Primitives and Peasants

In order to address this invention of the Peasant and try to understand its characteristics, one has to start from what it was distancing itself from--and, to some extent, what it was reacting at: the ?primitivist ideology? (Paul-Lévy, 1986), i.e. the very backbone of modernity and the one that informed the birth of social sciences in general, and of anthropology in particular. This worldview was classifying the cultural differences according to presumed stages of evolution between the ?primitive? world (of the colonies) and the ?civilized,? our own, metropolitan one. ?The lowest ideological common denominator of (this) Euro-American anthropology was a belief in the hereditary or cumulative environmental physical and cultural inferiority of the non-European others? (Stocking, op. cit. 173): the Primitive was thus the weak origin of mankind. As such, the Primitive was everything We are not (or not any longer) and Man in general should avoid to be. In slightly different words, the Primitive was the close-to-nature stage of humanity, and as such, the extreme origin of the millenary cultural evolution culminating with the modern Western world.

This close-to-nature status was eventually turned the other way round: nature is good, while civilization is perverse, some romantic voices claimed, thus reacting also to the mainstream of modernization and primitivist ideology. The Primitive became, in this case, a ?good savage,? rather a kind of model or ideal reminder then having the derogatory sense it used to have in the classic evolutionistic discourse.

The Peasant was shadowing this double faced Primitive, being, to some extent, his local companion: there was a bad inner-primitive-peasant, informed by an Enlightenment inspired primitivist ideology and staging the inner cultural difference, and a good-savage-peasant, shaped by a mainly romantic autochthonist ideology (Mihăilescu, 2003) and performing the own cultural specificity. The choices and variants depended on ?national conjunctures.? In France, for instance, the inner-primitive-peasant prevailed, both his backwardness and his ?ethnographic? particularities having to be overcome by the ?national everyday plebiscite.?  In Germany, on the contrary, it was the good-savage-peasant that was the national hero. In both cases, the opposite option was also present, in different forms and degrees. What was the case in Romania?