Ţăranul, o figură incomodă în imaginarul contemporan
The Peasant, an unconfortable figure in the contemporary imagery

Summary/Abstract: We live in a time when the number of anthropological studies dealing with the way in which certain categories of identity – social or ethnical – are represented in the human imagery is quite important. Although the peasant is a rather familiar figure in our vital space, having a specific cultural and social identity, he is a social actor who did not have the privilege of constituting the object of any of these studies. Even though the present paper does not claim to be an extensive research, it does propose a few indicators for drawing a veridical profile of a character that belongs to a social group that lacks any concerns for its own identity. This is the reason why we had to use the discourse of the other actors on the social scene or the clichés extracted from stereotypical thinking. As we are going to prove later on, the resulting figure will not be homogenous, fluctuating between a positive and a negative pole of evaluation. Its contradictory character shows a common fact, that reality cannot be reduced to some concepts and that while elaborating the theories, we cannot ignore the social and psychological frames. It would be interesting to see to what extent the peasant Ion would be able to recognize himself in the portrait drawn by the ethnologists for the author of Miorita. Also, it should be analyzed why the latter received excessive attention, while the former was accused of anachronism, caring the fault for the fact that the Romanian culture was stuck in the Middle Ages. The following article is an invitation to improve the mechanisms of perception of a character who, whether we like it or not, is still present on the scene of our social life.

• Details
• Contents