The Village as a Quest for Modernity:
on Dimitrie Gusti and the Nationalist Imagination
Ion Matei Costinescu,
PhD Candidate, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
This paper is about responses to the crises of modernity and technologies of nation-building. I analyze these problems through the focalizing lens afforded by the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti. My analysis employs a transnational perspective focusing on the village as a privileged site of nation-building and social reform. The continued, uneven expansion of capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century engendered an acute need to socially stabilize new states and/or ideological orders. Inherent in this asymmetrical expansion was the perception of "delayed development". This pushed the "peasant problem" to the forefront of European social thought, especially since the prescriptions proposed to overcome this putative lag generated anxieties about cultural authenticity. Gusti completed his education in Germany, at a time when German (and French) sociology grappled with the rural situation and the assimilation of the peasantry into national life. For Germany, like Romania, was also a "belated" nation, albeit one widely perceived to have been successful in becoming "modem". My premise, therefore, is that notions of "delayed development" do not point towards historical exceptionalism. Rather, they are a constitutive feature of the modem condition. In this context, Gusti's project points towards alternative readings of modem Romania. His monographic approach to village life illustrates an array of panoptical techniques well-suited to the administrative requirements of emergent nation-states aspiring towards supra-local coordination of their territories and homogenization of cultural space. Gusti's transformed the monographic action into an active instrument of social engineering aiming to fashion peasants into engaged citizens of the nation-state. The ambiguities, paradoxes, and objectifications inherent in such processes of subject-creation are symbolized by the Village Museum. Conceived as a national synthesis of the monographic approach, the museum initially featured a number of transplanted, "authentic" villagers living on the site.
