CULTURA

CULTURA
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE

CULTURA AND AXIOLOGY

Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of 2014
Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed journal devo- 2
2014 Vol XI No 2
ted to philosophy of culture and the study of value. It aims to pro-
mote the exploration of different values and cultural phenomena in

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF

CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY
regional and international contexts. The editorial board encourages
the submission of manuscripts based on original research that are
judged to make a novel and important contribution to understan-
ding the values and cultural phenomena in the contempo­r ary world.

ISBN 978-3-631-66062-1

www.peterlang.com

CULTURA 2014_266062_VOL_11_No2_GR_A5Br.indd 1 03.12.14 12:11

 CULTURA
CULTURA
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE

CULTURA AND AXIOLOGY

Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of 2014
Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed journal devo- 2
2014 Vol XI No 2
ted to philosophy of culture and the study of value. It aims to pro-
mote the exploration of different values and cultural phenomena in

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF

CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY
regional and international contexts. The editorial board encourages
the submission of manuscripts based on original research that are
judged to make a novel and important contribution to understan-
ding the values and cultural phenomena in the contempo­r ary world.

www.peterlang.com

CULTURA 2014_266062_VOL_11_No2_GR_A5Br.indd 1 03.12.14 12:11

CULTURA

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY
Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology
E-ISSN (Online): 2065-5002
ISSN (Print): 1584-1057

Advisory Board
Prof. Dr. David Altman, Instituto de Ciencia Política, Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile
Prof. Emeritus Dr. Horst Baier, University of Konstanz, Germany
Prof. Dr. David Cornberg, University Ming Chuan, Taiwan
Prof. Dr. Paul Cruysberghs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Prof. Dr. Nic Gianan, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines
Prof. Dr. Marco Ivaldo, Department of Philosophy “A. Aliotta”, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy
Prof. Dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University, USA
Prof. Dr. Maximiliano E. Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina
Prof. Dr. Richard L. Lanigan, Southern Illinois University, USA
Prof. Dr. Christian Lazzeri, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France
Prof. Dr. Massimo Leone, University of Torino, Italy
Prof. Dr. Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, Complutense University, Madrid, Spain
Prof. Dr. Christian Möckel, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
Prof. Dr. Devendra Nath Tiwari, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India
Prof. Dr. José María Paz Gago, University of Coruña, Spain
Prof. Dr. Mario Perniola, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy
Prof. Dr. Traian D. Stănciulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania
Prof. Dr. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Purdue University & Ghent University

Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief: Co-Editors:
Prof. dr. Nicolae Râmbu Prof. dr. Aldo Marroni
Faculty of Philosophy and Social- Dipartimento di Lettere, Arti e Scienze Sociali
Political Sciences Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Via dei Vestini, 31, 66100 Chieti Scalo, Italy
B-dul Carol I, nr. 11, 700506 Iasi, Romania aldomarroni@unich.it
nikolausrambu@yahoo.de PD Dr. Till Kinzel
Executive Editor: Englisches Seminar
Dr. Simona Mitroiu Technische Universität Braunschweig,
Human Sciences Research Department Bienroder Weg 80,
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Lascar Catargi, nr. 54, 700107 Iasi, Romania till.kinzel@gmx.de
simona.mitroiu@uaic.ro

Editorial Assistant: Dr. Marius Sidoriuc

Designer: Aritia Poenaru
Cultura
International Journal of Philosophy
of Culture and Axiology
Vol. 11, No. 2 (2014)

Editor-in-Chief
Nicolae Râmbu
Guest Editors:
Sonia Catrina and Cyril Isnart
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
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available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Umschlagabbildung: © Aritia Poenaru

ISSN 2065-5002
ISBN 978-3-631-66062-1 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-653-05406-4 (E-Book)
DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05406-4
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 CONTENTS

Sonia Catrina & Cyril Isnart 7

Introduction: Mapping the Moving Dimensions
of Heritage

Nicolito A. Gianan 19
Heritage-making and the Language of Auctoritas and Potestas

Susan LT Ashley 39
Re-telling, Re-cognition, Re-stitution: Sikh Heritagization in Canada

Michel Rautenberg & Sarah Rojon 59

Hedonistic Heritage: Digital Culture and Living Environment

VintilĈ MihĈilescu 83
“Something Nice.” Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society and the
Quest for Authenticity

Meglena Zlatkova 109

(Re-) Settled People and Moving Heritage – Borders, Heirs,
Inheritance

Ema Pires 133

Re-scripting Colonial Heritage
Eloy Martos Núñez & Alberto Martos García 145
Tourist Neoreadings of Heritage in Local and Transnational
Contexts

Elena Serdyukova 163

Keeping of Cultural Heritage in Emigration: Experience of Russia
Abroad

VARIA

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein 18

Believers and Secularists: “Postmodernism,” Relativism, and Fake
Reasoning
10.5840/cultura201411216
Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 11(2)/2014: 83–107

“Something Nice.” Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society

and the Quest for Authenticity

VintilĈ MihĈilescu
National School of Political and Administrative Studies
Bucharest, Romania
mihailescuvintila@yahoo.com

Abstract. As already stated by Alfred Marshall in 1891, a house is “the most conven-
ient and obvious way of advancing a material claim to social distinction.” The pre-
sent paper is tracking the means and meanings of such “claims” in the case of the
new households built all over the Romanian post-peasant countryside. These “pride
houses” are considered to by a local expression of a broader social phenomenon of
“conspicuous constructions” (Thomas, 1998) generally linked to “new possibilities
of consumption (that) have been used to embody elements of modernity” (Miller,
1995). In such a context offered by the fall of communism, the new rural dwellings
are circulating global construction items and recycling their local meanings. The
deep motivation behind these apparently irrational behaviours is considered to be a
quest for authenticity (Taylor, 1991).
Keywords: household, modernity, conspicuous consumption, tradition, heritage, au-
thenticity

Houses are not just dwellings; they are homes to distinction and deca-
dence, to dreams and nightmares. As already stated by Alfred Marshall in
1891, a house is “the most convenient and obvious way of advancing a
material claim to social distinction” (qtd. in Wilk, 1989: 297). As such,
they are one of the most common means of “lagging emulation”1 (Friedl,
1964) and thus an expression of social stratification and dynamics. The
present paper will follow the symbolic life of houses in the particular
context of the Romanian post-socialist and post-peasant society focusing
on the ways by which people are “homing” globalization by circulating
global and local, past and present means, and recycling their meanings.
Beyond this particular case, a more general and open question will be
approached: Why all this?

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 VintilĈ MihĈilescu / Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society

A POST-PEASANT SOCIETY

We fully agree with Philip Thomas’s approach, accepted by other schol-

ars as well, to modernist “white houses” and local practices and mean-
ings around western construction materials used to build them in a re-
mote county of Madagascar. I want to problematize the notion of “delo-
calization” and argue that, although materials such as sheet-metal roofing
panels may be produced outside the local economy, they can also be in-
volved in processes and practices of “relocalization”. In doing so I am
adopting the position of those who have stressed that the meaning and
significance of commodities and other objects are not fixed attributes of
their physical being, but are acquired through consumption and the work
of “appropriation” and “recontextualization” (Carrier, 1995: 106-25; Mil-
ler, 1987, Sahlins 1992; Thomas, 2001; Wilk, 1994: 114). From this per-
spective it can be argued that consumption is in fact a second moment
of production, albeit a production not of objects but of meanings, uses,
and values (de Certeau, 1984). Globally uniform de-localized materials
such as sheet-metal panelling are therefore re-localized through con-
sumption, incorporated into vernacular architectures and “local systems
of meaning” (Philip Thomas, 1998: 426).
Globalization of consumption producing indefinite de-localizations all
over the world is a trivial observation; re-localizations became trivial ob-
servations as well. What are less trivial are the meanings of this “common
stuff,” the ways they are selected and recombined, and the reasons of such
appropriations producing de facto re-localizations. To search for such
“local systems of meaning,” one has to start from the comprehensive
broader time and space frame of the “local” under concern. In our case,
this is figured by what I would call the Romanian “post-peasant society”2
(MihĈilescu, 2008).
A documentary film realized by Angus Macqueen in 2004 presents a
Romanian county under the title “The last peasants.” Indeed, with 84%
rural population at the beginning of the 20th century, Romania is still the
largest rural and agrarian country in Europe, with about one half of the
population still living in villages, and one third of the land occupied in
agriculture.
According to Henri H. Stahl (1979), the social history of the Romani-
an villages is one of a gradual dismantling of the original “obûte,”3 with
some “old” lineages inheriting more and more of the initial communal

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Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 11(2)/2014: 83–107

land (“sate umblĈtoare pe moûi,” roughly translated “villages stepping on

ancestors”) and thus accumulating more wealth, power, and symbolic
prestige. Further erosion split the “obûte” into component households,
which became “the smallest social units” in a village: “the villages are
composed of households, not of individuals” (P. H. Stahl, 1973: 150).
Even in our days, Adam Drazin notes that “the Romanian idea of do-
mesticity presumes the collectivity of the household” and not the welfare
or care for its individual members (Drazin, 2001: 196).
It was this lasting peasant household that the communism intended to
undermine according to the Leninist-Stalinist mistrust in the “kulaks.” A
model in agricultural cooperativization within the socialist Europe, ac-
companied by intensive industrialization and urbanization, has been the
means to achieve this rather ideological goal. Nevertheless, the result was
not a linear “modernization.”4 Instead, it produced a whole range of
adaptive strategies rooted in emerging rural-urban kinship and neigh-
bourhood networks. The top down state imposed process of industriali-
zation was counterbalanced, to some extent, by the “domestication of
industry” (Creed, 1995), institutional resources and time being embez-
zled for the sake of the rural household’s subsistence and, eventually, rel-
ative welfare. The households themselves became more flexible, turning
to “diffuse households,” bringing together in a “functional” unity the
stable rural members and (some of) their newly urban/industrial ones by
permanent exchanges of mutual services, urban and rural goods, indus-
trial money and household products (MihĈilescu and Nicolau, 1995;
MihĈilescu, 2000).5 The forced official proletarization of the peasants
was thus counterbalanced, in fact, by a rather underground ruralisation
of the workers, engendering a hybrid category of “worker-peasants”
(Szelenyi, 1988), which I prefer to call “household workers.” The final
result was that the households survived economically, even if in a bad
shape, and expanded socially through “diffuse” rural-urban networks.
Symbolically, the peasant household has even been upgraded through
communist nationalistic actions like the nation-wide festival “Cântarea
României” (Praising Romania) in its staging of the country’s acclaimed
peasant “traditions.”
With this strong and lasting legacy, post-socialist Romania’s specificity
in the European concert could be best described as a “post-peasant soci-
ety” insofar as its peasant heritage is still alive and influential, but more
and more in contradiction with, and ruled by, external markets pressure

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 VintilĈ MihĈilescu / Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society

and inner expectations of modernity: peasanthood is still here, but more

as a burden – even for peasants – then an asset. Nevertheless, in case of
economic or social economic failure, it still can be a resource for making
a life.

INHERITING THE FUTURE. THE POST-SOCIALIST MARKET

OF DESIRE, BRAND BULIMIA AND PRIDE HOUSES

As everywhere else in Eastern Europe, the fall of communism was per-

ceived by a majority as an epochal opportunity to get back one’s bear-
ings: legitimate place in Europe and in history, true identity and our-
selves. After decades of frozen desires and homogenized needs, wishful
thinking was again allowed and handy.
At the quotidian level, the fall of communism meant, for most of the
people, an unchaining of desire; moreover, after the excessive “relative
deprivation” of the 1980s, this “liberation” started in an excessive way
(the only bloody anti-communist revolution culminating with the killing
of society’s step-parents, the Ceauûescus, on Christmas day), it turned in-
to an excessive over-compensation. Or, in Inglehart’s terms when pro-
posing his scarcity hypothesis, “one places the greatest subjective value
on those things that are in relatively short supply” (1997: 132). Given the
fact that for decades “Western goods” have been the economic and sym-
bolic scarcity, the greatest subjective value was placed precisely on these
Western goods. The general and generic expression was a dream of
westernization and of living up to western standards, whatever these
standards meant: Europe (i.e. “civilized” western countries) was the
model.6 With this dream in their minds and souls, Romanians became
the most “euro-optimists” citizens (about 90% trust in Europe in the
1990s and early 2000s, and still high ranking in the euro-optimism top).
Consumption really exploded on a market of desire (MihĈilescu, 2014)
where most of the people were – and, to some extent, still are – confus-
ing needs and wishes. An epidemic of brand-bulimia was spreading over
the whole country: consuming the occidental other (i.e. eating, dressing,
behaving, etc. as he/she does) was the way of building an “authentic” self.
In villages, the post-socialism started with an almost instantaneous de-
cooperativization, a rushed dismantling not only of the cooperatist form
of property, but also of the few existing cooperatist means of produc-
tion. Successive “agrarian” and “agricultural” land reforms, i.e. centred

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Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 11(2)/2014: 83–107

on property and not on productivity (von Hirschhausen, 1997) restored

quotas of pre-communist ownership, “giving” land to the villagers but
living them without any means of production, state support or coherent
agricultural policy. The result was a raising fragmentation of household
plots by manifold heritages, sales and leasing, and a concentration of
land and means of production in some few large private farms. Thus, in
2008, more then 3,7 million households were owning in average only 1,5
ha of land, while less than 10,000 farms were owning in average 540 ha
of land each; 0,9% of these large farms cumulated 51% of the European
household direct subsidies, “the distribution of subsidies being the most
inequitable in EU” (CRPE, 2009).
On the other side, the huge number of unemployed workers that re-
sulted from the quasi total de-industrialization of the socialist plants and
towns were explicitly or implicitly pushed back in their native villages,
determining the reversal of the rural-urban migration flow after 1996 and
the growth of a left over rural and agricultural population. This huge in-
ner reversed migration further fuelled the massive external migration in
search for work that grew starting with the 2000s, which entailed a com-
pensatory “social transition by migration” as well (Sandu, 2010: 35). At
its climax in 2008, this phenomenon involved 2,8 million migrants (more
than a quarter of the active population) and was producing 6,307 billion
euro in remittances (idem), thus placing Romania on the 7th place in the
world’s top of remittances (source: World Bank, 2009)7.
In short, the particular context for the Romanian household worker
was one of accumulated delusions. After the frustrating 1980s, and the
disappointing 1990s, he/she was dismissed as “working class” (Kideckel,
2002) and unable to make his/her way through as “farmer,” being forced
to improvisations of subsistence agriculture. Thus, work migration be-
came an almost mechanical solution for “making a life.” It is in this “lo-
cal context” that, once larger amounts of money became available,8 the
“market of desire” was shaped in the countryside, mainly around the
“pride houses” (MihĈilescu, 2011) that migrants started to rise all over
the country, totally changing the rural landscape.9 This is a strong state-
ment of emancipation: from marginal and marginalized, the owners of
“pride houses” are acknowledged as winners!
As a social phenomenon, such “pride houses” have been acknowl-
edged in many post-socialist, post-colonial and, more general, post-
totalitarian societies once the access to global goods was possible. In

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 VintilĈ MihĈilescu / Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society

Madagascar, for instance, Philip Thomas called them “conspicuous con-

structions” (Thomas, 1998). Closer to us, in Albania and Kosovo, they
have been labelled “turbo-architecture” (Vöckler, 2010). Similar process-
es have been documented by anthropologists, mainly after 1990, in post-
socialist countries, from Russia (Humphrey, 2002) and Poland (Pine,
2002) to Hungary (Fehérváry, 2002) and Albania (Dalakoglou, 2010), but
also in remote societies like Mexico (Heyman, 1994) and Jamaica (Miller,
2008), Cameroon (Rowlands, 1994) or Madagascar (Thomas, 1998) – to
name just a few. Described under the headings of globalisation, western-
ization, commoditisation, delocalization, and the like, this “conspicuous
construction” phenomenon is generally linked to “new possibilities of
consumption (that) have been used to embody elements of modernity”
(Miller, 1995: 282). Anyhow, in each case, the houses are also preserving
a local flavour…
In the Romanian case and at first sight, “pride houses” can be best de-
scribed by excess: excess of shape, excess of rooms (up to 10–15, empty
in most of the cases and most of the time), excess of painting (bright
colours), excess of ornaments, a mix of influences (what the owner had
seen abroad, on the internet or looking at his neighbours), and of ongo-
ing improvisations (many such houses are designed and re-designed by
their owners while being abroad and changing their minds according to
new insights – “houses by phone” as Tue and Toderaû – 2012 – call
them); all these “for aesthetics, for use…no, not for use!” as one such
new householder told me, and “so that people can see how nice it is,” as
another one was explaining. Even the building materials were chosen
mainly for their perceived degree of being highly modern rather than ac-
cording to some scrutinized functional characteristics.10 In public percep-
tion, they are kitsch for architects, outrageous for ethnographers and ir-
rational for economists; but owners don’t seem to care…
But why building “pride houses”? At first sight, one may evoke status
consumption. Yet pride houses are rather “non-status” consumption, a
public denial of the attributed status rather than an expression of a rec-
ognized one: we are no more what it is presumed we are or were. Never-
theless, building pride houses is a conspicuous behaviour in the Veblenian
tradition, but rather the conspicuous consumption of a would-be “leisure
class.” As demonstrated by Kerwin Kofi and his colleagues, the reason
of visible luxury is rather to fend off the negative perception that the
owner is poor than to really claim a status of wealth. Such conspicuous

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Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 11(2)/2014: 83–107

consumption is thus more frequent in emergent economies (Kofi, Hurst

and Roussanov, 2009). Last but not least, the pride houses social phe-
nomenon could be listed with other kinds of symbolic capital, but this
would be more a categorizing description than an explanation. On the
other side, the Heimweh and the phantasm of a home mentioned by some
ethno-psychiatrists play also a role,11 but by no means a specific one. The
proper – and I believe main – question is thus what “claims” do these
“pride houses” advance beyond their generic motivation and their fre-
quent bad public image: what’s behind their obvious materiality, how do
people make sense of them and what is their rationality?
If asked about their reasons, most of these actors will not have much
to say: “Why, it’s totally normal, isn’t it?”, they replied to Fehérváry in
Hungary (Kofi, Hurst and Roussanov, 2009: 370). In Madagascar, people
were “simply content to tell me that ‘white houses’ were ‘good’ (tsara), a
term which combines ideas of the functional with the aesthetic raising
one” (Thomas, 1998: 437). In the Romanian case, the most frequent an-
swer was just we wanted to make something nice…12 And they never made in-
vestments or property claims: pride houses seem to be “terminal com-
modities” (Kopytoff, 1986).13
It is thus more profitable to question “material culture” itself, starting
with the very materials used in building these houses. They are all im-
ported from Western countries, from the building blocks and roof mate-
rials to sandstone, faience or even parquet; the same is true for home ap-
pliances. And, even if most of them are now available on the inner mar-
ket too, many householders prefer to bring them from the Western
countries where they are working.

The peasants too, you know, are in fashion, after the manner of those in towns, they
are following the luxury of those in town if one may say so, with the due quotation
marks. Meaning that everyone has to have what one desires, no more than is neces-
sary for a decent life. Being in fashion means to have whatever is new on the mar-
ket, new TV stuff, keeping the pace with it. For instance, if something new comes
on the market, say a set or parquet or something like that, it should be taken over on
the fly to furbish the house, supply the household with whatever it needs…what’s
on the market…to keep the pace… (a 39 years householder in Pucheni village ex-
plained to Corina Cimpoieru, 2010)

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 VintilĈ MihĈilescu / Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society

And a lady from the neighbourhood concluded: “Yeh, that’s it, this is
our standard, like this, something nice, no cow shit and all this dirt. It’s
over with the cow shit!” (Cimpoieru, 2010).
This proud and categorical statement also points to a deeper structural
layer of the new “pride houses”. Indeed, it’s over with cow shit for the
simple reason that there are no more cows. Once such new houses are
built by former peasants who are still sharing a traditional household
with their parents who are used to have cattle, poultry, a pig, and a small
vegetables yard, gradually give up all these components of their former
domestic life. Another totem object takes the place: the cradle, a hand-
made massive wooden cradle, is placed in full sight in the garden in all
the villages in an almost standard form. Why? It’s nice… – the answer
came always. But obviously it’s more than this: the cradle is the perfect
symbol of recreation, loisir, non-work.14 Productive work is leaving the
domestic space, thus achieving the “division of enterprise and house-
hold” Max Weber considered as crucial for the shift from “traditional”
to modern capitalist societies (Weber, 1995: 12). Pride houses are not
just show off and distinction seeking; they are material means to break
through the material space of a former way of life: modernization had to
start with households.
Imagined as (modern) houses, more than households, “pride houses”
have a declared non-peasant design: large and well equipped bathrooms
replace the former outdoor wooden toilets; glamorous living rooms dis-
playing the best furniture in the house replace the traditional “good
room” reserved only for dowry and life cycle rituals; as many bedrooms
as possible take the place of the single family room where children usual-
ly went through their adolescence sleeping in the same bed with their
grandparents or in a bed next to their parents’; flower gardens replace
former vegetable ones.15 Even beyond their owners’ discourse, the mate-
rial culture of “pride houses” is shaped in order to claim a categorical
farewell to peasanthood, to past, to local.
Bringing all these discourses, practices, and material expressions to-
gether we may now sketch the meta-discourse of this “staged moderni-
ty”. It seems to be rooted in a dramatically perceived feeling of back-
wardness but also of social inequity and marginalization: “I told you, liv-
ing here without light, without electricity, having no gas, being in the
dark and isolated from town, people [in the countryside] thought the
moment came to break it through” (41 years householder, my emphasis).

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Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 11(2)/2014: 83–107

With the advent of market economy, but left without jobs on this work
market, consumption took the floor: you are what you consume. “La-
bour lost its capacity of defining identity and family and home became
the domain of spontaneous expressivity of a genuine self” (CrĈciun,
2009: 63). Households became again the available means of “breaking
through,” but only insofar as they could appropriate the missed “moder-
nity,” the perceived modernity of the others, Western & city people. After
being for two centuries the objects of top down state modernization, rural
people were seeking – and sometimes were able to become – the subjects
of a bottom up sui generis claim to modernity. The public (urban and
modern) discourse – and even, initially, the academic discourse – was ra-
ther one of “elegies to disappearing worlds”: “Thatch is replaced by tin,
wood and bark by plastic, local fabric by factor output – everywhere au-
thenticity yields the ground of identity to sameness and junk” (N. Thom-
as, 1991: 208, qtd. in Thomas, 1998: 426). For the actors themselves, this
was a historical and personal revenge: this “staged modernity,” casting
prestigious items of a significant other on the global market, was mainly
a “dignifying modernity,” bringing status and feelings of self-realization.
But in order to be so, it had also to be recognised as such. “Placed in
mobility” but still “connected” migrants (Diminescu, 2005) as they were, in
the best case Gastarbeiter abroad, the new householders could hope for this
social recognition (Honeth, 1995) only in their own community: entirely global,
“modern” materiality, a “pride house” makes sense only locally. Comple-
mentary, this local recognition is not only a success in the local “pride
houses contest” between neighbours (Moisa, 2010), it also entitle them to
claim that they belong16 to and fit well in the global better world out there.
From a certain point of view, “pride houses” can be thus considered
as a kind of “inverted heritage”, turning the back to the past in order to
inherit the future, i.e. a market legacy of “modern” symbolic goods people
feel to have been deprived of.17 This also involves an eclectic circulation of
“modern” items and a re-cycling of their meaning in order to achieve a
“negative authenticity”: we don’t want to be any longer what we used to be!

INHERITING THE PAST. THE RUSTIC TURN, SIMULA-

CRUM AND AUTHENTICITY

It is hard to say when it started, but it is clear that the “rustic style” came
after the “pride houses” wave and is spreading all over the countryside

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 VintilĈ MihĈilescu / Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society

ever since.18 To some extent, this growing preference for rustic houses
may have an economic reason, stimulated by the economic crisis. Such
dwellings are smaller and thus cheaper. Yet the crisis may explain the
rustic shift only to some extent, as people started to build such houses in
Romania even before the crisis started. We have to look elsewhere for the
causes of this trend.
The “rustic” has a long history. According to Ernst Kris’ classical
work (1926/2005), its origins may be traced back starting with the 16th
century. Anyhow, in the 18th century it was already a recurrent fashion,
figuring a peasant-like, closer to nature, and genuine local style of life.
But whenever and wherever it occurred, it was expressing mainly the
taste and phantasms of wealthy urban people. This holds also true for
post-socialist Romania: the rustic style has been promoted first by edu-
cated and wealthy urbanites backed up by professional designers, then
“democratized” through “rustic” restaurants and pensions, copied by
some local administration to embellish their cities and disseminated by
all kinds of media. What is then different with these rustic houses is that,
in this case, (post)peasants themselves are figuring a peasant-like style for
their own.
As in the case of “pride houses,” one can hardly speak stricto sensu
about a “style”. It is rather a patchwork rustic repertoire of items, in-
spired from all the sources mentioned above and supposed to stage
peasanthood. In most of the cases, common objects of the traditional
peasant household are turned, as such or in detached components
(ploughs, rakes, scythes, wooden chars and yokes, troughs and pails etc.),
into decorative objects carefully staged in a “rustic” way. Sometimes
these are objects from one’s own former household, the most salient
case being that of still functional wooden chars turned to flower sup-
ports; sometimes such objects are taken over from elder neighbours or
bought from village fairs.
But the most important change is the house itself, “rustic houses” be-
ing comparatively small, family scale dwellings, much less colourful and
with less decorative gadgets then “pride houses,” with a nice but modest
look suggesting a comfortable peaceful country like kind of life. Building
materials are also different, wood being staged as a fetish material culture
item in itself: “Romanian domesticity is wooden” (Drazin, 2001: 179).
“Here, in our county, houses used to be made of wood, it’s good to build
as before” – a young migrant villager explained to me while showing his

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new house covered with artistically plastic imitations of deal boards.

Stone may be a choice too, for similar reasons: “here, the houses used to
have stone foundations” – another householder explained to me in an-
other village. To put it briefly, even if they are fakes, building materials
have to call up the local and the traditional.
At first sight, it seems to be the very world of Baudrillard’s “simula-
cra.” Indeed, this rusticity seems to be “no longer a question of imita-
tion, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the
signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard, 1994: 2): peasants are simulat-
ing a no longer existing peasant; rustic is a self-simulacrum of the rural.
“To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to
feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other
an absence”: rustic village houses are indeed staging an absence.

But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending. (…)
Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the dif-
ference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the differ-
ence between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’ (Baudrillard,
1994: 3)

It is indeed more complicated: while it may be true that rustic houses

are “substituting the signs of the real for the real,” it is not less true that,
in this case at least, signs are meanings; and meanings are always “real.”
To paraphrase Geertz (1973), we should look over the shoulder of signs
in order to disclose meanings.
For these rustic actors, the generic meaning seems to be opposed to
that of “pride houses”: instead of turning the back to the past in order to
inherit the future, “rustic houses” intend to re-place their owners in the
past and the local, not in order to piously inherit this local past but rather
to honestly enjoy it. “We are in fashion and back to old tradition. Every-
thing that used to be we are now copying. We turned back to wood” –
one such rustic householder said to Corina Cimpoieru (2010). “The rus-
tic is modern and traditional in the same time” – another one concluded
in an interview several years ago. After seeking “modernity,” the rustic
shift is now “domesticating” it. Modernity is still a reference for the
house, but its rustic shape is a kind of return to home, an Ithaca of memory
and sense. Traditional items are thus stricto sensu circulating and re-cycled
in order to produce an as-if-traditional ambiance, something we could call
“traditionality,” not acknowledging and staging selective items of the

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past as accredited “traditions”19 but rather expressing elective feelings of it;

not staying embedded in the local, nor reproducing it, but just living the
local.
“It is legitimate to wonder if the belonging to a local horizon is not
one of the necessary conditions of building up what makes us humans” –
Françoise Choay wrote (Choay, 2011: 233). As if echoing her thought, a
young householder from Cajvana once whispered to me: “We wanted to
be ourselves again!”.
What seems here to be at stake is still an identity-seeking quest for
“authenticity”; this time, a “positive” one. Fake peasanthood as it is, a
self-simulacrum, the rustic house is nevertheless “true” and “real” inso-
far as it enables locals to experience and give life to real and true aspira-
tions of self-realization and authenticity. Signs are not just cognitive
ends, but also expressive means of their bearers.
This kind of authenticity is socially recognized – and thus legitimated
– by a larger public, the one sharing the growing “economy of experi-
ence” (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) and its “experiential marketing”
(Schmitt, 1999), for whom one’s own genuine feelings about reality are
the reality.20 Not only tourists and other passers-by, but recent country-
side locals are enjoying this “traditionality” of the rustic houses as well,21
which opens for them a sui generis back door entrance into the brave new
world of post-modernity.

FAKE OR AUTHENTIC?

Considering the post-socialist vernacular architecture as a red line, the

question of “authenticity” came up repeatedly: are these houses authentic
or fake, are their owners pretending or are they honest? But what should
we understand by this umbrella concept?
Authenticity started by being the original, in fact a statement about the
original state of something, and evolved toward a more and more explicit
judgment of correspondence with an original or, in general, with a refer-
ent. Thus, authenticity turned to an explicit relation, a judgment about
the correspondence of a present with its referential precedent: “this ge-
nealogical dimension is what matters” – Choay (2011: 168) concludes.
And this is how authenticity already turned to…a fake. Is this text by
Plato “authentic”? How can we know if we never had the original, but
we nevertheless created criteria to declare it authentic or false? Is this 5th

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Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 11(2)/2014: 83–107

century B.C. sculpture “authentic”? What does it mean if it is no more

intact and stood buried in the earth for 2000 years? Is this ritual “authen-
tic”? Probably its “referent” came after the custom itself… This means
that authenticity is just a value judgment, not a pure subjective one, but a
judgment under a legitimate authority: unbound authenticity is just mad-
ness. As a matter of fact, this is how it started in the Latin tradition: au-
thenticus was an edict of a person in power (Choay, 2011: 167). Authentic-
ity has therefore a constitutive power dimension.
We may further suggest a tempting definition: authenticity is a corre-
spondence between an actual event (performance, product, etc.) and its
referent, stated by a power legitimated value judgment. This raises at
least three important questions: What makes something an eligible refer-
ent? What actual facts deserve being judged for their correspondence
with the referent? Who is entitled to make this judgment and confer le-
gitimacy?
It can be said that, in a way, the first “referents” have been cosmologi-
cal, i.e. original founding acts, from myths to holly books, enacted by the
authority of shamans, wise men or priests. In this case, what we may call
“authentic” is generally named “custom”22 or “customary,” or whatever
other synonym, i.e. a behaviour or an artefact considered to correspond
with the referential antecedent of legitimating ancestors; and even
changes in behaviour will be legitimated by assuming that they are still
rooted in the ancestors’ founding legacy. In-authenticity, breaking the
law of ancestors, calls for specific rituals of repair or may be ruled out as
mere heresy. Rationality itself is retrospective, grounding its judgments in
the exemplary past of ancestors, whoever they might be; and this ration-
ality is – and has to be – collective.
Things have changed a lot and in different ways during (European)
history, and essentially with modernity. To detach themselves from the
past in complex ways and for different reasons modern societies had
nevertheless to come to terms with their own past and, due to the grow-
ing universalism, with the past of humanity. Therefore, “patrimony” and
“traditions” have been invented to ex-pose a present choice of referential
customary behaviours or artefacts of the past. But are these staged tradi-
tions true ones; do they really correspond to what used to be the referent
originals? Somebody had to judge – and to be entitled to do so: this is
how civil experts of authenticity instead of sacred ones had to appear.

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 VintilĈ MihĈilescu / Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society

Ethnologists of all kinds, from empire-building anthropologists to na-

tion-building folklorists, were in the best position to take over this new
kind of responsibility – and power. But the same was true for other fields
of heritage, art historians and historians, architects and philologists etc.
playing the same type of role in their own domains. They all had do de-
cide what are the real and representative traditions for different cultures
and/or layers of culture and, accordingly, what is worth being patrimoni-
alized.
Under the pressure of a perceived kind of loss brought about by mo-
dernity, they first became a social category of priests of patrimony, from
local scale to UNESCO, what Christoph Brumann calls “heritage believ-
ers”, “explicitly committed to cultural heritage in general or to specific
heritage items of whose intrinsic value they are convinced and whose
conservation they endorse” (Brumann, 2014: 173-174), good past had to
be preserved or at least kept in present memory in order to ensure a
good future. It is from within this category that most of the critiques
about the “outrageous” new Romanian countryside vernacular were
coming.
With post-colonial and post-modern trends, a deconstructivist trend
emerged, unmasking the different cases of patrimonial fictions and other
kinds of invented (old) traditions. This “heritage atheism,” as it is la-
belled by Brumann, “is even clearer when (…) heritage adulation is seen
as a general societal ill,” as in the case of “the church of high national-
ism” (Brumann, 2014: 175). Both groups of “believers” and “atheists”
feel entitled to make and impose their judgments over the whole society
and get engaged in a symbolic war over the true tradition. Finally, the
whole question is about who has the right to state the identity of a na-
tion/community.
Brumann also proposes a “third way,” the “heritage agnosticism.”23 By
analogy with religious agnosticism, “an ‘agnostic’ study of heritage does
not posit a priori that heritage is an empty signifier, an entirely arbitrary
and socially determined ascription, but takes people’s heritage experience
and beliefs seriously” (Brumann, 2014: 180). The part played by fiction
in patrimony is obvious, but if in fiction we trust, so to say, these “fictions”
are worth being approached as meaningful social phenomena. Maybe
traditions are more about meaning than about truth…
Brumann’s view means also a fundamental shift in approaching patri-
mony, less as a correspondence with an external referent than one with

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some internal criteria and even feelings of patrimoniality. As in the case

of rustic houses, for instance, past items are recycled as means of genu-
inely feeling the past, not being embedded in or reproducing it: patrimony
turns to a kind of state of mind. This brings us closer to another filiation
of authenticity, one that concerns the relation with oneself rather than
one between events out there, authenticity as being true to oneself, to
achieve a true human existence; an authenticity of the householders’ feel-
ings about their own households rather than one of the households as
such.
This filiation has a long philosophical history too, but in its modern
form authenticity in this sense starts – according to Charles Taylor –
around the 18th century, with Rousseau and especially with Herder:
“Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being
human” (Taylor, 1991: 22).

This idea has entered very deep into modern consciousness. (…) There is a certain
way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and
not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to
myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.
(Taylor, 1991: 28-29)

To see what is new in this, we have to see the analogy to earlier moral views, where
being in touch with some source – God, say, or the Idea of the God – was consid-
ered essential to full being. Only now the source we have to connect with is deep in
us.24 (Taylor, 1991: 26)

On the other side, identity-building is always dialogical, and authentici-

ty cannot be autistic, limited to one’s self: it is where and why the
“recognition” comes in and frames the excesses of subjectivity. Being
true to oneself and making one’s own authentic choices means to choose
out of a socially defined repertoire of “things that matter”, “not redesign-
ing the menu at McDonald’s, or next year’s casual fashion” (Taylor,
1991: 40). If the choice may be personal, in order to be a fully – i.e. mor-
ally – authentic choice it has to stick to a socially designed and legitimate
broader “referent”. “Otherwise put, I can define my identity only against
the background of things that matter” (Taylor, 1991: 40). Methodologi-
cally this also means that searching for individual “authentic choices” we
will come over “thinks that matter” in the broader society.

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 VintilĈ MihĈilescu / Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society

Turned to culture or even to ethics, self-fulfilling authenticity starts

being normative too: not only each of us desires to be authentic, but we
are all expected to be so. The referent is now inside us, an ideal image of
oneself as genuine potentiality worth being embodied, but also an image
which society is expecting us to turn into being. Not only individuals are
thus fuelled by dreams of authenticity, but the whole society starts to be
shaped by expectations of authenticity as well. A new cult of the body,
for instance, replaced the soul as means of salvation (Baudrillard, 1970)
and constrains us to free our body, to build it, to nourish it in healthy
manners, to turn it into a holly unit of “egobody” (Redeker, 2010). The
reference of authenticity lies no longer in some kind of ancestors’ past
but is placed in front of us as a fata morgana of an ever better future: the
“egobody” became a full scale project everybody should achieve.
Embodied as it became, authenticity asked for an “economy of experi-
ence” (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) and was framed in return by it: we are
experience-seekers in order to nourish and fulfil our authentic beings ac-
cording to the proper lifestyle our societies trained us to believe in. From
clothes and food to happiness, everything is measured by its degree of
authenticity or falsehood.
But is this kind of authenticity à la carte not a trap, a way of being just
as authentic as our neighbours, thus in-authentically the same? Of course
– and this is the kind of critique Adorno (1991), for instance, has done.
Nevertheless, it is a shift from status authenticity to personal authentici-
ty, the authenticity of an empowered individual now entitled to make his
own choices from an otherwise still social valued referent and who is still
subjected to social recognition and rational critique.
We may now try to resume these several kinds of authenticity in the
following matrix:

Referent Entitlement Authentic choice

Ancestors/God Wise men/priests Customs
Customs Experts Traditions
Traditions Market Economy of experience
Economy of experience Individual Egobody

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Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 11(2)/2014: 83–107

This figure has not to be taken ad litteram. There is no evolutionary or

typological intention in it, but just a sketch of a heuristic order tacking
together some historical expressions of what seems to be a fundamental
human desire: “the quest for authenticity”.

THE AUTHENTIC CHOICE

We can now return to the homing behaviours we have been tracking and
have a final look at them. What are, in fact, the deep reasons behind their
seemingly irrational or just conspicuous appearances? There are lots, dif-
ferent, sometimes apparently contradictory or overlapping. There are al-
ways strictly economic reasons; there are needs of recognition and de-
sires of distinction; and always deeply personal, biographical reasons too.
But what Coleman calls “the engine of action,” the source of human be-
haviour in general (Coleman, 1988), lies behind all of them. It is what we
now may call the “authentic choice.” Not just “rational,” but broader
“authentic” in as far as life itself is also an “actual event” to be judged
according to a legitimate “referent.” It is fitting this referent, these stand-
ards of an “art de vivre” shared with elective significant others that con-
stitutes the final “engine of action” of Man. Deep motivation thus stands
in front and not behind man – and this is maybe what makes us human.
In this respect, people can hardly make in-authentic choices if not forced
to. Whether good or bad, this is another question; they always follow a
referent they share (try to share, believe they share…) with actual or virtual
fellow people. The challenge of our times is just that society designed a
kind of referent every individual is entitled to be in a personal relation
with: the common individual became the “authenticus.”
From this point of view, being honest to all these “small people” we
have been describing along this paper means to track back their reasons
up to their fundamental and human authenticity striving. Can we also
judge them? Yes, we can, just as they make mutual judgments too; but on-
ly in the good faith of the (re)cognition of their own authenticity and not
as a value judgment of the patrimonial authenticity of their products: life
is indeed “something nice”…
But this involves also a fundamental methodological question we pre-
fer to leave open: may anthropology shift from “writing culture” to
“writing lives”: could it? should it?

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Notes
1 “The emulation in question is the process whereby social groups of lower prestige,

upon the acquisition of new wealth or other forms of opportunity, imitate and often
successfully acquire what they conceive to be the behaviour of those with greater
prestige; the emulation “lags” in that the behavior imitated is that which reached its
acme as a prestige symbol for the higher social group at an earlier period in its histo-
ry, and is now obsolescent. Lagging emulation occurs, then, under conditions in
which the groups which constitute the traditional elites or which are otherwise con-
sidered worthy of emulation are themselves acquiring new ways at the same time
that the traditionally less advantaged groups are enabled to alter their previous pat-

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terns of life. The concept of lagging emulation is based on the assumptions that the
desire for prestige, or social status, or achievement is a basic motive in all cultures
and societies; that to some extent this motive enters into the conscious awareness of
the participants in a society-it becomes a felt need, in Erasmus’ terms (Erasmus,
1961: 12-13, 309); and that a frequently occurring means for satisfying the need is to
emulate the behavior of those strata of society to which prestige is already firmly
attached (Foster, 1962: 147-150).” (Friedl, 1964: 569)
2 The concept of “post-peasant society” has already a relatively long history. Initial-

ly, it was linked to the perception of “depeasantizing” and the emergence of a diver-
sity of “post-peasant” rural types (Geertz, 1962). In the French literature, this pro-
cess was mainly described as a shift from “paysan” to “agriculteur” (Mandras, 1995).
The evolutionary dimension was transparent in most of these approaches. The
ground breaking moment in this respect may be considered Michael Kearney’s cri-
tique, proposing a “postpeasant anthropology” having in its centre the character of
the “polybian” – not just the “amphibian” peasant cum worker, but a fluid and dy-
namic social category copying with the diversity of work opportunities and con-
strains available in the rural and urban contexts (Kearney, 1996). More recently, this
kind of approaches has been criticized for its essentialism, “polybian,” for instance,
being considered a concept as restrictive and fuzzy as “peasant” (Schüren, 2003). In
our case, what we want to point at is the fact that in Romania a “peasant society,”
whatever its definition, was dominant and vivid up to now and in spite of the com-
munist episode, and that external and also internal forces are pushing it out of the
game. A “post-peasant society” in this sense is a representative collectivity changing
in time and space according to contexts and selectively breaking through or re-
appropriating some elements of its peasant heritage in order to cope with these con-
texts. If it may be considered that there is a broader social phenomenon which we
can label “post-peasantry,” it is also obvious that there are very many ways of being
“post-peasant.”
3 In contrast with the south Slav zadruga, “in Romania the village as a whole was

communal and not the extended family” (Chirot, 1976: 141). The obûte devĈlmaûĈ, as it
was called, was based on a communal shared property over the “body of land” (trup
de moûie) and collective (obûtesc) decisions on all main problems concerning the vil-
lage, including the households’ shares of the communal land. The household was
customary composed of the parents and their unmarried children, with the youngest
child remaining in the parents’ house and inheriting it. For all the rest, the heritage
was egalitarian and the household was neo-local, raising one’s own house being a
man’s proof of maturity and full community membership.
4 In the remote case of Zambia, James Ferguson arrived to a similar finding: “it

should be clear by now that we will not get anywhere in analyzing African working
class until we cease to try to place them at a point in a linear continuum between
primitive and civilized, tribesmen and townsmen, traditional and modern or even precapitalist
and capitalist’’ and suggests that “the way to get beyond the limitations of linear and
teleological accounts is to give full weight to the wealth of coexisting variation at any

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given moment of the historical process” (Fergusson, 1999: 79î80). Such linear me-
ta-narratives dominated the communist period and only changed their dress with
post-communist “transition,” frequently obscuring the approach of “coexisting vari-
ations” even by social scholars; and the same is true for many other cases all over
the present world. This is also to say that the “coexisting variations” we try to un-
cover in this paper are by far no Romanian specificity.
5 The diffuse household is just the generic term for a larger category of households and

embraces contextual different types. David Kideckel, for instance, has identified in a
Romanian county five such different types or “socio-economic household strate-
gies” going from the most conservative to the most urbanized ones (Kideckel,
1993).
6 Europe, Occident, Western cultures/countries, civilization, modernity were all fused in a col-

lective imaginary of the “normal life” communism just deprived of the whole popu-
lation. “Civilized” is still a self-attributed trait private employees, for instance, put
on the first place when asked to list their main personal values (Bodea, 2013).
7 These aggregated statistical data are unequally distributed over the countryside, the

inner differences within the rural world being much bigger than during communism,
to the point that “every village is a different story” (Creed, 2013). On the other
hand, this does not mean that the rural-urban divide became totally obsolete. “It is
transforming itself from a spatial or geographical split into a political and ideological
divide. So instead of seeing the urban and rural as two distinct locations between
which we can physically travel, we now may regard them as constituting a ‘fractal’
distinction which may operate in any given location. They form ‘categories of
thought’ with which people try to understand, construct and represent their own
realities and other aspects of life.” (Duijzings, 2013: 17). Same behaviours may thus
have different meanings if their subjects are (self) positioned as “rural” or “urban”.
Even the status of the “village” may be negotiated sometimes: Cajvana, for instance,
where I did most of the research presented in this paper, is a former village, actually
town but struggling to become a village again due to administrative reasons.
8 The sociological surveys indicate that most of the remittances (up to 70-80%) were

invested by households in building, enlarging or refurbishing houses. Additionally,

about two thirds of the internal loans in the countryside have a similar use: acquisi-
tion of long term domestic goods (55,6%) and buying a house (11,4%) (Source:
Barometrul rural, 2007).
9 Pride houses are not a change of the rural, but an important process going on in the

Romanian countryside, both expressing and producing a part of the huge differ-
ences existing sometimes even between two neighbouring villages.
10 The totem object, in villages and towns as well, was the “termopan” (double glaze

window), perceived as the sine qua non of westernization, irrespective of their differ-
ent technical characteristics. “If you want to know how many migrants we have in
the village just go and count the termopane” – many local administration officials use
to say (Iancu, 2011).

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11 “In order to fight against this home-sickness – such an ethnopsychiatrist reports –

some subjects try to rebuild a frame reminding them the natal place, and are sticking
to an accumulation of objects, furniture, carpets… in order to bring in a familiar
presence. Some others build or ask others to build them a house in their origin coun-
try, a house to warrant the permanence of the abandoned place, a house which will
be the idealized place of an ever postponed return. This house of their dreams, fre-
quently inhabited, is turning to a mausoleum or to a ritualized pilgrimage during
holydays.” (Stitou, 2005: 97)
12 A comparative research on the semantic background of “normal,” “good” or

“nice” could be further revealing.

13 “For the economist, commodities simply are. (…) From a cultural perspective, the

production of commodities is also a cultural and cognitive process. (Thus), whether

and when a thing is a commodity reveals a moral economy that stands behind the
objective economy of visible transactions” (Kopytoff, 1986: 64). Made out of
“commodities,” pride houses seem to have mainly a “moral” meaning.
14 I took the time to search all the households of three different villages, one by one:

in only +/- 5% of the cases I could find a cradle and a cow…

15 If in the urban, more middle class Hungarian case described by Fehérváry (2002),

“American kitchens” were the hard symbol, in the Romanian more lower class pride
houses kitchens were much less emphasized and frequently accompanied by the
open, outdoor “summer kitchens”: cooking and eating remained much more inti-
mate and “peasant”.
16 In the long run, what is on stake in the case of social recognition is not just the

recognition of an attribute of A by a trustful or legitimate recognizer B (Ikäheimo

and Laitinen, 2007), but precisely to assure such a social belonging and avoid exclu-
sion or what Hegel called Misachtung. Migrants in general have little hope to achieve
more than “Misachtung” in the countries where they work, so they usually re-
localize their hope of belonging in the native communities where they may enjoy at
least the recognition of being winners.
17 As underlined by James Ferguson, “the metanarrative of urbanization and mod-

ernization is not simply the lens through which ethnographers saw their data, it is
itself an important datum”; the “story” of modernity became an “ethnographic ob-
ject”, what “dreams are made of” for lots of left over members of modernization
(Ferguson, 1999: 16).
18 This historical sequence should not be taken ad litteram but just as a relative time

frame of the two “ideal types.”

19 Following Hobsbawm distinction between “customs” and “traditions”

(Hobsbawm, 1983: 2), we consider “traditions” as a product of modernity, charac-

terized by an identity staging of a selective past for a present public. Traditions are
thus not mere survivals but reasonable intellectual fakes of the past expressing true
actual feelings of historical belonging (MihĈilescu, 2003).
20 Miranda Cornelisse is probably right when stating that “despite all debates about

the meaning of authenticity for the tourism industry, it is not really important how

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authenticity is viewed by others but by the tourists themselves” (Cornelisse, 2014:

105).
21 While “rustic houses” can be found all over the country, it seems that their densi-

ty is much greater in counties having an established reputation of “authentic peasant

traditions”. Rustic houses are thus also a matter of collective pride, and not only one
of personal distinction.
22 Naming pre-modern societies “traditional” may be misleading insofar as traditions

are a by-product of modernity; for this reason we prefer to speak about “customary
societies” (MihĈilescu, 2003).
23 Sticking to this religious parlance, I would add two more categories: a) the “patri-

mony profaners,” for whom past is just a dead body that has to be buried in order
to leave the place for the development of the future and b) the “patrimonial pagan-
ism,” concerning people who usually were – and eventually still are – the very sub-
jects of customs cum traditions and for whom the God of patrimony is just an alien
notion.
24 Of course, this may turn also to a kind of bad authenticity “of trivialization and ‘I’m

just doing my thing’ and all that kind of stuff” (Taylor, 2008). Anyhow, this new
“culture of authenticity” is a matter of fact: it is here and can’t be rolled back. But
“you can argue in reason about ideals and about the conformity of practices to these
ideals,” which “involves rejecting subjectivism” (Taylor, 1991: 23).

107