Sanda Golopenția – vocația antropologiei umaniste
Sanda Golopenția – the Vocation of Humanist Anthropology

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents Sanda Golopenția’s professional paths in relation to the main theoretical and methodological perspectives explored by the Brown University professor during her remarkable career. Attracted early on to foreign languages both within her family and at school, Golopenția became a linguist and a folklorist and navigated easily between the two disciplines. During the 1960s and 1970s, fieldwork undertaken in various rural Romanian regions aroused an interest in language dynamics, conversational memory, and the nature of speaker creativity in linguistics innovation. The village of Breb in Maramureș becomes the locus amoenus of her anthropological fieldwork, where Golopenția discovers and conceptualizes the speech acts of a close-knit community. In the field of linguistics, the professor of French Studies is drawn to the theory of structural linguistics, generative grammar, and pragmatics, while also analysing folklore texts and literary works with the help of linguistic tools. Within folkloristics, she is mostly interested in the study of charms and charming from a general anthropological and pragmatic point of view, highlighting the special type of intelligence that folk magic reveals. One of the main concepts that she proposes, intermemory – grounded in the conversational histories of the people of Breb – accurately defines many of her intellectual interests and also the deep structure of the content of her edited works. In Romanian sociology, Golopenția is appreciated for publishing the books of her parents, Anton Golopenția and Ștefania Cristescu – two principal members of the Sociological School that was led by D. Gusti, thereby recovering a lost connection with interwar sociology. Finally, the author describes her encounter with the works of Sanda Golopenția, as well as a personal meeting with the esteemed professor. Given the occasion of this paper – the celebration of Golopenția’s 80th birthday – the text is a general appreciation of her many contributions to Romanian culture, which could be defined appropriately in terms of what Claude Levi-Strauss called a “humanist anthropology”.

• Details
• Contents