Nation-building anthropology. Peasant anthropology and the Humboldtian tradition

George W. Stocking jr. introduced a very important distinction between two different ways of ?doing anthropology:? ?nation-building anthropology? and ?empire-building anthropology? (Stocking, 1982).

The fate of anthropology in Eastern Europe can be read through this bifurcation but also through its special way of reaching a closure of discourse. Even if this closure is sometimes evolutionary backed or culturaly tainted, the specific element is the national-organic one. The sociological/ethnological/ethnographical/folcloristic discourse has a national closure.

Notwithstanding the importance of this bifurcation in the project of a non-alterity oriented anthropology, as it can facilitate some cross cultural and cross theoretical fertilizations, it should not be overstressed. Even if we can find here what Matti Bunzl calls ?the Humboldtian tradition? and very important cultural sediments of the European anti-Enlightment we have to ?unpack? this anthropological tradition in order to deconstruct its specific, national closure and its administrative, state oriented trend.

Matti Bunzl is one of the most knowledgeable and sensitive historians of anthropology?s Humboldtian tradition but sometimes he seems to forget the political implications of that very tradition.

In Uli Linke?s view both kinds of anthropology have their roots in the symbolic concern with otherness when it assumes, systematically, political dimensions (Linke, 1997: 99). ?Social knwledge was transformed into an agent of power appropriated as an instrument of domination in the ?civilizing? and ?domesticating? efforts of the state. In England, the orientation of social inquiry was directed outward, influenced by the colonial encounter with distant peoples in the overseas empire. In other parts of Europe, such as Scotland or Germany, the quest for social knowledge was directed inward, motivated by problems of national identity and political disunity? (ibid.). Therefore, by participating in diferent political tasks, anthropology (Völkerkunde) and folklore (Volkskunde) became separate academic fields (Linke, 1997).

The study of folklore (Volkskunde), can be linked to two distinct political trends: romantic nationalism and administrative particularism (Bausinger, 1969, Brückner, 1987, Linke, 1997). The importance of the work of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, for example, is not just that he represents ?the culmination of a major alternative to the focus on methods of romantic folklorists? (Linke, 1997: 102) but that he represents a tradition that, as we will try to demonstrate in a Romanian case study, complements the romantic one. If the romantics used folklore as an ideological discourse in their quest for national unification, Riehl saw a political application of folklore to the management of populations

?Political folklore is...the guarantee for our political future (p.5)...[because] a liberal and popular administrative policy is unthinkable without regard for all the natural characteristics of  folk life. (p.10)...I would like to show...that a social policy, that is, the art of state administration...is based on the scientific study of the population through all its groups and estates (p.11)? (Riehl, 1851 apud Linke, 1997: 103).