Între etnografie și metafizică: structura cunoașterii în opera lui Ernest Bernea
Between Ethnography and Metaphysics: The Structure of Knowledge in the Work of Ernest Bernea

Summary/Abstract: This article proposes a reassessment of Ernest Bernea as a thinker situated at the intersection of ethnography, rural sociology, philosophy of culture, and the study of symbolic life. Rather than treating his work as a merely descriptive account of traditional peasant culture, the study argues that Bernea's ethnographic writings imply an epistemology of culture, in which custom, ritual, temporality, and communal life function as forms of lived knowledge. The analysis places Bernea within the Romanian interwar debate on modernization and cultural continuity, while also bringing his work into dialogue with broader theoretical frameworks associated with Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Clifford Geertz, Charles Taylor, Lucian Blaga, Mircea Eliade, Dimitrie Gusti, and Constantin Noica. The article maintains, however, that such comparisons must remain interpretive rather than genealogically absolute. Its central claim is that Bernea's work should be read not only as ethnographic documentation but also as a reflection on how a community inhabits meaning, organizes spiritual and symbolic order, and transmits intelligibility through tradition. In this sense, Bernea emerges as an author of intellectual frontier significance, whose writings illuminate the relation between culture, understanding, and communal being in twentieth-century Romanian thought.

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