Paper short abstract:

Staged folk traditions are well-known models of organizing locality. Through my case study I present how a constructed image of a golden age performed by a local staging movement, could serve as an anchor of stability in times of social and economic transformation.

Paper long abstract:

This study aims to present the outcomes of an ethnographic research conducted in a Transylvanian rural area, the Niraj Valley (Romania) in summer 2020, 2021 and 2022. The research primarily intended to follow the historical trajectory of staging the local folk culture in a village with nearly 750 - mostly Hungarian in small proportion Roma – inhabitants. Paying attention to the peaks of the staging movement’s history, it becomes clearly visible, that periodically gaining significance of intangible cultural heritage in local discourses is associated with the experience of uncertainty and it can be considered as indicator of social transformation.

Recent study offers an insight into three different periods can be characterized by the necessity of adaptation from the part of the local society: the years of the World War II., the decade after the political transformation (1990) and the early 2010s. In these highlighted periods, managing the local staging movement was strongly connected with the local churches, more precisely with the local pastors who were regarded the “engines” of local initiations in the cultural also in the economic sphere. Social trust in the pastors derives from the role, that the church has taken in the society existing in minority conditions from the 1920s. It is still a well-known pattern in the local society when local church oversteps the barriers of the religious sub-system and take the leading role in social integration in the moments of uncertainty.