This methodological design of the Peasant has some important consequences:

a) Praising continuity, one has to value the origin of this continuity too. If we are proud about our continuity, we have to be proud about the ancestor this tradition is bridging us with. Being this lasting ancestor, the Peasant will accordingly be treated rather as a ?good savage,? then as an inferior ?primitive.?[9]

b) Traditional facts are not just present end-products of the historical process of tradition but the recurrent expressions of this process itself, from the time of its origins. As landmarks of traditional legacies throughout time they are thus timeless: ?eternity was born in the village,? poetically exclaimed Lucian Blaga, overemphasizing what has become a common-sense representation.[10] Romanian national ethnology will be thus unable, or with difficulty, to replace its object in time and approach it in a historical way.[11]

c) Finding their full meaning as informative survivals of some original models or Urtexte,traditional facts will be approached, described and interpreted as parts of these original models rather then components of a social functional whole. Romanian national ethnology will be thus unable or in difficulty to replace its object in the present social space and approach it in a functional way.[12]

d) Interpreting social life mainly as a reproduction of Urtexte, it is not a surprise that the methodological approach is rationalism rather then empiricism (Leach, 1976), Romanian ethnologists are interested more interested with ?what the peasants say? and their ?systems of ideas,? than ?what they are doing? and their ?systems of actions.? Our archives still have billions of pages about Romanian folk lyrics, but there is almost no research on kinship, for instance.

e) Another consequence of this focus on Urtexte is that the ideal subject of the ethnologist is considered to be an old man in a remote village: age and isolation are almost mystically considered to be the best conditions for preserving a supposed ?popular memory? the ethnologist has to update[13] (Belmont, 1986). 

f) Not all social facts are traditional facts, expressing the worldview of the autochthonous people, the meaningful side of continuity. There is and has to be a selection?and that ethnology has chosen not to be ?traditional? is extremely telling too.[14] Traditional facts are thus value laden facts and ethnological description of traditions involves by definition value judgments. Accordingly, Romanian ethnologists will be (almost by definition) emotionally involved in any evaluation of the peasant world and will be anxious about any rumor of its disappearance. 

g) This moral and emotional relation of the national ethnology with its Peasant is essentially different from the ?physical and cultural inferiority? of anthropology?s Primitive. That is why Romanian ethnology never had a ?bad conscience? as had happened with anthropology during the so called post-colonial crisis, nor was it instrumented to play this role: she loved and defended its native object/people from the very beginning. Maybe this is one of the main reasons also for the fact that it has never questioned its epistemological and methodological fundaments nor was it tormented by the political or ethical implications of its doings: it had a good conscience from the very beginning?and still has. What is more, the peasants loved her too?and still do.

This ?traditionalist? relation with origins and obsession with archaic models is constitutive of the ethnological thinking to such an extent that it seems impossible even our days to get rid of it.  Thus, after prizing the idea of ?living fossils? Mircea Eliade was speaking about sixty years ago.  Nicolae Constantinescu, a reputed professor of ethnology, still claims that ?the reconstruction of the cultural context, of the (possible) original source of the different folk texts (...) is a way to the better knowledge and comprehension of the great unity of the Romanian popular culture? (Constantinescu, 2006).  ?Cultural survivals? are very much alive, indeed!

[9]One can say that there is almost a ?canon of the Peasant? in Romanian ethnology, describing and prescribing how is he to be conceived. In a pioneering text, Alecu Russo wrights for instance: ?I have long researched the oldest of literatures and the works of the most eminent poets, and I did not come across such a marvelous and beautifully told idea. Such an idea is the result of human wisdom, a display of the sense of immortality, expressed through the voice of the people. Vox populi, vox dei!?  (Russo, [1840] 1942: 221). This kind of representation follows, as a pattern, a great part of the researches of Romanian ethnology, functioning as a real Procust?s bed for what is usually considered ?the right/correct/real image? of the Romanian peasant. There are but a few exceptions, the most illustrious being Ovid Densusianu (Densusianu, [1909] 1966), Ion Muşlea (Muşlea, [1935] 1971: 299 ? 301) and Henri H. Stahl (Stahl, 1983). In this respect, Densusianu, for instance, wrote at the edge of the XXth century: ?Under the influence of some nebulous conceptions and of an enthusiasm that had degenerated into Romantic rhetoric (?), the simple man, from the countryside or from elsewhere, has been presented to us as a being endowed with numberless qualities, with a soul harvested by nature with an abundance of good thoughts and feelings? (Densusianu, 1909 [1966]: 46). It is telling that this kind of statements was generally left besides in spite of the high reputation the philologist-folklorist?s enjoys between folklorists.

[10]Henri Stahl was mocking in the thirties at this obsession: ?Any direct researcher of folklore can regretfully see that there is no standard text, as there is no pattern of belief, custom, rite or ceremony, known by everybody and repeated identically, there are only themes and expressions generally known (...). In almost all cases, such texts cannot be found. Nevertheless, folklorists cannot help believing that they existed and they do not lose their hope that they will end up restoring them. When such ?texts? do not seem to be possible, as in the case of ?ceremonies,? they continue to believe in a ritual scheme that must have existed in clear and perfect forms, that  survived in a damaged form up to our days? (Stahl, 1983: 237 - 238).

[11]It is not by accident that almost all historical ?winds of change? in the Romanian society had to refer to the Peasant in a way or another. ?We don?t want any longer to be the eternal peasants of history!? Constantin Noica was claiming, for instance, in the name of his 1940 generation (Noica, 1943). Post-communist changes are also accompanied by the adagio of the ?death of the Peasant.?

[12]We are not referring here to functionalism, but to what all anthropologists would share as the ?functionalist method.?

[13]The sociologist Henri Stahl is strongly criticizing this doctrine of a ?social amnesia? that the ethnologist is supposed to bring back to life (Stahl, 1983).

[14]There is not an ethnological interest in sexual practices or licentious jokes, for instance, and one will never see a peasant?s toilet in a peasants? museum.