory, as a reaction to the tendencies of our time, subject to the principles of the economy of experience (Pine and Gilmore 1998).

The presentation stresses the need to interrogate the process of changing an oral narrative into a written text, or as archive document - source and resource for researchers or cultural actors, who address the traditions of a community by means of remembrance or commemoration actions, with a retrospective and/or critical role (Goody 1977). It also discuss the need to document the narrative memory in a contemporary community, that should include the cultural literate milieu - publications, shows, local cultural performances (Baudrillard 1981), which becomes the object of memory and re-activates the empirical memory.