Vol. XXXIII, 2020
1. Daniel Gicu, Cultura populară: ambiguităţile unui concept proteic, p. 5-18.
The phrase “popular culture” is used by historians of different periods to denote radically different things. This article is trying to offer a survey of the most common definitions of popular culture offered by both historians and theorists in cultural studies. It reveals that most definitions either suffer from a bias towards present-day points of view and cannot be applied to pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies, or have methodological and conceptual problems. Historians can overcome these difficulties by starting their analysis not with a community, or some institution or form of behaviour known to be part of that community, but with a cultural artefact, trying to locate it in a network of relationships and assess its meaning.
The 1838 census of Wallachia is the first modern Romanian census and one of the first in South-Eastern Europe. Its population forms are preserved in most part, but are mostly unpublished and very few researches are based on them. After a representative sample from this material was published in 2015 in the MOSAIC database, the process of digitization continues at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, which plans to host the Dem-Ist database, explicitly designed for demographic sources created in the former principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. At the same time, the historiographic context in which this effort takes place calls for a general discussion on the need for such instruments, and the slow progress in which statistical sources are valued. On the one hand, this paper will attempt to contribute to such a discussion. On the other, it will present the general framework and methodology in which the first Dem-Ist population samples are being compiled.
3. Alexandru Mamina, Revizionism istorico-politic, p. 85-90.
L’article traite le révisionnisme historico-politique roumain en comparaison avec le révisionnisme français. Autant qu’en France les enjeux de l’historiographie ont été l’approche de la Révolution française et le marxisme, en Roumanie le révisionnisme s’empare surtout de l’État-nation et de l’interprétation selon laquelle l’unité nationale est le résultat d’un processus objectif. Le débat implique, plus que le côté professionnel, un autre côté social, politique et idéologique, entre le champ des historiens consacrés avant 1989 et le champ émergeant, imbu assez souvent de relativisme postmoderne, dont les représentants cherchent d’arriver à leur tour dans une position institutionnelle et symbolique prépondérante.
4. Tudor Avrigeanu, O manipulare durabilă: Nicolae Iorga transilvanist, p. 91-102.
During the third decade of the 20th century, immediately after the Grand Union of Transylvania with Romania and the Peace Treaty of Trianon, some Hungarian voices tried to establish the these according to which the great Romanian historian Nicholas Iorga may have defended a specific Transylvanian national identity of the people habitating this region. The paper questions this obvious manipulation, trying to identify its ideological premises, historical context and political consequences.