Taxonomies and the fragmented peasant 

Another main methodological choice is that of the Linné type of natural taxonomies Tylor was very found of too. In this respect, he was recommending the ?dissection? of culture into fine ?details? that can be arranged in systematic classes like botanists or zoologists do (Tylor, 1871/2000: 29). As a matter of fact, the approach was shared by most social scientists of positivist obedience. The first step of ethno-folkloristic research is thus a taxonomical one too, placing the traditional facts in their appropriate classes and by this taking them out from their present social context.

In the Romanian case, this kind of classification started almost simultaneously with the first folkloric collections. Vasile Alecsandri, for instance, was accompanying his collection of Ballades published in 1852 by a first attempt of typology.[15] This approach will be institutionalized at the turn of the century when the Romanian Academy will start an ambitious national program called ?About the life of the Romanian people? and aiming to present the Romanian popular culture in all its ?components:? birth, wedding, death, children?s play, festivities, textiles, and so on. A large part of the reference books of the Romanian national ethnology is part of this project. The development of the discipline is also perceived, to a large extent, as a refinement of these typologies. It is telling in this respect that, however excessive it may be seen from an anthropological perspective, this obsession with types, classes, and categories of the classical Romanian ethnology is considered by a present historian of the discipline as an ?insufficiently rigorous systematization of the issues according to their species?(Datcu, 1998 : 133).[16]

The ?life of the Romanian people,? i.e. of the peasant society, is thus fragmented into species and sub-species of traditional practices and beliefs. Exit functional or structural analysis! The idea of ?total social fact,? of the typical anthropological holism is thus excluded from the very beginning, being replaced by a kind of topical holism: the Romanian wedding, the Romanian epics, the Romanian ceramics, etc. Thus, the Romanian Peasant has rather a   patrimonial unity then a social-empirical one. As such, he is the source of the Self-collection (Clifford, 1988) the ethnologist aims to produce. Finally, what this ethnologist cares about are rather these ?patrimonial scarce resources? the Peasant is supposed to posses then what he claims to be interested in: the very life of the Romanian people.

In this respect, Romanian ethnology is much closer to ?Frazerian anthropology (that) fragmented the ethnographic community into bits and pieces that were reassembled in kaleidoscopic fashion in the grand compendium,? then to ?the Malinowskian style of ethnography (that) reconstructed these communities as places of human habitation? (Kearney, op. cit.: 27). Even if ethnologists always speak about ?we the Romanians,? the meaning of this plural is deeply different from, say, the classical anthropological representation about ?We the Tikopia??

[15]?These poems are diveded in three distinct categories: ballads, doine and hore,? Alecsandri claims and offers a rather impressionistic description of each of them (Alecsandri, [1852] 1965: 99).

[16]Further re-working of folk-typologies is even considered at the core of what a leading folklorist calls ?a second life of folklore?. ?Folkloristic has a great responsibility mission in the first and most important stage of what we called ?the second life of folklore:? the re-grouping of the material in scientific collections in a different environment than the one genuine folklore exists in. It should be discovered firstly, then recorded (collected), processed, archived, preserved, systematized in a typological form, anthologized, and, last but not least, offered as a model, through its most representative facts in a scientific usage. Through all these activities, the genuine message should not, under any circumstances, be distorted? (Ispas, 2003: 31, our underlining).