O rediscutare a viziunii lui Henri H. Stahl despre „adevărata și falsa cultură sătească”

Abstract

This article sets into light the context of ideas and relevant biographical circumstances at the time when the Romanian sociologist Henri H. Stahl issued the leaflet Cultura satelor. Cum trebue înțeleasă [The Village Culture. How It Should Be Understood] (1934), in a period of crisis of the Sociological School of Bucharest, when the project of its founder, Dimitrie Gusti, to employ the results of the monographic research campaigns in order to initiate a social reform, seemed to have reached a dead point. At the same time, we pay attention to the cultural distinctions and relations (rural and urban culture, popular/ folk and literate culture) that Stahl debates in his text on village culture. Taking into account the fact that each new reading of a scientific work implicitly updates its content, we also find in the pages written by Henri H. Stahl in 1934 an interesting material for revisiting engaged anthropology, a direction of study developed in the U.S.A. in the late 1970s but rooted in an older model of addressing anthropological research which was created during the Second World War and anticipated as early as the end of the nineteenth century. Beyond different labels applied to research tendencies in social sciences or ethnological/ anthropological approaches in various epochs, we argue that the manner in which researchers influence (more or less intentional) their target-communities not only challenges professional ethics but also provokes a meaningful reflection on the values which are ‘at stake’ in any intercultural encounter.