But how can one establish if an object is authentic or not? And, furthermore, against which elements are we to establish its authenticity? These would be only the first questions raised at once by a positivist mind. This is what happened during the last TV show where Horia Bernea was invited and where I and Speranţa Rădulescu cornered him, in a delicate, but thorough manner, with such questions and objections. Without any intention to offend us, during a short break, Bernea shrugged his shoulders and snapped at us, obviously annoyed: "If I look at certain objects, I know if they are authentic or not!" In other words, if you don't, that's it! But, as Crew and Sims specify: "authenticity does not pertain to factuality or reality. It is a matter of authority" (Crew and Sims, 1991:163). In the Romanian Peasant Museum, the "authority" was Bernea the artist, for whom the authentic cannot be measured, but seen, therefore, it depends upon artistic aperception, and not upon empirical analysis! When exhibiting it, interest does not fall on the truth of peasant society, but on the beautiful of peasant culture, a different kind of beautiful, though, which lies in the authentic meaning of objects, which seem to refuse the aesthetic autonomy. Can we therefore talk about an "art museum?"

Kirschenblatt-Gimblett proposes another more nuanced dichotomy: the one between "in situ" and "within context" approaches. "The notion of in situ entails metonymy and mimesis: the object is a past that stands in a contiguous relation with an absent whole that may or may not be recreated" (idem: 388). Therefore, seen as approach, in situ museography does not necessarily refer to eco-museums or outdoor museums, as the Skansen Museum, but to the constant practice of metonymy and mimesis, whatever their scale. The challenge is to create a representation "as close to reality as possible" of the exhibited objects. Is the Romanian Peasant Museum such an in situ museum? Obviously not, as its favorite practice belongs rather to poesis than mimesis. Therefore, are we dealing with an approach "in context" (this means the ordering of objects after a reference system imagined by the curator, and from this point of view there are "that many contexts for an object, as are interpretation strategies?" (idem: 390).  In a way, yes, but only in a way, for this "context" Bernea proposed-- as would be "windows," for instance - is not an  elaborate, explicit and clarified theoretical reference frame, but it stays an open reference which the visitor must discover and even create.

The exhibition of a culture always hesitates between exotisation and assimilation - as Ivan Karp states: "I call exotisation an exhibit strategy in which differences prevail and an assimilation strategy, one which underlines the resemblances" (Karp, 1991:375). To which of these categories does the Romanian Peasant Museum museography belong?  Hard to say. In a way, to a small extent, it belongs to both categories: there is a tendency for assimilation, to the extent where we aim for what is common and typical of "traditional man," beyond its particular traits in time and space. However, there is a distance which "exotises" objects, to the extent which it exhibits a different world from our own, maybe even lost to us. But both dimensions melt in the ambivalence of alterity and of the identity of "traditional man," as well as in the natural intention of the exposure. But this alternative also fails to help us much, in order to place Bernea's vision where it belongs, in the world of museums.