A peasant-building ethnology

We may now ask what was ethnology?s mission in this context? How did the national ethnology methodologically produced, used and abused this personage of the Peasant, turning it to its own object?

Let?s resume what was already been said: in the 19^th century continuity and unity became the main political concerns for all three Romanian countries and for all its autochthon social categories; these crucial political stakes fueled a genuine autochthonist ideology; that answered to the political claims of continuity and unity by staging the Peasant as the representative Autochthon of the nation. In this context, ethnology had just to put flash and blood on this abstract personage of the national desire.

Very roughly sketched, the methodological solution was to turn continuity into tradition and unity into typology: ethnology?s Peasant was a representative Autochthon in as far as he was the typical traditional man.

The methodological invention of tradition. The peasant as traditional man

Continuity from ancient times was, as we have seen, a main argument. In this respect, a first way to use (and abuse...) folklore was to turn it into an historical argument of this continuity.[7] Folk studies were thus rather an historical discipline or part of history. They were turned to a discipline in its own rights only by forging their own interpretation of social facts as traditional facts. The political problem of continuity is thus transferred into the epistemological one of tradition. Further on and accordingly, the Western type of conceptual frame opposing the civilized to the primitive is reshaped as an opposition between modernity and tradition.

Traditional facts are considered to be the facts of a ?traditional society,? i.e. of a distinct, specific one: the Romanian peasant society. In fact, they are methodological means of bridging present observable facts with their supposed ancient origins, what ever these origins might be. This is supposed to fit with the existing peasant society, where social life seems to be the eternal reproduction of such ?traditional? facts. An ideological laden methodology is thus shaping the social representation of society as being a ?traditional one.? By consequence, the insider of this society, the peasant, can be but a ?traditional man?. Accordingly, the origin of ?tradition? is not in the ?traditional society? but in the mind of ethnologists and their way of looking at peasant society!

In order to do so, Romanian ethnologists were strongly inspired (although in a confusing way) by one of the key methodological solutions of the classical evolutionism: the idea of ?cultural survivals.?

Romanian national ethnology is not evolutionistic, so that Tylor?s doctrine was adapted to local needs. Traditional facts are indeed used as survivals in order to trace back their origins, a kind of Urtexte the whole present society is supposed to flow from.[8] But this is not ideologically interpreted as a belonging of their performers (the present day peasants) to a primitive or former stage of evolution: few ethnologists?if any?would conclude that such surviving practices or beliefs would place the peasant close to ?the negro from South Africa? as Tylor did. And no Romanian ethnologist will be ever interested to compare cultural survivals of the Romanian peasant society with those from Africa or elsewhere, as was the main purpose of the comparative method of classic evolutionism. This methodological approach is serving only the stake of continuity and not the one of evolution. Traditional facts are thus facts of continuity and not of evolution, they are expressing and explaining continuity; in a way they are this very continuity. Accordingly, the Peasant is not supposed to ?evolve? in time from an inferior to a superior state, but rather to express (eventually better and fully) the same inborn specific capacities of the Romanian people. It is this specific and perennial character of the Self that ethnology has to document using available cultural survivals of traditional nature.

[7]The series of Romanian ethnological texts dedicated to demonstrate the continuity of a practice, of a custom, of a character from very old times up to the moment of its collection is impressive. It begun during Enlightenment by a series of small studies in which information regarding traditional life is converted into arguments that could prove roman continuity. For example, Samuil Micu?Klein does this is in 1800 in Short Account of the History of Romanians, than in 1801, in Dictionarium valachic?latinum (Muşlea, 1971 [1] : 4). The most representative case is, however, that of Damaschin Bojincă, whose Antiques of Romanians Now Written in Romanian for the First Timeconstantly refers to the facts of Roman civilization described as Romanian customs (Bojincă, [1832?1833] 1978 : 115 ? 130, passim). In the Romantic age, the pleading for continuity is not removed from the ethnological discourse, but slightly shifted: ?the revolt of our non-latin spirit? Hasdeu was promoting, brings the Dacian element on the front stage. Romans or Dacians, Pelasgians or Slavs, Christians or Pre-Christians, according to academic school and political ideology, all of them are invoked to explain the archaism and the continuity of various folklore elements. And this approach seems to be still en vogue: a year ago, the distinguished critic Mircea Mihăieş wrote about Otilia Hedeşan?s volume on calendar customs that it is a book that should exist in all libraries as it refers to our ?archaic customs!?

[8]?In a very real sense, the attempts to reconstitute Urtexte expressed metonymically the programs of national regeneration they were intended to serve? (Herzfeld, 1996: 236).