The trials mentioned above are already suggesting several ideas: a) it?s a pity they didn?t choose ?The Peasant?s Museum? and b) anyway, this museum is not part of the museum family of ?crafts and tradition.? On top of all these come the naming of the Romanian Peasant Museum as ?a national museum of anthropology? and the constant rejection of a ?purely? ethnographic vision. ?It is normal to have a national museum of anthropology,? said Horia Bernea during a round table organized by the daily ?Cotidianul,? of June 18^th, 1993. ?Understandably, a country which takes so much pride in the only civilization which can effectively protect it in the eyes of Europe (although this image is already starting to be questioned) should have a museum of anthropology in its capital, a national museum about what this traditional man was and is, while also serving as a testimonial for the future. The museum is a basic landmark for anyone who would try to understand this nation.? During the same discussion, Gabriel Liiceanu rhetorically asks himself ?whether, when Horia Bernea speaks about anthropology, he doesn?t refer mainly to the salvation of a human type.? Obviously, the answer is affirmative: ?The name of the museum (?) casts a precise light upon a new ?object,? that is the traditional man,? explains Irina Nicolau (op. cit.: 21, the underlined phrase belongs to the author).

The Archetypal Dimension

So, this is not about an ethnographic museum of the particular species of the Romanian peasant living in Romania, but about a more comprehensive notion of an anthropological museum of the next gender, i.e. traditional man. We therefore must ask ourselves who this ?traditional man? is.

Traditional man is placed beyond the variety and historicity of its particular traditions (also called ?ethnographic?). As Gerard Althabe remarks, ?the placement of objects in the museum marks the exclusion from the exhibition of a dimension pertaining to historical time? (Althabe, 1997:164, the underlined phrase belongs to us).  In other words, ?historical time is crossed in every direction, as here rules the long period of archetypes? (Pippidi, 1993:8; the underlined phrase is ours). Therefore, the type of ?traditional man? is a-historical.  At the same time, he is a matrix, a ?model? of all its versions and becoming.  As Andrei Pippidi underlines (op.cit.), ?the space outlined by the museum does not belong to geography, but to the primeval unity (the underlined phrase is ours).  ?We will study villages, modern man, peasants as they are,? says Bernea in his turn, ?but we will understand what happened only if we have a ?model? well structured inside the museum?that is, the traditional village.? (Bernea, 1996:14, the underlined phrase is ours). Open to changes and to ?present time,? the Romanian Peasant Museum wants to firmly and constantly stay anchored in this archetypal ?model,? without which the purpose of the ?Romanian peasant?s? world would wither away and would lose itself in the significances of peasants of our days and of the days of yore.