Confronting Legacies of Ethnic-National Discourse in Scholarship and Practice: Traditional Music and Dance in Central Transylvania

Abstract

Ethnic-national discourse in traditional music and dance practice and theory in central Transylvania is pervasive and persistent. Scholarship in the field has been deeply implicated in the elaboration and imposition of national ideologies by cultural elites, but while ethnicity is a naturalized category, the local practice of music and dance in social life need not be primarily so marked. This article examines and critiques the identification of traditional music and dance in this region as Romanian, Hungarian, or Romani as established by twentieth-century scholarship and as institutionalized in practice. A theoretical perspective that moves away from the re-iteration of these categories is suggested, and the possibility of escaping from them in practice is considered.

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