Topografii ale trecutului: structurarea şi restructurarea conştiinţei istorice româneşti prin manualele naţionale de istorie
Topographies of the Past: Structuring and Restructuring Romanian Historical Consciousness through National History Textbooks

Summary/Abstract: Starting from the assumption that the social management of historical time is a powerful tool in the political definition of reality, this paper analyzes how the history of the Romanian people has been periodized through the course of time. The central argument states that the partitioning system used to periodize the past harbors a hidden agenda, or a particular ideological „implicature”, that can be brought to light by analyzing the temporal watersheds selected as defining moments in the history of that community. The paper analyzes the social logic of periodization operating within the Romania national history textbooks, revealing how socio-political conditions determine the temporal structuring of the past. Moreover, it shows how social change, and especially the change of the socio-political regime, leads to a revertebration of the past’s symbolic backbone. Dramatic social and political change results in reconfiguring the formal structure of the collective consciousness concerning the past, within which specific events of Romanian history acquire their meaning. In conclusion, the study shows that, although resorting to a system of periodization is indeed a cognitive prerequisite for understanding the past, the reality of the past does not come with an already-there articular structure, so that „carving the (past’s) reality at its joints”, as Plato put it, is not a possibility.

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