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I had before
the eyes the local society of Sirbi in Maramures in 1973, which paraded
every Sunday on the main place, revealing to the observer its division in
age and sex groups, clothing emblems, signs of recognition, disjunctions
and conjunctions between parents and relatives, permitted and prohibited
spouses. (But this collective parade was nothing like an inorganized whirl
or alternate strolls which are so frequent in places and streets of Mediterranean
towns). Its attention was entirely directed towards a significant place
and a significant time for the ceremony of the day, the place of dance where
young people were to meet, not mutely, sighing or grumbling, like dancers
in our excessively noisy modern discotheques but in joyfully shouted interpellations,
the strigaturi, or in songs and texts fixed as if life and opera
were one. A simple and ordinary ceremonial ? A great ritual ?
Perplexed, I listened more attentively to Mihai Pop's lessons and I began
to understand why Rumanian folklorists turn their attention almost exclusively
to oral litterature and, through the study of customs, to texts related
to practices and uses. I thus decided to pay particular attention, when
collecting my materials, to the form of articulated speech. Not only to
the form of the text, as if it had to express by itself thought, a theoretical
choice that would reduce the circumstances of the effective production to
the rank of context, pretext or sub-text, i.e. to a global form in which
the text appears as the whole production of the one who utters it. A substantial
part of the materials collected during my fieldwork would thus consist of
tape recordings of texts recited, shouted or sung in the circumstances in
which they had been produced by the social actors themselves and of photographs
taken in these very circumstances. 
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