Bucovina - spiritul occidental în spațiul românesc; o perspectivă sociologică
Bucovina. The Western Spirit of a Romanian Province

Summary/Abstract: The current study is a first step toward concluding a project which focuses on Bukovina and its population consisting of forty oral history interviews. This project had set out to enact a form of social pedagogy, to lead to a moral restoration and to lay the groundwork for possible exercises in the sociology of history. The following essay is one such exercise which tries to define Bukovina as an exponent of enduring Western influence within Romanian territory. What strikes the reader when first perusing these interviews is the fact that all of the interviewees have a very specific and unmistakable adhesion to what Bukovina is and represents. From these extensive interviews an image of this region’s Volksgeist emerges: a specific kind of juridical-philosophical individual, characterized by his entrepreneurial behavior, an ethos defined by multiculturalism, ethnic tolerance and, last but not least, a state of discipline and righteousness which is imposed by disciplinary mechanisms. This human and social reality is the product of three forms of modernization: a. the economic modernization represented by money and the market; b. the political modernization, which focuses on governance; c. the social modernization, which concerns solidarity. These three mediums of modernization converge in order to transform the various ethnic communities (or people) in a homogenous population. They are also transforming the individual into a citizen, by defining him as an economical and political subject who shares the same values and principles with the other members of society, be they Romanian or not.

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