20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

892 Viorel Stănilăancestors and they do not ally with foreign elements. However,seeing that this nomadic life is met with more and more obstacleslately, they too will be forced to settle down sooner or later, inRomanian communities or in Albanian ones, where they will mostdefinitely be denationalized much faster than in their mountains.”The next parenthesis is valid for all Aromanian in the rural environment:”…neither the Aromanian population in the villages, cold andindifferent to the national issue has any intention of manifesting inthis way [as an ethnic minority], for fear of enduring prospectiveoppressions” (Report)The information being these displayed above, they must be handled asexaggerated formulations like:”the Romanians in the villages still vastly retain their nationalcharacter” (Report);”during my journey, I have never met one Romanian thatdoesn’t wish a complete religious and educational autonomy. Thisimpressive national ambition, which our brothers still maintainin the depression area on the coast, where they are in permanentcontact with strangers, is worth of being known better andcontrasted with the attitude of the authorities which claim we arenot facing a minority issue”. (Report)”The national ambition” and ”the national character” of the Aromanianshepherds and agriculturalists belong more to what the diplomats todaywould call ”wishful thinking”. The maintaining of traditions and languagedon’t necessarily involve a more elaborate stage of national consciousness.This conservatism was enacted according to the connections inside asmall circle, which favor local identities based on kinship and confessioncommunities, which are equally stubborn to any external influences, bethey denationalizing or nationalizing. “National character”, implies theadherence of their subjects to an ideology and conscious mobilization, forwhich the rural layers of the Aromanian society were not yet ready.They may be, as the basarabian historian Iulian Fruntaşu referred toas “intractibility” 14 or intractibility as we might call it: ”the identity of the14A. Bantas si L. Levitchi 1992, Dicţionar englez-român, Bucureşti: Teora, 134;Iulian Fruntaşu 2004, An ethno-political history of Bessarabia. Edit. Cartier, 57:Through adaptation to our case of the definition that I. Fruntaşu supplies to the”national i ntractability”, this would be the chronic incapacity of individuals (in this caseof the Aromanian peasants) to assume the necessaries identities to start and finish theprojects of national edification, without which the very acquirement of modernity wouldnot be possible. The intractibility in thus secured outside the historic frame and the coming