“SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY”: THE POLITICAL INSTRUMENTALISATION OF CULTURAL TRADITIONS IN ROMANIA, (1948-1965)
“SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY”: THE POLITICAL INSTRUMENTALISATION OF CULTURAL TRADITIONS IN ROMANIA, (1948-1965)

Summary/Abstract: Hard to avoid in a space perceived as specific for the collective mentality, traditional culture represented the central stake for the ideological discourse promoted by the communist regime beginning with 1948, being recovered and inserted into a large process of political instrumentalisation. On this respect, our study analyses the way in which relationships between political interests of the regime and the sensitive universe of the folk art were established. We also illustrate the fact that appealing to cultural tradition had as a goal providing identity elements that could give a local specific mark, to counterbalance artificial imported signs inappropriate for Romanian intellectual experience. By the help of Folklore Institute, Institute of History of Art, Institute of Literary History and Folklore and also imposing Marx and Lenin method of analysing cultural phenomena, the regime managed to gain the supremacy of interpreting folklore researching. Anyway, famous folk researchers (such as Mihai Pop, Zeno Vancea or Sabin Drăgoi) managed to create connections to interwar intellectual period, superior to the regime expectations. We try to reveal both the official and the interwar tradition, to realize the way in which folklore became “a prototype of domestic life” (Ortega y Gasset). This ideological form of folklore will be a precondition of what Terry Martin called “popular primordialism”, an element of the cultural policy promoted by Nicolae Ceauşescu during 70s-80s, continuing the process of instrumentalisation the traditional creation.

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