The emergence of the population as a target of folklore research finds its early beginings in the pragmatic concern of the German states (and also partially of East European ones), not, as is generally assumed, in the deological concerns of the German romantics. In fact, neither Herder nor the Grimms ever used the term Volkskunde (Lütz, 1982).

In Uli Linke?s view Volkskunde even remained ?the verbal emblem of the administrative tradition until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the name aquired romantic connotations by association with the English term folklore, newly coined at that time? (Linke, 1997:108). The Humboldtian-Boasian tradition (Bunzl, 1996) should be connected, of course mainly with the anti-Enlightment but we have to keep an eye open for early theoretical cross-fertilization and for a a truly historical, contextual understanding of intelectual traditions.

The dichotomy sustained by Isaiah Berlin, in the Introduction to his book on Vico and Herder, between an Enlightenment and a Counter-Enlightenment tradition of thought (Berlin, 1999), even if very important in our understanding of the different lines of interpreting society and history, should not obscure the many influences, overlappings, the more or less faithful translations, the blending of different brands of positivism and romanticism in Western and also Eastern-European modernities.

In both variants of the Volkskunde it as if the place of the ?primitive? is occupied by an even more ambiguous figure: the peasant. The trope of the peasant is apt to sustain apparently adverse discourses. Between the hard core archaicity of non-European, ?primitive? populations and the modern, urban euro-atlantic society, the peasant is an intermediary link. Too contaminated by primitivism to have a real chance of surviving as a viable social strata, but European enough to be an important identity resource in most modern nostalgies.

The (neo)evolutionist discourse of modernization theories is thus not necessarily opposed to the one talking about the authenticity of peasantry. In the same time with its dissolution and radical exploatation at the dawn of modernity in Eastern Europe, the peasantry suffered a symbolic transsubstantiation. Its authenticity was removed--sometimes in a scientific way, sometimes in a pure political one?from the real, concrete population sustaining that life, being used in the process of legitimizing social strata and political constructions totally different from the peasant ones. The nation was the idea, discourse, political setting, global affect etc. that was keeping this processes in check, that was creating a unifying background. The Ethnographic Museums were doomed to be national and peasant in the same time.

The East European peasant, as a dissapearing real social character is fated to be the theoretical place of a re-encounter of the ?nation-building? and ?empire-building? anthropology. This disciplinary-historical process, with its difficulties and huge misunderstandings, is, we believe, the real stumbling rock for creating a non-alterity, ?neo-Boasian? anthropology.

The East European peasant cannot be fully understood without an ethnography that reaches the zone where discourses about peasants are created. An ethnography of knowledge producers. These knowledge producers can, sutained by their imagined embededness into a genuine ?different modernity,? sometimes, in the Romanian case, a religious-Orthodox one, create various metadiscourses, ?secondary interpretations? of that modernity.

The neo-Boasian current is maybe to optimistic in announcing the emergence of a non-alterity anthropology. The alterity of ontological and epistemological positions hidden in the malinowskian field situation, tends to reappear--as  peasant, as elite of knowledge producers speaking about the ?primitive? or the ?autochtonous? etc.- every time we want to deconstruct it. This does not make the deconstruction process less legitimate and less urgent.