The Social Embeddedness of the Dance Culture in a Moldavian Village

The present research examines those changes that happened between the 1940s and the 2010s to the dance culture of a Moldavian Csángó village of East Romania called Magyarfalu. In the light of a holistic approach and on the basis of archive data and fieldwork, the leading aims are to identify those adaptation practices that lie behind the transformation of the dance culture, the triggers thereof, that is the micro or macro processes which induced the adaptation in the local community and to find an answer to the following question: what is the function that dancing itself fulfils in the life of the village when the phenomenon is regarded as social practice. The results suggest that the changes in the dance culture are triggered by ecological, economic, social, and cultural mechanisms; through the adaptation practices, the dance culture's self-organised and institutional forms allow the members of the community to attain cultural, social, and economic capital, in addition to that, satisfying certain needs and requirements of the community, contribute to the harmonious functioning of the social structure of Magyarfalu. In the present paper, the social embeddedness is demonstrated by real cases and it is proven that the theoretical frameworks of biopsychology and structural-functionalism are relevant when the anthropological eye turns upon the dance research.