Ethnographic Aspects in the Works of the Bucharest School of Sociology between the First and Second World Wars

Abstract

The Bucharest School of Sociology or, as it is often called, the Gusti School, was created by Dimitrie Gusti (1880-1955), a major scholar, scientific organizer, and prominent figure who founded the Department and Seminar of Sociology, Ethics, and Politics in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at Bucharest University and served as its head beginning in 1920, as head of the Rumanian Social Institute from 1921 to 1948, and as head of the Rumanian Open-air Rural Museum from 1936 onward. Gusti made a major contribution to world science and the centenary of his birth wwas celebrated under a resolution passed by UNESCO. Rumania had a bourgeois government during much of Gusti's lifetime, but he showed himself to be a scholar of democratic leanings and a believer in social progress. However, he remained a capitalist-oriented reformist who dreamed of eliminating the defects of contemporary society through action by sociologists. Gusti hoped in vain that the legislative and administrative bodies of capitalist ...