What next?

In his challenging book on ?Reconceptualizing the Peasantry,? Michael Kearney states that ?the category peasant has outlived the conditions that brought it into being? (Kearney, op. cit.: 25). Not only because of the ?changing realities of rural life,? but also because the shifts in social theory and representations about the peasantry. 

At different times in different western societies, the Peasant was turned by bourgeois population and taste into an entertainment object: peasants? life is the attractive opposition of capitalist work (e.g Bausinger, 1993). In this respect, the ?Romanian peasant? is starting to be approached and dealt with in this way too, ?traditions? being turned to commodities and peasant way of life being hailed as loisir: ?traditional house for tourists,? sounds like advertising. Nevertheless, the discourse about the Peasant of these very ?managers? is still about archaism and authenticity.

Another main dimension of change is embedded in the views and policies of development. During the cold war, the Peasant was re-emerging as the representative insider of the ?third world? both ?first? and ?second? worlds were trying hard to dominate. In this political context, the Peasant was the very primitive Other in an updated version.He was the one to be ?civilized? and much more important, to be ?developed.? The third world peasant is the underdeveloped primitive. And this is what happens to our good peasants too: with European integration and from the standpoint of local and regional development projects, the Romanian peasantry is a social category in a rather underdeveloped stage. In as far as this ?underdeveloped Other? becomes the central figure of post-modern anthropology (Sabelli, 1993), the Romanian Peasant is theoretical becoming the object of this new anthropology too.

But national ethnology still does not want to let him free! A very recent text by profesor Nicolae Constantinescu is but one example in this respect. In (at least seemingly) pleading for ?context,? the renowned Romanian folklorist reintroduces, somehow through the backdoor, the defining reference of folklorism to the Urtext.

?Coming back to the relation of the folklore text to its cultural (or genetic) context, let?s say that the first one is an extremely important source in restoring the other, that folklore, popular literature, primarily, but music and popular dance as well, represent a sort of a ?diary of the childhood and adolescence? of those peoples that have no history (Cl. Lévi-Strauss).Or, in the words of an African poet and philosopher, the dance, which has become nowadays ?the most profane of arts,? represents the ?warm ashes? of some rituals, myths, archaic behaviours, maybe long gone (Leopold Sedar Senghor, From Negroeness to the universal civilization, 1986). It is what Mircea Eliade argued in an article written sixty years ago in Speology, History, Folklore in the volume Fragmentarium (1939), where the concept of ?living fossils? appears, borrowed from the language of speology? (Constantinescu, 2006 : 3).

Here we are, back in the dawns of evolutionism, captive in Tylor?s vision  upon ?cultural survivals? (translated into Romanian as ?cultural fossils?). Romanian national ethnology cannot give up, it seems, the obsession of reconstructing a paradigmatic origin, even if, for this purpose, it will use devious and somehow more...?modern? means. The folklorist from Bucharest confesses this as clearly as possible at the end of his article : ?The operation of reconstructing the cultural context, the primary (possible) source of various folklore texts (...) is a way to a more precise acknowledgement and understanding of the great whole that popular Romanian culture is? (idem, our underlining). It seems that Stahl was truly right in saying that folklorists do not cease hoping that they will end up restoring these origins of national culture on the basis of their present folklore texts. It is no surprise then that they do not know how to approach and describe the living ?Romanian peasant.?

What about Romanian ?new? anthropology? It seems to be interested in the ?peasant? only as a subject of development or/and one of migration--and as such something with almost no connections with the former ?Romanian peasant.? This opposition and lack of dialogue between the two approaches (disciplines?) produced a lack of continuity as well as a lack of consistency of the very character of the Peasant. Consequently, the academic discourse seems to be unable to give a coherent and comprehensive answer to the simple question: what are we speaking about when we (still) speak about the Romanian Peasant?