Eschatological Ethnology.

The Fear of End within the Discourse of Romanian Ethnology

Mircea PĂDURARU*

Introduction
There has never been just one discourse of the Romanian ethnology.
However, even if the statement that there are just as many ethnologies as
ethnologists is not false, I believe in the heuristic utility of classifications made
on the basis of dominant epistemic and political attitudes. In this sense, by
Romanian ethnological discourse I mean the discourse of the establishment,
performed by research institutes, university departments, and by other insti-
tutions that are situated under the legal or symbolic authority of the Romanian
Academy. Without being monolithic, allowing polyphony and variation, the
discourse of the establishment presents nevertheless a certain epistemic and
political unity. So, the discussion that follows concerns mostly the activity of
the mainstream, academic ethnology.
The concept I introduce and explore in this article refers to a dominant
attitude which has been existing throughout the history of the Romanian ethnology
and has been inspiring a theoretical imaginary and a set of political options. This
dominant attitude is sorrow, sadness, deep concern that ethnology’s object of
research would soon disappear and with it cultural identities (which served and
fed the newly born national states1) would collapse. The very science of
ethnology was born with this sense of “urgency” and all over Europe this was
the main motivation for the tireless efforts to collect/save/preserve as much as
possible from the treasures of the folk2. Jacob W. Gruber’s famous study from
* PhD, Faculty of Letters, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, e-mail:
mircea.paduraru@googlemail.com
1
See Anne Marie Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales, Paris, Seuil, 1999, especially
the chapter on Folklore, p. 161-233.
2 Of course, as Jacob Gruber and George W. Stocking Jr. show, the interest in the archaic

and the old was intended to support both political interests (empire building and nation building)
and larger, general theoretical curiosities, but with clear political consequences. Jacob Gruber,
Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology, in “American Anthropologist”, New
Series, Vol. 72, 1970, No. 6, p. 1289-1299; George W. Jr. Stocking, Afterword: A View from the
Center, in “Ethnos”, Vol. 47, 1982, No. 1-2, p. 172-186.

Archiva Moldaviae, vol. XI, 2019, p. 247-259

 Mircea PĂDURARU

1970, Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping Of Anthropology, which analyses

(and documents this epistemic attitude with a set of eloquent and colorful quota-
tions from the XIX century) evolves around three main ideas: the need of the
discipline to preserve the savage and the vanishing archaic culture, the moral
responsibility of the discipline and the methodological consequences that derive
from these concerns3. The third idea is my starting point.

The proposal
Unlike many of the Western ethnologies, who managed to overcome this
initial fear of end, by constant reconceptualization of the discipline’s instru-
ments and purposes, Romanian ethnology (and more or less the other Eastern
European ethnologies, who share its political larger context and socio-eco-
nomical characteristics) never really left this anxiety4. Or if it did abandon some
of its dramatic discourse after World War II, the philosophy and the theory
inspired by this fear is to a great extent still at work even today. As we shall see,
core texts from every generation of Romanian ethnologists, including the post
1989 ones, confirm the observation.
In the just mentioned article, with reference to the methodological conseq-
uences that derive from the two concerns, Jacob Gruber writes: “from this need to
salvage there emerged a kind of intellectual myopia whose distortion accelerated
the process of an empirically based observational, item-oriented, theory-safe
anthropology”5, with reference to the XIX century, but – says Gruber – due to
the nature of the intellectual tradition, these concerns lived on. By intellectual
tradition he means: “a continuing – and generally unquestioned – notion
regarding the manner in which data were to be collected, or the purposes for
which they were collected, or the kinds of explanatory systems for which they

3 The first idea is in relation with the interests of the discipline in questions regarding the

human nature, the origins, the races, the belief in the epistemic relevance of comparisons so on.
The second betrays the ethnologists’ attention to the moral dimension of the research activity, the
idea that the westerner anthropologist manages delicate things and will be hold accountable for
his actions, for what he did to/with the savages and their culture. It is important to mention that
the second concern, traced by Gruber through the late XVIII and XIX, is often expressed in
passionate discourses.
4 It is clear to us, as it is to Gruber himself, that this attitude didn’t disappear also from the

western ethnologies completely, but it has lost its hegemonic power, even if it still continues to
live in euphemized forms and concerns and under a variety of “Trojan horses”. However, concerns of
a similar nature, if not the same fear exhumed/reloaded is active for some years now also in the west,
due to the refugee crisis and the huge migration waves. The International Society for Ethnology and
Folklore Symposium that took place in Santiago de Compostela, within 14-17 of April 2019
(https://www.siefhome.org/congresses/sief2019/) and The International Conference in Ethnology and
Folklore from Uppsala, 12-15 June, 2018 (http://lup.lub.lu.se/search/ws/files/53799862/34th_Nordic_
Ethnology_and_Folklore_Conference.pdf) contained both very substantial sections dedicated to the
questions of new nationalisms in many parts of the World, not only in the countries from behind
the Iron Curtain.
5 Jacob Gruber, op. cit., p. 1290.

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 Eschatological Ethnology

could be used”6. And further he clarifies: “Inasmuch as traditions persist long

after the disappearance of the circumstances that bring them into being, the
effects of this tradition are still significant in anthropological research”7. And to
sustain his affirmation about the afterlife of “salvage ethnography”, he gives an
example from... Lévi-Straus8. This observation is important and its value of
truth goes far beyond the circumscribed theme of collection. Moreover, intel-
lectual traditions are deeply influenced by the context in which they live. For
instance, those from the Eastern cultures, especially those from behind the Iron
Curtain, that have been isolated from the disciplinary international dialogue, tend
to be stronger and more rigid, strengthening the strictly intellectual, unintentional
causes of inertia, suggested by Gruber, with the political and socio-economical
ones. Indeed, the phenomenon I am dealing with displays a special kind of
convergence between intellectual inertia, socio-economic causes, but also deli-
berate political choices.
If one takes a closer look into this kind of intellectual exercise he would
notice a rather fearful detail: many Romanian ethnologists and folklorists had
indeed complained that phenomena providing cultural identity disappear, but
not only did they observe and comment upon the matter in the rhetoric of
lamentation, but had also determined the threat, the agent provoking the disap-
pearance of the authentic, national folklore. And in a context in which the theme
of the national cultural identity has always been a most important currency in
the political competition9, the activity of exposing the threat acquires major
importance and the aura of a moral gesture. The imagined threat itself, as we
shall see, varies according to the context, depending on the identifier, time,
place, political atmosphere, economic ambiance etc. and is always a political
and poetical creation, involving a polemical appreciation of the other, a convin-
cing dissatisfaction with the present state of things and a persuading linguistic
construction, because the action of constructing/revealing the threat happens in
discourse10. For this kind of ethnological practice I propose the concept of
eschatological ethnology. This highly polemical intellectual exercise has three
characteristics:
6 Ibidem.
7 Ibidem.
8 Ibidem.
9 See Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism, Berkeley, University of

California Press, 1991, chapter Intellectuals Defend the Nation and Construct Themselves (p. 55-63)
and, even more obvious, Intellectuals and the Disciplines (p. 63-71).
10 It is interesting that rarely did the (Romanian) ethnologists blame the peasants them-

selves for the disappearance of authentic folklore. From the beginning of this narrative their role
became that of victim, suffering together with the ethnologists from the effects of the progress,
and not as agents provoking the change themselves or as active instances in search for a better
world. For this difference of perspective between ethnologists and peasants as informers and
owners of folklore see Claude Karnoouh’s splendid essay Inventarea poporului-națiune. Cronici
din România și Europa Orientală 1973-2007, traducere de Teodora Dumitru, prefață de Sorin
Antohi, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Ideea Design & Print, 2011. Very instructive for this topic is the
chapter titled Turistul și etnologul, p. 64-75.

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(1) imagines its object of research as something always endangered,

fragile and ready to disappear,
(2) by which scientists convert pathos into logos, that is feelings of
sorrow, concern and sadness into epistemic, discursive instruments, and
(3) ameliorate the political status of the discipline, implying a connection
between the performance of its discourse and the spiritual existence of the
nation. When I say that I am interested mostly in the politics of the concept I
refer to the strategic values and uses of the concept.
In what follows I shall explain the definition by discussing each of the
three components of the concept.

Analytic of the eschatological ethnology

Imagines its object of research as something endangered, fragile and ready to
disappear
The Romanian student in ethnology remembers to have encountered the
theme of the dying folklore already in the discourse of the local intelligentsia ever
since the middle of the XIX century: Vasile Alecsandri, Mihail Kogălniceanu,
Alecu Russo and others. Afterwords, the theme continued its trajectory within
the “scientific stage” of the discipline (as Gh. Vrabie and Ov. Bîrlea call it), in
almost every relevant discourse of the late XIX century ethnology and on every
folklore journal or gazette of the time. Tocilescu’s lamentation from the preface
of Materialuri folkloristice expresses eloquently how late XIX century ethno-
logists were understandings their epoch: “a drought like no other haunts the
poetic spirit of the people. Nobody creates any more, as if fantasy has died,
moreover people ceased to preserve what the ancestors had left them”11. Also
folklore journals (such as Ion Creangă, Șezătoarea and the less important ones)
were making constant calls to intellectuals, priests, teachers to collect and mail
them folklore materials in order to preserve for the future the true image of the
Romanian soul. The phenomena provoking these effects were thought to be the
increasing westernization of the country (expressed by Tocilescu as a disease),
the appearance of the “the iron road” (the railway), the ignorance of the folk and
the presence of other ethnic minorities/foreigners in the country (especially
Rroma and Jews) who were damaging the genuine folkloric data12. Beyond such
ideas, these discourses were conceived in emotional, touching notes about the
old, white beard peasants and hard-working grandmothers who had passed away
and about the obligation of gathering as soon as possible what was left of the

11 Gr. Tocilescu, Materialuri folkloristice, vol. I, București, Tipografia “Corpului Didactic”

C. Ispirescu & G. Bratanescu, 1900. See the Introduction, p. VI-VIII.

12 Very eloquent proofs for this way of understanding/relating to the other ethnic minorities

are to be found in Mihai Chiper, “Țâța creștinelor nu e pentru prunci evrei”: segregarea forței de
muncă în Iași (1867-1870), in ArchM, IX, 2017, p. 121-139. This way of seeing the other
provoked not only a way of writing ethnology, but also social policies, often with legal, penal
consequences.

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Romanian folklore. Years later, in the interwar epoch, after Transylvania

became part of the Romanian state, in a time of ethnographic maturity of the
discipline, the same expressions of sorrow and sadness continued among the
elites of the time. Many of the folklorists and ethnomusicologists, Mihai Vulpescu,
Sabin Drăgoi, Gh. Breazu, Tache Papahagi, Constantin Brăiloiu, Ion Mușlea,
Anton Golopenția and others draw attention to the fact that the existence of
genuine old folklore is threatened and its collection, in a serious, professional
manner, is imperative13. The stylistics of these reflections betrays the seriousness
of the matter. H. H. Stahl, for instance, was writing to A. Golopenția that he no
longer believed in the capacity of the peasants to move on and that his duty
was just to write the “verbal process of the old, beautiful Romania’s death”14.
Ethnomusicologists Mihai Vulpescu, Sabin Drăgoi, Gh. Breazu talk about the
salvation of genuine folklore in terms of sacred obligation, reminding every-
body of the moral character of the enterprise, but also expressing anger towards the
new superficial customs/cultural practices replacing the old ones15. At this stage,
the agent provoking the disappearance or the corruption of genuine folklore is
identified in the foreign western borrowings, in the incapacity of the peasants to
remain themselves within the new conditions, in the influence of the school/city
over the young peasant population and, also, in the presence and activity of the
other ethnic minorities, especially Rroma and Jews (initially not recommended
for interviews in the field)16. The gradual fading away of the authentic folklore,
imagined to express and to produce the Romanian unity of conscience, would
eventually throw the whole national edifice into anarchy, claimed – in 1929 –
Tache Papahagi17. Later on, in the communist era, within the ethnological
sciences could be heard the same (old) warning: folklore, traditions and customs
were on the brink of disappearance. Adrian Fochi comments in 1985 that the
“epic traditional song is in an acute state of disappearance. The public doesn't
ask for it any longer, the fiddler wouldn’t learn it anymore”18. After Ceaușescu’s
13 See Theodor Constantiniu, Constantin Brăiloiu and the sociological dimension of

ethnomusicology, in “Transilvania”, 2016, No. 8-9, p. 28-39.

14 Ibidem.
15 An excellent analysis of these figures of the interwar ethnomusicology is to be found in

Marin Marian Balasa’s work Musicologii, Etnologii, Subiectivități, Politici, București, Editura
Muzicală, 2011.
16 See Ibidem, Chapter titled Folclorul – de ce trebuie “(re)cules”, mostly subchapter Ultra-

naționalism și rasism academic (elemente ale unor studii de caz și polemici de ziar), p. 86-121.
17 See Tache Papahagi, Folclor românesc comparat (academic course), București, 1929, in

which the author talks openly about the potential destructive aspect of cohabitation with other
ethnics, Romanians facing the risks of de-nationalization and estrangement, especially when they
don’t know very well their own folklore. The extensive quotation is presented also in Take
Papahagi, Poezia populară lirică, București, Editura pentru Literatură, 1967, p. 20-21.
18 Adrian Fochi, Cântecul epic tradițional al românilor, București, Editura Științifică și

Pedagogică, 1985, p. 29. Also, other ethnologists and folklorists from the communist period
already talk about serious folklore as a fact of the past, sheltered in very isolated places in the
mountains or in anthologies and archives from other times. The sensation that folklore is about to
disappear alerts the communist authorities who set in motion an ample program to re-folklorize

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ultra-nationalist turn, authors from the interwar period began to be republished,

the discipline recovering thus the interwar concerns, phobias and, of course, this
dimension of lamentation. This time, however, beyond modernization, radio, TV,
and books19, some contextual explanations were also at hand: the quick
urbanization of the country, the nationalization/collectivization process, and the
gigantic projects of Nicolae Ceaușescu, involving the destruction/relocation of
many villages20. Communist ethnology also undertakes, in a more or less euphe-
mistic manner, the idea that the presence/activity of other minorities, ethnic or
religious, could also be responsible for the vanishing state of real folklore21,
endangering thus the unity of the nation. In post-communism, with huge
archives achieved through time precisely because of the constant cultivation of
the apocalyptic perspective, this attitude is already a structure of the Romanian
ethnological mind. Folklorists, amateurs, cultural activists keep talking about
the imminent danger of losing the spiritual identity, make dramatic calls to
“wake up” in the 12th hour to save still exists of what once was “the authentic
Romania”. Who is to blame now for the tragedy of the Romanian traditional
culture? The communist experience, modernity, the foreigners and all the events
that followed the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989: huge migration waves,
western civilization, internet, Europenization and globalization. In the same
intellectual tradition discussed here, Camelia Burghelea suggests that faced with
globalization, progress and cybernetization, ethnologists should assume the
projects of an “emergency ethnology”22. In face of the new cultural and socio-
political challenges, Sabina Ispas warns about the imminent “disintegration of the

Romania. Constantin Eretescu’s article titled Obiceiuri noi pentru omul nou, in vol. Știma apei,
București, Editura Etnologică, 2007, p. 207-234, documents this idea which had influenced social
and cultural policies.
19 Ibidem.
20 The projects from the Bicaz Dam, The Iron Gates constructions (on the Danube) or

Vidraru Dam are just three eloquent examples for the dimension of the problem. A comment on
the matter is to be found also in Camelia Burghele, Satele Sălăjene și poveștile lor. Ritmurile
cotidianului. Dimensiuni feminine/masculine ale satului sălăjean tradițional, prefață de acad.
Sabina Ispas, București, Editura Etnologică, 2015, p. 14.
21 See Take Papahagi, Poezia populară lirică, p. 20-21. Again very relevant is here also

Constantin Eretescu’s study from 2007, Obiceiuri noi pentru omul nou. It is found here a very
interesting note in which some folklorists talked openly (in a report addressed to the Central
Committee of PCR) about the possible bad influence of the evangelicals in România. However,
since communism is the moment of maximal institutional development of the Romanian
ethnology, constantly enlarging the archives initiated by Brăiloiu (Bucharest) and Mușlea (Cluj-
Napoca), and making new ones (in Iași, Timișoara), its response to the problem fits symbolically
the magnitude of Ceaușescu’s other projects: this time the project is to re-folklorise Romania. The
initiative of the Central Committee of The Romanian Communist Party, published by Constantin
Eretescu in 2007, and the other initiatives such as Cântarea României, all speak eloquently about
the dimensions of that folklorism phenomenon. Indirectly, these initiatives confirm the obser-
vation that traditional life in Romania is fading away, that is why the need to revitalize it. That is
why communism is also the Romanian golden age of folklorism.
22 Camelia Burghele, op. cit., p. 17.

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Romanian cultural model”23 and Ioana Fruntelată calls – in an article from 2008
on the Ethnology of European integration, about the necessity to adopt the
strategies of an emergency ethnology – to save at least by collection, description
and archiving initiatives those cultural practices threatened by European Union
legislation24. In a context conceptualized as such, the archives are imagined to
preserve more than the empiric reality the authentic Romanian folklore and thus
the genuine Romanian spiritual identity25.
As it can be seen, in all of the four phases briefly discussed there can be
identified a relation of opportunity between the eschatological ethnology and
the political context and in each and every stage there are identifications of the
agents producing the disappearance of the national, authentic culture, rarely or
never is the peasant per se responsible for the changes. In this kind of conceptua-
lization he is more likely to impersonate the victim of other forces. From foreigners
and progress, the other ethnic or religious minorities to abstract concepts, but
sufficiently ecumenical to cover a large, diffuse category of threats: globalism,
europenization, migration etc. Ioana Fruntelată even states that the new quality
of Romanians as members of the EU and beneficiaries of a set of privileges,
“seems to dislocate them of some ethnic fundamental attributes such as the
relationship with space, concertized in the relation to land valorisation and of
village hearth”26. Of course, the dangers identified by folklorists are accom-
panied by their soteriological contempoint, by their contextual solution. So
eschatological ethnology works only in conflict.
Something else must be mentioned: even if the concern or nostalgia for the
old is not always expressed directly (as in the works of Ion H. Ciubotaru27), or
in euphemized, sophisticated ways (as in Nicolae Panea28, where there are some
surprizing notes about the ontological inferiority of the city, moral superiority
of the village, superficiality of the urban inhabitant and so on)29, the scholarly
solidarity with this paradigma is suggested by the cultivation of the same epistemic
horizon, themes of interest, invisibility of the contemporary phenomena, or of
readings of urbanity through the categories of the old, rural, past-oriented

23 Sabina Ispas, Identitatea culturală între conservare și rescriere, interviu cu Sabina Ispas,
in “Curentul”, No. 10, 17th July 2011, https://www.curentul.info/cultura/identitatea-culturala-
intre-conservare-si-rescriere/ (accessed on the 27th of November 2019).
24 Ioana Ruxandra Fruntelată, Etnologia integrării europene, repere inițiale, in “Philologica

Jassyensia”, Iași, IV, 2008, No. 2, p. 591-593.

25 Excellent criticism of this pathology in relation to contemporary reality is found in

Bogdan Neagota, Etnologia la răscrucea dintre episteme, in “Steaua”, 2015, No. 7-8, p. 23-40.
26
Ioana Fruntelată, op. cit., p. 21.
27 Ion H. Ciubotaru, Gherăiești, un sat din Ținutul Romanului, Iași, Editura Presa Bună,

2003 (chapter Dăinuiri etno-folclorice, p. 267-393); Idem, Ouăle de Paști la români. Vechime,
semnificații, implicații ritual-ceremoniale, Iași, Editura Presa Bună, 2012; Idem, Obiceiurile
funebre din Moldova în context național, Iași, Editura Universității “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 2014.
28 Nicolae Panea, Orașul subtil, București, Editura Etnologica, 2013.
29 For a detailed review see Mircea Păduraru, Orașul subtil/The Subtle City, in “Revista de

etnografie și folclor”, 2017, No. 1-2, p. 193-199.

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ethnology. This attitude should be read as an extension and an indiscreet meta-

morphosis of the phenomenon we discuss here.
The presence of such a concern haunting the scholarship of the discipline
throughout its historical existence, from the forefathers up until present, reveals
a problem in the theoretic apparatus of the discipline. The epistemology
concerning the “object” has not change too much since Simeon Florea Marian.
And despite the interwar progresses of Brăiloiu, Stahl, and the others around
them, concerning the act of collecting, recording, transcription and the deep
contextualization of the folkloric act (C. Brăiloiu), the scholarly belief in the
scientific irrelevance of the hybrid folklore products, touched by modernity, or
of present’s products which did not have anything archaic or traditional (in the
understanding of the moment) was strong and determinant30. Within this theo-
retical horizon, the attitudes of sorrow and sadness concerning the field appear
legitimate. It is strange, however, that this scientific belief has not been seriously
challenged by another alternative conceptualization31. Indeed, the largest part
of the Romanian ethnology seems to be a triumph of ethnology as the study of
the archaic, the traditional, the old with philological, historical, archaeo-
logical complications and complexities. But the logical correlative of this
perspective is the ever deeper crisis of the object. This kind of ethnology can
be only eschatological.
No matter how anachronistic it might look today, the eschatological
ethnology’s perspective over things is “scientific” to the extent in which it is
accepted in an academic community as legitimate, as a way of being in the
tradition of the discipline and in agreement with some of the forefathers of the
local ethnology. After all, a discipline in itself is nothing else that what Michel
Foucault had once called: “a system of control in the production of discourse
that continually reactivates a uniform set of rules within which statements can
be made”32. The present has been appearing in this apocalyptic light also
because it was set against a frame of thought which made it look so. What does

30 Idea/principle inherited from the forefathers of the discipline, used by the interwar ethno-

logists, reinforced both by Gh. Vrabie, Folcloristica românească, București, Editura Științifică și
Pedagogică, 1968, and Ov. Bîrlea, Istoria folcloristicii românești, București, Editura Enciclopedică
Română, 1974, in their histories and, it seems, cultivated with respect by most of their followers.
31 Maybe a chance for that would have been Brăiloiu’s functionalism, abandoned and

selectively undertaken by an influent scholar like Ov. Bîrlea, who criticized functionalism for –
he thought – understanding things in a too narrow perspective. Dismissing functionalism as
restrictive, Bîrlea clings to the abstract idea of plural semantic virtualities as opposed to the
determined meanings and contextualizations of functionalism. However, by doing so, Bîrlea
wastes the chance of a focus on the actuality and core importance of the element function, in its
new, contemporary aspects, expressions, forms, preferring to keep the focus of the discipline on
history, on the connection to old, archaic, origin. See Ov. Bîrlea’s analysis of Brăiloiu in Istoria
folcloristicii românești, p. 622-642. From this point of view, Bîrlea is more the disciple of
Caracostea than of Brăiloiu‘s.
32 Michel Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language, New York,

Pantheon, 1972, p. 244.

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this frame of thought consist of? Basically, it consists of set of premises, part of
a historically scientific imaginary (outdated, that might have had produced in its
epoch the effect of truth) which is now used as criteria for truth, as if it (the set
of criteria) were reflecting an objective, natural and, maybe, even divine order
of things, ignoring their als ob character, their status of scientific fictions, as
Hans Vaihinger once said. The apparatus by which eschatological ethnology
produces its truths is precisely the subject of the next element of the definition.

By which scientists convert pathos into logos, that is feelings of sorrow, concern
and sadness into epistemic, discursive instruments
Honest, coming from a subjective inclination, or played, that is assumed as
a political option, preferable in a determined context, eschatological ethnology
refers to the fear that genuine traditional culture would soon fade away and to
the romantic nostalgia33 for a better world that is about to die or has died. From
Gruber’s exploration of XIX century ethnologies and from the analysis of the
Romanian ethnologists, one can see that this discourse is articulated in emo-
tional, touching notes. By this feature of the concept I mean a little more than
that. This emotional complex generates effects in theory. Firstly, it implies a
way of making sense of the contemporary in a contra-present perspective (as
theorized by Jan Assmann34). Secondly, it determines the options for a certain
group of concepts as its theoretical equipment. In both cases, conceptual data is
handled in such a way that it receives a specific emotional color, an emotional
charge relevant for the scope of the discourse. Both strategies are set in motion
to textualize the feeling of sorrow and, more important, the scientific idea of
inadequacy, of lack of value and ontological legitimacy.
In the perspective of eschatological ethnology the state of the present is
always miserable. By what standards is the present perceived so? Throughout
the history of the discipline, the criteria behind this experience of the present
derived from concepts like authenticity, reality, origin, purity, canon so on. All
these concepts are highly problematic in their premises and in their relation to
the ethnographic reality. Their source is strictly theoretical, always implying or
making reference to a “golden age”, an archetype, an origin. Moreover, they are
33 Nostalgia can be defined here in Svetlana Boym’s terms from her splendid The Future of

Nostalgia, New York, Basic Books, 2002. From the XVII century medical definitions of nostalgia
as disease “that was said to produce «erroneous representations» that caused the afflicted to loose
touch with the present” (p. 3) to modern definitions as metaphysical sickness: “Modern nostalgia
is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with
clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an
absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before
entry into history. The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he
looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them” (p. 9), Svetlana Boym’s anatomy of
nostalgia dissects the feelings and the background that sets in motion eschatological ethnology.
34 Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, Cambridge University Press,

2011, p. 62. The expression refers to those situations when the past is invoked to invalidate and
de-legitimize the present.

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essentially polemic, non-descriptive, highly politicized, and imply – on different

levels – ontological, metaphysical and axiological presuppositions35. Faced with
this kind of apparatus, present cannot appear otherwise. Corruption, hybridity,
modernity, in-authenticity and all the other characteristics of the present are, in
fact, political designations from the perspective of eschatological ethnology,
and provide an appreciation betraying the idiosyncrasies and the limits of the
perspective. It does not describe the field per se. In this context, the materials
fitting eschatological ethnology’s canons, rather rare, are called “miracles”,
amplifying the state of misery of the field (evaluated in this perspective) and of
the discipline (threatened to remain without object). Faced with what it had
created, a consequence of its own theory, the gestures of folklorism36 and the
attempts to re-folklorize Romania appear unavoidable, especially if folklorism
is imagined as a way to preserve and re-vitalize the authentic, regardless the
absurdity of the situation in which peasants are called to learn and recite tradi-
tional culture, a culture that meantime has become elite and esoteric, a fiction
from eschatological ethnology’s repertoire. Such gestures of re-appropriation
have been performed in the interwar, in the communist times, and are still being
performed.
This kind of analytic exercise (understanding and evaluation of present’s
folkloric possibilities) has been ritually repeated, produced a library of works,
and has established one of the (most important) idioms of the discipline, becoming
indeed a structure of the local ethnological mind, even if not the only one. This
body of accumulated scholarship has become the medium, the lens between
reality and the ethnologist’s eye. Denouncing the expressions of contemporary
popular creativity as inauthentic, eschatological ethnology produces a discourse
that celebrates itself, praising its own theoretical fictions, reaffirming its principles
as landmarks of folklorism activities.
The rhetoric force of eschatological ethnology lies in the fact that it is based
on dichotomous constructions, on the exercise of a polemic spirit, animated by the
will to discriminate between authentic and inauthentic, real and fake, pure and
hybrid. These categories represent a way of textualizing its dissatisfaction with
the present, a dissatisfaction performed in an acknowledged/ authoritative epis-
temic frame. Of course, putting present in this perspective is also a strategic
movement, a dramatic way of emphasizing the importance of its mission.
35 Regina Bendix shed light over these concept in her excellent book In Search of Authen-

ticity. The Formation of Folklore Studies, London, Wisconsin University Press, 1997, part I, The
Instrumentalization of Authenticity (p. 25-68), and part II, The Role of Authenticity in Shaping
Folkloristic Theory, Application and Institutionalization (p. 95-155).
36 I use folklorism in the sense conceptualized by Marin Marian Bălașa, that goes beyond

the established idea of fake folklore or stage-performance folklore. Bălașa writes: “hereby I define
folklorism as the appropriation and translation of whatever peasant traditional culture means, as
far as it is to be taken over under the sign of an exalted romanticism and idealism; it [folklorism]
also is a valorization (of a possibly academic knowledge) of folklore as a supreme outlook, moral,
mentality and ideology, as sentimental and speculative paradigm, as salvationism/messianic and
absolute virtue (urban included)”. See Balașa, op. cit., p. 103, author’s translation.

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Ameliorate the political status of the discipline, implying a connection between

the performance of its discourse and the spiritual existence of the nation
Eschatological ethnology is the discourse of a discipline with a passion for
the old. Its political options are naturally in favor of conservatism and its best
institutional allay is the Church. But this logic is completed with one inspired
by the political relevance/opportunity of its performance.
In the competition from within the cultural field, eschatological ethnology
has its own part and its repertoire of discourses with acknowledged efficiency.
It claims to support the national idea and to secure those cultural features that
provide the specificity of the Romanian spirituality; in the absence of these
values for which it stands for the whole national edifice would fall into anarchy
(Tache Papahagi). Since the stake of the discipline is vital for the nation, then
ethnologists can make institutional claims, resources for their research and
goals, as it happened indeed in all the periods of the Romanian history: ethno-
logists were admitted in the Academy very soon after its inauguration (or were
already there in the person of B. P. Hasdeu), later as they conceived huge projects,
archives and long term researches they received support such was the case in
the interwar period with Gusti, H. H. Stahl, C. Brăiloiu. Also it is fair to admit
that it is the communist period where Romanian ethnology reached its most
advanced institutional development (as folklorists and ethnologists were omni-
present, from the political arena and the academy down to countryside halls, all
kind of institutions and factories), as it proved its political utility. On the other
hand, scholars such as Ovidiu Bîrlea claimed, in 1969, that ethnology should
have a central position among the national disciplines37. But also today, as we
have seen, there are voices that reserve this “emergency ethnology” a soterio-
logical mission.
Engaged in a long term fight that it itself had invented, produced and fed,
this kind of ethnology seeks to save not only the nation, as it claims, but also
itself, that is the means by which salvation is achieved – the analytical apparatus
of this theoretic perspective, prolonging the life of an intellectual tradition that
in the West has been buried or reconverted decades ago. In the context of
today’s development of ethnology, eschatological ethnology is itself a “miraculous
survival”. The miracle is however explained by its political/contextual uses.
However, as long as its narrative convinces, both the academia and the people
in the field that its fight is true and important, as long as the concept of nation
remains attached to the notions of ethnicity, authenticity and the others,
eschatological ethnology will live. The latest call to nation addressed by over 86
members of the Romanian Academy, launched in 2017 and titled Identity,
Sovereignty and National Identity38, conceived in surprisingly nationalist terms,
reminding of the interwar rhetoric, the fact that The Minister of Culture became
37 Ovidiu
Bîrlea, Metoda de cercetare a folclorului, București, Editura pentru Literatură, 1969.
38
https://image.stirileprotv.ro/media/document/61865250.pdf (accessed on the 27th of
November 2019).

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in 2016 the Minister of Culture and National Identity, the nationalist turn that
touched many western countries (discussed at the mentioned international
Simposia) – all create the context that encourage the practice of eschatological
ethnology.

Epilogue. Beyond the “great disaster”

For the westerner student in anthropological studies the practice of escha-
tological ethnology might appear strikingly anachronistic. However, for the
Eastern anthropologist it appears familiar, because the coexistence of very dif-
ferent scientific paradigms in non-conflictual terms talks not only about ecume-
nicism of the scientific life, but also about the political context in which the ethno-
logical reflection happens, where the (social, academic) success of a scientific
paradigm has to do not only with its epistemic validity, but also with its politic
opportunity.
I have chosen this theological metaphor not only because, as eschato-
logical ethnology, it talks about the end by reevaluating and impacting the
present, but also because this ethnological discourse professes obvious religious
attitudes, themes, images. Besides, it has been shown elsewhere that the Church
has been very much involved in the production of the ethnology (in the beginning),
interested in its knowledge and this interest took most active manifestations:
priests doing ethnology and ethnologists expressing indiscreet theological
convictions39. Moreover, since it is believed that nations are God given entities,
national churches are in order, despite the condemnation of philetism as a
modern heresy40 in the XIX century.
To be consequent with the theological metaphor it has to be reminded that
no Christian eschatological scenario ends in a catastrophic manner, but moves
beyond it, for the “great disaster” is only one event in a succession of events
leading to an optimist picture. There is “a new land and a new sky” to come.
Because after the collapse of eschatological ethnology there should come a time
for the celebration, that is for a positive comprehension, of everything it stood
against: pluralism, hybridity, present, globalism and all contemporary possi-
bilities and challenges. And fortunately, for quite a while now, there have been
ethnologists interested in this new picture.
39 See Mircea Păduraru, The Powers of Ethnography and Ecclesiastic Authority. Towards a

Romanian History of a Problematic Relationship, in “Jurnal teologic”, Vol. 15, 2016, No. 1,
p. 163-182 and Marian-Bălașa, op. cit.
40 Phyletism or ethnophyletism (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos “nation” and φυλετισμός phyle-

tismos "tribalism") is the principle of nationalities applied in the ecclesiastical domain: in other
words, the conflation between Church and nation. The term ethnophyletismos designates the idea
that a local autocephalus Church should be based not on a local (ecclesial) criterion, but on an
ethnophyletist, national or linguistic one. It was used at the Holy and Great (Μείζων Meizon
“enlarged”) pan-Orthodox Synod in Constantinople on 10 September 1872 to qualify “phyletist
(religious) nationalism”, which was condemned as a modern ecclesial heresy: the Church should
not be confused with the destiny of a single nation or a single race (Grigorios Papathomas, Course
of Canon Law – Appendix VI – canonical glossary, Paris, 1995).

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 Eschatological Ethnology

Eschatological Ethnology.
The Fear of End within the Discourse of Romanian Ethnology
(Abstract)

Keywords: theoretical imaginary, Romanian ethnology, eschatology, pathos, epis-

temology, intellectual tradition.

In this article I propose the concept of eschatological ethnology to characterize

one of the dominant types of ethnological exercise that has been taking place in
Romania. The proposal presents the three main ideas from the structure of the concept:
the recurrent discourses announcing the imminent collapse of the traditional culture, the
conversion of strong emotions into discursive instruments, and the political implications
of a discipline which defines itself by the moral importance of its mission. Although the
concept has a descriptive value, characterizing an intellectual tradition, the article deals
also with its contextual political uses.

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