(Re)negocierea canonului folcloristicii românești. Cazul lui Mihai Lupescu
(Re)negotiating the Canon of Romanian Folklore. The Case of Mihai Lupescu

Summary/Abstract: The influential survey of the study of folklore in Romania, “Istoria folcloristicii românești” (1974), written by Ovidiu Bîrlea, creates a canon of folklore and folklorists during the first century of the study of ethnography in Romania. There is no chapter dedicated to the teacher Mihai Lupescu (1861-1922). He features on three occasions in chapters dedicated to other folklorists: (1) as secondary author of two monographs, the first with Tudor Pamfile (“Cromatica poporului român” – 1914) and the second with Artur Gorovei (“Botanica poporului român” – 1915); (2) as co-founder of the folklore journals Șezătoarea. Revistă pentru literatură și tradițiuni populare (1892) and Ion Creangă. Revistă de limbă, literatură și artă (1908); (3) as “collector of folklore” and “correspondent” for the well-known folklorists S.Fl. Marian and Iuliu Zanne. Lupescu’s bibliography has been reconstructed relatively recently, and reflects the common areas of interest within the study of ethnography and folklore at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, when everything was still in need of being studied: folk tales and proverbs, popular medicine and botany, customs related to specific times in the year and rites of passing, beliefs and magical practices. At the same time, his bibliography also reveals a specific interest which was atypical within the study of ethnography at that time: food. Mihai Lupescu wrote 17 articles about “The Peasant’s Kitchen” (“Bucătăria țăranului”) in the journal Șezătoarea between 1899 and 1904, and in 1916 he submitted a manuscript for a monograph with a similar title to the Romanian Academy, to be published in the series “Din viața poporului roman” (“From the Life of the Romanian People”). For various reasons, as I will explain in my paper, Lupescu’s manuscript did not get published until 2000, thus denying the theme of food an early entrance, one could say canonisation, within the study of ethnography in Romania. My paper will offer an examination of Lupescu’s engagement with Romanian alimentation, and it will raise the issue of how the monograph “Din bucătăria țăranului român” (“From the Kitchen of the Romanian Peasant”) stimulates a reconsideration of the place assigned to its author, and to the topic of food, within the canon of the discipline of ethnography.

• Details
• Contents