ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

Ethnology „Revisited” oportunities and challenges for the 21 st century 193way of perceiving life is conjectural or does it have a definitive epistemologicalground, if it comes from an internal critics, from a speculative liberty of theethnologists” 13 ?John W. Cole analyses the contemporary European Ethnology even makingsome statements about the Romanian one in a workshop presented within a seminarheld in the University from Perugia in 2000, March, 9 th -10 th . His research has beenlater published in the work: “Anthropological research in Romania; Ethnographicaland historical perspectives” 14 . Although the author emphasizes the fact that theresearch is made under the “handprint of his subjectivity”, we may easily observethe objectivity he proves when analyzing the differences between the “AnglophoneAnthropology” and the “European Anthropology”.He then makes a concise, pertinent differentiation betweenAnthropology and Ethnology, stating that “studying a certain phenomenon inAnthropology usually takes a year or even more, whereas in Ethnology theperiods of observation are shorter, they happen at certain periods of time and lastlonger. Whereas Anthropologists focus on studying social relations in a broadersense, Ethnologists focus on the material culture and its means of culturalexpression; Anthropologists deal with recent phenomena whereas Ethnologistsdeal with archaic structures”. He also observes another difference that made theobject of some troubling discussions of the kind, namely the fact thatAnthropologists concentrate their attention on the foreign comparative researchwhereas Ethnologists conduct their researches at home 15 .In order to emphasize on the existent differences between “AnglophoneAnthropology” and “European Anthropology”, Cole quotes Orvar Lögfren,Swedish Ethnologist to whom “Global Anthropology” is embraced by Europeannations with a strong colonial sense, while the late or small colonial states focusedon “the internal primitives, either as folkloric studies or as a national culturalAnthropology. This more recent tradition was also called “European Ethnology” 16 .Especially, Ethnology has developed in the 19-th century countries suchas Romania. Cole focused on the idea that “there are distinctive nationalethnographical traditions that have developed more or less independently of oneanother”. Some researchers consider this partly owes to the “dominant culturalpluralism” in Europe on one hand, and, to the fact that “a politics of legitimacyof contesting the established order” 17 was attributed to national ethnologies on13 Jean Copans, op. cit., p.22.14 John W. Cole, European Ethnology: eight thesis, in “Anthropological Research inRomania. Historical and Ethnographical perspectives” (coordinators Cristina Papa, GiovanniPizza, Filippo M. Zerilli), Cluj, Clusium, 2004, p. 22.15 Ibidem.16 Orvar Lögfren, Linking the local, national and the global , in “Ethnologia Europaea”,vol. 26 (2), p.157-168, apud John W. Cole, European Ethnology: eight thesis, in “AnthropologicalResearch in Romania. Historical and Ethnographical perspectives” (coordinators Cristina Papa,Giovanni Pizza, Filippo M. Zerilli), Cluj, Clusium, 2004, p. 23-26.17 Pierre Bonte, Michel Izard (coordinators), op. cit., p.227.