On Băncilă’s sacrality of holiday. Towards a sociology of revival

Băncilă’s writings belong to that category of thinkers whose almost each paragraph is a reality-building. The Romanian author is one of the most brilliant thinkers of totality. His writings are seemingly fully recovered since Dora Mezdrea edited his integral Works (“Opere”), published by the Brăila Museum, Istros PH and the Romanian Museum of Literature, during the 2000s. Their social dispersion is, of course, scarce, since the society is undergoing a barbarization process. Present-day society has a special relationship with time. Everything must be new and cut short to get attention, that is, to be shallow subjective-personal. Do holidays still have a place in such a world? In fact what are holidays? And what is their social function? Are there any other important ramifications? Băncilă’s thesis is ethnicity, religion and holidays are the trinity of the societal infrastructure. Băncilă’s oeuvre considers the Holiday to be in relation with other categories: the Peasant, the Classical Rationale, and the Crisis. The Holiday’s reservoir is the village, and its vectors are the peasant on the one hand, and the Classical Rationale on the other. The result of the weakening of these two is the Crisis. The Crisis of the Modern World is a well-documented concern of both the Romanian and European intellectuals in the 20th century. From Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932) to Ernest Bernea’s book with the same title in the 70s and beyond. Another level of analysis is the holiday’s function in sociology. Băncilă’s demarche is a serious incentive to rethink subjectivity, to consider its collective dimension definitory for “the objective”.