Vise și viziuni în satul românesc interbelic: pentru o antropologie a experienței onirice
Dreams and Visions in Interwar Rural Romania: Towards an Anthropology of Oneiric Experience

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the status of dreams and visionary experiences in the Romanian rural world of the interwar period, drawing on field materials collected by members of the Bucharest Sociological School during monographic campaigns (notably Henri H. Stahl, Traian Herseni, and Gheorghe Focșa). The first part highlights the ways in which these researchers interpreted peasants' narratives of dreams and visions, interpretations that oscillated between a neutral methodological stance and a tendency to pathologize such experiences. The article also underscores the limits of these approaches, marked by the absence of a systematic engagement with the oneiric domain, despite the existence of a diffuse "visionary culture" in rural Romania, in which dreams and visions were not perceived as exceptional but rather as integral to the religious imagination of everyday life. Dream narratives mobilize a recurrent repertoire of motifs (journeys to the otherworld, encounters with supernatural agents, and revelation mediated through sacred texts) situated at the intersection of oral tradition, apocryphal literature, and religious iconography.

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