Cotoi on Drace-Francis, 'The Traditions of Invention: Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context'

H-Romania Cotoi on Drace-Francis, 'The Traditions of Invention: Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context' Review published on Tuesday, April 19, 2016 Alex Drace-Francis. The Traditions of Invention: Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context. Balkan Studies Library Series. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 310 pp. $149.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-21617-4. Reviewed by Călin Cotoi (University of Bucharest)Published on H-Romania (April, 2016) Commissioned by R. Chris Davis Inside Romanian historiography there was--and still is--a strong current that deals with “images,” “mentalities,” and “representations.” Influenced by the Annales school or by comparative literary studies, and impervious to the criticism leveled against the unreflexive usage of “mentalities,” this tradition is empirically rich but theoretically poor. This kind of discourse is centered on the contemplation, from various standpoints, of discovering oneself through the “objective” or “distorted” image produced by others, usually travelers. The attempts to understand and consume “images” about oneself produced by “others” induce a complex voyeuristic thrill. One’s writing (and reading) of this kind of historiographical and imagological production is situated, safely, in a position that gives oneself access both to local truth, as part of the “self” described by foreign travelers, and to the alleged objectivity gained by inhabiting, vicariously, the travelers’ slot. Alex Drace-Francis’s book breaks sharply with this representational apparatus by bringing together a series of case studies centered on a theoretical and historical investigation of the politics of language, collective representations, and discourses. One of the most important parts of Drace-Francis’s analyses consists in recovering the intimate dynamic and recursivity of “othering discourses.” The game of self and other becomes more balanced--becoming an element of circuits, alliances, and fractures that an alert and theoretically informed historian can unveil and describe. Part 1, “Social Representations,” disentangles the processes through which the image of the Romanian peasant emerged in the nineteenth century through interactions, translations, and reactions to older imperial discourses. The imagining of the peasant--as the foundation of Romania and Romanianess--was still unclear at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even the Transylvanian compilers of the first published Romanian dictionary, theLexicon Valacho-Latino- Hungarico-Germanum (1825), were significantly ambiguous about the meaning of the word “peasant.”[1] The discovery of the peasant was not purely a local one, as it was mediated by discursive traditions starting with the classical Roman legacy of Virgil and Horace, moving to the Princely Mirrors of the Renaissance, and appearing thereafter in the writings of Enlightenment and Romantic travelers and historians. For Drace-Francis, “the nineteenth-century Romanian writers’ discovery of the peasant went hand in hand with their discovery of ‘Europe’; and their encounter with the latter … decisively influenced their conceptualization of the former” (p. 16). Citation: H-Net Reviews. Cotoi on Drace-Francis, 'The Traditions of Invention: Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context'. H-Romania. 04-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/7941/reviews/121276/cotoi-drace-francis-traditions-invention-romanian-ethnic-and-social Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Romania A decisive moment in the political and cultural creation of the peasants was the period around the 1848 revolutions in Europe.[2] The context was the articulation of ethnographic and folkloristic interest in peasant songs, poems, and cultural creations with the political-economy ideal of peasant emancipation. The “people” spoke directly through the voices of the revolutionaries, and revolutionary discourses went directly into the hearts of the villagers. The peasants and the land they inhabited became symbols and carriers of the revolutionary nation, and part of new, capitalist processes of commercialization. The poet and nobleman Vasile Alecsandri reassembled and framed in a folkloristic way the still-dangerous images and discourses of the half-peasant Tudor Vladimirescu uprising of 1821. The “Dragon” and the “snakes” that represented the boyars who were to be fought and destroyed became “superstitions concerning snakes,” ones that emerged not from a dangerous and violent people but from a treasure trove of folklore, opened up by the sympathetic intervention of an ethnographer–poet (p. 52). In his landmark history The Romanians under Prince Michael the Great (1852), Nicolae Bălcescu, one of the most important Romanian revolutionaries and historians to emerge from the 1848 revolutionary period, switched from a generally accepted but diffuse use of terms likemuncitor (worker), plugar (ploughman), or lăcuitor (inhabitant) to refer to the peasantry, to a consistent use of ţăran (peasant). The political and linguistic creation of the “peasant” was based on Bălcescu’s attempt to use literary archaisms, to eliminate neologisms, and to search for old Romanian words in order to create a historically deep national language. Drace-Francis remarks that in the “peasant” case “the anachronism works the other way around: he is applying not an archaic meaning of the word ţăran, but a new one, which looks timeless but is in fact relatively recent” (p. 54). A true tradition of invention. Part 2, “Travel and Alterity,” is based on travel texts from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The travel text of Ignaz von Born (1742–91) was part of a series of works written in the late eighteenth century about the population living on the southeastern frontier of the Habsburg Monarchy, in a colonial-like endeavor to map and use newly acquired or acquirable territories. A Saxon from Transylvania and a mineralogist, freemason, and traveler, Born was the author of writings about Romanians from Banat that first appeared in the literary genre of letters between scientists, and then morphed into a book and a variety of texts including an Italian journal, an English translation, newspaper extracts, popular brochures, and French translations. Drace-Francis explains, puts into perspective, deconstructs, and contextualizes Born’s travel accounts, showing us how, why, and for whom they were written, how various publics might have read them, and what kind of mechanisms of representation can be seen by following the discourses and travels of these texts. Born was part of a colonial mechanism, “one of a number of scientist-bureaucrat-travelers who were to prove immensely influential in creating administrative systems and textual machinery for recording observations of Russian and east European peoples” (p. 87). The discourses of savagery and barbarism that captured populations at the fringes of European empires in Asia, America, and Africa were also deployed inside Europe, sometimes not as a preparation for colonizing but as “refusal to colonize.” Born’s discourse emerged from this context. The Wallachians he presented/invented were a symbolical other and, simultaneously, “a link in the chain of transformable human and natural resources” (p. 90). Chapter 3 focuses on the transformation, found in travel narratives and rhetoric, from the description Citation: H-Net Reviews. Cotoi on Drace-Francis, 'The Traditions of Invention: Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context'. H-Romania. 04-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/7941/reviews/121276/cotoi-drace-francis-traditions-invention-romanian-ethnic-and-social Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Romania of the world to the meditation on the self, by counterpoising two literary/travel traditions that were not in direct contact with one another: the British and the Romanian ones. Against the background of the British travel literature from 1750 to 1840, which established norms for travel accounts throughout Europe, the Romanian travelers’ attempts to pack the world into words appear more clearly. From Hegumen Venedikt’s report of his long trip to Saint Petersburg in the 1770s, pursued as a mixture of religious pilgrimage and political and personal impressions; to Teodor Codrescu’s description of his travel to Constantinopole in 1839, as part of the modernizing Moldavia’s new civil officialdom; to the accounts of Romania’s thoroughly Romantic travelers, the Romanian travel narratives spanning this era seem to substantiate a massive historical switch from “tradition” to “modernity.” This transformation is not, in Drace-Francis’s view, a simple and homogeneous one. The Romantic discovery of Moldavia’s landscapes, evident in Alecu Russo’s writings, “does indeed accompany and metonymies a fascination with the self, but it is a discovery mediated and overshadowed by the encounter with the other” (p. 112). The nature, the people, and the land are rediscovered from self-perceived uncanny historical positions, situated in an inadequate symbolic geography, through continuous, tensioned detours via Romantic “European” traditions of seeing and writing about landscapes. Romanian travelers’ narratives and rhetoric were not only circuitous comments on self and other but also comments on foreign travelers’ accounts of the Romanian lands. Drace-Francis succeeds in telling this story outside the simplifying

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