Ritualising the narrative song: The godfather's song

Fifor, Mihai (2002) Ritualising the narrative song: The godfather's song. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 47 (1-2). pp. 199-210. ISSN 1216-9803

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Abstract

One of the most controversial areas of folkloristic studies are those concerning the theories on the genesis of genres, on the mobility and variability of the folkloric “text”, on the process of its transition from one genre to another. There are still a lot of unanswered questions and unproved hypotheses concerning these intimate mechanisms of a mentality system of a certain social group, a mechanism that generates the re-functionaliztion of a folkloric “text” according to specific needs and specific contexts. For beyond the simultaneous presence of the same motifs and themes in genres with different functionality we have to take into consideration the case of those “texts” that due to the change of the register, in Hyme's sense, in which the transaction of meaning takes place, of their mode of performance and even of the arena of their performance, are being re-functionalised into another folkloric genre. Starting from the special case of the Romanian narrative song Letin bogat (The Rich Latin) also known as Cacircntecul Nasului (The Godfather's Song) we shall try to analyse the ways a narrative song has been ritualised by means of its performance as a distinct sequence of the wedding ritual, developing in time into a sort of ritual song. More than that we shall also focus on the reverse process nowadays that of another semantic readaptation of the song due to the de-sacralisation of the wedding ritual and its transformation into a spectacular ceremony.

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