ANTHROPOLOGICAL DEPICTIONS OF NATIONAL CHARACTER IN ROMANIAN POST-SOCIALIST POLITICAL ESSAYS – TWO EXAMPLES)
Keywords:
national character, nationalism, anthropological representations, post-socialism, Romanian political eliteAbstract
The history of cultural anthropology has recorded quite a few mythological depictions or fictional interpretations of ethnographic data. This happened to such an extent that the recourse to imagination in order to describe „the human nature” or „the national character” became a topic of anthropological study in itself. This field of research offers an impressive set of examples when it comes to the issue of the distinctive features of ethnic groups or national traditions, the political discourse about which is often loaded with stereotypes and anthropological representations that say more about those who conceive and circulate them than about the object to which they refer. The paper below presents comparatively two instances of the manifestation of this kind of fictional representations in the Romanian post-socialist public discourse and frames a series of observations regarding the mindset of the Romanian post-socialist elite.
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