In this respect, the view on the Romanian peasant seen as typology rephrases--or even better, it rebuilds--the dominant view of the period between the two world wars, which today's anthropology would name "essentialist" criticized by Henri Stahl (1983), who called it "a theological idealism"). Therefore, there are some obvious analogies between this idea of "type" and that of a "stylistic matrix" proposed by Lucian Blaga. The "model of traditional village" is formally not far away from the "village-idea," proposed by the same Blaga. This vision proves to be closer and directly related to the constant way in which Ernest Bernea (Horia's father and a brilliant ethnologist of Dimitrie Gusti's sociological school of Bucharest) imagined "the process of learning the peasant's way of thinking in traditional rural communities," aiming at identifying "the fundamental frames of Romanian popular traditional thinking"--that is, the way in which the Romanian peasant imagines time, space and causality (E. Bernea, 1985:10).  It is no wonder, therefore, that the museum is sometimes perceived as being "essentialist," if not plainly "fundamentalist."

The European dimension

This is not about going back to "traditional museography." or to the national and nationalist ethnography of the "popular culture" of the period when the Romanian nation formed and consolidated itself. "We do not want to add another variant to the large gallery of caricatures which, ever since the 18th century, produced almost every fifty years or so one or two different images of the Romanian peasant," as Irina Nicolau would specify in a dialogue with French anthropologist Gerard Althabe, who would also state:

?An exhibit is often the object of misunderstandings: some see this combination between the traditional peasant world and Orthodox Christianity as a nostalgic remembrance of a lost universe, which may have never existed; these people sense the peril of straying towards the expression of a national identity which closes itself around a specificity that separates it from others. In this case, we are dealing with a "pret-a-porter" interpretation, which reveals the refusal of making the effort to penetrate the exhibit, more precisely the sense that it carries in itself.? (Althabe, op. cit.:164)

Therefore, there is an important difference: "the human type" of "traditional man" in which and by which the "Romanian peasant" is seen walks out of the patterns of "Romanian apriorism" (Blaga, 1944).  It reaches beyond the frontiers of nationalism, without suffering the least estrangement from it. "Traditional man" is seen as being the "real" European man: "European man has really existed through peasants. Our museum will be an integrative view of the European man"--wrote Irina Nicolau in stating their programme (op. cit.: 26), echoing Horia Bernea's deep convictions. "I think the easiest way to unite Europe is to do it on the grounds of traditional man," Bernea said in his published dialogue in the Cotidianul daily newspaper. "I find that, much closer to a Romanian peasant with respect to what is profoundly human and typical to his civilization--is a peasant from Spain or Southern France, than the bourgeois or city dweller of 1800, who was paying a much more solid tribute to certain local habits and ways of life. This is certain." Gabriel Liiceanu writes in the mentioned dialogue that, in fact, we are dealing with "a human universality represented by peasant." Beyond these extensions, for Horia Bernea, the basic reference seems to be the European one, in its deepest sense.