BETWEEN MODERNITY AND PRIMITIVISM, BARBARITY
BETWEEN MODERNITY AND PRIMITIVISM, BARBARITY

Summary/Abstract: The present study combines the methodologies of imagology and travel studies (études viatiques in French). British travel accounts reflected an adequacy of the representations about the Romanians more to the realities in their minds than to actual ones. Out of the dominant images about Romania, that of barbarity (as opposed to civilization) would gradually become a nucleus for future stereotypes, which, in their turn, would orientalize and balkanize this space through negative attributions. Philosophy, natural sciences (anthropology, biology, ethnology, geography, with their much exploited theories on races and climates), together with history and economic sciences cooperated for founding the discourse of difference (the naturalization and absolutization of difference). The contribution of these disciplines is to be felt in the organization of the identity representations because travellers were experiencing alterity from their direction: ethnical origin, psychosomatic features, dress, food, architecture, beliefs and habits. As for the spatial-temporal structure of the British images concerning Romania, their situation in an uncertain space and time is dominant. Romania was thus suspended on the borderline between civilization and barbarity, modernity and tradition, Europe and the Orient, or the Balkans, between Europe and Asia, on the border separating empires. It was thus placed in a waiting space out of political and military reasons. The decision on the direction that this country would take depended on the evolution of the conflicts or of the mutual goals of the great powers. Romania was thus maintained in this balance on the symbolic map of the Continent through artifices of calculation, emphasizing in a politically correct manner either its Orientalness or its Europeanness.

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