The patriotic dimension

The Romanian peasant's authenticity is therefore meeting with the authentic European, while the European vision is transferred without any contortions on national patriotism. "He who doesn't believe in the virtues of this nation, in all its best that lies hidden under the miserable crust of vileness and acculturation, he who doesn't believe in its capacity to exhibit these virtues and make them obvious has no place here," Horia Bernea once said.  There is no trace of patriotic emphasis in this statement and in other similar ones, but only a trustful sense of "love of its kind" which belonged to a forgotten, but not extinct species. This "patriotism" has much deeper roots than the deep abyss of feeling. These roots are to be found in the words mentioned above and might be analyzed as follows: Europe's future (therefore, the future of us all) depends upon rediscovering its spiritual unity; this can be found in traditional man's past, in its "local" and specific instance of "Christian man," the way he existed on the entire territory of our continent, before the Great Schism; "the Romanian peasant," seen in his human dimension, is closer--especially due to his historical setbacks--to this mutual spiritual fund; he is closer both to original Christianity (by his Orthodox confession, which implicitly or explicitly continues "true Christianity"), and to tradition, by the fragmentary perpetuation of a specific spirituality or, at least, by the wide availability of certain creations, as testimonies of this spirituality: "our traditional man may be the most interesting, as he finds himself at a crossroad on a multitude of historical layers which are almost inexistent in other places, to such a great extent"- claims Bernea in a dialogue of the daily Cotidianul.[2]

What kind of a museum for Traditional Man?

In the vision we have traced so far, the Romanian peasant is neither a chauvinist, nor a fanatic--although he can become both at any time... His calling makes him an "authentic man," who in fact is the original traditional man of Europe. How can this be staged, especially while using the particular and connotative expressions of the Romanian peasant?

A religious creation: "testimonial" museography

The interest shown to "traditional man" starts by taking the peasant out of his particular ethnographic context. Thus, what shocks us in the very beginning regarding the exhibits of the museum, as compared to the rest of the ethnographic museums in Romania, is "the explicit refusal of the realistic illusion," a major trait of any other traditional ethnographic exhibition, while the "realistic illusion" consists in a full use of the object according to its function as a witness" (Althabe, 1997:145). A witness to a "social or professional universe" in which any museum of a society wants to introduce its visitors. Therefore, in Bernea's case, this is not about a "restoration" of the pre-Communist national ethnography, but about a true "instauration."

[2]During the same round table of Cotidianul, priest Coman shared another vision on this subject: "As a priest and theologist, I thought about the existence of a peasant's museum and, especially, about what the peasant represents, in this instance of making the subject of a museum. I see him as a positive challenge to the world of the city, in general, and to the cultural world, in particular.  In this sense, I would propose a parallel between what represents the village spirituality and what represents our modern spirituality - which you seem to blame in some sort. We should discuss the terms of this meeting and the dialogue between authenticity-truth and straying-falsity. (...) The image of the world, as revealed to us here, in the museum, is the one proposed by Orthodox theology. If you want, this image is in antagony with Western theology, which produced a menacing civilization (...). Still, I believe in the peasant spirituality, as it is presented here. (...) This peasant's museum proposes a life centered on Christ, as perceived by the Orthodox spirit, and not otherwise." The internal or external "ideologists" of the museum did never develop, to my knowledge, such a discourse based on the opposition between truth and straying, having Orthodoxy as the only way to authenticity, but they didn't publicly reject it, either...