Vintila Mihailescu

Romanian nation-building “diffuse ethnology”. Prolegomena to a critical approach

AcknowledgementThe present paper went through many versions and rather different approaches.

The permanent issue on stake was how to conceive a meaningful approach to “Romanian ethnology”, avoiding both a factual history of the discipline and a mere deconstructivist exercise ? The times are still, it seems, for uncritical, take-it-for-granted approaches or, at the other extreme and only to some extent, for overcritical reactions, overthrowing the whole “Romanian ethnology” as just a nationalistic mystification one has to get ride of1. The solution I choused here is just a preliminary contribution for further critical investigations and it emerged from long and deep discussions with the colleagues of the Nexus group. I would like to acknowledge here my gratitude to all of them.

Introduction. Toward a meaningful history of Romanian ethnology

“Starting with Ovid Densuşianu and D. Caracostea, to C. Brăiloiu and Mihai Pop, the Romanian ethnology…” (Constantinescu, 1999: 13). This fragment of a recent book published by a well-known professor of folkloristic – and now ethnology – at the publishing house of “The Romanian Cultural Foundation” (an institution aiming to present landmarks of Romanian culture to the foreign reader), may seem to fit perfectly into a common history of the discipline. It is as if the field of ethnology and its main contributors are both accredited. In fact, it is far from being as unproblematic as this.

First of all, one may wonder if speaking about Romanian ethnology is such a self-evident enterprise, given the fact that the very term is by all means a neologism in Romanian academia. As a matter of fact, the author has folk culture in mind and “ethnology”, in this text, stands for the study of this folk culture. In its turn, this one is named in different non-equivalent ways as “ethnographic”, “non-academic”, “rural”, “traditional”, “oral”, “peasant” culture, so that one may wonder what is it after all ?

The fact of being Romanian is neither more precise. We learn at the page 19 that “created together with the Romanian people itself (…), folk culture (…) has included essential data of Romanian ethos (…), even though some of them have much deeper roots, coming from immemorial times (…)”. And at page 29 a suggestion is made that these roots are going as far as 6500 to 3500 BC, making thus Romania the ‘heart’ of the “Old Europe”. One may wonder then what is really meant by “Romanian” ?

In fact and stricto sensu, there is not such a thing as “Romanian ethnology”, i.e. a professional and institutionalized field of knowledge developed under this label in the history of the Romanian nation2. Instead, the classical couple of folklore studies and

1 “The folklore. What can we do with it ?” Taking after a well known programmatic paper by Ovid Densuşianu, Otilia Hedişan (2001) is wandering under this title what should be now the proper approach of the impressive amount of folklore archives preserved all over the country. And she founds no final answer but just different “difficult decisions” one can make. Having no further ambitions, this book is nevertheless one of the very few to look in a reflexive way to folk-culture and its academic discipline, folkloristic, in Romania.2 It is even more problematic to speak about a history of anthropology in Romania. Developed and institutionalized as physical anthropology in the thirties, mainly due to the doctor Francisc Reiner,

ethnography has indeed an institutional expression in Romanian modern culture. Why not approaching then their history(ies) ?

Such a narrowing of the field of interest would make it more precise only to some extent. Getting more and more specialized and institutionalized starting with the second part of the XIXth century, both folkloristic and ethnography nevertheless transcend permanently their “technical” competence, aiming all the time, in fact, to have the last word on “the being of the people”, as Pârvan explicitly states when defining ethnography. The folkloric species and categories, as defined by the different schools and approaches, have as their only common point “their documentary value, all the goods of the so-defined field (of folklore, n.n.) being documents of popular mentality” (Bîrlea, 1969:7). Thus, the two disciplines are sharing, in fact, their object of research between themselves and with many other different disciplines or approaches. Even more: “the being of the people” is a general concern of the national elites during all this period, most of them contributing in a more or less specialized way to its investigation. From philosophers to geographers, all having something to say on this core issue, most of them have also “trans-disciplinary” affiliations, being philologists and folklorists, geographers and ethnographers, and so on. A strictly “disciplinary” approach of these discourses that are sharing “the being of the people” as their common object of concern would be thus misleading3. We may then come back to “ethnology”, but rather as an overarching label for the discourses addressing in an representative way the problem of “the being of the people” then as one academic discipline. In order to further avoid confusions, we should then probably speak about a diffuse ethnology.

But such a choice would open an opposite trap: the corpus of texts one should consider in this case is almost unlimited. In fact, it tends to cover the whole space of identity-building discourses. Or, as the authors of the CAS “Identity Reader” project are highly aware, “’identity-building texts’ are texts of any kind. To offer a different answer would be to restrict the epistemological field of the whole enterprise. Hence, the collection of texts extends from national anthems and constitutions to revolutionary songs and historical novels, from political or cultural manifestos to philosophical treatises.” (Mishkova, 2003:13) Just building such a corpus of representative texts is, as we can see

anthropology, in its social/cultural sense, comes into being only late in the sixties, mainly due to the initiatives of Vasile Caramelea, a former member in Gusti’s monographic teams and senior researcher at the Center of Anthropological Researches founded by Reiner. From an institutional point of view, one can then trace the history of “anthropology” in Romania as rooted (and, in fact, limited) to anthropometry – still the core of the existing Center – and integrating in its practices, to some extent, some complementary aspects of social life due to the open-mindedness of its successive leaders, from Francisc Reiner himself, through Stefan Milcu to Victor Săhleanu. We may see in this biology-dominated trajectory the specificity of Romanian anthropology as a “native anthropology”, as Gheorghiţă Geană (1996) suggests. But, on one side, in spite of the declared intentions of its promoters, this type of discourse was never functionally integrated or developed into a broader cultural/social frame of the type anthropology as a social science developed abroad; on the other side, beyond the historical fate of terminology and their frequent overlapping, we prefer to consider anthropology and ethnology as two different types of discourse. We will develop this issue later on in this essay.3 Most of the existing histories of folkloristic and/or ethnography are tracing back their development according to methodological improvements of the way folklore/ ethnographic material was collected and the thematic space that was covered by these collections. Underlying ideologies and the ways they interfere with methodology are almost absent or restricted to the generic context of the “awakening of the national consciousness”. A critical reflection on the ways and reasons folkloristic and ethnography expressed and modeled “the being of the people” in different times and contexts is thus almost missing.

with the above-mentioned project, a tremendous enterprise. A systematic reflection can only follow.

After having transgressed the (more or less) clear borders of the complementary disciplines of folkloristic and ethnography and open up our space of interest, we have thus now to step back and re-frame our concern.

The solution that seems to correspond the best with our interest would be to restrict ourselves to nation-building texts on “the being of the people” – a national discourse, “diffuse ethnology” is specifically what Stocking (19…) calls a “nation-building ethnology” – and stick as much as possible to the scientific canon, i.e. texts that where intended and accepted as approaches corresponding to the standards of scientific knowledge of the time. “Diffuse ethnology” texts are thus not “texts of any kind”, but only any kind of scientific texts dealing in a direct or indirect, but representative way, with the issue of the “being of the people” in the context of Romanian nation building.

But there is at least another discipline that had a similar “nation-building” history in Romania: sociology. How is one supposed then to differentiate between the two types of discourses ?

An analogy with the German Volkskunde may help. “As we know it for sure now, the real definition of Volkskunde refers, since the XVIIIth century when the word appeared for the first time in the context of administrative statistics, to the ‘knowledge about the people’ (Kentnisse über das Volk) and not to the ‘traditions preserved by the people’ (Uberlieferungen im Volk)” (Brückner, 1987: 228). The last meaning appeared only later on and turned to a mainstream under the influence of “romantic literary ambitions and the emergence of a national historiography” (idem). Nevertheless, the local/national customs (Sitten und Kultur) were shared as an object of interest by both approaches, only from rather different standpoints.

We may find in Romania too, after the “oriental crisis” and during the emergence of the Romanian principalities, a growing interest in general data about the people of these territories for diplomatic, administrative and/or economic reasons, a growing corpus of administrative and economic statistics and geographic descriptions that can be put together as ‘knowledge about the people’. It is the case of what Stahl (op. cit.) calls “consular documentation”, and, starting with the “Organic regulations”, the “periodic catagrafii (???)”. As in the German space (but not only), the specific interest for the knowledge of the people – mainly the ‘traditions preserved by the people’ – appeared later on, and has more or less other roots and served more or less other purposes. We may then consider the first one as belonging rather to the history of sociology4, and focus only on the second one as closer to what we just called diffuse ethnology. Of course, such a clear-cut distinction is never accurate, especially in early times when the same approaches (e.g. “administrative statistics”) may be claimed as “ancestors” of both disciplines, but it may nevertheless serve as a preliminary and orienting criterion. In this respect, we may then kip addressing the confuse but highly praised object of “the being of the people” in order to cover a diffuse but highly practiced concern.

4 Such a history of Romanian sociology has to face its own dilemmas about the building of the “sociological texts” to work on, especially when trying to identify the “forerunners”. When doing so, H.H. Stahl (2001) has chosen to speak about “sociography”, to which scholars from different academic affiliations have contributed before the institutionalisation of sociology as an academic discipline. These “sociographers” were developing mainly a kind of Volkskunde in its original sense of ‘knowledge about the people’.

The (re)constructed object of our investigation should thus be considered as the field of accredited scientific inquiries aiming to define, describe, and eventually explain the “being of the [Romanian] people” in the context of the nation-building process of Romania. We have labeled it “diffuse ethnology”, and considered it to incorporate – but being broader then – the academic fields of folkloristic and ethnography and (relatively) distinct from the field of sociology. Anthropology (i.e. physical anthropology, as it was developed by physicians and biologists in Romania starting with the late twenties and in the thirties) may be then approached, in as much as it is concerned by the “[biological] being of the people”, as part of this “diffuse ethnology” – a part that we will skip, not without regrets, from our survey.

As “nation-building ethnology”, this “diffuse ethnology” is a main actor in the production of national identity and a critical reflection on the ways this production was developed should be a preliminary step in any real reconsideration of identity claims and prospects in Romania – as well as in the whole Balkan region.

Choosing to approach the history of this “diffuse ethnology” in Romania, this paper aims thus to contribute to a kind of “post-national” critique of ethnology, complementary in a way to the already classical “post-colonial” critique of anthropology, a critique already developed in the German space, for instance, concerning the legacy of the Volkskunde (e.g. Brückner, 1987, Bausinger, 1993), but rather missing in the Balkan space (Todorova, xxxx).

Part I. Modernity, anthropology and ethnology

Even if speaking about ethnology as “diffuse ethnology” and about this as a “nation-building discourse” is not yet the common way of professionals in Romania, this does not mean at all that such an approach is a breaking-through one; it may be consider even as a rather trendy one, just proclaiming a non-essentialist view. But what next ?

In order to comprehend the meaning of this nation-building discourse, one should then step further and compare it with types of anthropological discourses, whose comprehension is further on possible only in the general context of modernity. Last but not least, one should then make also clear the methodological standpoint from which all this has to be approached.

To cover such a tremendous field of analysis is, of course, out of our possibilities and intentions. Nevertheless, we will try to sketch here some main directions of what seems to us a convenient way of approaching this issue.

In order to do this, we have to proceed à rebours, starting by addressing the methodological statements of our general approach, then turning to the problem of modernity as the meaningful context of our story. Only after revisiting these very basic assumptions on the chosen methodological approach, on one side, and the given general context of investigation, on the other, can we farther address the more specific question of anthropological and ethnological discourses in modern times.

1. The approach. Sociality and meaning

Coleman claims – and he is probably right – that any good social theory must be based on a statement about the “engine of action”, the very basic motivation of human action (Coleman, 1988). And he further states – as most of the recent social scholars do – that social sciences never proposed a better “engine of action” then the rational and egoist interest of the individual, thus placing the origins of society in a “natural” psychological motivation. One may have some doubts about this solution; I personally do. I believe that a man on a desert island is not a rational egoist being but just a lonely one. Egoist interests may pump out only in society and one will pick them up only in the eyes of the other. Efficient as they are – or may become – individual interests (if by this we mean something more then just the drives linked to the instinct of conservation) are derivative and not the break stones of social life. Only an early training in egoist rationality may produce a society functioning as if it were naturally based on egoist interests. In fact, as phrased by Gellner, “in most of their life time, people don’t maximize what so ever and don’t try to rich a concrete and clear defined aim, but are just seeking to stay integrated or to be part of an on-going game. The role is its own reward and not a mean to achieve a situation defined as aim." (Gellner, 1986: 33) Thus - Gellner concludes - this individualistic approach lets us down when we would most need it (in most of our daily routine life and even more so when facing love or death), and recent sophistications such as "social capital" are not of much help in overcoming this mis-understanding.

Without any further arguments we will then address this "seeking to stay integrated or to be part of an on-going game” as an alternative hypothesis for the basic motivation of social action, the one we definitely prefer. We will call it sociability5

and postulate it as the deepest meaning of human life, the one an individual life has to be rooted in, in order to “make sense”.

But, as Durkheim already noticed, “…sociability as such can be found nowhere. What does exist (…) are particular forms of solidarity” (Durkheim, 1893/ 2001: 83). Sociability has to be – and always is – “embodied” in particular social units, taking thus particular forms we will call sociality. In this sense, sociality is just the “real”, existing sociability.

We can now rephrase our statement as such: sociality as meaning of life is the double motivation of belonging-seeking and exclusion-avoiding and as such it is the very "engine of action".

We would like to point just at some few implications of this statement6. First of all, it means that conflict and not "harmony" is at the origin and basis of social life in as far as belonging always concerns some people and always implies the exclusion of other people. This

5 Of course, there is nothing new in this holistic statement about sociability, even if it may sound not very „trendy” in the present context of the social sciences. Durkheim, for instance, stated very clearly that „collective life did not emerged from individual life, but on the contrary, this one emerged out of the first.” (Durkheim, op. cit.: 296) And, as we will see, the Romanian Dimitrie Gusti was speaking even about a „sociological apriorism”. In as far as sociability means that man is a social being and not just one living in society, this statement is telling an old story. On the contrary, treating sociability as meaning, i.e. as a basic reference to make sense out of life and thus motivating life, is to some extent a different story. A story told, as always, by the subject of desire rather then by the subject of reality...6 Belonging-seeking and exclusion-avoiding may be seen as similar, to some extent, to the freudian polarity of Eros and Thanatos, for instance.

everlasting basic conflict calls the very intrinsic need of policy, of an explicit way of mastering and ruling this conflict and deciding in a consequent way who and how is to be in (We) and who is to be out (They)7. As a social being, Man is thus also a political being by definition. But this staging of conflict also offers a direction – if not a sense – to the mastering of conflict and reaching an universal goal; it is not just descriptive, but may – and should – be also prescriptive: the highest good is a maximum of belonging with a minimum of exclusion. Sociality is thus a war with the treaty of peace in its pocket.

“The main human question, the lasting question is not only ‘who am I?’, but ‘who are we ?’” (Leach, 1980: 367). We are Men, of course, but are we all equally Men ? And how is this belonging conceived and performed ? We would like to approach our specific problem from the standpoint of this “lasting question”.

2. The context: modernity and anthropocentrism If sociality is about “being part of an on-going game”, modernity is just one kind

of game, defining sui generis the criteria of belonging and exclusion. But in order to see what kind of game it is, we first have to look into some more details to how this social game we called sociality is generally played. In this respect, we can provide the following minimalist picture.

First of all, in order to exist, a social game - just as any game - has to have some shared rules of the game, stating the agreed-upon order and what the game is all about. Then it has to have some aims of the game. These are always embedded in the very sociality, i.e. seeking (some kind) of belonging and avoiding (some kind) of exclusion. Thus, the aim of the game is not to achieve something specific but to “make sense” of the game in a specific way. Finally, the game has to have a set of prescriptive, sometimes also optional means of the game allowing the players to achieve the aim of the game according to its defining rules. The choice of these means is rational in as far as it helps – and has to help – the player to avoid exclusion8 and to comfort belonging in the terms of some shared perceived “rules of the game”. In this sense, rationality is the very rule of social life – only there is not just one kind of “human” rationality !

Sociality is different and is changing. Its change is a systemic but not uniform one, with unequal and contextual paths in the changes of the rules, means and ends of the game. They are all brought together – when, and to the extent they may be brought together – by the supreme need of meaning: they have to “make sense” to an acceptable degree and for an sufficient part of those sharing a certain type of sociality. Only under these circumstances may man be rational, i.e. making sense out of the use of available means, according to perceived rules, in order to seek belonging and avoid exclusion. Rationality is thus not an individual premise but a social process of “rationalization”, i.e. of meaningful bridging of the components of sociality: as such, it is neither given nor permanent, it is historical and contextual. As an ideal, rationality is the social peace of meanings, their sufficient socialization.

We may design these relations in the following way:

7 This belonging-exclusion is not to be seen only as a social-empirical game. Salvation, for instance, is one of the most important belonging-seeking motivations.8 Exclusion means here to be „out of any game” or the very essential one and not just stepping out of this game for another one.

Rationality

Rules Means Aims(worldviews) (social practices) (belonging/exclusion)

Meaning/“making sense”

We can now approach modernity as a particular and fundamental type of order, of rule of the game, implying particular means and aims. In order to do so, we have to start with the following question: where are these rules coming from, what is their origin? From the standpoint of Man, there are two main possibilities: their origin is outside man, independent and anterior to man (heteronomy), or it is inside man himself, produced by man (autonomy)9; in other terms, “agency” is external or internal to Man. In the first case, the rule of the game is a sui generis Order of the Cosmos or cosmocentrism: the game of life is rooted in a common Order, external and anterior to Man. The “out-rooted meaning is a duty” (Gauchet, 1995: 33): “everything that masters the works and the days is received from outside” (idem: 35). In the second case, the rules of the game are produced by Man, giving to himself his own anthropocentric norms. From this point of view, modernity, with its whole range of alternative projects (modernities), is just the great shift from the Being of the World or cosmocentrism to the Becoming of Man or anthropocentrism – and thus from heteronomy to autonomy.

These two essentially different types of rules imply two essentially different types of rationality. In the case of a cosmocentric Order of the World, designed before you and without you, one has to keep being part of this very order; not complying to it would mean to be “out of the game”, excluded from the cosmic order, i.e. from the society itself. It is thus rational to be “world-bound” and to do what (you suppose that) people before you and around you – as world-bound as you – have done and are doing from the very beginning of this world. The choice of the means will thus look backwards (retrospective rationality) and take the form of customs10. In the case of an anthropocentric rule of the game, on the contrary, it is rational to look forward for the best strategies to achieve self-designed and free goals; we will call this a prospective rationality, and consider it as the main type of rationality modernity has promoted.

At this point, we may stop and put all this together in the following scheme:

9 This opposition is rooted in the psychological differentiation between external and internal locus of control, meaning that each individual will project in a “typical” way the origin of the mastery of his own behavior rather outside (God, destiny, state, powerful other, etc.) or inside himself. This typology works also between whole populations.10 Pre- or non-modern societies are thus customary and not traditional societies. Sticking to customs in such societies does not mean out ruling social change, but just proceeding in a (retrospective) rational way, i.e. making sure that the change can be placed retrospectively in the original order and can be considered as fitting this order.

Rule of the game Mean of the game Aim of the game RationalityCosmocentrism customs cosmic belonging retrospective Anthropocentrism strategies social belonging prospective

But modernity is not one-sided. If customary societies have personalized heteronomy in the image(s) of God(s), modern societies have usually given to autonomy the name of Reason. As new “locus of control”, Reason had to be…located. The lasting debates about this “location”, about how to place and argue the autonomy of Man, also produced, in the long run, the very concept of Man. Or there have been – and still are to a certain extent – several different such “locations” (and thus main conceptions of Man). We may call the three most important ones after a prominent philosopher having advocated such a specific “location”: Descartes’ location, Hegel’s location and Herder’s location.

In the first case, autonomy of Man is placed in the individual subject, i.e. in each individual as equal to each other one and thus sharing by nature the same rational capacities – which is at the same time the very way to produce the “individual”. If the only legitimate “locus of control” is the individual Reason, it is rational for the individual player to check his own reason in a prospective way and chose the best way to get in association (the only “reasonable” type of belonging)11 with other individual players, motivated in the same way. We may speak in this case about an individualistic rule of the game.

In the second case, autonomy is placed in the Zeitgeist and thus in a historical mankind presenting itself as its own rational becoming. Man belongs to this Zeitgeist and is moved by it almost unconsciously toward his own rational fulfillment, being thus his own historical becoming. It is then rational to adapt one’s strategies to this shared historical becoming or even to share the strategies emerging from this collective becoming. We may call this type of rationality a progressive one in as far as a rational strategy has to fit this collective improvement of mankind. We may also speak in this case about and universal-collectivistic rule of the game.

Finally, with Herder, the autonomy is placed in a linguistic population, who is thus given its own and specific reason: the Volksgeist. Autonomy belongs neither to the individual, nor to Man, but to the people, the Volk. This type of collective reason is what it is from its very origin and has to be preserved throughout history, aiming to its full and true expressions. Rationality can be thus neither retrospective nor prospective, but a kind of retro-prospective one, allowing the achievement of a subject embedded in the collective identity of the Volksgeist. We may speak in this case about a local-collectivistic rule of the game.

All this may be presented in the following scheme:

Versions of anthropocentrism

11 In „post-modern” times, this association may take the form of an elective club, as suggested by Rorty: one cannot belong to a traditional Gemeinschaft if everybody does not understand what means to be a “decent man”. The only solution is then to behave and control your feelings in the public space, where you may be treated as “different” and be facing “different” people and, “after a terrible day”, to join “your club”, where “you will feel comfortable in the company of your peers” (Rorty , 1994: 209)

Rules Rationality Aims/ types of belonging

Individualism Prospective Association

Universal collect. Progressive Zeitgeist

Local collect. Retro-prospective Volksgeist

As sketchy as they are, these few distinctions enable us to keep a kind of emic approach of some main different types of social games and try to understand social constructions (such as the building of Romanian ethnology, for instance) according to their own perceived and/or prescribed rules and aims of the game. Anticipating on what will follow, we can thus suggest that the Romanian ethnology as nation-building ethnology shared a rather local-collectivistic rule of the game, following thus a retro-prospective rationality and being concerned by the collective belonging to a Volk identity. This cannot be properly described and, even less, accepted, in terms of a prospective rationality, for instance, using individual choices in order to assure association as the only true form of belonging. You cannot comprehensively approach a type of rationality in the terms and meanings of another. (But one can do so if the true aim – explicit or unaccepted – is control and not comprehension…)

This categorization does not mean at all that such “pure” types of sociality do exist in clear-cut differentiation from one of another. They just may have the methodological utility any kind of “ideal types” may have. This position does not mean a total post-modern relativism neither, as it may seem at a first sight. On the contrary, it suppose some good old cues about the “modern game”:

There is development of mankind, the very building of the whole mankind as a common realm of men being a crossroad of this process. This development should be seen as the uncertain outcome of a unavoidable and growing coordination of local social games and historical selection of these outcomes in a more and more “mondialized” frame of interactions. As such, development is rooted in exchange and communication or, to put it in a more metaphorical way, in mutual interferences of less and less localized collectivities. As stated by Tenbruck, there is a shift from “localized” to “non-localized” definitions of ways of life, needing and engendering more and more “organization” (Tenbruck, 1964) – only this process started much before the XVIIIth century.

There is progress in mankind, from more heteronomy to more autonomy, which enables, in its turn, the free mastery of belonging/ exclusion and thus a better chance for “the highest good”. But “better chances” does not necessarily mean real achievements and higher autonomy of Man is not producing automatically higher autonomy of men. Nevertheless, there is a possible hierarchy: less exclusion is always better then more exclusion, and this can act as a stable criteria for judging in a non-relativistic way.

There is no evolution, in the sense of sequential, pair development and progress, each form of development being also a progressive step.

There is universalism, in as far as modern reason may – and, de jure, has to – approach and try to explain other rationalities then its own. It is able to produce – which does not mean that it always do – a rational “meta-discourse” (Cornea, 2003) on the discourses of the whole human kind, including its own one as difference.

Last but not least, modernity, as human autonomy and thus self-creation, is an opera aperta. In this respect, the modern society is the only one able to incorporate and not only leave with but leave from its own negations (Noica, 1984).On all these points, but mainly on those concerning evolution, development,

and/or progress, the Romanian modern culture had to make its choices.

3. Anthropological discoursesWe may consider “anthropology” written large as co-extensive with

anthropocentrism and the building of Man in as far as arguing and placing the autonomy of Man was also the very process of producing him. The pre-history of this long process may be labeled as “conquista and perspectivism” and is rooted in the discovery and conquest of the New World and the rise of a fundamentally puzzling question: How should we think and act about the Other ? Comment peut-on etre Persan ? – was the famous phrasing of this problem, producing an important de-centering of the vision on man and a critical reflection on spontaneous ethnocentrism Todorov (xxxx) calls “perspectivism”. How can we think about the Other as different and still Man ? In other words, how can we conceive the difference starting from the moment when the circle of the world peopled by humans was closed, in the wake of Magellan’s journey, and the people inhabiting this world, eventually became the large family of Mankind, a first circle of “mondialization”, ruling over an ever more “disenchanted” world ? Modernity – as well as “anthropology” – is deep rooted in this theoretical and political challenge.

We may identify three main kinds of solutions to these questions. The first one may be labeled, in a rather restrictive way, as humanism (and, later on, individualism), in as far as it is advocating, in different ways and on different grounds, the (biological and/or psychological) unity of Man, of the human beings. The official statements of the pope as well as of Carol the Vth, the king of Spain, at the beginning of the XVIth century, trying to assert that the “Indians” of the New World are human beings indeed, having thus some kind of equal rights with the Spanish and generally with Christian people, may be considered as a landmark in the chronology of this lasting process. Over centuries, this debate went on, producing different solutions and underlying different approaches too. The dominant solution became individualism, stating a kind or another of equi-valence of individuals, in strong connection with what we labeled as “Descartes’ location”.

But even accepting a kind or another of unity of homo sapiens, how can one cope with the evident differences between individuals and groups of this species ? How can we think the difference ?

The quasi-psycho-logical answer to it is quite simple: the differences can be ordered (herein lies, after all, the meaning of “thinking the difference”) either (predominantly) in time, or (predominantly) in space, which seem to be the two complementary co-ordinates which the human mind usually resorts to in order to arrange,

to “categorize” observed events (e.g. Mihailescu, 1998). However, as we shall try to demonstrate, these same seem to be the very co-ordinates, which also served the ordering of differences in the separate realm of the social. Therefore, we shall follow these two trails, with a view to shaping a simple (and inevitably simplifying) idea of the major paths followed by the conception of difference in the modern world.

a) The Primitive and the primitivistic ideology “’Time’as ‘time-in-itself’ (our underlining) has played a decisive role in laying

the basis of sociology, providing the essential and privileged way of differentiating societies. (…) More precisely, we will show how sociology, at its very inception, needs the establishment and development of what I would like to call “a primitivistic ideology” (our underlining). “This primitivistic ideology is more the work of ethnologists than that of sociologists, given the disciplinary cleavage operated at the beginning of the 19 th century, when the “primitives” and not only the “savages” became the object of a discipline in itself, that is, ethnology, replacing the debates over the state of society with an array of issues linked to the hierarchical classification of societies, based on a position related to the moment and the state of the origin and defined with respect to that particular moment or state.” (Paul-Levy, 1985, pp.302-303) Nevertheless, the primitivistic ideology also became the work of sociologists through Auguste Comte and the construction of sociology as a science of “the most recent society of evolution” and the sign of equivalence placed between “evolution” and “improvement”. “< It really seems to me that human development constantly entails, under all the various principal aspects of our nature, a double growing improvement not only in the fundamental human condition (…), but also (…) as regards our respective faculties>” (Comte, 1975, author’s underlining). Comte also adds that <betterment is the most appropriate term> for the development-improvement of human nature”. (Paul-Lévy, Ibid., p.308)

This organization of (social, cultural, political, etc.) differences on “the arrow of time” allows for their ordering without remainder according to the degree of closeness or remoteness to that origin of Mankind, which is the primitive. It is the solution arising from a double, or a complementary tension: Who are They (the peoples of the New World who have most significantly fired the imagination and the thinking of the old Europe)? And who are We (the modern Western, bourgeois, industrial society, unique in our resolve to be different) ? After centuries of debate (and bloody in-fighting…), They ceased to be “savages”, that is, actually non-Us, or even non/sub-humans and have become “primitives”: They are Our ancestors ! The differences coexisting in space are thus organized as a succession in time, which offers a solution to understand both Them and Us (and perhaps, more important, to legitimize Our uniqueness and superiority without excluding Them from the thus unified world of humanity). Therefore, this evolutionistic-historical vision, which we would rather broadly approach as a “primitivistic ideology”, succeeds in firing two master-strokes at once: treating the differences among societies across the world as “ages of mankind” means: a) to assert the unity of mankind (all are human beings – there are no more “savages” or non-humans – and as such they all have the same “natural” rights as we) and b) to assert a common “growth” ideal that is intrinsic to this humankind (if the differences are “ages of mankind”, this means that any component of this humankind – any society – can

“grow” through its very “natural” law, the differences being only transitory, smaller or bigger, steps towards the “maturity” of civilization, Our modern society, which thus becomes Their ideal). The invention of the primitive and the “primitivistic ideology” designed around it have thus become, to a certain extent, the Archimedean point of modernity, offering a coherence and a direction specific to the social life of Mankind as a whole. To various degrees and ranges, all classical theories of modernization share this ideology.

b) The Autochthonous and the autochthonistic ideology Although, with its countless variations and successive elaborations, this seems to be the winning solution, it was not the only one. In a complementary – and to a great extent reactive – way, the same modernity also elaborated another way of thinking the difference, by ordering dissimilarities, we might say, following the criterion of space as space-in-itself. From this perspective, the differences among human societies do not follow one another on the axis of time, but are arranged side by side on the coordinate of space. And this is so because, in one way or another, it has been so from the very “beginning”. The variable that is most directly linked to such a vision is given, of course, by the geographical space as such, and by the environmental theories related to it, which are time-honored and used to be quite fashionable in the 18 th and 19th centuries. Generically speaking, cultures are conditioned – if not actually determined – by the geographical environment in which they are born and where they develop as forms of specific adjustment to the given environment, thus generating both irretrievable differences and points of convergence between cultures which though remote, have been born from similar “environments”.

This originally spatial diversity is also the object of even further in-depth debate within the very realm of the human species. From this biologically-classifying perspective, which prevailed and was the more popular for centuries on end, the very idea of a single human species was repeatedly questioned. The alternative thesis, of polygenesis, which asserted the existence of distinct races with different spatial origins, was formulated in 1520 by the celebrated Paracelsus. Three centuries later, in the mid-19th century, and under the influence of the diffusionism, it was the prevailing thesis of the age. Even though the thesis of monogenesis would eventually triumph, nevertheless, the classifying practices of the naturalists resort to the artifice of the concept of “sub-species”, in order to continue to set order among the differences. As such, Linné, for instance, will introduce the Europeans and the Africans into two distinct and unequal sub-species, with different countenances, temperaments and natural habits.

The raciological and bio-typological concerns, which held an important place in the academic world, especially prior to World War II, were furthering the assumption of biological differences among people, which were this time considered to be intra-specific. For a long time, an explicit or implicit judgment of value was appended to these taxonomical differences, whose classification was equal to a hierarchical arrangement. But even beyond these biologistic excesses, this type of taxonomy would be transfigured into a certain mystique of the individuality of any “community of blood”, setting peoples and nations irrevocably apart, in as many distinct “sub-species” of the human species.

Nevertheless, the most important “invention” belongs to Herder, who shifted the problem from the realm of geography or biology, to that of philosophy. Arguing against his master, Kant, and the entire Enlightenment school of thought, he postulated in his treaty on the origins of language the fact that He who gave man the gift of thinking had done so together with the gift of language (Herder, 1772/1977). Diversity is thus original, set by God in the diversity of languages and entailing, by virtue of the postulated simultaneity of language and thought, the diversity of reasons: each population speaking a given language will thus ab initio also be endowed with its peculiar reason, the famous Volksgeist. Translated into the proper terms of linguistics by Humboldt, and developed by the Neo-Humboldtians, this idea will nourish sui generis the origins of American anthropology through Boas and the “emic” study of American-Indian languages, until the famous cultural relativism of Sapir or Whorf. The language thus becomes the consecrated space of the difference, being only later territorialized through the mapping of linguistic spaces, with the area of dissemination of a language or of an idiom forming the design criterion of the first “ethnographic atlases”. The geographical space, the people inhabiting it and the language they speak will combine in various ways and to various degrees, to define and describe the spaces of difference – or rather a kind of topos-es, in the more ancient Greek meaning of belonging to a there. So, for instance, to Adolf Bastian, the founder of German ethnology, the human species relies on a finite and general repertory of Elementargedanken, elementary ideas similar to the atoms and the isolated cells. These are the common heritage of people everywhere and forever, which “thinks within us”, therefore founding the constants which can be rediscovered in all the cultures of the world, beyond their diversity. As far as the diversity of cultures is concerned, it stems, according to Bastian, from the process of “individualization” that is exerted by the different contexts in which these cultures exist, with Bastian naming those contexts as “geographical provinces”. The historical interaction of elementary general human ideas with particular geographical provinces generates the so-called Völkergedanken, the peoples’ ideas, particular visions of the world, according to which various societies organize their particular social life. The latter are different both from “ecotypes” (variations due to the differences of environment), and from “convergences” (similarities derived from environmental resemblances) – that is, from the “mere” adjustments to the environment. The ethnic spirit and the geographical province within and through which it has appeared subsequently merge into such a topos of cultural specificity. In the same spirit – although different in certain respects -, Ratzel will propose in 1882 the concept of “ethnographic region” (Ethnographiches Land) and in 1898, his disciple, Frobenius, will entrust to a brilliant career the concept of “cultural circle” (Kulturkreis). Developed by Schurtz, Graebner and the Vienna school, the idea will then cross the Atlantic, with Clark Wissler achieving, in 1917, the ordering of American Indian cultures into geo-cultural areas, as well as proposing the concept of “cultural pattern”, which will, in its turn, witness a long history in American anthropology. In this context, Ruth Benedict, another advocate of the idea of “cultural pattern”, will thus sum up the generic significance of this approach: “The study of cultural behavior can no longer be pursued be equating the local particular patterns with the generic primitive. The anthropologists are shifting their attention from the study of primitive culture to that of

primitive cultures and the implications of this shift from singular to plural are just starting to become evident.” (Benedict, 1968, pp.35-36) After its days of glory, the idea of cultural space will be discarded both in Western Europe and the United States. On the contrary, in eastern and northern Europe, it will pursue its career, especially in connection with the drafting of national ethnographic atlases meant to set the stage for the nation as a specific cultural space. One can speak, I believe, in all these instances, of an autochthonistic ideology, which places and regards spatial differences as many “spatial” individualities, organically linked to that generic and original space, endowed in different ways and to different extents with the determining and convergent attributes of the environment, race and language. But this “placement” of the rules of the game is possible only under a specific understanding of history: instead of a sacred origine of the world, a human origine of history is set up; social life flows of this historical origine, thus becoming…unhistorical. Playing with Weber, one could say that a verzauberte Geschichte takes the place of a relatively entzauberte Welt, God mastering being thus not entirely outrooled: this human origine of history is usually a divine gift12. The autochthonous space is thus constitutively a mystical time13.

c) Man and the humanist ideology

In the frame of anthropological thinking, we may speak about a “humanist” ideology as far as it is concerned with the trans-spatial and trans-temporal unity of humankind. As such, and mainly in its early forms, it is co-extensive with the coming of anthropology in as far as all forms of anthropological thinking have ended by taking this idea of unity for granted and adopting a vision or another of its nature and functioning.

“The debate was carried out on two frontlines. The first was a religious one. Although most of the educated people would take the belief that the fair-skinned and well-dressed Europeans, just like themselves, had to belong to a species broadly different from that of the dark-skinned and naked savages described by travelers-cum-ethnographers, the irrefutable truth is that the Book of The Genesis asserted that the entire humankind was descended from Noah. And whatever the intellectuals of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries might have privately thought, very few were ready to publicly expose views that ran counter to the Holy Book. The example of Ham could be used as an excuse to legitimize the enslavement of the black people from Africa, without by this making them the members of a totally different species; and, anyway, the American Indians weren’t even black !

The second frontline on which this theme was developed pertained to a debate between philosophers, preoccupied with the moral nature of man at an abstract, idealistic 12 There is a recurrent temptation in Romanian historiography – and historical imagery – to consider that Romanians (as people/nation) were born Christians, thus equating a political and a religious origin. Orthodoxy will accompany the definition of the nation till our days.13 The highly influential case of the brothers Grimm may be reminded in this respect: „…the nostalgia of the brothers Grimm was oriented toward the origins of history. (...) Used in this sense, ‚historic’ almost means ‚out of history’. (...) It is obvious that this theory could be put to practice only by adoption or reduction. It became indispensable to ‚place’ in a certain way this origin: in fact, Jacob Grimm was not interested just in myth, but in German mythology.” (Bausinger, op.cit.: 41) Under these circumstances it is not surprising that „the work that played a primordial role in the development of Volkskunde was not entitled ‚History’ (...) but Mythology.” (idem: 39)

level, and biologists-naturalists, preoccupied with defining man as a zoological species. The former would present their arguments in the pattern of an imaginary social history, which basically presupposed that man is a unit, although human societies are different; the latter were preoccupied with distinguishing the varieties of humankind, just as they used to distinguish the varieties of animals, birds, plants and insects.” (Leach, 1980: 70-71) Nevertheless, the unity of mankind becomes a working premise, even if the further focus might be on difference – with Bastian, for instance, being a good example in this respect.

In its further elaborations, it was looking for the “human constants” or “universals”, as they used to be called for many decades. These could be searched in the psychological settings of man, as, for instance, with Lévi Strauss’ structuralism (one should remind here that for the French author, anthropology is, finally, a psychology14), or in the settings of society, as it was mainly the case with the British tradition of social anthropology. In both cases, this universalistic approach was meant to organize and explain cultural/societal differences and not to disregard them.

Shifts from “structure” to “process” and “dynamics” also meant a coming-back of the difference as different trajectories and differentiating mechanisms, without necessarily out-staging the universalistic frame of mind of these approaches. With change rather then functional equilibrium being on the front stage, the individual actor was also ascribed a more and more important role in these changes, individualistic methodological claims becoming thus more frequent in the context of otherwise rather holistic tradition of anthropological approaches. In fact, with the more recent developments of the field, such classical “brands” are less and less useful in the classification of schools and trends of anthropological thinking.

* * *

14 Levi-Strauss is explicitly searching for the deep common structures of the “human spirit”. Anthropologists like him “tend to write of cultural systems being composed by a kind of collectivity – ‘the human mind. From this they infer that it is necessary to study a number of contrasted empirical examples (…) before we can be confident that we know what is the common abstract ‘reality’ which underlies them all.” (Leach, 1976: 5) Shared by all the members of the humankind, these deep structures of the common “human spirit” do not seem to be performing as such in each individual actor, this approach being thus methodologically rather holistic then individualistic.

The Primitive and The Autochthonous emerged as the main eponymous heroes of the Difference in modern European thought. Both stand for an origin, thus each founding a distinct series of ordering the differences: in the first case, a “weak” origin, placed at the beginnings of the entire humankind, from which the latter can and must distance itself consciously and militantly through its progressive evolution, gradually sucking in the differences into a unity of “end of history”; in the second case, a “strong” origin of each separate social individuality, which each of them can and must re-produce, perpetuating the human socio-diversity which Herder envisaged under the sign of Proteus. Social changes at the scale of mankind are also opposed from these two perspectives: they fall within an entropic process of homogenizing, in the first case, and make up a recurrent heterogenizing in the second case. Modernity, in its turn, emerges rather more like a gap in time, in the first case, and more like discontinuities in space, in the latter15.

With the generic Man as place of human autonomy, Unity rather then difference is on stake, anthropologists scrutinizing what is common and not what is different between primitive and civilized cultures and what is shared by different local, autochthonous societies. Difference being back-staged, modernity as fundamental difference is also shadowed, being considered rather as “complexity”.

15 This difference may be expressed also in two opposite metaphores of wisdom: become what you are ! (the famous gothean Werde was du bist) versus be what you become !.

Behind the two generic ideologies of difference obviously lie fundamental political stakes – and fundamentally opposed. Both of them are also embedded, of course, in larger legitimating power discourses. The “primitivistic” one is founding the uniqueness in time of the western world – or, to be more precise, of the most “civilized” part of it –, self-placed as finishing-line of this evolution of mankind. Primitivism presupposes the messianic pride and the responsibility of the “civilized world” for being the ideal of The Other, and for promoting that ideal at the scale of the whole mankind, until the dissolution of the differences in the earthly paradise of the capitalist market or the communist society, both of them at earth-wide. Autochthonism amends this hegemonic grandeur in the name of marginal or marginalized cultures, which are yet postulated as equi-valent, therefore, as equal in rights on the world stage, promoting the complementary pride and responsibility of the ideal of the Self – and thus of a perpetual plural world. Promoting the uniqueness in space, autochthonism is opposing the equality of co-existing cultures to the hierarchical vision of societies different in time, with Herder already tracing, in this respect and as pointed out by Louis Dumont (1983), the future rights of peoples and/or cultures. Speaking of the venerable and “outdated” primitivistic ideology, Françoise Paul-Lévy remarked that nowadays “we still find it very hard to accept the fact that primitive societies do not represent the original state of societies. And that, because of at least two reasons: on the one hand, if we give up turning them into the image of the origin, we no longer know how to think the difference or the differences between these societies and our society; on the other hand, because due to this image offered by primitive societies, we believe that we can think our own history.” (Paul-Lévy, ibid.: 311-312) Primitivism has perpetuated itself until today, shedding only the idealistic layer of intellectual and moral improvement – of “human nature” as Comte had foreseen – in order to beat a pragmatic retreat into the realm of economic improvement, “the arrow of time” no longer separates more “primitive” societies from more “civilized” ones, but societies which are more or less “developed” 16. On the other hand, we can also say that some societies feel the complementary difficulty of giving up the image offered by the Autochthous from the same two reasons. In brief, without the Primitive some find it very difficult to think their own difference; without the Autochthonous, others find it very difficult to think their own specificity; without both, we all find it very difficult to think our own history or that which we have been used to consider so. In this respect, we may say that we are leaving in a neo-modern world, with neo-primitivistic and neo-autochtonistic practices (rather then ideologies) fighting for the “good solution” of ruling a mondialized population.

16 At a seminar dealing with southeast Europe, in order to illustrate the economic situation of the region, one economist told the participants, after computing for a time on his laptop, that “Athens is 45 years away from Vienna”.

This is perhaps also due to the fact that, beyond packages of different theories and arguments, which complement or contradict each other, which come and go like any theory, the two “ideologies” also designate in their depths two major complementary and alternative cosmogonies (or, if you would rather, sociogonies), which sought to give meaning to the existence of Man in the new and “disenchanted” world of modernity, replacing the sacred order of the “traditional” (customary) worlds. As meaningful social representations, the latter have a different duration and consistency than the theories they fuel – and are relatively immune to their passing. Although we “know” that their rational validity is at least debatable, although we claimed the “death of ideologies”, “we find it hard” to fully renounce them, and we do so because such a renunciation would throw us into a deep crisis of the meaning – which actually happens to the extent of this renunciation. It is as if “time as time-in-itself” or “space as space-in-itself” were, through their passing icons, some ultimate revealed realities, the only apt to give a meaning to our social life, beyond its contingent contradictions. It is as if we still live, in various ways and to various degrees, within the cult of the ancestors of modernity, The Primitive and The Autochthonous…

This conclusion is true, of course, only without counting with the proclaimed winner of the story: the Individual. Embedded in a legitimating power discourse too, this universalistic ideology contributed to the “défense et illustration” of the universal human rights, challenging all kinds of particularistic claims.

But even so, one cannot disregard the fact that the Primitive and the Autochthonous still “strike back” permanently in our mondialized societies and that the Man of the humanistic ideology is neither precisely this Individual…

4. Anthropological methodologiesWe would like to address now a crucial methodological distinction, running

through the whole history of anthropology: the opposition of what Leach labels rationalism and empiricism: “…before you can hope to explain anything you need to understand what is going on. What are the facts which need to be explained ? On this issue most contemporary discussion among social anthropologists exhibits a tension between two contrasted attitudes, empiricist and rationalist.

The empiricist position is perhaps best represented by the ‘transactional viewpoint of Frederik Barth (1966) which is a development from the functionalist tradition originally established by Malinowski and Raymond Firth, which in turn is quite close to the structural-functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown and Gluckman and their many intellectuactual descendants. Empiricists assume that the basic task of the anthropologist in the field is to record directly-observed, face-to-face behaviours of members of a local community interacting with one another in their day-to-day activities.

This localized field of human activity is then analysed as one in which social persons, acting out the customary conventions associated with their particular roles and statuses, engage in economic transactions. (…) In this case, what is described as the ‘social structure’ of the system is a derivation from sets of such directly observed transactions. Empiricist anthropologists steer clear of argument about ‘the structure of ideas current within a society’ which most of them would consider to be a second order, unobservable, abstraction invented by theoreticians. (…)

The contrasted rationalist standpoint is prototypically represented by the work of Levi-Strauss and by some of the later writings of Evans-Pritchard.

The rationalism in question is not that of Descartes, who believed that by following rigorous procedures of logical argument we can develop in the mind a ‘true’ model of the universe which exactly corresponds to the phenomenal objective universe which we perceive through our senses, but something closer to the ‘new science’ of Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher, which recognized that the imaginative operations of human minds are ‘poetic’ and are not trammeled by fixed, easily specified rules of Aristotelian and mathematical logic.

Levi-Straussian rationalists call themselves ‘structuralists’, but structure here refers to the structure of ideas rather than the structure of society.

Because of their interest in ideas as opposed to objective facts rationalist anthropologists tend to be more concerned with what is said than with what is done.” (Leach, 1976: 4-5)

To resume: “According to the predilections of the author we find that special stress is laid either on the structure of ideas, or on the structure of society” (idem:3).

Leach does not consider these two methodological choices as contradictory but rather as complementary, most of the actual anthropologists claiming their combination. Nevertheless, such “special stress” can be identified throughout the history of anthropological thinking and is frequently embedded in larger cultural/ideological preferences.

We may now resume all the distinctions we made in the following scheme:

Empiricism Rationalism

Primitivism (forms of) evolutionism(e.g. Morgan) (e.g. Levy-Bruhl)

Autochthonism (American) culturalism (German) Volkskunde Humanism (British) soc. anthrop. (French) structuralism

Such a classification, as sketchy and oversimplifying as it may be, is meant just to help a meaningful “location” of Romanian diffuse ethnology in the broader frame of alternatives developed in the XIXth and XXth centuries “anthropological” thinking. But can we – and should we – speak about “anthropology” in all these cases ?

5. Anthropology and ethnologyIt is a well-known fact that the use of the terms “anthropology” and “ethnology” –

without mentioning more “regional-bounded” terms such as Volks/Völkerkunde or Laographia – had a very different history in different socio-political and institutional contexts, what was called “ethnology” in one context being labeled rather as “anthropology” in another and vice versa. It is also well-known that some attempts were made to order them in an epistemological clear system, such as for instance Lévi-Strauss’ claims about the normative relations between ethnography, ethnology and anthropology. Disregarding these more or less random terminological traditions, we would like to use

here the two terms in order to name what seems to us to be two distinct, even if complementary, types of discourse and approach: anthropology for what Stocking (….) addresses as “empire-building ethnology” and ethnology for what the same labels “nation-building ethnology”. Stocking’s formulas have the advantage to clearly point to two different political challenges, asking for different types of answers. Naming them anthropology, respectively, ethnology also points to the different frames of reference these answers had to take into consideration: the whole Mankind, in the first case and one particular People, in the second17. When aiming to control the Other, anthropology helped by ordering all these Others in a useful system of human differences. When, on the contrary, the aim was rather to protect or confirm Oneself, ethnology had to focus on the specificity of this social Self. The objects the two approaches had in mind and the methodological rules they obeyed to might have been similar or even identical, but addressing them by differently oriented types of questioning and stakes could result but in different types of discourses: a (mainly) anthropological one or a (mainly) ethnological one. In this respect, speaking about a domestic or native anthropology should be considered, as Hastrup (1996) states, a “contradiction in terms”.

Of course, in reality this distinction usually did not functioned in such a clear-cut way. If we take, for instance, the case of what we called “American culturalism”, beyond its loosely defined identity, one would hardly decide whether it is an “anthropological” or an “ethnological” type of discourse. The key-concept of “pattern” and especially its molding into the configurational point of view are a good example. “The idea that cultural patterns or the total-culture pattern shapes specific cultural traits, and that it patterns covert and overt individual behavior (thereby endowing cultural systems with self-directed goal orientation, the quality that systems theorists call equifinality), has deep roots in the American Historical Tradition” (Honigmann, 1976: 203), going back, as in so many other cases, to Franz Boas. With one of his followers, Ruth Benedict, it was phrased in one of the most well known expression. “Every culture, she asserts, in Patterns of Culture – reiterating Lowie’s thesis that, in terms of historical origins, every culture is a thing of ‘shreds and patches’ – selects from a great range of potential interests, activities, and institutions, and in its own way elaborates those it chooses.” (ibid.) A kind of general human repertory lays at the background, similar to some extent to Bastian’s vision, only the “selection” is done in this case by History and not by Geography. What matters then is history and the particular pattern or configuration of culture it produced. The focus is thus on particularity – on “specificity” one could say – but backed by a clear recognition of a common background of the humankind. One could be tempted to consider this ‘shreds and patches’ solution as a kind of federative autochthonism, fitting with the political federalism of the United States… The Janus-faced case of Volks/Völker-kunde is even more complex.

This strategic difference between anthropology and ethnology can be approached also from the point of view of “belonging”: the universalistic ideologies of primitivism and humanism have a representation of humanity as their frame of belonging, while the particularistic views of autochthonism are stressing on representations of a particular collective belonging. This polarity is thus consistent with the one suggested by Dumont 17 One may remind here also the famous methodological claim of Levi-Strauss, considering that if one wants to approach Man, then he has to practice a “regard éloigné”; when approaching men, one has not to “put at distance” his object of concern. Of course, anyone may take a “regard éloigné” to his close fellow neighbors; the problem is not of scientific skills but of a prevailing interest in Man or men.

(1983) when opposing the “German model” (I am German and human in my quality of German) and the “French model” (I am human and French by accident). The political needs and cultural trends in the management of belonging and exclusion will thus influence in time and space the variability of anthropological/ethnological answers that will be developed closer to one or the other of these theoretical solutions.

Part II Modernity and ethnology in Romania

After having circumscribed in the introduction the invented object of diffuse ethnology in Romania, the whole first part of this essay took us very far from this declared object of concern. In doing so, we just followed “the central dogma of functionalism18 that cultural details must always be viewed in context” (Leach, 1976: 5) And, if the Romanian nation-building ethnology is the “cultural detail” one has to comprehend, “modernity, anthropology and ethnology” – the content of our first part of the essay – are, we believe, its proper context of meaning. Nevertheless, we have to make now more explicit how this broad “context” is linked with the “object” of our concern in the perspective of the approach we choused to follow.

Our intention is to highlight the Romanian nation-building diffuse ethnology from the particular point of view of belonging/exclusion, i.e. as part of a process of defining and defending the “rational” subject of this new type of belonging: the “national” one. Of course, as we have suggested in the first part, belonging/exclusion is just one main component of what may be called the field of sociality. The rules of the game, their means, the forms of belonging/exclusion and the rationality binding them together form a global field of interactions and inter-conditionings in which no single component can be considered as the causal one. Nevertheless, the contextual social, economic and, of course, political interests on stake in the (re)definitions of the “rational” subject of belonging/exclusion may be considered as playing the role of an “efficient cause” in the global (re)configurations of this “field of sociality”.

Placing the Romanian diffuse ethnology in this “field of sociality” then means to search, on one side, for the contextual stakes and constrains to which one may ascribe in a legitimate way the role of having produced the reconfigurations of this field of sociality in the long run of the nation building, and, on the other side, for the “ethnological” answers developed in response to these specific demands and in as far as they express this privileged component of belonging/exclusion19. Of course, there is here a methodological cut through the circularity of these aspects, the emerging “responses” (re)defining in fact the very context of “efficient causes”. The “ethnological” reactions to the nation-building context were thus growing into this very context of nation building as part of its on-going “stakes and constrains”.

18 We would prefer to speak about „functional analysis” instead of functionalism, which suggests just one academic trend sharing this all-anthropological belief. 19 When introducing his comments on the history of Romanian sociology, H. H. Stahl claims that „judging the social theories as ways of critical reflection on social problems is the correct way to make the ‚sociology of sociologists’” (H. H. Stahl, 2001: 12). The approach suggested here is following, sui generis, this almost common sense recommendation of rooting the history of social thinking in the specific context of social problems theory is trying to address and solve.

Both these “context” and “answers” cannot be limited to the space of the to-be Romanian nation-state for the very obvious reason that both were part of a much broader reconfiguration process of the inter-national field of sociality – and mainly because both were defined, to a large extend, outside Romania by more powerful actors of this process.

There is a final “ethical” issue we would like to address before approaching our main object of concern. What gives us the right to think that we can judge past problems in a more rational way then the thinkers that lived with these problems managed to do ? – is wondering the same H. H. Stahl. Of course, we have the advantage of history: we know what they din not – and could not – know at these past times. But this is just an advantage and not a merit – considers Stahl. It is thus “proper to keep a respectful attitude toward our old men. Even regarding those who we know very well as having belonged to the opposite camp in the case we would have been contemporaneous with them” (Stahl, op. cit.: 22). “Context-seeking” is thus not just a methodological request, but also a moral one. Morality, in this sense, is rooted in methodology (or vice versa ?). Anyhow, comprehension may occur only through a “context-friendly” approach and not by de-contextualized a posteriori value judgments20.

1. The context. Stakes and constrains of Romanian nation building

The large context of the nation-building Romanian diffuse ethnology is the general process of inventing the Nation(-State) as the political embodiment of modern quest for the autonomy of Man. Its full expression is the finally world-wide accepted principle of the self-determination of nations. In a way, this is the new proclaimed “rule of the game”. But in order to “play” it, the very “actors” had to be defined – if not produced: the Nation is also a new type of belonging. But who and how should decide these new belongings/exclusions, who and how is to “determine” this Self of the one nation – one state “self-determination” ?

In the present text we intend to focus on the nation (and its building process) as a challenging type of belonging/exclusion, part of a larger restructuring of the whole “field of sociality”. It is only from this point of view that we will address the peculiarities of the Romanian nation-building process, without taking in any particular theory of nation/state building. We will thus organize our brief description along the main components of the “field of sociality”, being aware all the time, of course, about the fact that such a sequence is rather a rhetorical arrangement then a historical design.

20 History is revisited always on purpose. When writing his book about the German Volkskunde in 1971, Hermann Bausinger intended to subject this field of knowledge to a “choc therapy”, tracking down all its old and “venerable” roots that led, willingly or not, to its moral and scientific bankrupt with the Nazis ideology. It was only such a “choc therapy” that could further on enabled a creative and up-dated re-shaping of the discipline in Germany, turning it to what Bausinger named an “empiric science of culture” (empirische Kulturwissenschaft). It is in this militant respect that Bausinger is tracing down long lasting and uncritical legacies, putting the blame – not without nuances – on their initial producers. It is the case, for instances, with Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl to whom is ascribed a “direct responsibility” for the lack of any analytical approach and the poverty of scientific methods of the future German Volkskunde (Bausinger, 1971: 61). Personally, I am rather cautious about such a retrospective responsibility, being nevertheless aware of the need of a retrospective critique of such largely unaware but profound agencies. This is also due to the fact that such a much need “choc therapy” in the post-communist Romania should take into consideration also the opposite trend of putting the blame pell-mell on the Romanian “nationalists” and thus discarding in an easy-going “deconstructivist” way the whole field of “nation-building ethnology”.

1.1. Belonging and exclusion. The Oriental crisis and the shared stakes of independence and unity

Let us start by reminding the quite opposite case of France, where the strong monarchic state produced much before the national stake an almost ready subject of national belonging. In its efforts “to empty out the substance of the local powers and to clear away the local peculiarities”, the monarchic state “has produced a homogeneous and strongly centralized structure of government. (…) Bringing to uniformity the ideas and the tastes through the institutions and the model of education she was promoting but also by the model of mobility she was proposing, the monarchic centralization was simultaneously inspiring an unitary conception of society; it means the conviction that its functioning obeys to some simple and rational principles.” (Bourguière, 2000). And Bourguière is reminding an extraordinary statement by Tocqueville: ‘France was [before Revolution] the country where people have become the most alike with each other’. Inequality of statuses and wrights apart, the population of this political space of the strong centralized monarchic state was sharing the same legitimate belonging. It had just to fight for its “self-determination”…

Ethnological approaches of the French population will also be specific, influenced by the context of this political construction of the “Frenchman”. “One has to question – Bourguière suggests – why the discovery of the singularity of popular culture did not engendered the idea of a national culture embedded in the peasants’ customs, and why neither Legrand d’Aussy, nor Dulaure, Cambry or Lenoir did not turn to French Herder. Why, to put it other way, the idea of cultural singularity, as a way of thinking about social practices, was quickly replaced by the observers of the society with the measure of economic and moral deviations. Due to this missed start, the ethnological approach of cultural diversity in France was giving free play to an unifying and dynamic view of society, to a sociology of France.” (idem)

Nothing of this kind in a country such as Romania, where the population of the to-be nation was not preliminary forged into an unity of shared belonging by a strong political actor ! Ethnological approaches were thus, as we will see, also very different.

The Romanian principalities (Moldova and Muntenia) were feudal boyar states leaded by a voievode, representing and being controlled mainly by the boyar class, the very few attempts done at the beginning of the XVIIIth century to shape the state as a strong hereditary monarchy ending in dramatic ways. The emergence of a strong monarchic state was against the interests of both the boyars and the Ottoman Empire. In Transylvania, belonging to the Habsburg Empire, Romanians had almost no political voice, although demographically they were the largest population of the county.

Under these circumstances, for the Romanian Principalities (as well as for other countries of the region) “the winds of change” started to blow with the so-called “oriental crisis”, i.e. the decline of the Ottoman Empire. With the first signs of its weakness (the Vienna defeat in 1683, the Karlovitz peace in 1699), the two neighboring empires started to “move East”, with Austria ruling over Oltenia for a while and Peter the Great reaching with his army the eastern border of Moldavia, the Nistru. The long lasting tributary status of the two principalities started to be challenged.

The first one to react was, of course, the Ottoman Empire itself. After the “treason” of Moldavia’s voievode Dimitrie Cantemir and his runaway to Russia in 1711 and the assassination in Istanbul of Muntenia’s voievode Constantin Brâncoveanu in 1714, and in order to better control the political loyalty as well as the economical tribute of the two principalities – not surprisingly longing more and more for diplomatic support from the Ottomans’ enemies – the Sublime Porte decided to replace the local chosen voievodes with its own representatives, loyal administrative servants from the “Phanar” district in Istanbul. During a century long period (until 1821), known as “the Phanariot” one, the two Romanian provinces lost their state autonomy as well as some main rights of their local boyars.

On the other side, beside Austria and Russia who were directly involved in this regional crisis, the European powers such as France, Great Britain, and, to some extent, Prussia, became also more and more interested in the regional evolutions. Initial “statistical21 reports” by “occasional” travelers were replaced in the second part of the XVIIIth century by stable consulates (Russia in 1782, Austria in 1783, Prussia in 1784 and France in 1798), playing a very active role in the inner political life of the two provinces. Their initial mainly political interests were doubled more and more by economical ones, especially after the Kuciuc Kainargi (1774) and Adrianopol (1829) treaties and the gradual integration of the Romanian provinces in the free capitalist commerce system. Comercial treates, especially with the Habsburg Empire, were (also) diplomatic weapons, trying to place the Romanian provinces in the western space of economic interests, and thus becoming “decisive steps on Romania’s way toward independence” (Kellogg, 2002: 138). The prospect of some independent national units, political friendly and economical useful partners, got thus more and more momentum.

During all this period of highly conflicting external interests, the inner situation was not only one of extreme taxation (at the end of the period, in 1921-22, 45% of Moldavia’s treasury for instance was still taking the road of Istanbul), but also one of instability and insecurity: the average duration of a reign, for instance, was less then two years, and the territory of the Romanian provinces has “lodged” the wars and campaigns between the neighboring powers for a cumulative time of about 25 years (Georgescu, 1991). “…and what was even worse, the risk to disappear (…) as state entities was also emerging” (Stahl, op. cit.: 25).

Under these circumstances, “apariţia statului a corespuns nevoii elitelor de a păstra un control asupra propriilor resurse, în condiţii în care nesfîrşitele dispute teritoriale între puterile europene periclitau continuitatea şi stabilitatea oricăror structuri socio-economice. Absenţa unui statut internaţional precum şi obligaţia de a întreţine trupe străine cantonate pe teritoriul provinciilor româneşti face ca, într-o primă instanţă, problema suveranităţii (subl. noastră), în cadrele încă necontestate ale dependenţei otomane şi protectoratului internaţional al marilor puteri, să devină o urgenţă. Crearea unor instituţii statale capabile să asigure o asemenea funcţie era în primul rînd un mod de asigurare a intereselor elitelor însele: interese economice, legate de exportul de grîne – şi politice, afectate de imprevizivilul dependenţei de jocurile marilor Imperii.” (Lazăr, 2002: 94) The desire of the large population of peasants to get ride of this worsened state of affaire is also to be taken into consideration.

21 In the original sense of a “science of the state”, concerned by maps, demography, communication, main products, and other kinds of data useful for the administration of a territory.

But how could the Romanian principalities, without an “international status” and having lost even their own rights of self-control to impose – or at least propose – such a state-building ? “Their immediate task was to find the needed arguments proving that the Romanian populations of all the three provinces – of Transylvania, Moldavia and Muntenia – are autochthonous, that they form one single People of Latin origin, their rights being thus at least equal to those of the populations that came afterwards in the former Dacia.” (Stahl, op.cit.: 26) This claims of “autochthonicity” had further reasons with the local boyars. Even before the “Phanariot period”, the boyars were split into two competing categories, the “country boyars” (boieri de ţară) and the “Istanbul boyars” (boieri de Ţarigrad), of alien origins. Under the Phanariot rule, this conflict was exacerbated, the claim of being autochthonous getting thus much more weight for the old local boyars that have lost their privileges. In this socio-political context, autochthonicity, i.e. roman origin and continuity on the territory of former Dacia, was just the best card the Romanian provinces could play. Pârvan had thus good reasons when stating that “the funding idea of the Romanian culture [meaning the “national culture”] is the idea of Rome” (Pârvan, 1920).

This “idea of Rome” has its origins in the late XVIIth, and is clearly stated and promoted by the humanist prince of Moldavia, Dimitrie Cantemir. In his famous Descriptio Moldaviae, elaborated in the humanist tradition inaugurated by Flavio Biondo’s Italia Illustrata (1451) and published in 1716, he is raising his voice against the Slavonic as official language of the Orthodox church, considering it as “alien” and “barbarian”, imposed long time ago over the Romanians by the Bulgarian patriarch Teoctist in order to move them away from their Latin, occidental roots. Thus, “two links are set down by Cantemir: the link between the Romanians from everyway, and the link of the Romanians from everyway with the Romanian soil. Without any doubts, this is one of the greatest ideas of our nation…” (Iorga, 1901: 403).

But the main impetus for these ideas will come later on from Transylvania and spread over in the two Romanian provinces by the militant works of the “Transylvanian School” (Scoala ardeleană). Fueled by the Greco-catholic priests and intellectuals that, after the “union with Rome” of a part of the Transylvanian orthodox Romanians in 1697, were sent in catholic schools abroad22 – and, most important, in Rome, – this movement went further and deeper with the claims about the Roman origins of Romanians. The reasons were obvious: at this time, the Romanians of Transylvania were still tolerati inter status, non recepti, so that the emerging Romanian elites had to fight much harder for their basic recognition and rights as Romanians. Rome was not only the origin, as already stated by the Moldavian XVIIth century chroniclers, but there is a Roman-Romanian continuity of history. “It was for the first time that the history of Romanians was considered as a whole” (Eliade, 2000: 244), starting not at different periods for the different provinces, but for all of them with 106, the year of Traian’s victory over the Dacians. Language too, was no more just of Latin origin, but a Latin language that has to

22 It is a kind of irony of the history to note that the two important moments when the Roman origin thesis was clearly stated as a (pre)national claim were due, in a way, to the catholic propaganda trying to convert the hostile orthodox population of Romanians: Moldavian chroniclers became aware of the Latin origin by learning good Latin from the Jesuit priests in Poland and the leaders of the Transylvanian School got their insights in the Budapest, Vienna and mainly Rome schools where they were sent by the Catholic church to strengthen their “true” catholic faith. “The Orthodox church never was la înălţimea acestei misiuni” – Pompiliu Eliade sadly notes (Eliade, op. cit.: 241).

be resettled in its purity – starting thus with the (re)introduction of the Latin alphabet. Exaggerated as it was, this “Latinist movement” played an extremely mobilizing role in the neighboring Romanian provinces, both by the circulation of its writings and by the migration of some of its leaders in Moldavia and Muntenia. As noted by Pompiliu Eliade (op. cit.), it also strongly influenced, though in an indirect and even unwilling way, the relations with France, considered more and more not only as a fashionable reference but mainly as “our bigger sister” of the prestigious Latin family.

Territory (rooted in the former Roman Empire province of Dacia)23 and language (and, letter on, culture, both of Latin origin) will become the ever-lasting landmarks of the Romanian sovereignty and identity claims; Romania as an “island of Latinity”, having just the Black Sea as a faithful neighbor, will be a lasting metaphor of the national imagery. But above all, this “idea of Rome” was a central political manifesto of independence and unity. “This common origin had in the view of Romanians the same importance a shared living in an unitary state would have had.” (Eliade, op. cit. : 233) It was around – and thanks to – this idea that the Romanian people was built into a unified subject of independence24.

To conclude, we may quote again H. H. Stahl: “Cred (…) că trebuie să se ţie seama de necesitatea, pentru întreaga clasă boierească, cît şi pentru cea ţărănească, de a face dovada că ‘rumânii’ sunt autohtoni, direct descendenţi din romani, întîmplător căzuţi în robie, dar avînd tot dreptul să lupte pentru recîştigarea autonomiei lor, ‘umanismul’ [that flourished in the Romanian principalities starting with the XVIIth century] putînd fi în acest scop de un real folos, ca mijloc de propagandă în tot Apusul European. Permanenta referire la originea noastră latină avea în cazul nostru (şi nu numai în cazul nostru) valoarea unei teze de politică militantă, de apărare a dreptului nostru la viaţă, sub forma unei ostentative şi trufaşe revendicări a unei nobleţe aruncată în obrazul altor neamuri, barbare, de inferioară calitate, care doar prin siluire ajunseseră stăpîne pe pămîntul strămoşesc al Daciei. Dacia ea însăşi era mereu invocată, cu intenţii iredentiste din ce în ce mai clare, de afirmare a tezei că românii din Transilvania, Moldova şi Muntenia sunt un singur neam, dăinuind neclintit pe teritoriul lor strămoşesc.” (Stahl, op. cit.: 30) To put it briefly: independence (or, as it used to be called at these times, “inner autonomy”) being the main stake for both the boyars and the peasants, the (Latin rooted) autochthonous character of all the Romanians was the main – if not the only available – political mean of legitimating this claim of “autonomy”; lacking a strong and shared political space of belonging (a “nation”), the Romanian populations could build themselves into a unitary and autonomous subject of belonging only around a proclaimed

23 „The earliest mention of territorial loses appeared in the petition submitted to the Porte in 1774 by the Moldavians. Many others followed and a lot of writers were expressing this concern. In a petition of Mihail Sturdza, in 1829, these territorial claims are accompanied by the idea of natural borders. These were identified by writers like Nicolae Râmniceanu or Zilot Românul with the old territory of Dacia. (cf. Georgescu, 1971). „The problem of territory and the struggle for recognition of natural frontiers provided a forum in which national feelings were first able to express themselves, with incipient irredentist features, including the entire territory inhabited by the Romanians, the old Dacia” (Georgescu, op. cit.: 165).24

One lasting problem of this kind of political building is that, as a “subject of independence” rather then of “liberty”, the People-Nation is a subject-against, constitutively depending in its acts of belonging-“defining and defending” on exclusivist and permanent exclusion claims and permanently fearing its own exclusion. A propensity for a kind of “cultural sado-masochism” becomes thus a prevailing characteristic.

common heritage and as heritors of these common ancestors; the prestige of these ancestors was, beyond any doubts, an important card to play. The Romanian nation is thus the achievement of a shared historical destiny of heritors on their original homeland, the state presenting himself as the artisan of this achievement. “The nation-state is self-presenting himself from the very beginning as the fulfillment of a collective destiny; even more, he is proposing himself as a preliminary condition of the building of the nation and not the other way around (the nation belongs to the state and not the state to the nation !).” (Lazăr, 2002: 108) This is true in as far as, for a certain period, the stake of an “independent state” prevails over that of an “autonomous nation” and thus the state-won independence and unity may – and, to some extend, has to – stand for the coming into being of the “modern nation”. With a deep-rooted and long-lasting metaphor, the state may be considered as the awakener of a dormant collectivity of amnesiac heritors25, the Romanian nation being thus the recurrent miracle of rebirths or revivals (Zub, 1983, Michelson, 2001). But the Nation – dormant or not – was always there ! With the prestigious Roman past as archetype, national elites will constantly look for and refer to mythical standards of a “golden age” of the autochthonous people (Eminescu’s complex of the Voivode, the highly prized times of the social harmony between boyars and peasants or even the image of the inter-war period for the post-communist “revival”). In this respect, one may speak about a “complex of the ancestor” in Romanian modern culture (Mihăilescu, xxxxxxxxx).

Under these circumstances, the poetics of shared territoriality stood, to a large extent, for the politics of common space. The People was leaving on a moşie (land, estate) inherited from their strămoşi (ancestors).

1.2. The means of the game. The rural crisis and property relations

The position – and positioning – of the Romanian provinces during the “oriental crisis” also drastically changed inner economic interests and relations. After Adrianopole, a new and important economic stake emerged: the selling of agricultural products, mainly cereals, on the European market. Short after Independence, in 1883, the commerce with the Ottoman Empire fall down from 29,55% to 3,82%, the export toward the Habsburg Empire being still the largest one, Great Britain becoming the second largest market, with 28,83% of the export. The nature of this export was almost exclusively agricultural (at the beginning of the 1880’s 95% of the export to Austro-Hungary was made of crops, animals and furs, 84% of the import from the same region being manufactured products), ascribing thus a semi-colony status to the young independent state of Romania (Kellog, op. cit.).

This has produced a large colonization movement of the southern plains (according to H. H. Stahl, in only several decades the population in the region became five times larger) as well as the emergence of many new towns bordering the Danube and serving as ports for the developing cereals-trading (Turnu Severin, Calafat, Turnu Măgurele, Alexandria, Giurgiu, Călăraşi, Feteşti, Brăila, Galaţi). A strong competition for access to this main resource started and went on growing during a century. The

25 The actual national hymn of Romania – a XIXth century revolutionary song – starts with „Wake up, Romanian, of your deadly sleep !”

underlying issue on stake was thus (re)defining and defending property relations linked to land and its laboring.

“Regimul proprietăţii rurale, în Principate, se cerea clarificat tot sub presiunea pieţei internaţionale şi a sistemului productiv bazat pe exporturi agrare masive. Statutul de proprietar conferă şi statut de partener legitim în schimburile economice, agent liber pe piaţă. In consecinţă, boierii doresc să obţină recunoaşterea lor ca proprietari în detrimentul clăcaşilor, principala lor forţă de muncă şi pretendenţi la statutul de proprietari. Intreg sistemul relaţiilor agrare, în secolul XIX, va gravita în jurul proprietăţii asupra pămîntului. » (Lazăr, op. cit. : 107)

But we have to be very careful about the meaning we ascribe here to “property”. As noted by Thomson, “the central concept of feudal custom was not that of property but of reciprocal obligations” (Thomson, 1991: 127). This general statement works also for the Romanian case far into the 19th century. It is thus more appropriate to use a broad anthropological approach on “property relations” as social relations and not (just) relations with a “thing”, following, for instance, Chris Hahn’s suggestion to “adopt a broad analytic concept of property in terms of the distribution of social entitlements” (Hann, 1998: 7).

What were this distribution of social entitlements in the Romanian village ?The reference social organization of the Romanian villages was the obste

devalmasa. In its archaic form, this communal village was “an association of family households, based on the common share of a territory, where the community as such has anterior and superior rights in respect to the households, rights that are performed through a leading institution called ‘obste’. [in fact, the more or less totality of the grown up autochthonous members of the community, acting as a “primitive democracy”]” (Stahl, 1959, p. 25) As such, “Romanian communal villages were apparently territorially rather than family based units from a very early period.” (Chirot, op. cit., p. 153) Compared to the better known Zadruga structure, “in Romania, the village as a whole was communal, not the extended family.” (idem, p. 141) It also had to distribute common village responsibilities, such as distribution of property and work, communal functions and mutual help. But all these “village responsibilities are emphasized far more than kin responsibilities” (Mead, 1976, p. XXIV), so that in the obste devalmasa there was no need for large domestic, kin-based, groups or households: “within the [Romanian] village, families were considerably smaller than in the zadrugal areas.” (Chirot, op. cit., p. 141) In fact, as a rule, the gospodarie is made of the parents and their unmarried children, the youngest of which will stay in the parents’ house and inherit it.

The communal “body of land” (trup de moşie) was divided in two main parts, one in permanent exploitation of the households and the other in common and itinerant exploitation. On this second territory, initially the far largest one, households were temporary entitled to work a needed piece of land according to the primitive technique called “în moină”, moving from one place to another every 2-3 years, across this joint possession of the whole village community. “Culturile agricole nu erau făcute, deci, an de an, pe aceleaşi terenuri, ci erau itinerante, adică ‘mutătoare’ de la un loc la altul, la libera voinţă a agricultorilor, care deci nu posedau terenuri în stăpînire veşnică, ci doar vremelnic. Cu excepţia desigur a terenurilor plantate cu vie sau cu pomi roditori sau pe care se construiseră case şi diverse acareturi. Dar şi aceste locuri erau stăpînite doar atîta vreme cît erau efectiv folosite, părăsirea lor însemnînd renunţarea la orice drept asupra

lor. Din punct de vedere juridic, locurile acestea se aflau în ‘stăpînire locurească’. » (idem : 56-57) Sau, cum se exprima un călător german pe la începutul secolului XVIII, « acesta este pămîntul lui cît timp stau bucatele pe el ». This free access to a “needed” piece of land, restricted only by mutual obligations of the “obşteni” (the members of the “obşte”), even if constantly limited in time, was still in practice late in the XIXth century and went on to be considered by the peasants as their “ancestral right”.

This organization of the “primitive” or “absolute” devălmăşie lasted in its more or less original form as late as the XXth century in some remote counties of Romania, but these were just exceptions. With important differences in time and space, between the XVI and the XIX centuries the obste devalmasa went through a long process of dissolution. “When a communal village was divided, land was allocated to the several large ancestral families who made up the village. The forefathers of these extended families [the Romanian name is neam, which should be translated rather by lineage!] were assumed to have been the sons or brothers of the village founder. Thus, a village would be said to ‘walk on X number of old men’ [sate umblatoare pe mosi]. The land would be divided into X number of equal strips. Each extended family then divided its own lands and gave them to the individual nuclear families [in fact, to each gospodarie of the neam]. This was done in the same way so that as many equal strips were created as there were nuclear families. Division was not always equal, for certain richer or more powerful families could impose an unequal division. Also, extended family with few descendents could hand out larger individual strips than those with more descendents, so that an individual’s placement within the village genealogy was crucial.” (Chirot, op. cit., 142) This new distribution will be settled after long debates about the number of lineages (neamuri) the communal village should be divided in, this genealogies being just instruments of customary law (Stahl, op. cit.). Kinship, reshaped by the legends of the eponym hero(s) of the village (idem), thus becomes important in order to legitimize the new territories of the village.

This form of social organization also disaggregated in different degrees and ways, the gospodarie standing still, more or less, devălmaşă, At this level of the household, defined as an economic unit of production, its members were bound by reciprocal obligations of shared work that entitled them as joint owners of a family property to be divided in equal parts between the children at their marriage, with the last born staying in the parents house and taking over their part at their death. “Noţiunea juridică de proprietate este deci înlocuită printr-un fapt, anume: prestarea muncii în colectivitate.” 26

(Stahl, 1959: 123) In spite of disaggregating, the obşte, the global village community acted and was

still considered in many respects as a “collective subject”27. The taxes, for instance, as well as other kinds of dues, were ascribed to the “obşte”, who was redistributing them according to its own practices and criteria. “When the Austrian state will try to fix the taxes for each household (by ‘fiscal unit’, to use a modern expression), what happened

26 „Property” was thus – and will last to a large extent till nowadays – rather the feeling of owning by caring (“a îngriji”, in Romanian, meaning to take/have care of, to look after). See also Adam Drazin for an insightful discussion about “grijă / a îngriji” (Drazin, 2001).27 Criatina Codarcea is reminding the origins of an old Romanian saying: „l-a prins cu mortu’n păpuşoi”, meaning that he was caught with the dead body in the fields. The explanation is that a crime was imputed to the whole community as far as the individual guilty person was not known, so that to find “a dead body in the fields” was a misfortune for the whole “obşte” (Codarcea, 2002: 49).

was that they had to sum up the total amount of the dues of the households, this amount being then re-distributed between the villagers in order to come out with the total sum requested by the state.” (Codarcea, 2002: 50) Even land reforms, trying to introduce modern property relations, did/could not settle the boundaries of the legally constituted land properties, the “obşte” being in fact entitled to distribute and labor them according to its customary practices: “Cei ce au aplicat legea rurală [din 1864] s-au mărginit a face, în fiecare sat, două părţi: partea proprietarului şi partea locuitorilor, fără a delimita locul fiecărui sătean. Astfel, azi încă sătenii posedă pămînturile lor în indiviziune” – Kogălniceanu was noting in 1906. Even the law of 1918 “nu prevedea nici o dispoziţie pentru împroprietărire, care urma să fie făcută după o lege specială mai tîrziu. Pămîntul expropriat trebuia cultivat în obşte” (Garoflid, op.cit. 581). In what concerns the relations between peasants and landlords, the “tiersage” – that developed in the Romanian provinces only late in the XVIIth century – was defining the third part of the landlord’s ownership as against the parts owned by the whole community of the village and not in respect to each household and even less so to each individual; even later on and in other respects, the landlord was defining his relations not to households or individuals, but to the whole “obşte” of the village. The emergence of the “individual” in the modern sense of the word is thus at least problematic.

On the other side, the distribution of social entitlements between the landlords and the villagers went through a chain of changes resumed by Stahl as follows:

“a) La origini, după întemeierea statelor autohtone, ţărănimea, deşi ‘liberă’, era exploatată de către clasa boierească în system ‘tributar’, continuare a celui practicat de nomazii cumani.

b) Pe la sfîrşitul veacului al XVI-lea, deci simultan cu ivirea pretutindeni în Europa marginală a unei noi forme de servaj (al doilea), o mare parte din ţărănime a fost redusă în stare de ‘servaj’, de ‘rumânie’ (sau de ‘vecinătate’), semnificativă fiind ‘legătura lui Mihai’.

c) Aceasta este epoca în care are loc constituirea marilor ‘domenii muncite în clacă’; lupta socială caracteristică a vremii fiind nu atît ‘servajul’ ţărănimii cît acumularea latifundiară de sate, curbele statistice arătînd creşterea asimptotică a satelor ‘cnezeşti’ căzute în stare de clăcăşie, dublată de o alta, arătînd efortul invers al satelor de a se elibera de ‘rumânie’, cumpărîndu-şi cu bani grei libertatea, ‘cnezeşti’.

d) Modul de producere al marilor domenii muncite în clacă se dovedeşte însă curînd a nu fi economic rentabil, ceea ce obligă la trecerea la o nouă formă de exploatare a ţărănimii, care prin acţiunile ‘mavrocordăteştilor’ este ‘liberată’ din ‘rumânie’ dar transformată în ‘clăcăşie’, adică în ţărănime neredusă în robie propriu-zisă, datoare totuşi cu prestarea dijmei şi a clăcii, în condiţii fixate prin dispoziţii statale: este regimul aşa-numit al “clăcăşiei urbariale’, care se va continua necurmat, în condiţii din ce în ce mai aspre pentru clăcaşi, pînă la deplina lor formulare de către ‘Regulamentele Organice’ care (…) reprezintă o primă încercare de ‘modernizare’ a proceselor de producţie agrară printr-o soluţie de compromis.” (Stahl, op.cit.: 53-54)

All this system was limited and reshaped in time, as we have tried to show, due to demographic pressure as well as because of growing debts toward. But its main challenge came with the integration in an open European market and thus the need of merchandise-crops. “E de la sine înţeles că, de îndată ce recoltele avute în vedere vor urmări producerea de cereale-marfă cerute pe piaţa capitalistă, această stare patriarhală de

lucruri nu va mai putea dura; căci atît ţăranul cît şi boierul aveau interesul de a obţine cît mai mari cantităţi de produse pe care să le poată vinde contra bani. Aceasta înseamnă că era fatal să se ivească o luptă socială aprinsă între boieri şi ţărani, avînd interese economice rivale, şi două concepţii juridice înfruntîndu-se cu privire la drepturile de folosire a terenurilor.” (Stahl, op.cit.:58)

The landlords tried by different means, on one side, to restrict the peasants’ rights on land access, pretending thus to behave as “modern proprietors”; on the other side, giving the fact that “titlul de ‘proprietar’ nu aduce cu sine, ipso facto, muncitori, boierul ‘proprietar’ trebuia să-şi asigure şi muncitori agricoli, adică mina de lucru care să facă efectiv agricultură” (idem: 63). In this respect, the landlords will reproduce with as few changes as possible the former feudal relations of corvée. “Continuarea sistemului venea însă în contrazicere cu pretenţia de deţinere în ‘proprietate’ a terenului, după definiţia din codul civil. Ieşirea din contrazicere a fost căutată prin subterfugiul afirmării că între ţăran şi proprietar pot interveni contracte sinalagmatice, în urma unor ‘tocmeli agricole’ prin care proprietarul dă în ‘arendă’ un teren cu condiţia ca ‘renta’ să-i fie plătită nu în bani peşin ci în sistem de ‘meteiaj’ (în franceză ‘metayage’), adică prin dijmuirea recoltei, plus executarea unui număr de zile de clacă, sistem care pînă la urmă va lua forma ‘dijmei de tarla’, care va dura pînă după răscoala din 1907.” (idem: 63)

On their side, the peasants were seeking for their former rights too, concerning in this case mainly the customary free access to land. This claim was concerning rather the freedom to work – meaning the reduction of the servitudes toward the landlords – then the right of land property: enough land to work on was not a juridical claim of “enough property”. “At this time [of the first land reform, in 1864], the peasants were not asking for land, they were asking for much more: the liberty of work, the abolition of the corvée” (Kogălniceanu, 1889, quoted by Garoflid, 1938: 577). Thus, “un veac întreg sătenii n-au făcut altceva decît să răstălmăcească în duh devălmaş, toate reformele statului şi, paradoxal, seria de împroprietăriri care au urmat nu au dus la o întărire a spiritului de proprietate individuală ci dimpotrivă la întărirea credinţei într-o devălmăşie a tuturor pămînturilor ţării, din care ei, săteninii, aveau dreptul să se folosească după nevoie, evident plătind impozite şi dijmă” (Stahl, 1938: 575).

No part in this conflict was thus really interested just in the “individual property” of a “thing”, the land, but rather in the (re)distribution of social entitlements in a way to provide them the rights to use the land according to their “legitimate” interests. “Property of work”, “property of products” and “property of land” were a whole network of “property relations” far from what classical liberalism was claiming as the safe way to capitalism. As noted by Stahl, “pentru un gînditor de şcoală liberală în sens apusean (…) este o neputinţă logică de a înţelege, necum de a admite, devălmăşia ca sistem social” (Stahl, 1938: 574).

The state, starting with Alexandru Ioan Cuza, the founding father of the Union, was trying to “modernize” these property relations and create a “real” land property, mainly by compromise solutions of expropriation (of some quotas of the landlords’ properties) and putting in possession the peasants. But this state was to a large extent and for a long time controlled, as we will see, by these very landlords and their representatives. Cuza, the first, had thus to pay for his land reform – courageous for that time – and, two years later, had to abdicate.

It is only in 1921 that a new law managed to achieve a drastic limitation of the large landownership (above 100 hectars), that fall down from 40,23% to 10,44%. But this did not changed, in the long run, the situation of the peasants. “De la început loturile de împroprietărire au fost neîndestulătoare ca suprafaţă (…). In condiţiile noastre de climă şi debuşeu, de agricultură rudimentară, producţia lotului tip de 5 hectare nu putea asigura existenţa ţăranului. El era nevoit, pentru a-şi completa întreţinerea, să se învoiască la marele proprietar. Legile agrare nu au creat ţărani liberi. Această situaţie, de la început rea, a fost înrăutăţită încă prin dispoziţiile legii. Loturile de împroprietărire erau inalienabile, dar divizibile. Rezultatul a fost că proprietatea ţărănească care avea la înfiinţarea ei o mijlocie de 4,6 hectare, avea la recensămîntul din 1896 o mijlocie de 3,4 hectare, iar la 1905 numai de 3,2 hectare. De fapt, această mijlocie era şi mai redusă, căci statistica a fost întocmită după rolurile fiscale, care în cele mai multe cazuri înscriau proprietăţi familiale nedivizate în drept, dar împărţite în fapt. Ce agricultură se putea face pe asemenea parcele care mai aveau şi neajunsul de a fi împrăştiate ? » - is wondering Garoflid (1938 : 579) “The agricultural problem replaced the agrarian problem » - observes the same Garoflid (idem : 585)

In this fight for redefining land property rights, land reforms had constantly an agrarian rather then an agricultural character, focusing rather on property then on productivity. “The agrarian policy of the political parties has to be replaced by an agricultural policy” – was stated in the land reform of 1918. “This point of view [a concern for agrarian transformation of property accompanied by a concern for the agricultural productivity] was not shared by the Liberal government in 1918. The social and political point of view was prevailing at that time, and now it seems that the new parties emerged from the people’s vote will stress even more the political aspect28 in order to solve the long lasting agrarian question” (Garoflid, 1920: I). Even nowadays, because of similar prevailing political considerations, Romania’s post-communist land reform still has an agrarian rather then an agricultural character (von Hirschhausen, 1997). In this respect too, the state did/could not promote a capitalist development strategy of Romanian agriculture and thus a real modernization of the rural world. The social life of the Romanian mainly rural society – in 1930 the percentage of the rural population was still 78,9% - was thus largely influenced by these modernizing negotiations of conflicting customary property relations. For landlords as well as for peasants, references to “how it used to be” had common even though conflicting meanings, and the public discourses sustaining one or the other point of view strongly elaborated such references. The outcomes were thus mainly reshaping customary claims into legal conservatism, a kind of “means of the game” in between customs and strategies, trying to forge some kind of modern traditions, in the sense we have ascribe to the word in the first part of our essay.

1.3. The rules of the game. The old boyars and the young state

28 The following quotation from the Chamber debate on 25 August 1918 clearly makes the point:„Mr. C. Garoflid, minister of agriculture: We have agreed with expropriation because of economic

reasons.Mr. D. Pătrăşcanu: We place the problem on the national ground, not the economic one !”

(Pătrăşcanu, 1925: 194).

Being the artisan of the much needed independence and unity, as we have seen, the state had to grow into a strong centralized system. Looking mainly at France as an institutional model, the Romanian étatisme was rooted to a large extent in shared foreign policy interests. It is rather in the realm of inner policy that strong conflicting interests challenged the state29. As diverse as they were, these conflicting interests may be grouped into a main and representative polarity: the “old” landlords and the “young” state bureaucracy, growing into a powerful noblesse d’état. “Opoziţia esenţială în jurul căreia se organizează câmpul luărilor de poziţii în Principate şi Vechiul Regat nu este, astfel, aşa cum s-a tot vehiculat, aceea dintre moşierime şi burghezie, ci între moşierime (ca reprezentant al sferei private) şi birocraţia de stat. (Lazăr, op.cit.: 96) Romania’s main problem in its building as a “modern” nation was not the fact that it had only a small and weak bourgeoisie – in fact not as small and weak as this, especially if we compare it with some other Balkan cases – but rather that it had a large and powerful category of landowners, almost without equivalent in the neighboring southern states, and empowered by its external commerce and inner (relative) control of the state. Complementary to this main factor, one should take into consideration a second one: the emergence and empowerment of a state intelligentsia, having higher and higher educational resources but rather lacking economic roots and power. “Intelectualitatea dobîndeşte astfel un loc cheie în explicaţie. Segment (dominant) al elitei dominante – sau, mai exact, o sub-elită, cu un status în continuă afirmare -, ea va tinde să ‘ţină locul’ burgheziei, în spaţiul ocupat de clasele mijlocii, pe parcursul întregii perioade de edificare a statului, asumîndu-şi în nume propriu – şi deturnînd, totodată, prin discurs şi faptă – rolul istoric pe care l-ar fi putut juca această categorie, activă economic, dar dezavuată politic mereu de posesorii instrumentelor de dominaţie şi legitimare simbolică. » (idem : 109)

Concerning the relations of the landowners with the state, a brief reminder of the history of the electoral system may be enlightening. After the Adrianopole treatise in 1829, the Romanian principalities were given, under foreign supervision, the so-called “regulamente organice” (organic bill). In 1831, the legal, executive and judiciary powers are for the first time separated. The “People’s Assembly” (adunarea obştească) is created in each province, headed by the metropolitan bishop, and composed of the episcopii eparhioţi, a fix number of high range boyars and a fix number of county deputes, elected from the landowners and their sons by their “peer”. According to this rules, there were just 500 electors in Muntenia and 400 in Moldavia. After the treatise of Paris in 1856, thinks had to change, again under foreign pressure, in order to assure a better representation of the different social categories. Four electoral “estates” are proposed, including, for the first time, the peasants. But the rules of eligibility were still highly favouring the landowners: representing less then 8% of the legal electors of Muntenia, the great landowners had more then 36% of the places in the assembly (Divan); in Moldavia, where they represented 17% of the electors, the great landowners had the right to 35% of the chairs. The peasants had just about 18% of the chairs both in Moldavia and in Muntenia (see in Filitti, 1938). Even in these circumstances, “proprietarii din divan, în majoritatea lor, erau chinuiţi de spectrul unei afluenţe ţărăneşti într’o viitoare adunare şi 29 Alexandru Ioan Cuza is a good example of these convergences of diplomatic interests and divergences of inner social and political interests, being proclaimed as the hero of the Union and, several years later, forced to abdicate as the promoter of an undesirable land reform and a new Constitution by almost the same political elites.

de al reformei agrare pe care o putea aduce.” (Filitti, 1938: 249) After 1858 things changed thus again according to the interests of the larger land property. A system based on census is (re)introduced and the number of legal electors was reduced to 58% of its former number in Moldavia and to 18% in Muntenia: “the property was saved” (idem: 250).

Alexandru Ioan Cuza is trying to re-establish a more representative system, but the assembly rejects his project, so he decides to dissolve it and imposes, by plebiscite, a new constitution in 1864. After less then two years, Cuza has to abdicate, and in 1866, together with a new constitution, a new electoral law will be promulgated, “that represents, from the point of view of the principle of universal vote, a regression” (Alexianu, 1938: 236). The following laws will give even more power, by very restrictive census rules, to the landlords and their companions. It is also to be reminded the fact that the important category of priests and the growing category of teachers and liberal professions were not subjected to the census requests, being thus an important electoral mass.

It is only with the First World War, the constitution of 1917 and the following electoral law of 1918 that there is a clear statement about the “principiul votului universal egal, direct, obligatoriu, cu scrutin de listă şi pe baza reprezentării proporţionale a minorităţii” (idem: 237). “Universal” as it was, this system of vote was still not concerning the women, some categories of which will get the right to vote only in 1929. Nevertheless, “after 1919, the electoral body is steadily increasing much more then the demographic growth” (Preda, 2002: 92). Thus, “in 1911, out of the 1 644 302 men with constitutional rights of vote only 1 077 977 (65,55%) could be found on the electoral lists, out of which only 101 339, meaning 6,16% of the total, being direct voters” (idem: 93). In the thirties, it can be evaluated that all the men above 21 years were registered on the electoral lists.

During all this time, the representatives of the large landownership have lost a part of their economic power, due mainly to successive land reforms. They were loosing also “direct” political power, based on their origin status; but they were also largely converting to a new, educated state bureaucracy, getting thus in a pure fight for personal power30 with the other competitors – mainly “new comers” – for “state ownership” (for an insightful analysis of this process, see Marius Lazăr, op. cit.).

This dynamic may be sketched, at a first level, by the gradual “opening” of the governing elites. After the abdication of Alexandru Ioan Cuza and till the first world war (1866-1916), in the 37 successive governments, “un număr mic de oameni – 145 şi, dacă îi excludem pe cei ajunşi în guvern o singură dată, 87 – controlează, practic, în întregime administraţia statului român pe o perioadă de 50 de ani.” After the war and with the achievement of “Great Romania”, the political participation becomes more “democratic”: “în perioada 1916-1938 (deci un răstimp de două ori mai scurt) s-au rulat la guvernare 227 de personae, aproape o dată şi jumătate mai mulţi decît înainte.” (Lazăr, op.cit.: 121) Their status is also changing, “the main trend being the shift toward a system of political-administrative management where the possessors of a historical capital are progressively replaced by possessors of a transactional capital.” (idem: 124) The state needs more and more a skilled bureaucracy at all the levels of its system, able to face the challenges of its building. It also offers, in revenge, attractive career opportunities for those willing to

30 It is what Rădulescu-Motru (1904) will describe – and condemn – as „politicianism”

share this building effort. A dynamic “noblesse d’état” is thus emerging, initially almost monopolized by the representatives of the landowner aristocracy, but progressively opening to representatives of middle and, to some extent, lower but educated categories of the population. Education becomes more and more a key issue in this process, without managing to exclude the status factor in the access to higher state functions. A brief overlook of the development of education may be thus enlightening.

Besides some few exceptions, the Romanian provinces (Transylvania not included) had in fact no education system till the half of the XIXth century. The 1859 Union and Cuza’s energy gave an important impetus in this realm too. A university was founded in 1860 in Iassy and, two years later, in Bucharest. A common law was promulgated in 1964, shaping the unity of the education system too. Communal (in the villages) and primary (in the towns) schools were developed, where 76485 boys and 11000 girls were learning in the academic year 1861-1862 (Popescu-Spineni et al., 1938). In 1898, an important reform was elaborated by Spiru Haret, trying to promote a “democratic school”, pushing further the “communal” education and developing the secondary one, building the “pedagogical seminars” and renovating the higher education system.

The level of literacy grow thus up from 22% of the population above 7 years in 1899 to 39,3% in 1912 and, for the whole “Great Romania”, to 57% in 1930. If we compare these figures with Bulgaria (60,3% in 1926) or Hungary (84,8% in 1920), and if we add the fact that 85,1% of this “literacy” was due only to primary schools (not even finished in about one third of the cases), the situation turns out to be less satisfactory (Manuilă and Georgesu, 1938). Strong imbalances between villages and towns (51,3% literacy versus 77,3%), man and women (69,2% versus 45,5%) and between regions have also to be added to the picture (idem).

More interesting is the situation of the secondary education, covering only 8,6% of the literacy. The profiles of these schools can be divided in “practical schools” (technical, commercial, agricultural, etc.) and “theoretical schools” (secondary schools, pedagogical seminars, military schools, etc.). The arithmetic proportion between the number of pupils in practical schools and those in theoretical schools is one of the most relevant figures concerning the professionalization of the emerging state bureaucracy. In Hungary this ratio was 4,5, in Bulgaria 4,3; in Romania, between 1921 and 1936 it fluctuated between 0,2 and 0,3 ! In other words, “in the Romanian school (…), the proportion between the theoretical and the practical branch is inversed in the favour of the first one” (Popescu-Spineni et al., 1938: 478). And to the authors to conclude: “…dacă în trecut predominarea şcoalelor teoretice va fi fost justificată prin nevoia Statului de a-şi pregăti aparatul funcţionăresc necesar, de acum înainte se impune, fără întîrziere, o dezvoltare a şcoalelor practice” (idem: 479). But this proved to be just a wishful thinking…

The higher education also gives us some clues in the better understanding of these bureaucratic elites. In spite of the growing accusations that the Romanian universities were producing too many bachelors, the situation seems to have been comparable with the one existing in other neighbouring countries: the percent of students out of the total population was 0,19% in Hungary, 0,16% in Bulgaria and only 0,14% in Romania (idem). It was not thus the number that was a problem, but rather the structure of this university population: according to Popescu-Spineni, Iulian Peter and Iosif Gabrea

(op.cit), from 1921 to 1933, about two thirds of it was studying law, philosophy and letter (43,1% of the students were following the classes of the faculties of law and 20,6% those of philosophy and letters) !

Such a medium and higher educated “humanistic” population, with few if any opportunities – and interests – for getting a job in “productive” activities, was thus putting a relative career-seeking pressure on the state and its bureaucratic system31, thus strengthening the power games in the system. As a consequence, “adevărata problemă a elitelor româneşti a constituit-o, mereu, puterea – nu atît occidentalizarea. Concurenţa internă pentru accesul la resursele dominaţiei este elementul care, în fond, motivează şi demersul integrator European. Modernizarea şi orientarea pro-occidentală, inevitabile de-a lungul întregului proces ce a condus la creşterea interdependenţei între naţiuni, au fost doar elemente antrenate de cucerirea sau conservarea unor poziţii în centrul puterii, nu scopuri în sine. Aşa cum, uneori simultan, un rol de resursă ideologică complementară l-au constituit şi antioccidentalismul sau paseismul ruralist. » (Lazăr, op. cit. : 85) Going a step further, it seems that Marius Lazăr is perfectly right when stating that “în absenţa unei structuri sociale adecvate şi a unui suport economic pe măsură, resursele modernizării au fost preponderent instituţionale” şi nu economice (ibidem). The rural and agrarian structure of the country and the lasting claims of the peasants were a permanent obstacle to modernization, being turned into modernizing stakes rather by the political discourse and as an ideological capital of some ruling elites. The economic interest of the landowning aristocracy could not be either an engine of modernization, later on being partially converted in political capital invested in the state building and ruling. The bourgeoisie, as a self-consistent category, even if comparatively large, was mainly “an extension of agriculture” or just a “service-class”, its industrial character being a late and relative achievement32 (Lazăr, op. cit.). Even more important, in spite of this relative economic power, it was mainly out-ruled from the political decision-making sphere, its development running to a large extent apart from the political mainstream.

From the point of view of our present interests, some main conclusions may be now sketched out, mainly following the inspiring analysis of Marius Lazăr:

As already mentioned, the main conflict in establishing “the rules of the game” was for a long period that between the (old) landowning aristocracy and the (emerging) state bureaucracy. About the turn of the century and especially with the founding of “Great Romania”, this conflict was transformed more and more to an inner power game of the ruling elites;

This “founding” conflict also shaped the perception – and building – of the private space as the one of the large land property and its interests, in conflict with the public interest, defended by the state and its bureaucrats in the name of the nation. “Aflăm aici o explicaţie pentru orientarea spre stato-centrism a

31 In this respect, one can not overlook the fact that‚ according to the „cubic root low” of population-parliament ratio, there was a strong over-representation in the Camera inferioră, this one being two times larger then the optimum in 1919 and 1,5 times in 1920-1937 (Preda, op.cit.). Of course, this high proportioin of lowiers and other „humanists” cannot be considered as the cause of this politicial over-representation.32 Zeletin, in his famous approach of the Romanian bourgeoisie (1925/1991), is ascribing it a historical role as a “commodity handling class”, according to his view about the pre-eminance of circulation over production in defining capitalism – which is debatable…

naţionalismului românesc: el opune spaţiului privat, dominat de marea proprietate rurală, un spaţiu şi un interes public. Clasele care promovează acest curent sunt clasele – mai ales intelectuale – deprivate de capitaluri şi care sunt dependente şi promotoare în acelaşi timp a resurselor statului. Conceptul de naţiune este opus celui de spaţiu şi economie privată.» The public interest (public sphere, public space) will become more and more the private, « professional », competence of these elites and their means of legitimating.

The states elites – in particular the dominant segment of the intelligentsia –, proclaiming themselves as defenders of this “public interest” – and thus as legitimate representatives of the whole nation – will be the promoters of a rather institutional then economic modernization, limiting without essentially restructuring property relations and privileges of the landowning aristocracy and out-ruling to a large extent the bourgeoisie from the monopolized public sphere.

Becoming the very trend – and the main resource for a large category of carrier-seeking bureaucrats -, this “institutional modernization” will privilege a cultural rather then economical mobilization discourse. “Altfel spus, fiind legată mai mult de construcţia de stat decît de aceea a societăţii civile, intelectualitatea va căuta să-şi impună propriul ei proiect naţional, subestimînd tacit condiţionarea materială a procesului de modernizare şi făcînd apel aproape exclusiv la mijloacele mobilizării culturale.” (Lazăr, op. cit.: 109) The final outcome is that, to a large extent, “the ‘at top’ modernizing project of the state will keep on being ‘at top’” (idem: 93)Translating these conclusions into our frame of reference, the following main

hypotheses may be stated:1. The common “Roman” belonging of the Romanian People will be

challenged by inside conflicting categories and interests along a kind of “social division of belonging”. As far as legitimate belonging is based on autochthonicity, belonging/exclusion control will engender a permanent competition and tension between categories of self-perceived “true” representatives of the People: We, the “real” ones, and They, the “late-comers” or “intruders”. This conflict is to be seen as an inner competition for the identification with the nation and its meaningful belonging33.

2. The “rules of the game” will be imprinted by this “founding conflict” between the retrospective, conservative, customary rooted economic interests of both peasants and landowning aristocracy, and the prospective, innovative strategies of the institutional rooted interests of a state elite. This “structural ambiguity” (Lazăr, op. cit.: 84) of the social process of nation-building and modernization had to be expressed – and legitimated – by a structural “ambiguous” form of rationality: what we have identified as the retro-prospective rationality. In this respect, the Romanian elites in general will be all the time tormented by the feeling of a gap (between boyars and peasants, between “forms and contents”, “civilisation” and “culture”, etc.), and obsessed by the finding out of a kind of theoretic-bridging third way (different phrasings of “organic development”, etc.).

33 The following dialogue in a Parliament session may be quoted in this respect:„Pătrăşcanu: This country is a country of peasants.Stoianovici: Who said this ? Where is this written ?Arion: Romania kept up only by the boyars !Teodorescu: It is not true ! (outcries in the room, protests)” (Pătrăşcanu, 1925: 194)

3. The pre-eminence of the “cultural mobilization” will forge a longue durée dominant rationalism (in 1845, raising the question “what is the development of a society ?”, Mihail Kogălniceanu states that “if we would answer that it is the development of its ideas, we would say an evident trouth” – Kogălniceanu, 1845/1967: 127). Almost a century later, Eugeniu Speranţia, for instance, will explicitly state that “society is a fact that happens in mind; its existence is an idea” – Speranţia, 1938: 501). Empiricism is dismissed – or largely suspect !

2. Autochthonism in the Romanian culture

…disregarding the place and willing to start with an universal science is a wrong way.Ernest Bernea (1937: 389)

After having sketched the “context”, we may now look for the “answers”. In doing so, we will focus on autochthonism. The reason of this choice is the fact that autochthonism seems to be the main and most common type of “answer” to the challenges of the belonging-building “context”, and as such the underlying ideology of most of the concerns about “the being of the people” – i.e. our own concern in this essay. But this does not want to suggest at all: 1. that there were not also other “answers”, more or less elaborated; 2. that there was just one homogeneous and permanent type of autochthonism.

As one may expect, alternative ideological visions came mainly from “liberal” positions, claiming a kind of “primitivistic” view about human evolution as a “normal” if not “natural” process. Rooted in the revolutionary ideology of 1848, the liberal theoretical vision of the early times of the nation building may be considered as having as its core belief what Ion Ghica called “the most beautiful of all the laws of the universal realm, the law of perfectibility” (Ghica, 1914: 122). Thus, for Ion C. Brătianu, the founder of a prominent dynasty of liberal leaders, the life of any society – considered as a “natural realm” – “is an uninterrupted development, a gradually approaching of the absolute perfection” (Brătianu, 1853, cf. Herseni, 1940: 24). This development is general in as far as “besides its [common] origin, humanity is one, not only in the present, but also in the past and in the future, meaning one in spirit and in time” (idem: 24). And yet, in the same text, Brătianu becomes reluctant about this stated universalism: “Fără a mai intra în alte consideraţiuni, zic că, chiar de ar fi adevărat că genul omenesc întreg s’ar fi trăgînd dintr-o singură pereche, tot n-aş vedea putinţa ca într-o zi toate gintele, familiile şi naţiunile să se topească într-o unitate deplină a speciei umane” (idem: 26). In fact, turned to a governing ideology, the “liberal” social thinking became more and more pragmatic, focusing on burning issues of the moment. Genuine claims about perfectibility, progress and so on were thus just the general highlights for their desired changes. “Sociologia apare deci ca ştiinţa naturală ‘a societăţii’ şi are menirea, ca şi la Auguste Comte, să îndrume raţional viaţa laolaltă a oamenilor.” (Herseni, op. cit.: 27) And yet, the “liberal” leaders, more involved in governing, will largely desert this “sociology”.

Later on, this evolutionary credo will be further elaborated and applied to the Romanian case in Zeletin’s classical book about the Romanian bourgeoisie (1925). Giving a very broad definition to the bourgeoisie (considered to be the same thing as “capitalist class”), Zeletin identifies, largely taking after Sombart, three main phases of

evolution, each of them having their own rules of development: mercantilism, linked to the trade capital, liberalism, rooted in the industrial capital, and imperialism, based on the dominance of the financial capital. Romania entered capitalism by its “normal” mercantilist gate and had to cope with the unavoidable steps of the general evolution, considered as a “natural historic process” that has to be approached “as any other natural phenomenon”. From this standpoint, he considers that “crizele agrare au fost o urmare necesară a desvoltării capitalismului sub formele sale inferioare, şi vor dispărea iarăş în chip necesar, prin înaintarea capitalismului către stadiul superior al producţiei industriale. Politica noastră agrară nu are nici o parte de vină în deslănţuirea acestor crize, şi nu poate avea nici o parte de merit în vindecarea lor.” (Zeletin, 1925: 214) This total faith in a “natural” law of evolution has also a polemic stake, wishing to point not only to the “necessary” outcome of capitalism, but maybe even more so to its necessary economic mechanisms and laws that cannot be short-cut by pure political of-hands. But here Zeletin is contradicting himself, stating also that the Romanian case is a “typical example of organic evolution” due to the fact that “the old Romanian political oligarchy turned directly into a financial oligarchy”, thus enabling “the two different historical phases, mercantilism and imperialism, meaning the development and the organization of production, to melt together from the very beginning in one and the same process”. A genuine kind of “organic development” is pumping out even in this militant “primitivistic” discourse.

Concerning the second point we wanted to clarify before approaching the issue of autochthonism in the Romanian culture, it is obvious that “autochthonicity” had not the same meanings in the early time of Roman origin claims, for the Transylvanian “Latinist school”, during the struggles for unity or after Great Romania was established. It even had a “flexible geometry” for different thinkers belonging to same trend or school. Nevertheless, we are interested here only in its ideal-typical reconstruction, choosing thus to address mainly its mature expressions in the inter-war scientific discourses. It is only after such an achievement that one could – and should – look for the different historical species of autochthonism.

2.1. Autochthonism in the scientific discourses

a) A historical hypostasis: Nicolae IorgaIorga, who was also a powerful orator, phrased the idea of autochthonism in a

concise way when speaking about the “sovereign land” (pămîntul suveran). One of the three main factors explaining the historical continuity, the land or place has nothing to do with what he banters as “historical climatology”; it is neither reduce to the economist status of resources. Its causal power is rather open and flexible, working through the directions of contact (mainly commerce) it promotes and its general “orientation” rather then “position”. Nevertheless, it is a lasting and defining influence: “felul de viaţă al fiecărui neam va trebui să corespundă aproape în întregime cu hotărîrîle supreme ale pămîntului. Pămîntul acesta va impune modul de a clădi, linia şi calitatea costumului; prin influenţa lui asupra organelor vorbirii, el va adduce modificarea sunetelor şi va contribui la crearea noilor dialecte; din toate acestea va ieşi o ţinută, un habitus local, ce se menţine sub vagabondajul întîmplător şi capricios al raselor. Fiindcă pămîntul suveran, cu vecinătăţile şi orizontul lui, îşi va impune voia” (Iorga, 1944, quoted in Pop,

1999: 220-221). The personality of a land thus hosts a diversity of historical facts that prove to be linked to each other in a historical continuity. From this point of view, the Romania of his time is considered to be “just the re-embodiment, due to the will of the Carpathians and the Danube, of the empire monarchy of the Dacians” (idem). Place is thus a way of placing continuity, a way to trace the longues durées34 of history, and as such, a factor in-between ontology and methodology.

In a quite rationalist approach, Iorga is stressing also the determinant role of ideas, “acel lucru de o infinită complicaţie, care e gîndirea omenească, idee, sentiment şi instincte laolaltă, dela care porneşte perpetua mişcare” (idem:219), “în stare să se opună la orice chemare a realităţilor celor mai evidente” (idem: 222). But, as we will see, these ideas have to be “organic”, i.e. shared in a real society, and not ideologies imposed from above to such historical realities.

Together with place, ideas form a “skeleton” of continuity that enables the historian to feel in the gaps of historical documentation with comprehensive hypotheses. How is it possible ? – Iorga wonders, rhetorically. It is possible “prin aceea că, într-un anumit moment, vezi o dezvoltare ajunsă la un anumit grad, constatat din izvoare. Această dezvoltare trebuie să vină de undeva. Civilizaţiile omeneşti merg după anumite linii logice, şi după mersul altor civilizaţii vezi care este această linie, ori cum se formează un lanţ. Cu oarecare prudenţă şi cu un oarecare simţ intim al realităţilor istorice, poţi uni printr-o ipoteză ceea ce altfel s-ar prezinta ca nişte fragmente informe.” (Iorga, 1928/1987: 86)

This continuity is not just the object of a poietic historical reconstruction, but a social reality too: “the past is leaving in the present”, so that Iorga could claim that “we too [the Romanians] still feel in a Thracian and Macedonian way” (idem: 79,80). As last – not final – term of this leaving continuity, Romanians may thus be more empathic with the “formele prin care s-a perpetuat acea barbarie de pe vremea tracilor şi macedonenilor în vremurile noastre” (idem: 79).

Iorga is pointing here to one of his core hypothesis about the national history as rooted in the social life of “free peasants”: “clasa care a creat Statul, în legătură cu ideia naţională prin mijlocirea democraţiei, clasa care a creat cea dintîiu Domnie în munţii Argeşului, clasa aceasta ţărănească era, fără îndoială, liberă” (Iorga, 1922/1992: 210). This free population, with small if any hierarchy, just choosing its legitimate leaders, was already a “nation”, having a primer kind of “nationalistic instinct” that managed at a certain moment in history to build “a country for a nation” (idem: 212). Thus, Iorga concludes, “it is not our nation that was created by a State, but our State was created by a nation. Franţa, cît e de mare, de frumoasă şi de mîndră, este o ţară creată din mai multe naţii prin forma de Stat care a contopit aceste naţii împreună şi care a facut-o capabilă de o desvoltare unitară. La noi, Statul este o creaţie a naţiunii. Sau anume Stat, cel mai vechiu, din 1300, cel dela Argeş în Muntenia, dela Baia în Moldova, Statul acesta este, nu creaţiunea unei clase, ci creaţiunea unui popor întreg care n’avea deosebiri de clasă. » (idem : 209). Iorga’s approach of the nation-state relation is illuminating a much broader concern of the Romanian nation-builders: lacking such a strong State as the French one, able to fuse together different “nations” and thus playing the role of power engine, an

34 It is risky, I believe, to consider that Iorga’s views anticipated in a way Braudel’s conception about the longues durées of history – as suggested by Adrian Pop (op. cit.) – , his approach being rather rooted in the XIXth century claims of continuity.

available solution was to consider the Nation as already there – an “evidence” that could be produced by discursive means, proving the continuity in time and space of this “nation”. Continuity in itself had to be considered thus as good in itself. The « Peasant State » the politician Iorga was dreaming of, was a renewing and re-empowerment of this “good continuity”.

Continuity is part of an even broader world-view, being considered an advantage if compared with historical breaks: “Dar noi n’am făcut Revoluţia cea mare, n’am avut un răsboiu civil, analog celui care a bîntuit în Franţa. E desavantaj sau un avantaj ? De sigur că este un avantaj : dacă poţi face cu solidaritate naţională ceeace alţii au făcut cu o dureroasă ruptură a solidarităţii naţionale, este un mare avantaj : dacă poţi face cu elemente organice ceeace alţii fac cu elemente abstracte, este un foarte mare avantaj (…) ; dacă n’ai nevoie să treci prin faza abstractă şi de-a dreptul iei din vieaţa organică a poporului elementele constitutive de Stat, cu atît mai bine » (idem : 218). Not criticizing but explaining, as Iorga himself pretends, the Romanian historian is nevertheless clearly opting for an organic development, for a modernity that avoids, if possible, revolutionary breaks between past and present.

Before ending this brief overview, we have to remind that Iorga was devoted all his lifetime to the idea of a “universal history”. Focusing on particular lands and ideas, his approach does not stick to the local but is integrated to a universal map of historical connections. In this respect, Iorga was claiming for the “historical facts” the kind of “functional analysis” most of the classical anthropologists were promoting for the “social facts”. Afterwards, as integrated parts in an organic historical chain, different historical facts can – and have to – be compared according to the method of “historical parallels”. This method is different from the one promoted by Spengler, for instance: “Nicolae Iorga va critica tocmai ideea unor asemenea ‘paralele’ în mersul istoriei nu întrucît ele n-ar fi posibile – el însuşi va apela la metoda ‘paralelelor’ cînd va lămuri Romaniile populare prin paralela dintre Gallia postromană şi Romania orientală (…)- ci întrucît ele sunt extrapolate nejustificat, neorganic. Paralele stabilite de Nicolae Iorga au numai un rost metodologic şi, în acest sens, istoricul face precizarea că metoda ‘paralelelor istorice’ este tot atît de importantă pentru lămurirea unui fenomen istoric ca şi metoda ‘mărturiilor documentare’. » (Bădescu, 1987: 349) Universal history is thus the unavoidable methodological frame for history in general.

b. A geographical hypostasis: George Vâlsan and Simeon Mehedinţi “What a nice word ‘moşie’ (estate)! Of course it’s derived from ‘moşi’ (ancestors), but it still refers to the land. It blends these two elements into one. So that the man should neither forget that his ancestors are all of this land, nor that this land has been humanized through the labour and successive death of lines after lines of predecessors. This very word enshrines the assertion of the right of the actual owner from the darkness of time.” (Vâlsan, 1919/1992, p.29) Nor could the road from ‘moşie’ (estate) to ‘ţară’ (country) be an easy one in the consciousness of the inhabitants of Greater Romania! During World War II, soldiers would still call each other, occasionally “Hey, county!”2, suggesting the membership of a local, pre-national there, so to say.

2 I owe this piece of information to Şerban Anghelescu

The country’s territory is made up of national elites as an “estate”, blending these elements (people and nature, time and space) into one, as Vâlsan put it: the body, the living being of the country. The “country” exists only through this mutual predestination and consecration of the people and the territory, which accomplish themselves only in a profound concurrence with each other – more often than not, with God’s blessing. The prudent and subtle George Vâlsan ventured to say, as a geographer, that “there is some exaggeration” (Ibid., p.31) in Michelet’s assertion that “the bird is like its nest; and man is like the homeland”. Wary of what “was oft’ and a bit superficially called ‘geographical fatality,’” (Ibid.), Vâlsan, on the other hand, assumes as a noble task, the decoding and accreditation of the the geographical individuality of the Romanian nation: “The duty of the present-day geographer, when studying a country, is to highlight the real individuality of that country and to distinguish it from other neighbouring individualities.” (Ibid., p.33) The universal vocation of geography as a science must be articulated with its particular, namely, its national mission: “There can be a geography of one region, which is overlapping with a national consciousness” (Ibid., p.31), namely, a “localized geography, a chorography” (Ibid.). This “chorography” thus becomes a national and militans geography, somewhat in the same manner in which Gusti was speaking about a Romanian and militans sociology. Yet what is this “real individuality” of the Romanian country all about? Here is one possible illustration, among others: “In the Institute of Geography of our University we have inherited plaster reliefs, representing such a portion of Europe as was necessary to prove that the land of the Hungarian State had been predestined by God Himself to be under one rule – Hungarian, by all means: a uniform plain, surrounded by mountains everywhere. (…) But if the relief had been widened by another three or four degrees to the East, the admiring gaze of the Hungarian student would have beheld something else, too. Namely, that besides the Hungarian wonder, and from its very elements, God has wrought another wonder: a tall citadel, surrounded by mountains and bounded by plains, which are clasped in the watery belt of three major rivers. Here is a truth that the national Hungarian consciousness did not see. Now it must see it, and think about it. What is better and which is the stronger: a plain bound by mountains, to justify the bondage of many peoples, or a tall citadel amidst the mountains, bound by plains, - citadel, mountains and plains inhabited by a single people in an overwhelming majority?” (Ibid., pp.27-28) Therefore, the country’s territory is less a political matter, than a matter of natural right, “predestined by God Himself” and con-secrated, as I said, through the concurrence of a perennial geography and population, which lend the country its irreducible “individuality”. And that individuality, through its very nature, can but only be dismembered at the risk of death… This reciprocal consecration of a geographical space and of a population explains why the age of a people is not so much linked to its demographic continuity along the meanderings of history, as it is to the duration of its dwelling in the same space. Upon this foundation, Mehedinţi rejects the Roman conquest as the inaugural moment of the Romanian people and goes on to assert that “the Romanians are one of the oldest peoples of Europe” (Mehedinţi, 1928/1986, p.192) : “First of all, far from being a young people, beginning with the Dacian war, the Romanian people’s origins lie in the remote past. Compared to all its neighbours, it is the only one which knows not of having had a homeland anywhere else than on the land where it lives today.” (Ibid.). “Thus, starting

from new premises, we must revise our ideas about the being of our people,” Mehedinţi concludes. And to do so, “we first need the precise inventory of autochthonous civilization from the most ancient times until today. To an anthropologist like Pittard, it seems like nothing prevents us from admitting the continuity of the population linked to the Carpathians, back to the Neolithic Period. Research into the Paleolithic has been expanded from the Dniester and the Black Sea to the Tisza plain, with positive results. When we have before our eyes the entire series of the documents of civilization linked with the land we dwell on, only then will we be able to draw a scientific parallel between our life and the life of others.” (Ibid. p. 194, our underl.) The people is thus autochthonous by definition and autochthonism defines the people. Even when the age of this autochthonism is lost in the dawning days of the Paleolithic, with Mehedinţi, prudently, no longer speaking about the people, but about “the continuity of the population”, this ancient population nevertheless, mysteriously belongs to “our life”, as different from “the life of others”. This vision would not be complete if it did not reach up to the ontological, that is, to a certain fundamental idea of Man. And the Man of authochthonism is The Native, as the only real. In this way, Mehedinţi opposes, for instance, “the conception of an abstract child, that is, a being that would be more or less the same in all the countries of the world3”, with which “many pedagogues” operate. And, Mehedinţi says, “such a child exists nowhere”. As such, “the education of a people’s youths can only begin with the concrete-child, as is presented by its ethnic environment, laden for good or for bad with all the legacy inherited from its ancestors.” (Ibid., pp.197-198) And the conclusion is categorical: “…there can be no pedagogy without autochthonism.” (ibid., p. 200) Mehedinţi and Vâlsan are the founders of scientific geography in Romania. Their autochthonistic visions are far from being unique or excessive in those times. On the contrary, they were carefully structured in an elaborate chain of reasoning, yet elaborated from a strategic perspective shared in various ways and to various extents by a majority of national elites. This stake-cum-mission leads their actual geographical reflection on a trajectory that adds up geography-chorography-ethnography-ethnopedagogy into a coherent and consistent system.

c) A Psychological Hypostasis : Constantin Rădulescu-Motru A student of Wundt and one of the founders of “scientific” psychology in Romania, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru is first of all a philosopher. And as a philosopher, he aims to be a “Romanian philosopher”. …”in this respect, Oswald Spengler is right to say that there is no science in itself, art in itself and morality in itself, but that there is the science, art and morality of a culture, a culture differentiated by type and people.” (Rădulescu-Motru, 1927/1984, p. 573) Rădulescu-Motru will therefore aim to deal with “Romanian philosophy”. And here is what he meant by this: “By saying Romanian philosophy we mean : the systematic reasoning whereby a consciousness formed in the Romanian people’s environment will come to sincerely reconcile within itself scientifically demonstrated truths and the secret beliefs of one’s own experience; that is, the reflection of facts which are given as certainly known, brought to a unitary thinking

3 “There is no “man” in ‘mankind’ from the viewpoint of a serious analysis. Man is to be found only in his family, in his nationality,” Aurel C.Popovici also said in 1910. In various enunciations, this idea was fairly common in that age.

with the self-consciousness of the man produced by the Romanian environment.” (Ibid. p.528) If the “scientifically demonstrated truths” are relatively clearly defined, the “secret beliefs” which they must be reconciled with are more mysterious. Without tackling their inventory, Rădulescu-Motru highlights one which seems of utmost importance to him, namely the fact that, in his opinion, “within the deepest layers of the Romanian soul lies the belief that man is one and the same as the earth. This tends to be the belief of agricultural peoples.” (Ibid., p. 530) Rădulescu-Motru will try to “reconcile” this Romanian “secret belief”, opposed to western dualisms, with the “scientific truths” of the time, through the “unitary thinking” of his philosophical system (the energetic personalism), conceived as a solution of “unity of the person with the material nature, yet which should not diminish the role of the human personality.” (Ibid. p.529) We will now look into the philosophical construction of the energetic personalism only to the extent to which it stands for the theoretical foundation of the psychology of peoples – or as Rădulescu-Motru prefers to call it, “social psychology” or “ethnopsychology”. In broad lines, the basic reasoning, from this point of view, could be presented as follows: Starting from Kant, whom he considers as an acme of personalistic thinking, Rădulescu-Motru tries to amend the “erroneous separation” which Kant introduced from the beginning “between the unity of pure aperception, which is found only in consciousness as such, and the unity of real consciousness, which is found in all human individuals.” (Ibid., p.481) This “erroneous separation” between the consciousness as such and real-individual consciousness would have a more general origin, namely, the traditional centering upon the luminous level of consciousness and the reduction of the object ego of the reflection to its conscious surface. Yet, according to Rădulescu-Motru, “those who stayed at the conscious surface of this ego tried to solve an unsolvable problem. They sought to explain the permanent fabric of the ego (…) through the accidental appearances of the consciousness; they sought, in one word, to topple the pyramid of spiritual life, setting it on its top, rather than on its foundation. Kant also shares that error.” (Ibid., p.484) Resetting the “pyramid of the spiritual life” on its real foundation will be the task of energetic personalism. To that effect, the first step consists of “the unity of personality”: “The unity of consciousness, in order to be understood and to yield, in its turn, a means of understanding, must be set at the foundation of the entire organic unity of the individual, with which it forms a whole.” (Ibid. p.484) Yet this unity of the personality is only the top floor of the pyramid. Its foundation is a much wider unity, that of the “psychosphere”: “The objective science of the personality sets the origin of the personality in the structure of the psychosphere, that is, in the structure of the life of mankind as a whole, and not in the isolated human individual. The isolated human individual completes the personality; the structure of the personality in itself starts with mankind. The most serious errors in the study of the personality stemmed from the overlooking of this truth.” (Ibid. p.541) To Rădulescu-Motru, this is the centre of gravity of his reasoning, as the Romanian philosopher built his solution not on the “superstructure” of the consciousness, which allows the unfolding in the ether of transcendence of a “consciousness as such”, but on its “infrastructure”, so to say, where the ego is an us, and the individual is a collectivity. The encompassing reality of the psychosphere also allows a solution of continuity between the person and the world, fallen into opposition as long as the psychic reality was confined to the individual. From the reality of mankind (the psychosphere), there is now a natural descent to the

foundation of the pyramid, the reality of the world, through the hypothesis of evolution. “Nature also includes among its possibilities the human personality, as a necessary link to its overall progress.” (Ibid., p.578) In this respect, “reality is an energetic personalism,” because “reality, inasmuch as it is conceived as an evolving energy, overlaps its evolution with the process of formation of the personality (...).” (Ibid. p.509) This anthropocentric evolutionism in which the energy evolves and becomes socialized, sui generis discards the irreconcilable polarities between the individual and the social, and moreover, between the social and the natural. In this evolutionary chain, mankind plays the role of a mediator: “the truth discovered above, that the personality continues the physical energy, has the value of a general rule not for the isolated individual, but for mankind as a whole, or at most for the human groups constituted as peoples. The individual, isolated, ego, just as the isolated molecules in the substance of a gas, has its arbitrary motions, which a scientist cannot rigorously define.” (Ibid.579) It seems that, just as gas, and not the gas molecules, is the object of study for the statistical mechanics of Bolzmann and Gibbs, or just as to Darwin the laws of nature operate on populations and not on individuals, to Rădulescu-Motru the people, not the individual, is the term of reference for psychology. But not all peoples. Given his aim “to determine and to explain the spiritual traits of a population” (Rădulescu-Motru, 1937/1999, p.11), the social psychology as outlined by Rădulescu-Motru is virtually deprived of its object in the case of the populations where “the hereditary biological background” and the “geographical environment” are prevailing, to the detriment of the third determining factor, the “spiritual institutions”. In all these instances, “the object of social psychology is nearly non-existent, or overlaps with the object of other sciences,” (Ibid., pp.13-14) such as ethnography or sociology. Only “cultivated peoples” which have developed “spiritual institutions” as “an insulating shield”, allowing them to break free “from the biological and geographical yoke of their living conditions”, really represent an object of study for social psychology.4 These “cultivated peoples” are the result of a more pronounced “personalization”, inherited from pronounced and profound “spiritual finalities”, “particular to each population” (Ibid. p.13) In their case, “the subject of social psychology not only exists, but it is multiplied in keeping with the number of those peoples; we have not one social psychology for all the cultivated peoples, but different social psychologies; the social psychology of the English people, the social psychology of the French people,” etc. (Ibid. p.14) The analysis of the “spiritual traits”, which is the task of social psychology, will have to take into account, in each case, the specific spiritual finality, according to which the same “traits” can be good or bad, to the extent to which they serve or not the respective spiritual finality. Within each cultivated people, this “personalization” is continued to the level of the individual: “The individual becomes not any kind of personality, by choice, but becomes the personality which is virtually found at earlier stages, in the skills inherited” from the people to which it belongs (Rădulescu-Motru, 1927/1984, p.580). And the “people not only precedes the individual, but is also more complete than the individual. The people includes, in its core, all the skills of its members, and thus its personality (its culture) appears like an ideal harmonic potentiality; whereas the individual includes in his essence 4 We can draw an analogy here with Auguste Comte, to whom sociology, as a science of society, can only be a science of “evolved” societies, before that stage actually lacking a real subject matter. Unlike Comte, however, the acquisition of the distinction of “subject matter” is not the result of a law-like evolution of mankind: “Spirituality is not a product of time,” points out Rădulescu-Motru (1937/1999, p.12)

only certain skills, and therefore, his personality appears like a special or concrete realization of those skills.” (Ibid. p.581) This “special realization” is further refined through “vocation”, which nevertheless, by definition, does not “individualize”, but only channels the energies of the “people”, expressing them and thus “turning them into account”. The vocational man is “the one who is fit for the land he dwells on”, Rădulescu-Motru said in 1934, in his work programmatically titled Vocation. A Decisive Factor in The Culture of Peoples. This cosmic breath of the energetic personalism, anthropocentrically oriented towards the “socialization” of the energies of the universe and the fulfillment, in this way, of the potentialities existing in nature, could have led, through the idea of “psychosphere”, to an evolutionist and universalist sociogony. Yet the closer it gets to the “applied”, the unity of the psychosphere, one and generally human, is replaced by the multitude of peoples, of ethnic units. Therefore, it is difficult to say even if the psychosphere still exists as a unity, as a kin gender of the species of peoples, or if it is not actually only the sum total of those species. Anyway, the “social realism” which Rădulescu-Motru advocates, is based on the idea of ethnic unity, not on that of psychosphere – and less so on that of the individual: “The European living after the Great War has changed the perspective from which he understands the reality of social life. He has become more realistic. The illusion of man’s improvement under the influence of the normative principles of law no longer deludes him (…) Each people’s social life is, to him, given by nature, once and for all (…) The contemporary European is the first cultivated man who has become convinced of the vanity of a social policy which rests its validity upon the norms derived from a postulate of law. This could have been believed in previous ages, when the reality of social life was totally disregarded; when the individual alone was considered as real and as an agent of social transformation. (…) This countenance is totally altered, as soon as the world becomes convinced of this dependency which the individual has on society, through the laws of heredity. The disclosure of heredity means the end of the individualistic illusion.” (Rădulescu-Motru, 1936/1992, p.21) “In our century (…) in which the research of positivistic scientists has come to establish the differentiation of races and nationalities according to their origin and the environment in which they live, it comes as natural for the political thinker to prefer a spirituality which should justify the historical vocation of a people, rather than to speak of a “spiritualization of frontiers” and the humanistic ideal, as it came as natural for the political thinker to speak in the past century, having before him the research work made upon the foundation of the abstract and universal man.” (Ibid., pp.18-19) As such, the author calls for “more social realism and the setting of social totality before the individual” (Ibid. p.22) – where “realism” typically meant the replacement of the “abstract man” with the concrete collectivity. This “social realism” yardstick is politically embodied in the thesis of “Romanianism”, as the “catechism of a new spirituality” – a thesis formulated by Rădulescu-Motru in 1936. In the author’s own words, this is what it means: “By making Romanianism triumph, we ensure the future consolidation of our nation and, at the same time, we are in the spirit of the time. Today’s Europe demands from its peoples an utmost sincere differentiation of national types, according to their original characters (…) It rests upon each people to accomplish, through its own abilities, the vocation it has been blessed with by God (…) The last century, under the domination of engineering mentality, considered organization as a mechanical thing which could be switched over from one place to

another and, therefore, it encouraged imitations. Yet organization is part of the life of the nation. It is fashioned by its originality and is implemented after the potentialities available to the nation are known, and only through the labor of those who belong to the nation.” (Ibid. p.13) In a few sentences, we have a nearly caricatural description of autochthonism: an original community, consecrated by God, and thereby having a definitory virtual originality, which accompanies it throughout its existence and whose accomplishment is the mission of that and only that community. Inspired by such thoughts, Rădulescu-Motru will devote his psychological activity to extensive studies of “ethnopsychology”, which have become reference works in many respects, and he will also produce exhaustive experimental studies, such as the one on the intelligence of the Romanians, for instance, as well as lay the bases of psychological education in Bucharest. From this point of view, Rădulescu-Motru’s activity leads us to think of Galton, concerned with “improving the human livestock” and “eugenics”, and inventing, to that end, statistical instruments and methods which are still used in psychology nowadays…

d) A sociological hypostasis: Dimitrie Gusti The monographic school initiated and presided over by Dimitrie Gusti is neither the first, nor the only expression of sociology in Romania. Yet it is indubitably by far the most outstanding and accomplished one, which allowed Henri Stahl (1980) to consider it the Romanian sociological school. On 13 April 1918, at the end of World War I, and confronted with the construction of „Greater Romania”, Gusti founded the Association for science and social reform, whose explicit aim was to mobilize the efforts and know-how of all kinds of scholars in order to “reorganize the state on a scientific basis”. One year later, the Association would have its own journal (The Archives for Science and Social Reform) that became in the forties the International Sociological Union’s official journal. In 1921, the Association turned into the Romanian Social Institute, which had an extraordinary development until the next world war. During this time, thousands of people, from students to prominent scholars all over the country took part in Gusti’s monographic teams, doing fieldwork and social work, trying to understand and to help peasants from hundreds of villages. This prodigious network might have been generalized through the “law of social service” Gusti had promoted while Minister of Education. Nothing was left aside in the effort of building “the science of the nation” and thus fulfilling the dream of a rational nation-building process. Gusti had been preparing himself for this task since his university years in Germany and in 1910 his theoretical framework was already established in a programmatic paper entitled Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie, Politik und Ethik in ihren einheitlichen Zusammenhang: Prolegomena zu einem System. Some main ideas, such as sociology’s object – the global social reality -, its monographic approach and the militant vocation of sociology as the science of the nation will stay as landmarks of his life-long activity. In this respect, it is not surprising that the theoretical book he published more than thirty years later, in France, kept almost the same title: La science de la réalité sociale. Introduction à un système de sociologie, d’éthique et de politique (1941). We have recalled these aspects in order to outline the fact that Gusti was not only an outstanding personality of Romanian sociology, but a genuine institution, involving

thousands of people in his activity and his way of thinking – which makes him all the more significant for the intellectual setting of the moment. We can now proceed to presenting his vision. ‘‘…the attentive observer of the development of social science over the past few decades will easily find, despite all the pluralism of contemporary scientific thinking, a fundamental problem, common to all the sciences, which could be taken as a starting point for their unity. It is the problem of the whole and the total (…) ”(Gusti, 1943/1999, p.8, our underl.) Being an old problem, “we might say that the slogan of contemporary science, Gusti says, “would be a ‘return to Aristoteles.’” (Ibid.) “Therefore,” Gusti concludes,”speaking in the name of sociology – the true Real is the Social Whole” (Ibid., p.13) Hence, Gusti derives an integral and consistent holism, which we will try to briefly present as follows. The basic tenet that should be invoked in the opening of Gusti’s system is what he called “the law of sociological apriorism”: „the individual is social not because he is living in society but because society lives in the individual” (Gusti, 1941, p.54). It is important to notice that this enunciation is an almost faithful reproduction of the way in which Durkheim defined “collective consciousness” as being “the society which lives and acts within us” (Durkheim, 1893/2001, p.146). Whereas for Durkheim there was a genuine and dramatic “dualism” between the collective and the individual consciousness, generating two successive forms of solidarity (mechanical and organic), for Gusti there is rather a “monism”, thus eliminating from the very beginning the dramatism of human evolution (and actually of modernity), without by that neglecting the dynamics of social change. This society which lives within us was conceived by Gusti as “social units”, which are actually identified with social reality: „social reality shows itself as concrete units” (Gusti, 1941, p. 30). Sociology as a science of social reality will thus find its object of study already given in a „natural” way: „The delimitation can be done in a natural way following the indications of reality itself : the sociological monograph concerns the study of concrete social units whose principles of delimitation are due to their organic and holistic nature.” (Ibid., p.27) However, this does not mean that social units are static entities. “A social unit is therefore not only a simple existence, but an ascent, an ennoblement, a breakthrough, an impoverment, an act of creation, a process of salvation and emancipation.” (Ibid., p.14) Sociological knowledge will thus find its militant role starting from this, because, to Gusti, “getting to know the existence means to ensure its direction in life, to enlighten, rejuvenate and enrich it.” (Ibid.) These social units are classified by Gusti into three main categories: communities, institutions and groupings. At one extreme, community will be defined by „an entire integration of the life of individuals, the annihilation of the individual will...(Ibid., p. 66). At the other end, the social grouping is thought to be based on „the free will of the individuals”, and is characterized by its „conventional or contractual nature” (Ibid.) We should take note of the way in which Gusti actually reintroduces, through this classification, Durkheim’s collective-individual “dualism”, yet giving the latter a somewhat secondary and derived role. In the same fashion, “social groupings”, linked with the expression of individual consciousness (respectively, of the will, with Gusti) , are presented in a much closer way to Tönnies’, rather than to Durkheim’s vision.

This position becomes more clear when Gusti explicitly refers to the individual: “A society is necessarily made up of individuals (…). At first sight, the individual seems to be society’s last and irreducible element. But science cannot stop here” (…) (Gusti, 1941, p.53). And Gusti will try to go further, in order to avoid this unscientific “illusion”. Let us then resume Gusti’s reasoning from this very perspective. Sociological apriorism can also be formulated in this way: “There are no individuals outside the society, nor is there a society without individuals. Yet there is a Social outside any experience.” (Gusti, 1943/1999, p.18) This aprioric Social “outside any experience” is manifest through “concrete” social units, which are thus the only truly “real” ones, beyond its constitutive components. “Therefore, in a social unit there is no question about who has an exclusive value, the individual or society, as the individual is organically comprised within the social whole, and thus a social unit is a living plurality, while the plurality of individuals is a living unit. Unitas multiplex.” (Ibid. p.21) Set on an equal footing with society, the individual remains, however, subordinated to the social unit: “An individual can participate in several social units, without changing their nature. This means that the change is affecting the individual himself, to the extent to which he takes part in one or the other of the social units and that the latter have their own principle of organization, irreducible to the component individuals.” (Gusti, 1937/1995, p.4) The historical reality is also read from this perspective: “The historical event is a social element, even if it is expressed by a single individual, because for it to be historical it needs to spread into an ever wider circle of individuals, and thus to assume a character of collective consciousness, under the aspects of: language, custom, tradition, institutions.” (Gusti, 1943/1999), p.17, our underl.) The same in the political realm of the state: “The political, mechanical, libertarian atomism, characteristic of the scientific, sociological atomism which exclusively extols the individual, was opposed by a mechanical, centralizing and just as exaggerated collectivism, which exclusively extols the collectivity, by eliminating the individuals. (…) The true structure of the State cannot be, however, either individualistic alone, or only centralizing, but must be attuned to the Laws of the social units.” (Ibid., p.21) We could therefore say that it is not society that is prior and superior to the individual, but that the social unit is prior and superior to both terms, because it brings them together and defines them reciprocally in its concrete reality. That “concrete”, which to Gusti “is both social and individual at the same time.” (Gusti, 1943/1999, p.17) All these and many others of a similar nature had prompted Traian Herseni, one of Gusti’s main collaborators, to draw the following conclusions: “Through the essential analysis of the idea of man, Professor D.Gusti removes the antinomy between egoism and altruism. In their normal form, these two motives of human action are not mutually exclusive, on the contrary, they support each other.(...) Love of oneself which excludes empathy, that is egoism in its usual meaning, is only a degenerate form. “The personality theory rejects the antinomy between individualism and collectivism, both under its sociological aspect and under its ethical and political aspect. Social apriorism disentangles the antinomy of classic sociology, of the relationships between the individual and society. Neither can the individual be conceived without society, given that he comprises it in his very psychic structure, nor can society have a self-standing reality without the individuals it is made of, given that it is the manifestation of their

sympathy and creative will. (…) The antinomy between the individual and society, considerably diminished through the theory of social apriorism, is completely eliminated through the personality theory. “On an ethical level, the personality theory gives maximum value, of moral and imperative ideal, precisely to this process of merging between individual and social tendencies in the field of the cultural creations which encompass and use both of them. The individual as such is deprived of value, and just as lacking in value is the society unable to develop a culture. The individual gains value through personality, that is through the very fact which enables societies to develop a culture and which, at the same time with his socialization, ensures his utmost originality. “As an ultimate consequence, the personality theory removes on a political level the antinomy between liberalism and totalitarianism. The individual has the right to be protected only to the extent to which he strives to become a personality. The liberalism which wants to secure freedom at any costs to the individual and to consider him equal with all the other individuals (…) lacks a serious scientific foundation. (…) In practice, people are different both in point of existence and value, through their degree of personality, and the state must support the efforts of the individuals striving to become personalities (…) On the other hand, totalitarianism is just as lacking in scientific foundation when it advocates the complete absorbtion of the individual by the state, the impoverishment of the human personality through uniformity and the reduction to functions that are useful for a certain political regime. (…) “Eventually, the personality theory as a social ideal removes the antinomy between realism and idealism in ethics. Reality such as it is given is unsatisfactory from a moral point of view, hence the necessity of an ideal, but the social ideal alienated from reality, beautiful and high as it might be, is inoperative. Professor Gusti does not accept the given reality, but he does not formulate an ideal alien to that reality either.” (Herseni, 1940, pp.105-106) Let us add to all these the following conclusion formulated by Gusti himself: “…the social process, much as it is expressed through movements of opposites, is continuous, not discontinuous.” (Gusti, 1943/1999, p.19) Beyond the success or the validity of all these attempts, what is spectacular is their converging stake to dissolve antinomies and discontinuities, and thus to de-dramatize modernity as tension and/or gap. Gusti’s world seems to call for consistent actions, rather than for consistent choices… Yet this general and systematic vision is only the necessary foundation for the lifelong task which Gusti assumed: the construction of a national and militans sociology. To that effect, “D.Gusti does nothing but consistently apply, to the most minute detail, his system of sociology, hence of general theory of society, to one of the most important historical variants of social life, which is the nation.” (Herseni, 1980, p.101) Let us now follow the “applied” part of Gusti’s sociological vision.

First of all, if the nation is only “one of the most important historical variants of social life,” then “the sociology of the nation” cannot either be than a “variant” of sociology. Indeed, Gusti explicitely considers the sociology of the nation as a „sociology-in-need”, the kind of approach Romanian reality just needed, and which was entirely legitimate in its purposes, without pretending to be the „real sociology”, as he puts it, but only a „new branch” of it. The reason for it is contextual but mandatory: „The positive science, i.e. oriented toward facts, cannot ignore the hierachy of problems imposed by

reality itself. As far as the nation stands as the most important form of modern life, the science of society, sociology, has to build itself too, first of all as a science of the nation.” (Gusti, 1938, p. 24)

Thus postulated as (local) Object of (present) Sociology, the nation will be imbued with a specific ontological dignity, yet one which would seem to belong to it, which would define it independently from the interested consideration of the sociology of the nation. From the very beginning, the general sociological apriorism, for which man is social inasmuch the society lives within him, will have its particular correspondent in the fact that “the nation lives (…) in each individual” (Gusti, 1919/1995, p.33). Although Gusti does not use this term, we might thus also speak of a “national apriorism”, derived from the general “sociological apriorism”.

Then, according to Gusti’s system, the nation will, of course, be a “social unit”; but – and this point is crucial -, it will be considerd as a social unit of the type of the “community”, and not that of the “social grouping”, of the same nature as the family, for instance and especially, closely related with the village.

The national community will then be heightened in rank, being considerd as “the only self-sufficient social unity” (Gusti, 1943/1999, p.15) In this quality, the nation also becomes “a central purpose”: “As early as 1774, Herder wrote that ‘Each Nation holds the centre of happiness in its midst, like any ball its centre of gravity’.” (Gusti, 1943/1999, p.15)

Furthermore, as a self-sufficient social unit, the nation does not – or not yet5 – have another super-imposed unit above it: “Below the nation it is not the humanity that is revealed as a self-sufficient world, but humanity as the totality of nations, as a harmony of national beings (…)” (Gusti, 1938, p.26) On the contrary, it integrates – or should integrate – in a harmonious way all the social sub-units which are part of it and to which it confers a common meaning.

In accordance with the special role which he assigns to will in the establishment and functioning of social units, Gusti will also consider the nation as “a voluntary creation, since, unlike the people, which is a natural ethnic community, the nation is achieved through a constant effort, through the will to be, to live and to fight. (…) It is not what nature made it, but what it strives to be, what results from the ceaseless effort of those composing it. (Gusti, 1937/1995, p.4) From this perspective, Gusti will enthusiastically salute Renan’s famous formula regarding the nation as “an everyday plebiscite”, which, taken in itself, seemed to comfort his voluntaristic vision. However, just as in the general system, the will would not impose itself freely upon the social either, in this case, too, “a nation is what it wills to be”, yet not anyhow and totally, but “in a certain framework, in keeping with a given national character.” And at this point Gusti fundamentally departs from the “French model” in order to find again, through the lenses of his system, the autochthonistic logic: “As a rule, a nation develops on a gertain

5 This nation-centered outlook is to be understood in the context of the young “Greater Romania’s” political and social problem at that time. From the very beginning, Gusti accepted the “framework” of humanity, but yet as an ideal possibility rather than as a real matter of fact. As an ideal, he even stated in 1934 that “The close collaboration among nations, with the unspoilt freedom of their specific productive genius, in order to biuld the most superior social unit, mankind, that is what internationalism is all about.” (Gusti, 1934, p.189) With the consolidation of the Romanian nation, he changed the accents of his approach and even proposed, beginning with 1946, a project of a “Social and Economic Institute of the United Nations”, thus shifting his approach from nation to nations.

soil, the soil of the homeland. The links born from this settlement are quite varied. Some peoples conquered the land after their habits and their views of life were formed, leaving their birthplace, the cradle of their formation. That is why the land does not express them, nor do they express the land. Other peoples distanced themselves, through a subsequent development, from their geographical environment, becoming alienated from their own civilization under the influence of imported civilizations. In both cases, there is a discrepancy between the environment and the nation, and civilization becomes an inorganic reality, alien to the geographical background in which it develops. Yet there are also peoples which are born on a certain land, which continue an ancient, immemorial life, whose being grows as an extension of the geographical background, and whose habits and civilization are stamped, in exchange, as a seal upon that land. Such is, for instance, the Romanian nation. The Romanians are a Carpathian people, and the Carpathians are a Romanian world. Without that connection, this time essential and organic, between the land and our people, we cannot understand anything from the present history and civilization of the Romanian nation.” (Gusti, 1937/1995, p.5) Therefore, “a science of the nation is not possible without a thorough research of the relationships between the nation and the land on which it is sheltered.” (Ibid.)

The theoretical vision of the continuity of social processes, applied to the concrete object of sociology, will generate the following thesis: “The entire social progress is summed up by the evolution of these two degrees of social units: in creating from the potential nations, which are the primitive peoples, actual nations.” (Gusti, 1919/1995, p.35, our underl.) Progress is thus only a problem of “degree” and a process of “actualization”: Werde was du bist!6

At this stage, “the sociology of the nation” continues with the “militans sociology”, because this self-development, this actualization must be channeled through the clarification of “the national ideal” and the orientation of “the national will” in accordance with it. And it is so because “the ideal is not always clearly envisaged and the nations will often strive for foreign ideals, unfit for their nature. That is why, a thorough research of the national ideal is mandatory, a problem which makes up the ethics of the nation. So far, the only reliable source for the ethics of the nation was the national history. A more in-depth knowledge is yet required, which can only be given by the science of the present national reality, the science of the nation. This will be the foundation allowing us to eventually establish the true national ideal, which will not mean an alienation, a departure from the historical line of the nation, but a maximum development towards fulfillment, of all its natural capacities.” (Gusti, 1937/1995, p.15) Sociology will thus offer its services to the nation, and through them the nation “will be brought to self-awareness and will realize what makes it distinctive from other nations. This knowledge will become the basis of a healthy nature and national policy.” (Gusti, 1941, p.40). Without being limited to this, militans sociology is thus first of all a pedagogy of the nation, which is, essentially, a kind of ethno-maieutics apt to selectively and electively “actualize” the “potentialities” of the Romanian people.

After all these, the defense – which was vehement especially in the years around World War I – of the rights of nations as being primary and having priority over

6 “Gusti incorporated Goethe in his intellectual and moral outlook, in his conduct in life, in his way of thinking, so that, in order to seek his advice and to get answers, he would not open the books each time, but will find them almost ready in his own thinking.” (Bădina, 1968, p.16)

the rights of individuals can no longer come as a surprise. „Beginning with the French Revolution, the whole political world speaks about human rights as eternal rights, part of all the constitutions (...). When will the time come to consider the rights of Nations, which are the very condition of human rights, as eternal as the latter ones ? Indeed, what is the individual alone, isolated, without the nation he belongs to ? Nothing ! The nation is the substance of the soul that gives cultural legitimacy to the individual. (...) The real life is the national life; individual life is evanescent and permanently changing, it has value as far as it is a life through and for the nation. Is it then not strange that people talk about the eternal rights of man when one should consider in the first place the eternal rights of the nations ?” (Gusti, 1915/1995, pp.125-126) Here is once again, clearly and militantly formulated, a thesis which was only outlined, as we have seen, by Herder. Beyond this, we recognize in all that has been said above, a few of the defining lines of autochthonistic ideology, even if with Gusti man’s “existence in space” is much more nuanced and more dynamic – and more emphasized in the “sociology of the nation” than in his general theoretical system.

2. 2. Two Dreams of Autochthonism: Eminescu and Blaga“Eminescu enunciated, in passing, in 1878, sociological ideas which will later

become celebrated in the works of Tőnnies and Durkheim,” Traian Herseni pointed out, when presenting Eminescu in his “Romanian Sociology” (Herseni, 1940, p.68). And here is one of the texts Herseni had in mind to support this point of view:

“First of all, Eminescu denies ‘the existence before the establishment of states’ of ‘a state of eternal enmity…the all-out war’. ‘People gathered to establish a modus vivendi through discussion and planning.’ “This stage comes…at a much later point. Yet just as for the bee swarm or the ant nest, there are no written laws of faculties of law, although all the creatures that make up a swarm live in an order established through their inborn instincts, just the same, the primitive man lives from his earliest moments in the society, and when he begins to realize and to seek to explain his coexistence and collaboration, religions are born, which establish moral truths, under indeed dogmatic or mythological forms, religions which are by the same token also a codex. Slowly, however, the perfectible man will emerge from the totality of natural organization and will enlarge, more and more, his circle of individual activity and only then will he start to live a truly human, free life.” (Herseni, Ibid., pp.67-68)

The comparison with Tőnnies and Durkheim, as suggested by Herseni, is interesting not from whatever proto-chronistic considerations, but because Eminescu seems to set himself, inasmuch as his literary-polemical endeavours allow us to guess, at variance with what came to be outlined as the major coordinates of modernity.

Firstly, society, in its primeval stage, is considered as “natural” by Eminescu, and strongly valued in this hypostasis. To Eminescu, “natural” means - as with Tőnnies – something quite confuse, rather “commonsense”, “organic”, “spontaneous”, as opposed to “artificial”, “conventional”, “stemming from the free mutual accord between citizens” (Eminescu, 1887, see Herseni, Ibid., p.67): “In the general theory we shall thus say that the essence of the old system had ceased with the foreign rules, that the natural state perished with them, giving way to the artificial.” (Eminescu, 1880, see Stanomir and Vlad, 2002, p.143, our underl.) This “natural” sui generis includes the spiritual, with Eminescu speaking, for instance, about “the divine order, which was but a name for the

natural organization of the time” (Eminescu, 1881, see Stanomir and Vlad, Ibid. p.153) In this respect, “peoples are not products of the intelligence, but of nature” and the state is “an establishment of nature and not of reason” (Eminescu, 1876, see Herseni, Ibid. p.68), Eminescu being a fierce anti-contractualist.

So far, we might say that Eminescu is, in his way, closer to Tőnies. Yet his vision of evolution also gets him closer, up to a point, to Durkheim. We have seen that to our poet “slowly, however, the man will emerge from the totality of natural organization and will enlarge, more and more, his circle of individual activity and then only will he start to live a truly human, free life.” The emergence from “the totality of natural organization” and individualization are, therefore, the “truly human life”, set under the values of liberty (yet not of equality, as Eminescu repeatedly pointed out!). Social by definition, man is individualized somewhat along with Durkheim, being fulfilled as a man through the very conduct of this social life. Yet on the other hand, Eminescu describes the present society, resulted from this very individualization, rather in Tőnnies’s terms, as a loss, a corruption of the good natural order: “All these have vanished today. Human society is no longer a body as it used to be previously, it is a mass of socially equal individuals, unconnected among themselves, free to work and to move however they may wish.” (Eminescu, 1881, see Stanomir and Vlad, Ibid., p.148) How can these apparently contradictory meanings be reconciled? Eminescu is polemical and fragmentary, and his direct stakes are those of social and political criticism, so that it is difficult to draw a clear and consistent answer in this respect. Nevertheless, it seems that to Eminescu, Tőnnies’s “natural” society can progress towards the individualization proclaimed by Durkheim only if it keeps unaltered its very eternal nature, “true progress being a natural link between the past and the future” (Eminescu, 1880, see Herseni, Ibid. p.70). In other words, “the perfectible man” will “enlarge, more and more, his circle of individual activity”, which represents an actual progress, yet with one condition: that this progress should be “a natural, organic development of his own capacities, of his own faculties” (Eminescu, 1881, see Herseni, Ibid. p.69). Eminescu’s “perfectible man” is thus “perfectible’ only within and through his particular “nature”, which is not “altered along with societies”, as advocated by Durkheim, but is only fulfilled, “perfected” within and through the progress of the society, which allows the individual liberated from the totality of his natural organization to remain a natural being, an organic individual within the society he belongs to, rather than “a mass of socially equal individuals, unconnected among themselves” – that is, what has generated the modernization of European societies. The individual as outlined by Eminescu is thus not only opposed to the original individual of utilitarianism, it is also different from Durkheim’s organic individual, at least to the extent to which it is not the product of a universal evolution operated inclusively at the level of human nature, but of a local fulfillment which remains faithful to its primal and original nature. Individualization, the liberation of the individual from his natural totality is, nevertheless, a great human accomplishment. Therefore, what is rejected is not the progress and emancipation of the individual, but the artificiality that a non-“natural” progress entails. Instead of the dramatization of the universal posture of modernity as a messianic fall, we witness a dramatization of the particular modernization as im-posture. The traditional community plays a role of polemical reference, just as with Tőnnies, only that is does so in a dramatization which can have only a local meaning,

rather than a planetary one: the Romanians’ eponymous here is categorically the Autochthonous, not the Primitive.

Against such a background, which brings us back to autochthonism, Eminescu polemically expresses a pushing to the limit of the implications of such a vision. The “natural”, thus understood, is the norm of functioning and development of the society, which is placed above the “conventional arisen from the free mutual understanding among citizens”. This “natural” is the law of the social (“social phenomena are natural phenomena” – Eminescu also says) and as such, any intervention outside this “natural” can only degrade it to “artificial”. The natural evolution is from “barbarism” to “civilization”; artificiality means “semi-barbarism”, and the latter is a deviation from the “natural development”, a setback: “Barbarism and civilization sit together in the same relationship as the oak’s acorn with the roots, the trunk, and the offshoots. Semi-barbarism is something else, it is an illness generated through a foreign environment, the decay which would be produced by planting an oak in a swampy and marshy area and submitting it to the regime of the common willow.” (Eminescu, 1881, see Stanomir and Vlad, Ibid., p. 102)

Taking this logic to its limit, Eminescu was dreaming of the absolute autarchy of natural society, pushing, so to say, autochthonism to auto-chthonism. In this respect, Eminescu had a genuine obsession with modern means of communication: “We know too well that we have built comfortable railroads and bridges over rivers for the invasion of the modern age, and that the future masters of our land cross the border each and every day, by the hundreds and the thousands. The New America, the easterly America-upon-the-Danube has long ago thrust open its doors to the migration which brings our civilization and extinction. (Eminescu, 1878, see Stanomir and Vlad, Ibid., p.140) “The means of communication, the railroads, navigation on the Danube instead of being a benefit, are, due to the present lack of organization7, an evil. (…) Railroads are meant to further expand the export of raw materials as well as the centralizing power, which is followed by the impoverishment of the land, the weakening of the power of association, the decay of domestic trade. (…) For the well-organized states, where internal production is extremely diversified, any new road brings a gain in the power over and the domination of nature; in the ill- or ineptly-organized states, any new road, any new communication is a channel which drains its vital juices (…). (Eminescu, 1938-1939, pp.325-326) The permeability of the “natural society” is deadly to it, because these communicating vessels of the roads, railways and bridges (such as that across the Danube) allow “what is Good to be drained out from the country and for Evil to get in.”8 For the “natural” to fulfill its law, it should therefore also remain “pure”. Hence Eminescu’s generalized xenophobia.

On the other hand, Eminescu was aware of the fatality of contacts and population mixes, of trade, a.s.o., but he refused to pay the price: “The major social phenomena occur, in our opinion, in a causal order which is just as necessary as the elementary events, and if we cannot say that we hate the rain, even when it pours, or hate the snow, in the same fashion we cannot say that we hate such an elementary event as the migration en masse of an ethnic element, which has acquired specific economic habits, which don’t

7 Eminescu was not against exchanges (trade, means of communication, a.s.o.) in general, but he saw their advantage only in the case when the partners were, so to say, accomplished civilizations, which followed their “natural” road of progress. Among unequal partners, any “opening” means the intrusion of “artificiality”, thereby leading to the “semi-barbarism” of the weaker partner.8 Şerban Anghelescu, personal communication

agree with us, under the persecution of other peoples. Nevertheless, no serious mind can demand that our people, which is innocent in this respect, should bear the nefarious consequences of the persecutions which the Israelis suffered from others.” (Eminescu, 1881, see Herseni, Ibid., p. 7)As a sociogonic vision9, Eminescu’s autochthonism, taken to its limits, thus becomes hermetic, strictly closed upon itself10, its best known and paradigm-like expression being the famous lines: “And on the railroads as they roll/All the songs into oblivion fall”.

The pushing to the limit achieved by Blaga is somewhat opposed and complementary. The foundation for this endeavour is the well-known theory of the stylistic matrices, playing the role of “categories” of the abyssal unconscious, a vision led to the point of the assertion of a “Romanian apriorism”: “We would thus speak about a sort of ‘apriorism’ of the human spontaneity in general, as different from, and above the mere apriorism of ‘knowledge’. We imagine the stylistic apriorism, whose nest and cradle is the unconscious, as varying from one region to another, or from one people to another.” (Blaga, 1944/1969, p.256) Given the availability of such a stylistic apriorism, the Romanian culture does not need to fear from contacts and influences, and no longer needs to be protected through the lofty ideal of a hermetic closure. “We asserted previously that our ‘history’ can no longer be a succession of ingenuous forms, from itself, parthenogenetic, pure, unaltered. It is just as true, nevertheless, that an existing stylistic matrix remains a strong organ of assimilation of foreign influences. It can assert itself despite all outside spiritual inductions.” (Ibid., p.257) Thus sheltered in the depths of the categorical unconscious of the population and not the species, as with Jung, or of the individual, as with Freud – from whom Blaga carefully distances himself – autochthonism has nothing to be afraid of any longer. Moreover, as it has become “stylistic”, Blaga’s autochthonism is ideal, and much less linked to the materiality, be it nationally transfigured, of a territory.

Henceforth, the idea of stylistic matrices takes its final flight through a pushing to the limit in the hypothesis of the “stylistic topography”, launched by Blaga in the context of a commentary-cum-reformulation of Pârvan’s monumental work, Getica:

“The illustrious professor proposed in his ‘Getica’ a few hypotheses regarding what might have been once, in its protohistory, the spirit of our ancestors. Pârvan’s opinions require serious rectifications. A certain philosophy of culture, recently formulated and whose perspectives were still alien to Pârvan, allows us to add some corrections, some reversals or clarifications. (…) We must admit that, on the exclusive ground of the information available to us, we cannot hope to reconstruct, as such, the

9 We are not speaking here about the valences of social and political criticism solidary to this vision, as outlined sui generis by Ilie Bădescu (1984)10 The “methodological” pendant, so to call it, can be illustrated by the furious rejection, by A.C.Popovici, of any comparative approach in sociology : “That is why, sociology is today a “science” ridiculed by the world. Firstly, not even today does it know what it wants, and then it ‘treats’ all the ‘social’ matters of ‘humanity’ with all sorts of hotchpotch data, gathered from Belgium and Patagonia, from Sweden and from the Bushmen (…) But why should I care about the Bushmen and the Patagonian and the Swedes ! To me, as a Romanian, resolved to discover the normal development conditions of my people, all the necessary material is here at home, among the Romanians (…). If I know what I am looking for, and I am good about my task, about the methods of scientific research, today I don’t need to bother to go not even to Bulgaria to bring over material. That might come in handy later, but now it would only serve to distract my attention focused on a single point on the world map: that of the Romanian nation.” (Popovici, Ibid., pp.74-75)

contents of the Getic mythology and religious life. Yet we believe that based on a more thorough examination of the documentary material we might point out, at least approximately, the place held by that mythology and religious life in the framework of a stylistic topography, which would embrace all the Arian branches. (…) So far, there have been quite a few attempts to characterize various mythologies, but the idea of a stylistic topography of mythologies, which should give us certain opportunities to fill a “void” within its body, is ours.” (Blaga, 1943, pp.3-4)

Yet what is the idea of this stylistic topography all about? Blaga first points out that “we attribute to topography a significance which is more than geographical. Indeed, we suppose that topography also has an ideal significance, which has yet to be outlined.” (Ibid., p.12) He then compares stylistic topography to Mendeleev’s table, and concludes that stylistic topography allows him a precious support in order to reconstruct certain spiritual profiles, about which there is left only too few direct pieces of information.” (Ibid., p.14) The fact that he also expresses “a serious reservation in principle” only refers to a difference in the degree of “utter concludence”, which is considerably higher in the case of the periodic table of elements. Such being the situation, he could only start from the “equally geographical and ideal” place that the Getae occupied in the Arian space, in order to be able to “correct” or even to reverse, from a strictly deductive point of view, Pârvan’s empirical archaeological conclusions.

Through this type of, so to say, Kantian non-Kantian critique of pure autochthonism, Blaga hopes to identify the stylistic categories of human spontaneity as aprioric and, at the same time, systematically set into and differentiated in space. In their quality as categories, the latter are no longer totally “embodied”: “a society can change its outlook, structure and configuration, adopting the articulation and the architecture of another style,” Blaga would point out. (1944, p.12) They would thus exist as a humanly universal (?) repertory, which is yet only established in and through its differentiated and differentiating topographic projection. The final signification would be that, stylistically conceived, autochthonisms are not only individual topos-es, but that together, they make up a finite and complete system: the differences can be ordered, in principle, as an exhaustive, comprehensive and non-enumerative-descriptive stylistic topography.

Seeking to give a strong image to differences as a succession, Tylor asserted at the beginning of anthropology that human institutions are just as clearly layered as the earth on which man dwells. I know no better correspondent for this icon of primitivism than Blaga’s stylistic topography as an icon of autochthonism. What a great and symptomatic phantasy! Pushed to the limit, primitivism and autochthonism become a kind of mystique of the time, respectively, the space, equi-valent even if not equally spread and acting in opposite directions.

2. 3. The chart of autochthonism. The reconstruction of a „meaningful system”

All these authors are different in many respects. Their political involvement is also different and, besides a certain common conservatism, there is a gap between Eminsecu and Gusti, for instance, Blaga being even considered as “the first author thinking Romanian but not politically” (Eliade, 1933). And yet, all of them are members of the large intellectual family of autochthonism in as far as they share, sui generis, the

same frame of existential meanings we may group together under this label. It is to this very framework that we would like to proceed now.

But is this a legitimate approach ? Can we speak about a shared framework if this very framework is not present as such in any of its individual expressions ? I believe we can, in as far as we are searching upstream to a set of values, beliefs, and practices linked together in a “meaningful system” of sociality, and not downstream, to the way each author has emphasized one aspect or another of this system or has enacted it in the daily social life. In its struggle to define appropriate rules and means of a national type of belonging/exclusion, the Romanian society mainly developed a retro-prospective kind of rationality for the reasons we tried to point at in the above paragraphs. It is this dominant “ideal type” of rationality that seems to be shared in spite of the divergent readjustments due to changing contexts or personal power stakes. Sociality is neither un-historic, nor un-conflicting, but it is by any means a longue durée phenomenon. And it has its genuine rationality, it “makes sens” – to some extent at least – to its participants.

In the case of Romania, the social, economic, and political interests on stake in defining and defending the new “national” subject of belonging engendered, as we have seen, an autochthonous definition of belonging/ exclusion, that seems to have been the best available solution in the context of Romanian nation-building. This founding endeavor had to be embedded in a larger field of more or less independent but convergent ideas, shaping together what may be called the autochthonous ideal type of rationality. Autochthonism thus understood claims to be rooted in the “real” social life and thus to promote the “true” ideals of human life. In this respect, it is a sense-giving Weltanschaung, a kind of “teodice” in the sense of Max Weber. Our brief “reconstruction” is addressing this issue, irreducible to – even if not independent of – the social theories and the autochthonist policies deriving from or claiming their belonging or dissidence to it. We may map it out by the following main characteristics:

1. Sociological apriorism. We may use this very expression of Gusti to name the grounding principle of Man as a social being and not just as a being living in society. It is in this principle that the different critiques of individualism and contractualism35 are usually rooted in. When applied to politics it engenders forms of collectivism; applied in methodology it produces holistic approaches, usually addressing community as their object of concern. It is useless to say that such a general view is rather anti-individualistic.

2. Particularism. This “society which lives within us” – according to Gusti’s phrasing of sociological apriorism – is a particular society36, not the general humanity, which, from this point of view, is not “real”. Such a view will not be universalistic-prone, without refusing nevertheless some types of universally shared values and goods.

35 But even explicit contractualist claims of Enlightenment intellectuals were rooted in such a kind of principle. As noted by Vlad Georgescu, in this period “the general opinion is that the social contract was adopted because man was by nature a social being” (Georgescu, 1971: 88). 36 Tracking back the roots of the conservatism of the Volkskunde, Bausinger identifies a main source in the „discovery of the particular (das Eigentümliche), closely bound by Leibnitz to his universalistic conception. The frequently quoted sentence about the “pre-established harmony” of the world was embedding an organic principle: the proper and indubitable interdependence of the parts was grounding the intrinsic right and value of the particular, the individual, the spatial and temporal singular.” (Bausinger, op. cit.: 19)

3. Organicism. This peculiar existence is “real” because natural – and inasfar as it stays natural –, and thus opposed to the rather artificial general norms of mankind (and mainly those of any rejected Other starting with the Ottomans37). It also is what it is in all its components, “naturally” bound to each other.

4. Localism. This particular society is a placed society, localism thus understood meaning placing the particular in space. Thus, the individual this society is living within will be a placed individual too, belonging to the topos he is born in. Localism may be embodied in nationalism when and if the nation is perceived as the main social topos. Nevertheless, the ideal of localism remains a kind of federalism, the harmonic diversity of autonomous local societies, not being thus intrinsic chauvinistic.

5. Traditionalism. This particular society is not only a placed society; it is placed from its very origine (or, even more so, its placement is its origine). Traditionalism thus understood is tracing the particular in time. The (local) past is thus a defining dimension of present society due to continuity of (local) past and present. Present is thus, to a defining extent, the legacy of the past.

6. Organic development. According to this understanding of history as continuity, actual changes are mandatory rooted in this continuity: any kind of split or shift in respect to the past is affecting the very existence of the present society. According to the organic approach of society, these actual changes have to be harmoniously spread over the organic body of society. In as far as the autonomous becoming of man is the modern “rule of the game”, autochthonism is placing this autonomous becoming in the real, local and traditional society, as a continuous process, bridging the real past with the present reality in order to achieve a real future38.

7. Social “Bildung”. Modernity (and modernization) may be seen as a up-lifting in this continuous process, from its natural to its conscious stage39. At this level, the becoming of man in his real society is (also) the result of a social pedagogy, a kind of “ethno-maieutics”, bringing to the surface of social acting unknown or sleeping capacities.

When, how and why was this autochthonist Weltanschaung politically empowered, or if and how it was just the legitimating chart of some main political options, are different stories. Such world-views should not be judged (only) in terms of

37 Starting with Cantemir, who was speaking about „lex naturae”, the references to natural writhes were mainly used in a polemic political context. ...”the writers tried, indirectly, to supply a theoretical justification of their anti-Ottoman and anti-Phanariot attitude and point out (...) the incompatibility between foreign domination and the natural laws of development of society” (Georgescu, op. cit.: 88-89).38 Turned to a policy-making rule, the idea of organic development is deep rooted in the Romanian modern culture. Its best-known expression belongs to Titu Maiorescu. But the idea that development is continuous and not discontinuous, that there is no future without past, etc. was first stated by Alecu Russo (1840, 1851, 1855), than by the prince Barbu Stirbei (1855) and Al. Moruzi (1861) (Georgescu, 1991). With considerable differences, the main stream of the Romanian representations about progress may be linked to organic evolutionism of a spencerian kind, frequently used as an argument agaist revolutionary theories (Pop, op. cit.).39 In this respect, Vasile Pârvan is opposing the „ethnographic” and „popular” culture to the „national” and „creative” one, claiming the mandatory shift from the first to the second as „the duty of our times” (Pârvan, 1920).

and according to their remote practical implications. Considering, for instance, Herder guilty for fascism, Marx for the Gulag or Darwin for all these together, is at least tendentious. Or, as a Weltaschaung, as a “meaningful system”, autochthonism just…makes sense!

Xxxxxxx

3. Diffuse ethnology and self-collection

>>> Clifford…….

3.1. Building the selfKnowledge about the Romanian people was provided, as we have seen at the

beginning of this essay, by the growing interest in the organization and peculiarities of the country and the need to document its present. The other line, which will be of much more interest for us here, concerns the past of the Romanian people, approached as a proof of its noble origin. In this respect, it is not a surprise that the very “discovery” of popular culture, of “folklore”, will be mainly the endower of the Transylvanian Latinist School.

The founders of this school were men of the Enlightment, but also Greco-Catholics, usually educated in Catholic schools from Budapest, Vienna or Rome. These roots, making them approach customs mainly as superstitions, will thus largely influence their vision about peasants’ life. “They believed that, concerning the lower classes, they could be but enlighteners, helping them to get rid of all kinds of prejudgments in obvious contradiction with natural and human mind’s laws. Thus, nothing was to be taken from the people, but everything to be given to him in order to save him from its miserable social and cultural condition.” (Birlea, 1974: 31) In this respect, Gheorghe Sincai, one of the founders, will translate Helmuth’s Volks Naturlehre under the adapted title of “Natural learning for the undermining of ordinary people’s superstition” (Invatatura fireasca spre surparea superstitiei norodului); when presenting his doctoral dissertation on the funeral rituals in Vienna in 1817, the doctor Vasile Popp will insist on some unhealthy “abuses” of these customs; even later on, another pillar of the Latinist School, G. Barit, will still fight against the bad customs of the illiterate peasants, accusing those intellectuals who appreciate and promote them for esthetical reasons.

In order to fight against superstitions, these intellectuals had to start by better knowing and documenting them, as in the case of some Catholic and Protestant writings fighting against heretical superstitions: “This [folkloristic] curiosity meats – by reshaping it into a secular form – another chapter of the ecclesiastic culture: the attention payed to superstitions as it was originally elaborated by Saint Augustin and further on modified and amplified by the 16th and 17th centuries reforms. Luther and Calvin were, according to Van Gennep, the first ethnographers. Their fight against the cult of saints and the bad beliefs was cutting apart in the realm of religious practices a sphere of customs that have to be banished because they belong to the bad and non-rational thinking. The catholic doctrine is adding the notion of survival: the superstitions are vestiges of pagan beliefs handled by the Devil.” (Burguière, 2000) Bad beliefs, these pegan survivals turned to be

also good testimonies of a past that the Latinist School was struggling to document for political reasons.

The Latinist School was first of all interested in defending its main thesis: the Latin origin of the entire Romanian people. In the general political context we have already sketched, defining the whole Romanian “nation” as a Latin one was a crucial stake. The national belonging had to be built as a shared space of the legitimate heritors of a recognized ancestor. And there were good reasons to choose Rome as this ancestor.

In this respect, folklore became a main resource of arguments, first of all linguistic (the Latin origin of the spoken language) and historical (the Roman roots of actual customs and even folklore memories of this glorious past). Documenting folk-life was in this respect a national duty, every link with the Latin origins being turned to a matter of national pride. Thus instrumented, folk studies were founded as an inaugural-seeking knowledge, having mainly the documentary stake of testing (and proving !) the original roots of present popular culture. It is for the same reason that “popular” (i.e. peasants’) culture had to be equated with “national” culture: it was in this conservative space of a majority that the expressions of the origin could – and had to – be still found, and not in the “perverted” and minority one of literate and upper class people.

Addressing the historical origins in this way, folk studies were shaped from the very beginning as an…unhistorical knowledge. The “scientific” interest of a piece of folklore was based on its VECHIME, its supposed present reproduction of a very original source. The folkloristic approach will thus start by linking the observed present directly with its claimed origin, overlooking historical chains of changing. In doing so, plenty of the interpretations will be mere phantasmagoria, the Latinist School becoming later on famous in this respect. In what concerns the social-historical context of folklore, it will be addressed later on, but mainly in order to explain spatial and typological diversity of folk expressions of the same original source.

This inaugural-seeking characteristic of folk studies will stand for its almost unquestioned evidence throughout all its history. Later on, in the second half of the XIXth century, when Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu will elaborate the founding criteria of the discipline (labeled by him in 1885 as “folklore”, thus giving up his former usage of the German translated term of “ethnopsychology”), this young science will be explicitly a “science of the origins”: “Hasdeu’s science can be briefly called a science of the beginnings” (Birlea, op.cit.: 179). Documenting the origin of a piece of folklore meant for Hasdeu to point at its very essence: the study of folklore could be thus scientific only under this condition.

With Hasdeu – and some less important thinkers before and around him – another inaugural reference will be proposed and start to be a recurrent issue in Romanian self-defining: the Dacian, and broader Thracian origin. Insisting on this remote past as the “true” origin of the Romanian people, “he was pushing our autochthonism many centuries further in the past, up to the horizon of pre-history, a vision that will be later on poetically, philosophically, and first of all historically valued through M. Eminescu, N. Iorga, V. Parvan, and L. Blaga” (Birlea, op. cit.: 180). And one may add many other names to this list.

This shifting of the inaugural-seeking interest has, of course, political stakes (communism will also prefer, with Ceausescu, this Dacian origin-claim to the Roman one). For Hasdeu it is also linked to a methodological request of a larger comparative

view, contrasting Romanian folklore at least with those of the neighboring nations. Under the same claims of scientific approach, sticking to the Roman origin of Romanian folklore would mean, in many cases, to falsify its “essence”. But most of his followers will not be able – or interested – to pursue such a difficult request, most of them also turning back to the Latinist claim.

As knowledge about an origin, or “science of the beginnings”, folk studies had to face, sooner or later, a puzzling problem: how does the present reproduce the original past ? The gap between the claimed origin and the observed present had to be covered by a reasonable explanation. It is probably here that we should address the problem of a central concern of diffuse ethnology in general: tradition. To a large extent, it is in this context of a “science of the beginnings” that tradition, as a kind of methodological fiat, comes in: it is possible to read the past in (some) present expressions because past is reproduced up to the present by the process of tradition…defined as this very reproduction! Tradition thus explains reproduction as far as it is considered to be itself a cultural process of reproduction, which is the very essence of…traditional societies. Which, in their turn, being traditional, will behave in a traditional way and produce…traditional artifacts. “Tradition” is thus a crucial notion in folk studies (and not only), explaining everything under just one condition: not to be itself explained. If it would not exist, folklorists would have needed to invent it in order to methodologically legitimate the very possibility of their “science of the origins”! But “tradition” was needed even in a less origin-seeking approach: “they are needed as regularities, and therefore handed on as traditions” (Popper, quoted by Bausinger, op. cit.: 149).

This full-scale circularity of the notion of tradition was not present from the very beginning, and was neither assumed by all the authors in the same way. It was rather gradually elaborated – or just supposed – as an explicit or implicit answer to the bothering question of “continuity” in time, and to a growing extent the complementary one of “homogeneity” in space. Thus, at the beginning, in the pathos of political fights the Latinist School has assumed, what will later on be called “tradition” was concerning just a methodological unproblematic survival proving a political problematic claim of continuity. As “survivals”, the not yet named traditions where just “out there”, in the culture and practices of the peasant society; one had only to consider this peasant society as a history building subject in order to take into consideration its culture and practices as legitimate historical facts. Following in this respect Vico, Samuil Micu, by the way he was conceiving the popular customs as a legitimate part of the “national culture”, “was introducing the notion that later on will be called tradition, underlying its crucial role in the preservation of the being of the people” (Birlea, op. cit.: 35). The problem is not yet how the present is reproducing the past, but what a present piece of folklore is reproducing from what original repertoire.

We find later on the very term of “traditions” as a general label for the cultural products of the people, mainly those linguistically expressed – as for Alecu Russo for instance, a leading romantic and revolutionary figure of the 1848-generation. The very term might come – as suggested by Birlea – from the French “traditions populaires”. But its semantic field is confusingly broadening: the “author” of tradition being “the people itself, the whole people”, as Russo claims in a very romantic mood, the reproduction of people’s traditions over time turns to the reproduction of the people itself. Folk survivals are not just proofs of origins and continuity of a Volk, but expressions of a self-

reproduction of this Volk, of its very essence40. Thus understood – or just broadly represented – traditions were more and more value-loaded: tradition is good ! Another dimension – almost neglected by the members of the Latinist School – will thus be added to the notion of folklore: its intrinsic value. But this will further raise another dramatic question: if tradition, as self-reproduction, is good, then how is change to be considered ?

The question will be sui generis addressed later on by Ovid Densusianu’s programmatic and path-breaking book on “The folklore. How is it to be understood” (1909). On this occasion, Densusianu urged the folklorist to take into consideration not only the “traditions”, but also the “present” life of the peasants, with (some of) their innovations and diversity: “Folclorul trebuie sa ne arate cum se rasfring in sufletul poporului de jos diferitele manifestatiuni ale vietii, cum simte si cum gindeste el fie sub influenta ideilor, credintelor, superstitiunilor mostenite din trecut, fie sub aceea a impresiunilor pe care i le desteapta imprejurarile de fiecare zi” (Densusianu, 1910: 12, subl. noastra, V.M.). It was beyond any doubt a very important change in the conception about peasant life and a crucial opening of the frame of reference of folk studies. On the other side, this sharp dichotomy between the past determination by tradition and the present one by improvisation and spontaneity – which will persist throughout all his work – leaves “tradition” in its unquestioned rights, and makes its insertion in present life even more puzzling. “Cistigul cel mare ar fi fost insa detectarea legaturilor dintre bunurile traditionale si mentalitatea contemporana, punind in lumina prin ce aspecte acestea ramin totusi vii in circuitul folkloric.” (Birlea, op. cit.: 361). In other words, a deep change would have been a theory of tradition, and not just a limitation of its acting. Tradition is thus no more ruling over the whole life of “traditional societies”, but it seems that it gained an immovable place in it, just balanced by some kinds of innovative adaptations to the present context. This kind of “solution” in coping with the dynamics of social life is still in vogue, dozens of papers on present rural life being approached in terms of

40 In this respect there are some similarities with the German case too. „Jacob Grimm also stated that the peasant’s tradition allowed to grasp the survivals of a culture very remote in time. But the diversity of perspectives opened by Grimm was reduced and the horizon of his cultural comparatism was brought down to the statement that there is a high Germanic culture staying active in the popular tradition. (…) [Thus], the Germanics school was ascribing the idea of continuity mainly to the longevity of the ‘racial substance” (völkische Substanz) – völkisch being used here in the strong meaning of the term given the fact that it was concerning the continuity of the Germanic race.” (Bausinger, op. cit.: 81)

“tradition and innovation”41. And it is up to the researcher if he/she will enjoy or not the outburst of “innovations”, the only ones to be really problematic…

This kind of leave-it-for-granted view about tradition was systematically challenged probably only by some members of Dimitrie Gusti’s Monographic School, mainly by H. H. Stahl.

In the volume entitled Critical Essays, published in 1983, Stahl gathered various texts, published or unpublished, all of which deal with “one of the essential themes of our culture, namely the rural, folkloric life which many consider the only carrier of our traditional culture”. Although the main target of his polemic attacks were the philosopher Lucian Blaga and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, the current “diffuse ethnology” as a whole is subtly criticized in this work.

The main line of thought of his critical work is his declared and argumentative empiricist commitment. Starting from the imperative of the direct knowledge of the field established by his master, D. Gusti, Stahl claimed that “every direct researcher of folklore finds, to his regret, that there is no standard text, nor a model of faith, habits, rites or ceremonies known by everybody and repeated ad literam”. All, or almost all perpetuated mistakes in the different approaches to folk culture derive, in Stahl’s opinion, from the naiveté or speculative will of the researchers which persist in attempting to find such an original text or model, whose reiteration in the present would be, in one way or another, the essence of the traditional life. The folklorists, for instance, “cannot help believing that they (the texts, o.n.) existed and never lose the hope of reconstructing them. When such ‘texts’ do not seem possible, as in the case of ‘ceremonies’, they persist in believing in a ‘ritual schema’ that must have existed in some clear and perfect forms, deteriorated today”. Thus they continue to appeal to the hypothesis of social ‘amnesia’ to which they oppose the reverse process of ‘social anamnesis’.

The bias of these researchers faithful to the “texts”, be they real or “mental”, prevented them from understanding and explaining the “concrete reality” of cultures in general and of folk cultures in particular. In Leach’s words, the original sin of those “rationalists” is that of “separating the ‘text’ from the social complex in which it appears, which determinates it and which it influences.” Consequently – Stahl argues – these Romanian rationalists believe that “there is one single folklore for every social group, in particular one single Romanian folklore which represents the entire Romanian people”.

41 In a posthumous work published only in 1994, Petru Caraman is presenting a very personal view about the relation between tradition and innovation. He starts by stating the existence of a general “instinct of self-orientation”, covering the “whole range of [unconscious] psychic manifestations of an individual or a group of individuals deriving from their contact with the environment they are living in.” (Caraman, 1994: 24) This instinct is then considered to be the genetic background of the “critical spirit”, via a transitional stage of “primary critical spirit”. Enacted whenever the individual or the collectivity is facing a new situation, the “critical spirit” (be it at the instinctual stage or that of “primary critical spirit”) has to perform two complementary operations: a) selection (choosing what fits into an existing frame) and b) imitation (introducing some new items in this very frame and thus changing it to some extent). At the level of collectivities, Caraman considers these two processes as being the traditionalist trend and the innovative trend, the functioning of the “critical spirit” being thus a permanent dynamic play between the two. Any excess in one or another direction may be fatal for the very survival of the respective collectivity as such. In a sui generis approach and terminology, Caraman is thus projecting onto ethnic life a cognitive approach of individual psychology similar in many respects to Piaget’s principle of equilibrium between assimilation and accommodation. The “autochthonous tradition” is playing here the role of Piaget’s “schemes of action”, the existing and persisting frame of reference. “Tradition” and “innovation” have thus nothing left of their usual static rivalry.

They favor a hypostatized unity, going as far as attributing the ‘reality’ to this single unity. On this, Stahl standpoint is categorical: “there is no unique Romanian folklore, there are several Romanian folklores”. This is due mainly to the “public opinion” nature of folk culture, not in the sense of Rousseau’s “general will”, but in the modern sense with which sociology operates.

Stahl named this kind of approaches he was fighting against “theological thinking”, and considered them to be tightly linked to the postulation of one collective entity, from the family of Volksgeist (Blaga’s concept of “style” or Eliade’s “sacred” being just sophisticated forms of the same family).

To this “theological thinking” Stahl opposed an empiricist-committed approach of tradition as rooted in the repetition of a social form of interaction rather then as reproduction of a cultural content: “in sociology, ‘tradition’ is considered to be a phenomenon of stability and long duration of the social, material, spiritual structures as well as of the ‘repetition’ of the human action, partly through the mechanism of imitation”. The essence of tradition is thus the repetition of certain human actions in groups that recompose themselves on the occasion of such action and which he calls “traditional groups”. In order to define them, he brings up the famous example of the Vatican choir, which has been singing continuously and in the same fashion for one thousand years, although it naturally changed the members. Simmel had used the example in order to illustrate the way the social forms are maintained. The traditional groups are such “social forms”, which reproduce themselves as such on every occasion when a certain collective activity requires their performance. In such groups as the ritual groups of marriages, funerals, etc., “all the participants, each representing only a fragment of the global culture”, reenact together the gestures assigned to this occasion and transmitted by the previous participants to the same action. “The phenomenon of folkloric contamination through the participation to a social group has a major theoretical significance, as it highlights the fact that folkloric cultures are not transmitted from father to son, from generation to generation, but they are continuous, at the core of the same social group, lasting as long as the group continues to exist. (…) …the folkloric tradition is, first of all, a phenomenon of transmission of cultural goods between the members of social groups with stable formal structures, ‘tradition’ being therefore an aspect of ‘stagnation’ and not a passage from one generation to the next.” And Stahl concludes: “Consequently, it is not the psychological process of memorization that is essential, but the social group in which the process takes place.” Tradition as repetition of certain actions in a certain way is thus re-born each time in the present daily life of “traditional groups” and not reproduced from a remote past thanks to generational memory.

According to Pascal Boyer, “the phenomenon a theory of tradition must explain is why and how it seems so natural to people, in certain circumstances, to take last year’s or last decade’s version of some myth or ritual as the only relevant way of performing these actions. (Boyer, 1990: 9) The usual conception, which would lead to different answers to, this question is that “traditional phenomena are linked to, and explained by a set of underlying ideas or representations.” “General theories of tradition (…) focus on intellectual constructions (‘world-views’, ‘conceptions’. ‘models’, ‘theories’, etc.). Instead of dealing with the repetition of actual interaction, they focus on the conservation of underlying cultural models. Obviously, this is a different question; while repeated events are observed, conserved ideas are hypothesized. The two problems just cannot be

confused.” (idem: 10) Equating the “repetition of events” with the “conservation of a model” is thus a fatal error. And we may add that it further on leads to another error: the presupposition of a general coherence of traditional manifestations as common – even if diverse – expressions of a shared “model”.

In this respect, one cannot sustain that Stahl really answered Boyer’s main question, “imitation” and “contagion” being rather weak explanations in this context. But it is obvious that he placed “tradition” on the more empirical and present ground of “repetition of events”, out-ruling the dominant view of the “conservation of a model” from its origin throughout time. This position Stahl has struggled for starting with the ’30 was also the most reasonable methodological choice for somebody who designs, as Gusti has asked all his colleagues to do, the scientific social reform of his country. But in these years before the war times were rather favoring the “rationalist” dreams of spiritual renaissance, so that Stahl’s “empiricist” views had not an important public echo.

We may now return to our essential history of folk studies and look at its further development.

The Enlightment orientation of the Latinist School and its strong commitment to the national cause at the moment prevented its members to take into consideration also the intrinsic value of folk productions. This will be added later on, as we have already mentioned, with a rather romantic commitment and in the revolutionary context of 1848. The interest for folklore was now changing stakes, being turned from (mainly) a historical document to an (mainly) artistic/cultural source of inspiration. For the newly issued Dacia literara journal, for instance, the main stake was the building of a “national literature”. Or, as clearly stated by Kogălniceanu in his “Introduction”, “translations do not produce a literature”. The Romanian “national literature” had thus no other better way of imposing itself then genuine folklore sources. In this respect, folk productions had to be collected in order to make available the “treasure” of esthetic values hidden in the popular culture. Vasile Alecsandri’s collection is the most well known example in this respect. A leading figure of the 1848-generation and a famous poet himself, Alecsandri approaches Romanian folk poetry with a typical romantic national enthusiasm, putting into circulation (national as well as international, Jules Michelet, for instance, being one of the great admirers of his collection) some of what will be considered to be the main masterpieces of Romanian popular culture, and in the first place the identity-mark poem of Mioritza.

Two statements, coming from two main representatives of these trends, can best illustrate this shift of accent in the prizing of folklore. Looking at the Romanian folklore as a proof of our Roman origin, Samuil Micu has exclaimed in the first half of the XIXth century: “What a great thing to be born Romanian!”, thus expressing a kind of genealogical pride. In the second part of the century, Vasile Alecsandri will open one of his books on folk poetry with the exclamation: “The Romanian is born poet!”, thus expressing a cultural pride. The Romanian, as heritor of the Romans, was already “born”; now it had to be proven that it was worth existing – and artistic (cultural) value was considered to be the best proof.

It is in this context of folklore as intrinsic value that we best should address, probably, a second key concept of national ethnology in general: specificity. In this respect, Constantin Negruzzi, another leading generation fellow of Alecsandri and

Kogalniceanu, was stating that “fiestecare tara are cintecele sale, a caror muzica si poezie sint potrivite cu firea pamintului sau si caracterul lacuitorilor ei” (quoted in Birlea, op. cit.: 68). We may recognize here, in clear herderian filiations, the very idea of specificity as placed or autochthonous value. Ascribing to folk productions an intrinsic value, and, as such, the status of main source for national literature, meant to dignify the popular culture as national patrimony. And even more: this claim of an “artistic” national self-definition Alecsandri is promoting will further on confort a long run preference for self-reference in terms of what we are feeling and thinking rather then in terms of what we are doing.

But this relatively new dimension also integrates the former genealogical, origin-seeking one: the “author” of this prized artistic value is the original Volk and in as far as it managed to kip and express its origin. For Alecsandri, for instance, “locuitorul taran a ramas tot acelasi de 2000 de ani si infatoseaza antichitatea” (quoted in Birlea, op. cit.: 82). Specificity is thus an original, time-lasting and space-rooted value, and as such the totally ethnocentric version of the idea of difference. Even when an opening of a comparative frame of reference will be requested, these comparisons will aim a better, more nuance form of specificity definition, figuring thus a kind of comparatism pro domo. In this respect, Alexandru Odobescu, a pioneer of scientific folk studies and promoter of the comparative approach, expresses in 1861 his belief that it is only by having and using a better knowledge of folk productions of neighboring countries that we may get a proper understanding of “our old customs”. This “proper” way also means some kind of modesty, as recommended later on by Ovid Densusianu, warning the folklorists not to consider any valuable piece they might find as necessarily being the expression of the high qualities of the national character: it may be shared by others too.

Specificity will go on challenging the intellectual elites – and not only the folklorists – and being challenged by them. An universalistic and sociology oriented mind such as Constantin Brailoiu was still stating in 1929 that “sigur este ca tinta noastra finala trebuie sa ne duca in cele din urma la aflarea mult discutatului specific musical romanesc care alaturi si impreuna cu specificul psihologic in genere va defini icoana morala a poporului nostru” (quoted in Birlea, op. cit.: 523). “Specificity” is here just a final and problematic finding, embedded in a universalistic specificity of human psychology, and being thus replaced in the general frame of human diversity. But Brailoiu was rather the eminent exception then the ordinary rule.

In 1838, George Barit was inviting the readers of the journal Foaie pentru minte, inima si literatura to send a diversity of folk production. In a rather unsystematic enumeration, he is mentioning also old practices and tales “care ar avea ceva insamnare istorica si arheologica si care ar vadi trasaturi de caracter pentru noi” (quoted in Birlea, op. cit.: 58). At that time, the two main dimensions of folklore are already side-by-side, but in a not yet explicit and programmatic way. For Barit, as a member of the Latinist School, the main direction remained, in fact, the “historical and archeological meaning”. The “expressing of our character” will be stressed later, as we have mentioned. From the mere “poetic character” of the Romanian, this interest will grow to what Hasdeu, and later on Densusianu, will consider being an “ethnopsychological” stake of folk studies42, a description of the psychological specificity of the people. In different ways, these two

42 Densuşianu stated in an explicit way that „leading us to establish psychological facts” has to be the folklore’s aim, so that each scholar collecting whatever kind of folklore pieces should keep in mind that all these are "precious and sure contributions for ethnopsychological conclusions” (Densuşianu, op. cit.: 9).

dimensions – and interests – will go together. And so will also the two concepts more or less linked to them: tradition and specificity.

Tradition and specificity are probably the most important specific claims diffuse ethnology in general has developed and defended in the general realm of autochthonism, turning them to highly emotion-loaded, and belonging-defining notions. It seems that it succeeded to such an extent that even now it is hard for us to escape this noble trap: without tradition and specificity we feel lost in our practice of self-definition. And then we try to escape by mocking them out – which is neither the best solution…

3. 2. Making the collection“Probably there is no other discipline where to contribution of amateurs was so

extensive as in folk studies” (Bîrlea, 1969: 23). This reflection made by Bîrlea en passant is far from being an exaggeration. Collecting, which stood – and, to some extent, still stands – for the most important part of the folkloristic activity, was done to a large extent by, or with the large help of non-professionals, mainly village teachers and priests. Gheorghe Bariţ, an important member of the Latinist School and editor of Foaie pentru minte, inimă şi literatură, published in 1838 an appeal to all “learned people” to collect folk literature, and starts to publish the receive materials in his journal. In 1857, Atanasie Marienescu, one of the most prolific collectors of his time, also launches an appeal, the collection he will produce being almost entirely the result of such collaboration. Alecsandri’s collection was also built with the help of some friends, some of them unknown. Starting with the second half of the 19th century and till the Second World War Bîrlea could enumerate 31 such appeals considered by him to be “the most important” ones (Bîrlea, op. cit.). Some of them were just asking for “all kinds of folk pieces”; others were more elaborated, joining some brief methodological requests. The first draft of a questionnaire was sent by Marienescu in 1870, followed by Hasdeu in 1878 and Simion Florea Marian in 1879, using more elaborated forms. The state institutions, mainly the Romanian Academy and the Ministry of Education, will also get involved, launching appeals for collecting and helping for their publication. The Romanian Academy will even initiate a collection called “Din viaţa poporului roman” (From the life of the Romanian people), 41 volumes being edited till 1931.

In time, this collecting will be done more and more carefully, following more and more detailed methodological instructions; but the large participation of local learned people added to the intrinsic methodological weakness of folk studies will prevent them from a wide professionalization.

a) Collecting folklore. The problem of authenticityHow should one collect the folk material ? As soon as this question is raised in its

explicit methodological stake, it will produce opposed partisanships. This conflict has famous antecedents. The publication of Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Achim von Arnim and Clement Brentano in 1808 has engendered passionate debates. For the two editors, “the ‘Volk’ concerns rather an active poetic force then a social reality” (Bausinger, op. cit.: 28) so that a collection of such Volk Lieder (even if they are supposed to be “old German poems”, as was mentioned in the subtitle of the volume) is aimed to express this poetic force and not whatever present or past reality: poetry is neither young nor old, it just has no history – will claim von Arnim. This rather free approach of folk poetry will

scandalize more then one. Jacob Grimm, for instance, will accuse von Arnim of robbery. But he will have to be more cautious when von Arnim will reply that, in fact, what the brothers Grimm have done with the collection of fairy tales was a creative remaking of what they have heard. Jacob Grimm will stay trustful to the idea of fidelity of transcription, still being aware of the fact that a perfect fidelity is not possible.

In the case of Romanian folk studies, “the chronological order will give the priority to the principle of respecting authenticity, which will soon be replace by that of restoring authenticity by ‘setting to rights’ (…) the popular texts.” (Bîrlea, op. cit.: 15) Interested in language as a main proof of our Latin origin, the members of the Latinist School – in as far as they will be interested in folk collection – will claim for authenticity, meaning a faithful transcription of peasants’ parlance. Gheorghe Bariţ, as editor of Foaie pentru minte, inimă şi literatură, will be the most prominent defender of this trend. But the outcomes will not correspond to this request, the problem being yet not fully understood. Several decades later, with Marienscu’s and first of all Alecsandri’s collections, the romantic principle of “restoring” will take over. In fact, both of them were convinced that it is by “cleaning” the collected poems from their time rust that the true authenticity is preserved. Besides this, Alecsandri especially was conceiving the people much in von Arnim’s way, as an anonymous poetic force (he was speaking about the “genius of the Romanian people from whatever province”), being thus entitled to restore all its brightness and show it to the world.

But the entitlement for restoration had also another root. In their origin-oriented approach, folklorists could consider that they have to proceed as archeologists, putting together the original statue out of its broken pieces. Besides, there were a lot of famous antecedents of such “restorations”, from the Homeric poems to Kalevala. It is thus not surprising to see that Marienescu was considered by some as “our Pisistrate”.

“Cunoaşterea imprejurarilor de atunci, cind creatia populara era si un blazon al natiunii ce aspira la afirmare si independenta politica, explica resorturile metodologice ale culegerilor de folclor si le justifica erorile, inerente oricarui inceput. (…) Din păcate, scuza nu se extinde si asupra materialului din colectii, care ramine neautentic, de utilizat cu prudenta si cu rezerve critice, ca atare destinat numai celor familiarizati cu folclorul autentic, mai ales in ceea ce priveste aspectul stilistic. A le pune in rind cu culegeriloe autentice si a le studia fara rezerve e o mare greseala, care mai dainuie. » (Birlea, op. cit. : 21)

This trend will be blamed soon after its relative success, Alecsandri being accused of robbery in his turn by Ion Eliade Rădulescu and some others. More and more voices will rise against such misuses, so that about 1870 the claims of authenticity are again the dominant trend. But personal interventions in the collected material will never totally disappear.

Fidelity of transcription will be much fostered by the introduction of some “technicalities”, such as the usage of shorthand writing, and more important, that of phonetic transcription starting with the end of the 19 th century. At the turn of the century the phonograph will also make its entrance in the field of collecting, but Constantin Brailoiu considering that “only the machine is objective” will promote its systematic and scientific use mainly later on. Full “authenticity” could thus be reached.

This most debated notion of authenticity started by concerning a transcription in its identity/non-identity relation to the original (i.e. the informer’s performance), being

thus a legitimate methodological problem. It is only with time that authenticity started to concern the original itself and not just its transcription. Being “authentic” in this case meant a kind of identity/non-identity relation of the observed performance to its supposed original background: an authentic piece of folklore was thus a genuine one, expressing in an unaltered way the category it was belonging to. According to this criteria a selection could – and should – be operated between “authentic” and “non-authentic” folk pieces and even between more or less “authentic” counties43. When systematically used, such an approach had as its logic outcome the worst reification of folk culture.

But even in this sense, authenticity is not to be uncritically dismissed. The distinction made by Brăiloiu between “popular music” and “musical life” of the people may help us to better explain this issue. As already mentioned, according to Brăiloiu, the whole musical life of the people is to be documented in order to comprehend the existing “popular music” and to check its authenticity. In this case “authenticity” concerns the identification of musical patterns having been documented for a certain space, be it local, national or broader regional, and their eventual way and degree of mixture. Musical performances belonging to the “musical life” of the people at a certain moment but proved not to belong to the specific patterns of these people can be considered “non-authentic”, i.e. not to be confused with the specific ones. This does not imply any kind of hierarchy or rejection, and not even an ever lasting “authentic” pattern but just an esthetic identification of styles, types, etc. “Authenticity” is thus a methodological criteria as any other, becoming harmful only when turned to a purity-seeking criteria by purist folklorists – which is far of being an exception…

b) Placing folklore. The problem of unity and diversityPlacing the collected pieces in a concrete social context was not a main

preoccupation of early folklorists. For the scholars of the Latinist trend authenticity was, eventually, much more appealing then context: for their origine-seeking approach it made almost no difference who and where said or did something as far as it could be documented that it was a Romanian. In the romantic view, context was neither important as far as the collected pieces where ascribed to the collective and anonymous genius of the people. The informers were eventually mentioned only in outstanding cases that have impressed the collector, Marienescu suggesting even a hierarchy of the informers according to their perceived importance.

The first claims concerning the identification of the sources will be made only about 1880, being usually limited to name, age, sex and locality. In the first decade of the 20th century I. Bianu will ask to joint the transcription of melody to that of texts in the case of popular tunes in order to try an common comprehension; in the same period, G. Pascu will legitimate the idea of the exhaustive registration of an individual repertoire, which Brăiloiu will extend later on to the request of the registration of a whole community’s repertoire. Folklore started thus to have a face.

In the same time, folklore itself started to change its physiognomy. Probably the most important contribution in this respect was the idea of variants, clearly expressed by Hasdeu: “Prin varianturi, în literature poporană ca si-n lingvistica, se inteleg examplare

43 Speaking about Vasile Alecsandri, Ovidiu Bîrlea tells the reader of his History of Romanian Folkloristic that the poet „went in a place where authentic, old Moldavia, that if the mountains, was still alive” (Bîrlea, 1974: 75).

diferite in forma, in accidente, in punturi secundare, dar identice in toate elementele fondului, iar nu numai in unele din ele” (quoted in Bîrlea, 1974: 176). Hasdeu is forging a whole chain of notions (sub-variant – variant – sub-type – type – archetype), not always very distinct and in clear relations one to the other, but trying in a systematic way to bridge unity and diversity, and even a common human ground of folk productions with the more local and particular ones. But not even him was able to really follow this ambitious standard. Nevertheless, the methodological request deriving from this vision, namely that of an (as far as possible) exhaustive collection of the whole range of available variants will orient, to some extent and at least some of his followers, toward a more regional and/or a more comparative, trans-national approach: variants and types had to be “placed” and their circulation to be established and thus diversity started to be tracked in a methodic way. The national space keeps on being the main target, but the idea of ethno-zones emerges and is more or less better highlighted. On the other hand, the opening of a comparative space starts challenging the pure national origin issue. Lazăr Săineanu, for instance, one of Hasdeu’s most important followers, will place his study on fairy tales in a Balkan and even broader European context, claiming an “anthropological” common origin of all fairy tales.

But “methodic” does not necessarily mean a methodological proper way. In his famous manifesto, Ovid Densusianu stated in a militant way that “the time of random collecting, without system, without orientation, without scientific training has to stop” (Densusianu, op. cit.: 20). One of his pinpoints was also the mere accumulation of “variants”.

It is mainly Dumitru Caracostea in the second decade of the 20 th century that will give a methodological proper form to this search of variants, linking their coexistence in space with their becoming in time and giving up the search of an archetype, that he considers useless and even improper. In his 1915 monographic study on Mioritza he will consequently approach the problem of the social roots – mainly popular customs and practices – of this folk piece and its diversity of local variants.

Looking at the state of affaires of folk studies in this period of the first 2-3 decades of the 20th century, one can find a lot of fine and precise theoretical and methodological statements, covering together most of the needed fundamentals of the discipline. But most of them are not followed or properly performed even by their authors. Large collections of unequal value are emerging, many of them displaying unequal information. Concerning the issue of unity and diversity, the basic request of a large and systematic coverage of the Romanian space is unequally respected too. For instance, Elena Niculiţă-Voronca’s collection on “Customs and beliefs of the Romanian people”, considered by the editor of its 1998 republication as “one of the most representatives work of the Romanian ethnology” (Berdan, 1998: 9), is listing 93 villages where the information was collected from, 91 being from the Bucovina and Botoşani counties. An explicit or implicit belief in the unity of Romanian folklore still entitled many authors to present as beliefs or practices of the Romanians in general information gathered from just one or several counties they had access to. On the other extreme, many small local collections are staging “our regional folklore”, without much concern of a proper placing in its broader, comprehensive context. The practice of “village monographs” done by local intellectuals, still in uses our days, will enforce this trend.

c) From origins to contemporaneityThis shift from the ubiquity of folklore as a product of the People to more and

more “placed” expressions, linked to individuals and limited spaces was due also to a change in the political context. >>>>>Times have changed. Unity has been achieved and the first modern Romanian state has emerged. Obsessions with origins could become thus more relax and interest for present life should get some impetus. In this context, Ovid Densusianu marked a crossroad in this on-going activity of folk studies at the beginning of the XXth century. It is he to have stated for the first time in a clear and programmatic way – even if he was not the first, of course, to be aware of this problem – the fact that the peasant is not (only) a survivals-barrier, as precious as these might be, but that he has also his own daily life, and, more important, that this life also deserves the folklorist’s attention. The field of interest of the discipline is thus essentially broadened, including also more psychological and sociological aspects, as he himself made it clear speaking in this respect about “ethnopsychology”. Birlea considers that this “includere a fenomenului contemporan in cimpul investigatiilor si conceperea folclorului ca o disciplina a speciilor traditionale si a fenomenelor spirituale contemporane e cel mai de seama cistig al folcloristicii secolului nostru” (Birlea, op. cit.: 359). Folk productions were thus also linked to their social context of production instead of addressing them always and only in relation to a supposed origin. In doing so, the time horizon of folklore is brought closer to our days, some folk productions being related to national or local events and processes that happened “only” some centuries ago. It is in this perspective that Densusianu tried to interpret the relations between the Romanian folk poetry and the pastoral life in his 1922-1923 book dedicated to this problem.

Densusianu’s main intuition was not doubled by an equal-range methodological renewal, the data about the “social context” being still rather irrelevant and insufficient and many of the connections established by Densusianu being highly debatable. Last but not least, this opening toward present life did not meant at all a dismissal of the origin quest, still high ranking in Densusianu’s interests and commitment to comparative philology.

The theoretical and methodological coherence in this respect was to be achieved only much later, the most representative character being probably Constantin Brailoiu. “Noutatea vine din surprinderea firelor care leaga cintecul popular de viata sociala in totalitatea lor” – Birlea observes (Birlea, op. cit.: 513). Musician by formation, Brailoiu will be closely involved in Gusti’s Monographic School and will take a very active part in its monographic campaigns. This will bring him closer to a more sociological insight, still observing nevertheless the autonomy and peculiarity of Folk studies. Brailoiu was aiming at the “study of phenomena together with the phenomena’s condition and their filiations”. In this respect – and concerning the musical phenomena – Brailoiu makes a fine distinction between “popular music” (music of peasant origin and use, belonging to identifiable types and categories) and “musical life” of the people (all kinds of music circulating at a given moment in a given “popular” space). Only the first one is to be considered as the sticto sensu object of ethnomusicology – and this should be kept in mind –, but as such it can not be understood without a proper knowledge of the second one as being its comprehensive context (Brailoiu, 1931). Kipping its specificity, ethnomusicology (and folk studies in general) has to open thus to a rather “sociological” approach of the “conditions” and “filiations” of their object of concern. According to this

desiderata Brailoiu will request an exhaustive checking of the repertoires of each member of the studied community, this large corpus of songs and their precise distribution in the community being considered as the only proper unit of investigation. By the same doing, the standard status of the informer as a traditional specificity-barrier is strongly undermined without a priori dismissing the very idea of possible specificities that may show up after careful comparative work.

With Brăiloiu (and other few scholars sharing this type of view) we may say that folk studies will end, in a way, their long journey from origins to present life. But this was rather the achievement of some individuals then a collective process. Folk studies thus mainly produced a patrimonialized self, an object prized for its conservative and genuine values, something one rather possess then belongs to. Speaking about our Self in this respect is less an expression of what we ourselves actually are then a discourse about what we have in common out there, in the protected space of our rural life: one cannot say that we are our own traditions, but just that we do have our own traditions ! The folklorist approach is thus constitutively producing a remote “being of the people” to the extent that one may say, (ab)using Lévi Strauss’ formula, that the “regard proche” of the folklorist is a “regard éloignant”. A shared possession, this reified spirit of a nation the folklorist himself is proud to belong to, may then be turned into a discursive resource on the free market of social capitals. >>>>>“Folklorists”, as a large social category of priests of this national self-patrimony, might then fight for the preservation of this resource as a way of recognition of their status.

Adaugiri >>>>>>>pg 50

Systematic views about evolution started to be elaborated and shared with Enlithenment. Adressing the history of the Otoman Empire, Cantemir was also explicitly performing an approach in terms of the theory of cycles (growth, equilibrium, decline). A less known writer, Depasta, was speaking about a “rhythmic low”, clearly borrowed from Vico. But, as noted by Vlad Georgescu, “the theory of the ages was more widespread than the theory of cycles. Romanian writers like other European thinkers divided the worls into the ages of gold, silver and bronze. (…) Romanian writers reached the conclusion that society followed a descending curve (…). The widespread dissemination of the theory of ages was also due to the fact that it represented, for most writers, an illustration of the history of their country. (…) after 1711/1716, when the setting up of the Phanariot regime actually meant a deviation of the Principalities from their natural course, this conception was strengthened. The generation coming after 1750 saw the Phanariot epoch as a separate epoch in Romanian history, an ‘age’ of decline which they sometimes opposed to the idealized ‘golden age’ of the past” (Georgescu, 1971: 90), i. e. the more or less remote pre-Phanariot times. Nevertheless, this was not a mere pessimistic view, but “were aimed at stimulating conciousness and inducing people to strive for a political revival (…)” (idem: 91). Even more, a strong belief in general progress was expressed by other writers or on other occasions. In fact, all of them had a kind of political-rethoric usage of available theories that they knew how to handle in order to express major social (and personal !) stakes. This kind of underlying

evolutionism will be evoked later on by authors sharing in an explicit way different worldviews. Haşdeu, for instance, will speak of whole humanity as one individuality progressing throughout the three ages of childhood, maturity and old age and still sharing a militant autochthonistic view, as we will see.

>>>>>> p. 78 (end chart of A)These characteristics may be considered as an attempt of reconstructing the

autochthonistic “rules of the game” that were governing the sense of belonging/exclusion of the young Romanian nation. As in any other modern society, this dominant Weltanschaung was not taking its course unchallenged. And neither was it comprehended and enacted as a whole by everybody at any time. But all these characteristics made system and, as such, “made sense”, even if only some of them were highlighted by some actors in some contexts. Or, to put it in another way, autochthonism became the dominant rationality, different individual “rational choices” making to some extend different use of it.44 The other side of the coin was that, due to a kind of system-effect, making just some autochthonistic claims had – or could have in time – global autochthonistic meanings and implications, eventually not intended by their author. The shared “rationality” was self-reproducing and developing behind occasional individual rejections or disapprovals of one “rule” or another.

ConclusionsComing to the end of our essay, we may ask, paraphrasing Katherine Verdery,

what was national ethnology and what comes after ?We have tried to suggest that its broader frame of reference was a kind of

autochthonist rationality. In the context of nation-building constrains, this growing dominant rationality was not only legitimate, but also a contextual proper way of bilonging construction, a political efficient tool of the moment: the crucial stake of independence had no other better available arguments to provide.

Rooted in constrains of political development, localist and origine-orieted as it was, autochthonism was nevertheless usually enacted as a progressive – if not progressist – approach of the future of the local and original People. The prized world of “traditions” peasants were seen as bearers of, is also frequently conceived as a childhood stage for which these very “traditions” are the best source of further evolution, as clearly stated by romantics such as Kogălniceanu, Russo, Negruzzi and the like. “Russo is not a past-ridden, he is oriented toward future and it is this very concern for future that makes him to search for support in the past” – Bîrlea (1974: 69-70) considers. Further constrains of progress will make this past-future concerns more and more dramatic: “We don’t want to be any longer the eternal peasants of history !” – will pathetically claim Constantin Noica

44 In his “reflections on the politics of Serbian ethnology”, Slobodan Naumovic (1999) is building a “rudimentary research style comparison matrix”, defining what he calls the “double insider syndrome” in three mutually interconnected segments whose presence or absence is then checked in different periods and contexts. A more dynamic and nuance picture of the complex trajectory of Serbian ethnology is thus highlighted. A similar strategy could be used in this case, in order to better track the diversity of autochthonistic claims, especially in time. The listed characteristics could be thus checked for their presence or absence with different representative authors in different representative contexts. But this is out of our purpose in the present essay.

in the name of his “golden generation” of the thirties. Autochthonism will be thus permanently revisited as the very starting point of any strategic decision.

But what was the specific place of “national ethnology” in this process ? A short-cut evaluation could be that, as “nation-building ethnology’, it started as being a main actor of the construction of autochthonist rationality, sticking with its gradual professionalization to a more “scientific” documentation of autochthonicity. A further evaluation should answer at least to the following two questions: 1. what was the upcoming meaning of this national ethnology as specific expression of an autochthonist rationality ? and 2. who were the autochthonist ethnologists ?

The first question may seem fallacious: how can one suppose to pick the very ultimate meaning of such a complex endeavor ? Of course, such a claim would be tendencious. We intend thus to propose just one possible way to approach this issue, a way we consider to pinpoint a sensible aspect of the whole story. In order to do this we have to make a detour and briefly address the propblem of property relations.

In anthropological parlance, property is not a 'thing' but a 'relation'. That is why "the study of property rules in general, and of land tenure in particular, is the study of relationships between people" (Davis, 1973, quotted by Hahn, 1998: 5). And Chris Hahn is further enlarging this view: "It (...) seems desirable to strech the definition of property beyond the conventional anthropological formula, which proclaims simply that property relations are social relations. The word 'property' is best seen as directing attention to a vast field of cultural as well as social relations, to the symbolic as well as the material contexts within which things are recognized and personal as well as collective identities made. This usage may seem abstruse and at variance with both ordinary language and academic usages. It might seem too loose and open-ended, making the study of property relations coextensive with the entire field of social anthropology. However, the main advantage of approaching property relations in this way is that it carries minimal ethnocentric baggage. It can therefore be used to facilitate comparative analysis in fields of social organization where economics, politics and law intersect." (Hahn, op. cit.:5) We will thus follow Chris Hahn's suggestion to "adopt a broad analytic concept of property in terms of the distribution of social entitlements" (idem:7).

Using this interpretation as a general frame, we would like to add just some specifications provided by an ecological approach and made very useful in our case. We will follow in this respect some of Tim Ingold's suggestions in his quest for an "ecology of life" (Ingold, 2000). Following in his turn Bateson's concern for an "ecology of mind", Ingold is opposing the perception of ecology as concerned by a 'world out there' and how it shapes and is shaped by organisms, considered in their turn as "somehow beyond the world, and therefore in a position to intervene in its process" (idem: 20). The object of ecology is, in his view, this very relation of organism and environment because this is what realy exists, and not two distinct face-to-face realities: "In short, my aim is to replace the stale dichotomy of nature and culture with the dynamic synergy of organism and environment, in order to regain a genuine ecology of life" (Ingold, op. cit.: 16). Or, to be even more precise, "a properly ecological approach (...) is one that would take, as its point of departure, the whole-organism-in-its-environment. In other words, 'organism plus environment' should denote not a compound of two things, but one indivisible totality. That totality is, in effect, a developmental system (cf. Oyama, 1985), and an ecology of life - in my terms - is one that would deal with the dynamics of such systems."

(idem: 19) This "indivisible totality" of the "whole-organism-in-its-environment" is an

embodied relation, which is deeply felt as such by the subjects and stands for the very knowledge these people have of themselves and their environment. "It is knowledge not of a formal, authorised kind, transmissible in contexts outside those of its practical application. On the contrary, it is based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through long experience of conducting one's life in a particular environment." (idem: 25)

Following this kind of understanding property relations, we may say that autochthonism produced a specific kind of property relation of the original People with its autochthonous space. The whole nation-building ethnology was thus sui generis producing a “social entitlement” for the whole People as owner of the national space. Patriotism – eventualy turned to nationalism – may be seen in this respect as a way of deeply feeling the national space as one’s genuine environment.

We may turn now to the second question.National ethnologists were also militant political actors at least until the first

Romanian state and its independence, playing thus an active role in the political life of the country. Professionalization and institutionalization of folk studies were possible rather after the original political stakes became more relax. In return, this emergence of an academic field of knowledge in its own rights turned its members from nation-builders to “experts” of the Nation and its proclaimed “essence”. By the same doing, their folk-knowledge was turned to a cultural capital rather then the initial more outstanding political one. The national self-collections they provided were thus also a kind of symbolic personal resource of legitimating in the broader social power game. The way this collecting was managed, using large numbers of local non-professional learned people, also helped to spread this approach all over the country, in the most remote villages, and thus produce a large social category of “national experts”. This meant a vulgarization of ethnology and its underlying autochthonism but also a strengthening of the autochthonist group. To some extent one may even say that the practice of collecting produced in villages a kind of literacy as autochthonism.

This diffuse category of “humanist intelligentsia” felt more and more „seduced and abandoned” as they were gradually loosing social and political visibility. Starting with the thirties, national and independence threats were again on the public agenda so that old autochthonists arguments could be used again. This was also an occasion for this left-over “humanist intelligentsia”, experts of autochthonist claims, to recover prestige and power: „(...) intellectuals in each province were struggling to preserve and even expend the space for intellectual activity, in a society in which the technical requirements of economic development were displacing humanists from central stage. In the interwar cultural press there appeared numerous articles appealing to Romanian intellectuals to help build the state, to defend national unity (...) and many other things.” (Verdery, 1991: 55) „Intellectuals cannot continue to remain indifferent to the gravity of the current situation, which threatens the very foundations of the Romanian state. Their purpose should be to organize with foresight for state leadership” – Rădulescu-Motru was claiming in 1921.

In this general trend, the rather cultural capital of folklorists as patrimony priests had also a chance to be re-converted into political capital. Militant rationalism with its

social roots in the over-representation of this “humanist intelligentsia” and its village literate networks also played a crucial role in the orientation of this process and its final outcome of a „metaphysical nationalism”.

Romanian “nation-building diffuse ethnology”. Prolegomena to a critical approach(abstract)

Vintila Mihailescu, Romania

The reason of choosing such a subject in the Nexus frame was that “Romanian ethnology” as “nation-building ethnology” is a symptomatic case of “identity building” in the Balkan context. The permanent issue on stake was then how to conceive a meaningful approach to “Romanian ethnology”, avoiding both a factual history of the discipline and a mere deconstructivist exercise ?

Such an enterprise proved to imply some careful up-stream reflection, mainly on the very concept of “identity”, as well as on the different ways and paths of “nation-building” in the context of European modernization. Common with most of the Nexus projects, these issues were largely debated in the Nexus meetings and reshaped the whole first part of the present paper, devoted to this general framework. Some guiding lines emerged, contrasting cosmocentrism and anthropocentrism (the last being more or less equivalent with the underlying Weltanschaung of modernity), primitivism and authochtonism as competing ideologies of modernization, and rationalism and empiricism (Leach) as complementary methodological approaches of Man and Society. “Nation-building ethnology”, contrasted, following Stocking, to “empire-building ethnology”, was then considered as a rather autochthonist and rationalist discourse, the main trend of Volkskunde (whose history is more complex) being considered as typical. This allowed also a working distinction between anthropology, rooted rather in the problem of thinking about mankind and the human differences (e.g. the famous adagio of “Comment peut-on être Persan?”), and ethnology, involved rather in the thinking of cultural specificities of social groups (one could wonder, in this respect, “Comment peut-on être soi-même?”). A short consideration of the political contexts and stakes of these different choices is also provided.

The second part of the paper is addressing the case of “Romanian ethnology” and starts by questioning the supposed-to-be evidence of its very object: what should be considered “ethnology” and even “Romanian” in this case ? In this respect, an an-easy and almost never clear-cut distinction between “sociology”, as interested mainly in knowledge about the people in order to shape the nation, and “ethnology”, involved in knowledge of the people as specificity of the nation, had to be made. Ethnology, in this case, has to be just a label (what we choused to call “diffuse ethnology”) for the conflicting and rather unspecialized discourses about the “being of the people”, as Pârvan, a founding father of Romanian ethnography, has claimed. A general overview of the academic and political conflicts of “sociology-minded” and “ethnology-minded” elites in time and space is then sketched.

Defining in this way our field of interest, we then tried to place this “diffuse ethnology” in the general framework sketched in the first part, describing from a systematic rather then historical point of view the common and variable features of rationalist autochthonism as the underlying “ideological-type” of Romanian diffuse ethnology. A second-sight approach is suggesting that most of the authors engaged in this trend were sui generis modernity oriented, different brands of “autochthonism” being proposed as dramatic but the only “rational” paths for national modernization.

A final chapter is addressing the legacy of this “diffuse nation-building ethnology” in post-communist Romania, stressing the ideological dimension of an emerging anthropology-oriented discourse about Romanian society. What seems to be on stake now is not just the institutional building of a new discipline, displacing in a way the “old” professionals, but also an important shift in the way of conceiving and performing the (national) identity. The academic conflict between “folklorists” and “anthropologists” is thus staging a much deeper political and “cultural” tension.

Choosing to approach the history of ethnology in Romania, the project aims to contribute to a kind of “post-national” critique of ethnology, complementary in a way to the already classical “post-colonial” critique of anthropology, one already developed in the German space concerning the legacy of the Volkskunde, but rather missing in the Balkan space. Focusing on autochthonism as ideological-type of Romanian diffuse ethnology, the project also aims to revisit “autochthonism” as a modernity-oriented solution, its historical tensions and present legacies in a Balkan country, without out-ruling it as mere “nationalism”. As a wishful thinking, this may help to think in more nuances and in a more comprehensive way the problem of “Balkan identities” in the past and the present.

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