Abstract
Focusing on the project of cultural work (muncă culturală), involving hundreds of university students from different disciplines going to the countryside to study rural life and to aid its modernisation, this article examines the prominent role sociology played in King Carol II’s Romania as a scientific tool for planning rural reform and as a practical project of mass social organisation. Designed and launched by the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti in 1934, cultural work competed with the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael’s work camps, providing an “official” project of rural modernisation, meant to bridge the gap between the educated youth and the peasantry and increase support for the King. Largely ignored by scholars of this period, this project offers a new perspective on the country’s social, political, and intellectual history, one that concentrates on the “rise of the social” in Romania, to which the transformation of the peasantry was central.
“Cultural work is . . . the mobilisation of all social energies and forces of the village and of the state for the great battle to cure, uplift and ennoble the village.” 1 This is how the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti (1880–1955) summed up the goals and ethos of the new project he launched in 1934 as the newly appointed director of the “Prince Carol” Royal Cultural Foundation (Fundaţia Culturală Regală Principele Carol). Based on Gusti’s social theory and cultural politics, the principles of cultural work (muncă culturală) formed an experimental blueprint for social reform meant to mobilise all professions seen as vital to the improvement of peasant life (human and veterinary medicine, agronomy, physical education, domestic science, and theology) under the umbrella of sociology in an effort to modernise the rural world. At the same time, the project played an important political role both as propaganda for King Carol II and as a way to compete against the rising influence of the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael (Legiunea Arhanghelului Mihail). 2 Between 1934 and 1938, hundreds of university students and graduates, from a wide variety of disciplines, were recruited and dispatched to the countryside to study peasant life and apply their knowledge and skills to its improvement. Their duties combined research, manual labour, and professional work and were aimed at reforming specific aspects of rural life whilst preserving local culture and traditions. Designed to use sociology as a tool for rural reform and a new way of seeing and engaging with the countryside, cultural work raises new questions about the development of social sciences in Romania and about their role in state-sponsored social reform, especially in rural areas. This article looks at cultural work from several perspectives: as the application of Gusti’s sociological theory and his politics of culture; as the product of interwar politics; and as a practical attempt to “cure, uplift and ennoble the village” through a scientific approach. 3
The peasant’s status as the “common denominator of all things Romanian” has been widely discussed in the context of nationalist discourses. 4 However, moving beyond the sphere of nationalism, this article shows how the rural world and its transformation became central to a new sphere of concerns, a “particular sector” generally referred to as “the social.” 5 First used by Hannah Arendt to describe a crucial aspect of the modern human condition, “the rise of the social” has been examined as a historical phenomenon by scholars such as Jacques Donzelot, Paul Rabinow, and James C. Scott. 6 Their work has stressed the historical nature of the concepts “society” and “social,” documenting the processes by which “society became an object that the state might manage and transform with a view toward perfecting it.” 7 The new realm of the social brought private matters into the public eye, making them into the object of new academic disciplines and, simultaneously, into political concerns. This became a feature of Western modernity that gradually spread, though import–export and symbiosis, to other geographical areas where it encountered and was transformed by different political, material, and cultural conditions. This process was directly related to the development of social sciences, which provided the specialist knowledge for planning social reform. Whilst this has been the object of many studies focusing on Western Europe and more recently Russia, not much attention has been paid to cognate phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe. 8 The development of sociology, led by Gusti and his school of sociology, played an important role in this process in Romania, bringing the countryside into the realm of the social, translating matters of peasant life and culture into the language of the social sciences and seeking to shape its transformation in line with its reformist ambitions.
Gusti proposed sociology as a meta-discipline able to bring together all other social sciences to provide an overall understanding of village life. Furthermore, expanded into the field of social reform, he argued sociology could offer a synthetic vision for all professions engaged in the transformation of Romanian society, starting with the rural world. The expansion of Romanian sociology into the countryside was inspired by and shared features with the study of marginal social classes in countries like Britain and France and with that of “primitive” cultures by Western anthropologists. Like them, Gusti stressed the importance of direct contact with the peasantry through collective fieldwork and a synthetic study of all aspects of rural life. 9 This places him in a tradition of holism whose origins lay in the nineteenth century but that continued in a more systematic way into the early twentieth century. 10 Examining how sociological research was translated into a method of social reform, this article engages with the political implications of Gusti’s project in the specific context of mid- to late-1930s Romania.
The cultural work project, which reflected King Carol II’s own reformist ambitions, gives an indication of the fierce competition for the domination of the rural world and of the wider sphere of the social through different programmes of mass organising society. Used as a way to compete with the activities of the Legion, which Rebecca Haynes has described as an effort to create a “parallel society” meant to “challenge the hegemony of the state and the dominant class,” Gusti’s project came to represent the “official” vision of social reform. 11 This made it into a tool for King Carol II’s own authoritarian agenda, which he managed to bring to fruition in 1938, with the short-lived royal dictatorship.
Examining cultural work and its theoretical grounding connects the development of the social sciences and the politics of “mass organisation” in the context of interwar Romania, also providing meaningful comparisons with similar processes occurring simultaneously both in Europe and further afield. 12 However, this article does not present a linear passage from ideas to practices, but a much more uneven and complex set of contexts, trends, and influences that generated an increasing concern with the social, manifested as a desire to manage the transformation of Romanian society starting from the countryside.
Dimitrie Gusti: Sociologist and Reformer
Like other scholars in countries whose territories had been reconfigured by the war and the Versailles settlement, Gusti was one of the intellectuals who saw the new drive for modernisation and social reform as an opportunity to contribute to the building of a modern Romanian state.
Gusti was born in Iaşi, in 1880, shortly after Romania, then formed of the two former Principalities of Moldova and Wallachia, had received independence. 13 He was one of many young Romanians who, coming from affluent backgrounds, went to study abroad. He left for Germany in 1898, aged only 18, and stayed there until 1907, the year of the famous Romanian peasant revolts. 14 By then, he had received a doctorate from Leipzig University (1904) and a Habilitation from Berlin Univeristy (1907). In 1908, he applied for a post at the University of Iaşi and then spent that year in Paris to study with Durkheim. He then returned to Iaşi in 1910 to take up a position as Assistant Professor in History of Classical Philosophy, Ethics, and Sociology at the Faculty of Letters of the city’s university. In the inaugural lecture presenting his academic interests and intentions, he singled out the agrarian question as a potential object of research for sociologists and stressed the importance of modern and practical study methods and techniques. 15
As the First World War made Iaşi the temporary capital of Romania, Gusti’s home and library became the base of great intellectual ferment. In the spring of 1918, together with a group of famous Iaşi academics, he set up the Association for Social Science and Reform (Asociaţia pentru Ştiinţă şi Reformă Socială) as a forum of specialists prepared to study and debate the country’s social problems and inform its future reforms. 16 Two years later, Gusti moved to the University of Bucharest to become professor of Sociology, Ethics, and Politics at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. This marked the beginning of his multifaceted career at the heart of Romanian public life.
As one of the leading figures of social research in a country in the midst of crucial social and political transformations, Gusti proposed sociology as the “science of the nation,” a discipline able to shed new light on Romania’s existing social problems, starting with the rural world. In this eminently agrarian state with around 80 per cent of the population living in the countryside, the political changes at the end of the war, including the 1921 land reform and the new constitution of 1923, gave peasants both land and the right to vote, making them central political and economic actors. 17 At the same time, the new ethnic balance of the Romanian population, which included a higher percentage of other ethnicities, made the peasantry into the “common denominator” for all things Romanian and a national symbol by the country’s intellectual and political elites. 18 Since the fate of the rural world dominated most academic and political debates about national identity and modernisation, Gusti’s focus on peasant life reflected the heightened importance of this social group after the war. Moreover, it announced a reconfiguration of rural issues within the new paradigm of the social.
At the University of Bucharest, Gusti transformed his seminar of sociology into an active research group that became known as the Bucharest School of Sociology (Şcoala de Sociologie de la Bucureşti). The School offered students and scholars from different disciplines interested in the research of rural life the opportunity to undertake collective fieldwork in various Romanian villages. Gusti and the leaders of this group developed a unique methodology of collective field study based on the observation and recording of everyday village life that, by the early 1930s, established sociology firmly in the intellectual arena of the time. 19
However, Gusti’s ambitions for his discipline did not stop at academic and intellectual prestige. In his view, beyond its role of understanding social reality and producing research-based knowledge, which he termed sociologia cogitans, sociology also had the important role of informing and managing social reform, sociologia militans. 20
Sociologia Militans
Gusti’s social theory was the product of many influences, of which German voluntarism and French positivism were central to his holistic vision of “social reality.” 21 Following in Durkheim’s steps, Gusti stated that society was not an idea but a concrete reality that could be studied and understood scientifically. 22 Unlike other social sciences, he argued that sociology could offer an overall view of this reality starting from the comprehensive study of individual social units. Most importantly, this had to combine the study of the determining factors of each social unit (called cadre or contexts), which formed its “milieu,” with that of its “manifestations” (manifestări), which formed its specific social values or creations. 23 The “contexts” (cosmological, psychological, biological, and historical) and the “manifestations” (economic, spiritual, political, and juridical) existed in each social unit, regardless of size and form, from tribes and village communities to nations and humanity as a whole. The life of these social units presupposed, according to Gusti, the correlation between contexts and manifestations through “the social will,” which provided the unifying principle and main motor of social life. 24 His central law of “sociological parallelism” best summed up his vision of social reality, stating that C (contexts) + V (social will) = M (manifestations), meaning that each social unit, determined by its specific conditions and guided by its social will, produced its own manifest social reality. Whilst the concept of social will, representing the consciousness of living together and the creative force of all social units, showed Gusti’s voluntarist inspiration, placing the social group (unit) over the individual and stressing the importance of “milieu” betrayed influences from the French social sciences, represented both by Durkheim and by the members of the Musée Social. 25
His totalising view of society was centred on social order, conceived of as the goal of all social units in their constant cyclical adaptation to their milieu. In this process, the concept of “social will” was also the central motor of social change and of any potential social reform. As the formula above showed, the only way to transform a community was by altering its social will.
26
However, in Gusti’s view, directed change was not something that could occur overnight, but gradually and organically. As Gusti explained,
The world cannot be changed through a system of ideals, no matter how perfect or ingenious. A future society cannot be invented; it has to be discovered, through the study of social reality, which contains the germs of the future society. . . . It is therefore pointless to make plans for a future social organisation since the [present] social reality expresses everything, it is both a plan and a future.
27
Reform was therefore a complex process that required the informed work of specialists able to provide a thorough analysis of society, diagnosing the problems and imbalances of social life and only subsequently helping each unit to use its social will to restore its equilibrium. This quote expressed Gusti’s view of the relationship between sociology and transformation, clarifying the two interrelated facets of the discipline: knowledge (cogitans) and “militant” action (militans). Sociologia cogitans consisted of an interaction between methods, theory, and reality, at the same time paving the way towards social action and reform. 28 However, the role of sociology did not stop there, its final goal being the realisation of a future society. The transformation implied in Gusti’s term sociologia militans was that of social reform or even social engineering. Understanding social reality would naturally lead towards the realisation of the ideal society, which, unlike the utopian socialist version, was not an invention but a process of discovery. However, whilst cultural work was the practical application of militant sociology, it also implied another dimension of Gusti’s thought—culture and the politics thereof.
The People’s Culture
In a document from 1922, Gusti stated:
The fortuitous unification of the Romanian territories has brought with it a series of issues that are crucial to our national and state life. The cultural problem is certainly one of them. . . . The most important of the socio-political aspects of our cultural problem today is our spiritual unification. Furthermore, the moral upheaval and the great social waves caused by the war have made the masses more prone than ever to demagogical promises and to stronger anarchical movements. Leaving these masses, which have not yet entered or have long exited the influence of the school, without any guidance, would lead to the break-up of the present state and society. The third socio-political aspect of the matter is that of building a real democracy. A cultural activity as intense as the gravity of the problem we face is therefore absolutely and urgently necessary.
29
The quote above reveals the widespread fear of social unrest at the end of the war and the trust that the education and “guidance” of the masses would restore order in the state and in its society. Like many other intellectuals of his time, Gusti saw the reform of Romanian society as a “cultural problem,” which he engaged with in his writings and political speeches. Gusti argued for the organisation of an institution for the life-long education of the masses, called the House of the People (Casa Poporului), meant to supplement and expand the role of the school, already coining social reform in terms of new, extended forms of mass education and culture. The idea of a “culture of the people” became clearer in later speeches that discussed new forms of cultural politics:
the true goal of the people’s culture is the transformation of the people, a bio-social unit, into a Nation, a superior spiritual-social unit. Thus understood, culture creates the community spirit, the consciousness of national values, the consciousness of national solidarity.
30
Presenting culture as the source of national self-realisation, this quote clarified its role in making the transition from the expansion of the social to the higher ideal of creating “the consciousness of national solidarity.” It is important to note that Gusti placed the “bio-social” stage as a lower form of existence, whereas culture provided something akin to Durkheim’s organic solidarity with the context of the nation. In realising his vision, Gusti proposed to combine top–down intervention with a bottom–up approach. He criticised earlier attempts to “civilise the peasantry” and to “domesticate the people,” explaining that culture “[could] neither be given nor imposed from above, as it had to be acquired freely, from below,” the role of any cultural activists being to enable the rural population to “develop their own culture.” 31 He was equally critical of initiatives of bringing culture to the people, as these were based on an uneven relationship between “the educators” and “the masses” and on a false understanding of “the people’s culture.” In his view, the Romanian masses needed their own culture, but this was neither a replica nor thinned-down version of high culture but an original, new product of the people themselves.
To create new forms of culture, Gusti emphasised the agency of the villagers in their own cultural awakening, through the concept of the villages’ “right to culture,” which the government and society had a duty to satisfy. Rejecting other philanthropic initiatives of “spoon feeding” the people with “the cultural values of the time,” he affirmed cultural activism as the fulfilment of a social right. 32 Framed as a civic responsibility, his projects revealed both modern aspirations and a direct attachment to the authority of the state. Again, this placed Gusti within an international trend that emphasised social over individual rights and proposed society as the main unit for the state to operate with. 33 In this context, culture, like education, was meant to become a “right” of the masses and therefore had to be nurtured by specialists.
In his cultural politics, Gusti drew inspiration from a wide variety of regional, national, and international initiatives in Romania and abroad. Inside Romania, the most notable inspiration was offered by the Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and Culture (Asociaţiunea Transilvană pentru Literatura şi Cultura Română, generally known as ASTRA) that had been extremely active in the region during the Hungarian domination, also continuing its cultural projects throughout the interwar period. 34 Abroad, Danish popular universities and Austrian Volksheim were perhaps the most frequently mentioned examples, to which, over time, Gusti added German, Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, and Turkish cultural programmes. 35 Apart from these national projects, a great source of confidence and inspiration was found in the Rockefeller and Carnegie worldwide programmes. 36 This unusual combination of many influences was used to devise a way of responding to Romania’s specific problems in a time of emerging extremisms. At the same time, Gusti’s own political agenda was never clearly defined, his search for social order and trust in a more technocratic yet paternalistic form of governance bringing him close to King Carol II, whose populism also envisaged a new, more direct, relationship between the elites and the masses, whilst undermining the country’s fragile democratic system.
The Cultural Work Project
The shift from cognitive to militant sociology occurred within a political context that allowed Gusti to marry his vision of reform with that of the country’s monarch, King Carol II. 37 After taking the throne in 1930, Carol II combined his ambition to modernise the country with a populist approach to politics aimed at winning the support of two key sections of society: the youth and the peasantry. Interested in Gusti’s initiatives and their potential benefits, in 1934, the King placed him in charge of the “Prince Carol” Royal Cultural Foundation, an institution set up for the enlightenment of the peasantry. 38 This institution became the new headquarters for Gusti’s cultural work project, which he designed together with some of his students and collaborators from the Bucharest School of Sociology.
Cultural work in the countryside was based on a holistic reform plan centred on four main areas of change—the body, work, the mind, and the soul. 39 The composition of the teams of students recruited to go to various villages, which were typically formed of a doctor, a physical education teacher, an agronomist, a vet, domestic scientist, a priest, a teacher, and a sociologist, corresponded to these areas of action. This assignment of duties reflected Gusti’s vision of culture and society, confirming the role of sociology as a discipline sitting above the specialist fields elaborating a synthetic vision of social reality. At the same time, the project, which involved not only sociologists but also students of other disciplines with no sociological training, continued and adapted the fieldwork practices of the Bucharest School of Sociology, which offered a model of interaction with the locals. However, the ethos of the project was very different from earlier fieldwork initiatives, as it implied not only an academic goal but also a highly political one.
King Carol II’s Agenda
In Carol’s own words, cultural work was “a way of offering the peasantry a better standard of living, a better understanding of their needs and obligations.” 40 In this, he acknowledged the importance of the rural masses both as a political power and as crucial to the state’s future. In one of his speeches, the monarch complained about the state of Romanian villages with their “bad dusty roads, ditches with stale water, no bridges or flower gardens in front of any houses,” his wish being that villagers be taught the value of cleanliness, order, and beauty. 41 This advice presented the monarch’s interest in the countryside as the result of his desire to turn country folk into rational modern farmers and active citizens of the Romanian state. Nevertheless, beyond its modernising agenda, Gusti’s ideas were attractive to Carol for two much more political reasons. Firstly, it matched his populist ambition of ruling above the parties, offering him the possibility to pose as “King of the Peasantry” and to have direct access to the masses that he wished to win over through the work of young state-sponsored volunteers recruited “to spread the royal message to the villages.” 42 Secondly, it had the potential to counteract the rising influence of the Legion of the Archangel Michael amongst the youth and the peasantry. 43
The 1930s were a time of crisis and discontent across the entire Romanian political, economic, and intellectual scene. As the enthusiasm brought about by the victory of the National Peasant Party (Partidul Naţional Ţărănesc) in the 1928 elections, promising great changes for the rural masses, subsided, the severe consequences the international economic crisis had on agriculture sunk the peasantry even deeper into debt and poverty. 44 Deemed unable to deal with the new social concerns of the population, the traditional democratic parties came under the threats of extremism, on the one hand, and of Carol II’s own authoritarian agenda, on the other, both competing for popular support.
Between 1932 and 1934, the Legion of the Archangel Michael increased rapidly in popularity, especially amongst young intellectuals and the peasantry. 45 Amongst the Legion’s new propaganda tactics had been the organisation of voluntary work camps aimed at bringing urban intellectuals to the countryside. Although the first work camp was organised in 1924, in the 1930s, the work camps grew in number and size, becoming a successful means of recruiting and spreading the Legion’s ethos amongst young students, intellectuals, and the peasantry. 46
Also aimed at university students, graduates, and young professionals, Gusti’s cultural work project responded to the political demands of these troubled times, although the initial plans for it had long been present on the sociologist’s agenda. In the 1930s, the project appeared as the alternative, official way for the youth to “go to the people,” allowing them to do their bit for the countryside, work in teams, and get their hands dirty. His initiative therefore appealed to the same psychological factors as their competitors: sacrificial heroism and the will to change the nation’s future. Also like the Legion, cultural work proposed an alternative form of generating social solidarity and of mass-organising society, therefore competing with them over the resolution of Romania’s “social issues.” Yet, unlike the Legion’s religious mysticism and revolutionary spirit, the underlying principles of Gusti’s cultural work were science, reason, and most importantly, respect for existing structures of authority.
The Royal Student Teams
In a text published in 1924, Gusti argued that the university held a crucial role, “as the supreme organ in the creation of national culture and in preparing and guiding the nation’s superior intellectual forces.” 47 Moreover, the student body also played an important part in generating social solidarity for the entire Romanian nation. In Gusti’s integrated vision of society, students, as producers of high culture, were responsible for contributing to the national prise de conscience of the rest of society. The programme launched ten years later, in a time of social unrest amongst the youth, also sought to capture and channel the aroused spirits and the energy of students, offering them an opportunity to engage in a type of social work that not only required their professional skills, and enthusiasm, but also remunerated their efforts.
Students responded to the King and to Gusti’s call out of a wide range of interests: from sheer curiosity to personal or professional reasons. For many of them, the rural expeditions were a means of gaining professional experience, displaying their knowledge and skills, and contributing to the “education of the peasantry.” 48 Others saw volunteering as a step towards a career with the Foundation as remunerated team leaders. 49 Still others thought this type of work would be useful in their future employment. However, apart from dedicated professionals, there were also people who took advantage of the project to have a paid-for holiday or even to subvert the aims of the project itself. 50
Although overall the project did not involve great numbers of people, participation grew steadily from 1934, when only 98 students took part assisted by 56 technicians (i.e., professionals from the designated domains) working in 12 villages, to 1937, when a total of 407 students and 404 technicians worked in 75 villages. In 1938, the programme listed 471 students and 397 technicians working in 63 villages. The majority of the students (227) were from the University of Bucharest, the rest being from the other academic centres (Iaşi 96, Cluj 66, Cernăuţi 13, Caransebeş 4, Oradea 2, Arad 1). 51 Over these five years, 114 villages were visited once or repeatedly across all Romanian regions.
On a geographical scale, the project opened the countryside to a new form of extensive organised travel and exploration, transforming it into a network of destinations connected to Bucharest as the main hub. 52 At the same time, it engaged students and professionals from a vast range of regions, many of them children of peasants, village intellectuals, or of the petty bourgeoisie. As an article in the programme’s own journal boasted, in the team dispatched to the village of Cegani “the seven team members are all sons of peasants from seven regions of the country. We have an Oltenian, a Transylvanian, Bessarabian, a Moldovan and three Wallachians.” 53 In terms of gender, as the quote indicates, the project was dominated by men, who filled most of the roles, with only a few exceptions of women from the School of Medicine and the Faculty of Letters. Each team had a gender-specific role, that of the “domestic scientist,” which assigned women to the traditional duties of house-keeping.
The Practices of Cultural Work
Between 1934 and 1938, as the trips grew from one year to the next, a compendium of regulations, duties, and rules of conduct was produced and then further refined. The sociologist Henri H. Stahl played one of the most important roles within the project, as author of the guidelines and theory of cultural work. The first guidebook of cultural work was published in 1934 and later reprinted and expanded in the successive editions of the “Guide to Cultural Work in the Countryside” (Îndrumătorul muncii culturale la sate). 54 Apart from this, the teams also had their own newsletter, titled Curierul Echipelor Studenţeşti, which published stories and advice based on the experience of each year’s work. Moreover, at the end of each year, the FCR-PC organised public displays of the findings and the results of the student teams. To this rich published material, the documents in the archive of the Foundations provide an overall view of the project’s propositions, theories, and methods as well as of the students’ own views of their work in the countryside.
The practices, the assignment of duties, and the design of the teams showed the project’s holistic vision of social reform, which sought to make students not only see and think, but also work and act sociologically. Each team went to a specific village and remained there for three months, first assessing its medical, economic, moral, and educational situation and then working to improve the life of the locals. Once they settled in their location, the first month was devoted to research. Studying the local conditions had a double function: firstly as a way of “breaking the ice,” visiting the villagers in their homes and talking to them, and secondly as an assessment of the local problems and of their short-term solutions. The results were written up in plans of action followed up by reports monitoring the team’s weekly or monthly activity. 55
In terms of study, the project of cultural work continued, in a more applied way, the practices of fieldwork in the countryside as established by the Bucharest School of Sociology. Similar to field-based research, cultural work was meant to help the team members observe and understand peasant life in its local context, allowing them to develop cultural sensitivity and understanding. Nevertheless, although they employed some sociological methods to assess the local situation, the students’ main activities were professional and manual labour for the community, aimed at completing tasks and achieving specific goals (treating patients, setting up a choir, delivering classes, repairing roads, churches, etc). Therefore, this qualitative study of village life was meant to provide a diagnosis rather than an academic ethnographic account.
After the brief assessment of the local situation, the remaining two months were used to put these plans into action. The strategy and tempo of work differed from one profession to the other. If the civic projects were the easiest to plan and monitor, the activities of the individual members depended on the nature of their profession and its applicability to rural life. In theory, the teams were expected to start a new era for the rural world, by working intensively. The goal was to accelerate the time of the village and to bring it up to the speed of the city and of modernity. In practice, the doctors frequently saw tens of patients a day, the vets visited all households to neuter, treat, or give advice on the locals’ animals, and on one occasion a priest married fifteen couples in one ceremony. 56 Such zeal sometimes amazed the villagers, sometimes annoyed the local authorities, raised hopes, and helped the royal propaganda. Ideally, the organisers thought that imposing a sustained pace of work would make the village follow, hastening its own rhythm and adjusting it to the enthusiasm of the teams. However, these periods of intense activity were balanced out by times when teams’ daily routines were sucked into the everyday life of the village. This is shown by the weekly reports from the field that recorded the repetitive pattern and slow pace of the work that involved visits to the locals’ houses and workplaces, giving advice and organising various events. Alert to this, Stahl warned that “the great danger of staying in the village is to let ourselves drawn into its sleepy and uneventful rhythm.” 57
The rhythm of the teams’ activities was closely dependent on their relationship with the village, since performing their duties required the locals’ cooperation and willingness to take advice and criticism from young “strangers.” At the same time, once accepted and trusted, their professional roles allowed them to take part in the social life of the community. However, the integration of the teams was never complete, as the scale and intensity of the project contributed to the perception of the student’s stay as a state of exception, disconnected from the real flow of rural time.
The teams’ relation with the village was regulated not only by the objectives of the trips but also by the specific moral conduct of the project. Designed as miniature social units, the teams were meant to work collaboratively, providing models of order and harmony for the village community. The project textbooks mentioned the importance of the entire group attending church every Sunday, of dressing in an appropriate way and of avoiding conflicts. Also, the project leaders promoted interaction and cooperation between the members of the teams. For example, free medical consultations, which were seen as “the best way to win over the village and the trust of the locals,” were often used to open the way for more difficult interventions. 58 In other situations, when the doctors were involved in less welcome activities, the project’s organisers suggested that they be helped and recommended to the villagers by the priest, a traditional figure of local authority. This collaboration extended to working on matters that required the combined efforts of more specialists. Moral “problems” like that of cohabitation, for example, were not confined to the culture of the soul, as they were seen to affect the moral and social hygiene of the entire community. The teams were therefore encouraged to identify couples “living in sin” and convince them to get married. In this sense, cultural work represented not only an attempt to deal with the interconnectedness of social life but also a desire to transcend professional specialisation and the fragmentation of modern social life, by providing specialists with a new holistic way of understanding, a sociological one.
An Ambiguous Vision of Social Change
Cultural work sought to incorporate demographic, medical, economic, and political matters into the wider sphere of culture, which became the main tool of social reform. This was criticised by commentators from both the right and the left of the political spectrum, who deemed the solutions proposed to the deep and more complex problems of peasant life as “superficial.”
On the one hand, the Legion’s members and sympathisers criticised the teams for being “unjustified and useless” parodies of their own work camps, which had been set up as models of a “parallel society,” which challenged the hegemony of the state and sought to instate a new form of social solidarity and a new moral code.
59
An article discussing the student teams stated:
Camps based on wide scientific and nationalist ideas such as the “culturalisation of the masses” have been set up. Well-kept and often well-paid teams of students are being sent to the countryside to study the local situation sociologically and to improve it. . . . We welcome the scientific activity of these teams, but we disagree with the type of education these teams impart to the people. A paid ideal cannot save the people. These teachers . . . are raised at the school of politicianism and even if they are sincere, they have an upbringing based on an individualist spirituality.
60
On the other hand, the left-wing journal Era nouă published several articles by Şerban Voicu who pointed out that the teams had correctly and scientifically shown the difficult living conditions of the peasantry, but that their interpretation and solutions of these problems was flawed.
Faced with the extreme misery and poverty of living conditions encountered in the villages and driven by the incorrect understanding that the upper classes had done all they could for the people and that the social problem had been resolved, the team members were mistaken to believe that what the people lacked was guidance.
61
For Voicu, the “social problem,” for which the government and the establishment were to blame, was still unresolved and could not be resolved through the measures proposed by the teams. He therefore concluded that “the admirable work of the teams, driven by their desire to “do something” for the people, has had no result in solving our peasant social problem.” 62
These criticisms, from both extremes of the political spectrum, brought out the tight link between the teams and the established institutions and forms of political power, at the same time deriding the project’s cultural agenda as being neither materialist enough (in the sense of historical materialism) nor spiritual enough. In fact, they also show the distinctively reformist ethos of cultural work and its desire to nurture a “culture of consent” amongst both the youth and the peasantry. 63 This involved seeking to address two opposing drives: on the one hand, to transform and “civilise” the peasantry and, on the other, to rescue and preserve its specific cultural traditions and customs. An examination of the tasks set out for the teams and the participants’ interpretations of these tasks will allow a better understanding of how these contradictory drives were translated into the cultural work project.
The Drive to Change: Rationalising Peasant Life
The use of specialists and professionals showed a great trust in the transformative power of scientific knowledge expressed through the desire to rationalise many aspects of village life. These were reflected in the activities promoted in all cultural areas. For example, the measures categorised under “sanitary education” sought to redefine concepts like “clean” and “healthy” against others like “dirty” and “sick” and therefore required changes in the life style and daily routines of the villagers. This did not only mean convincing people to wash their hands and bodies, sleep in separate rooms, and build showers and use them regularly, but also making them “understand the notion of ‘infection’ and imagine the millions of germs on their own hands and on those of their neighbours.” 64 The trust in the power of medicine and interest in cleanliness and hygiene also extended to the advice on nutrition and leisure, categorising foods and activities as healthy or unhealthy.
The desire to transform villagers into rational farmers was also present in the instructions of the culture of work. From an economic point of view, the project brought the theoretical know-how of specialists to the village, trying to change not only the locals’ labour practices but also their entire conception of work as a complex economic process. The aim was to impress upon the peasant the value of rational agriculture, by helping them understand the added value of animal labour and mechanisation in cultivation, redirecting them towards more cost-effective products and more efficient use of land, preaching the benefits of cooperation and, in some cases, even promoting amalgamation of peasant holdings. These measures sought to address the best-known problems of Romanian agriculture such as the fragmentation of property, peasant indebtedness, technological backwardness, the cultivation of a limited range of non-profitable products (grains, corn), etc. 65 The reports of the agronomists and vets reinforced these points, diagnosing most villages as backward in terms of exploitation of the natural conditions, use of technological innovations, and work practices. 66 However, students and technicians believed that the peasant economy could be reformed through adequate knowledge, for example, of how to breed, use, and treat their own animals.
Through the work of the domestic scientist, a position occupied only by women, cooking and cleaning were also transformed into quasi-scientific domains. They were in charge of three main sets of tasks: domestic education and home economics; nutrition and food preparation; and craftwork. These made up a programme for modern rational living, including advice on “how to use the rooms . . . in their homes” efficiently, how to clean dishes, furniture, and materials; and how to “manage one’s time and household.” 67 Solely responsible for the provision, selection, and preparation of food for the entire family, the peasant woman was expected to learn not only how to cook but also the nutritional value of different foods, their modes of preparation, and serving. 68
Finally, in the sphere of the culture of the soul, the wider desire to rationalise religion and to use the church as a national institution of social order was reflected in the priests’ and theologians’ fight to cleanse religious belief of its superstitions and mysticism.
A Drive for Preservation—Traditional Culture, Moral Order, and the Peasant Woman
This trust in the power of science and reason was however not aimed at radically transforming peasants. On the contrary, the project sought to safeguard the peasantry as a socio-cultural group and thus help it adapt to the conditions of the modern world. The interest in progress was therefore counterbalanced by a strong desire to protect the heritage of traditional culture and to preserve the existing social order. If the former was seen in the attitude towards folk customs and dress, crafts, and architecture, the latter was evident in the project’s agenda regarding gender.
The first way of protecting the existing order of things was illustrated by the desire to rescue local customs and traditions and to designate folk culture as part of a living national heritage. Aware of the erosion of traditional culture, Stahl mentioned: “it is true that a part of the old peasant culture is disappearing fatally, under the influence of urban influences and that a new culture will be born out of somewhere,” yet he held that “we cannot expect the student teams to create this new culture.” 69 Their role was only to try to revive and revitalise old artistic traditions and help the village itself to develop its cultural future with the guidance of local and national organisations like the “Prince Carol” Foundation.
The students actively embraced their role as protectors of folk traditions and promoters of national cultural values. Their observations lamented the disappearance of folk dress, the prevalence in some areas of modern objects, clothes, and cultural practices. 70 To counteract the loss of traditions, the cultural activists proposed a different combination of modern and traditional culture, by creating an interest in reactivating old traditions in modern forms (theatre shows, choirs, organised folk dance, museums) and encouraging a fashion for folk dress and an interest in craftwork. In their reports, many students took pride in their success in turning the locals away from the pub to cultural activities, seen as a move from vice to virtue.
Moral order was another important area of conservation, where reform actually meant correcting or reversing the negative effects of recent social changes. For the activists in charge of the peasant’s soul, underneath the visible rural diseases lay the alarming signs of moral and spiritual degradation caused by the loss of faith and tradition, the influence of the city or of local politics. Therefore, alongside the doctor, who looked after the peasant body, the priest took charge of healing their soul. The tandem doctor-priest was the perfect illustration of the link between the moral and the physical state of the peasantry. Using illness as a metaphor, the theologian of the Nereju team commented that “cohabitation [was] the plague of the village” and proposed a plan of combating it by officiating mass-marriages for the locals. 71 The family and its preservation were central to the priests’ activist agenda that always mentioned the issue of cohabitation as a quantifiable target for the mission. In the Banat villages, cohabitation was connected to the influence of modernity and its terrible effect on the region’s population level caused by a drop in the birth rate. 72 Likewise, in the village of Goicea Mare, in Oltenia, it was connected to a lack of “social unity” caused by the dissent amongst the local intellectuals and authorities. Finally, in the remote villages of Bessarabia, it was indirectly explained through the lack of material means to pay for a big wedding. 73 Faced with these changes in the private life of the village, the young priests and theologians tried to convince people of the moral value of the family both in their homes and in public conferences and sermons.
In the guidelines, the duties and advice regarding women reflected the overall tension between seeking to modernise and to preserve that underlined the project as a whole. To start with, the project displayed a traditionalist vision of gender roles for the countryside, wishing to keep and reinforce the place of women in the family home rather than extending the budding emancipation of women occurring in urban Romania. In their organisation, the teams already had produced a gender separation of duties and roles by creating the female-specific role of the domestic scientist, who apart from her own duties, was also charged with the teams’ own housekeeping, overseeing the cook and keeping the “key to the team’s pantry.” 74 The gender roles within the teams were offered as a model for the rural population: the domestic scientist was meant to dissuade local women from working outside of the home and instead teach them how to be good housewives and mothers. 75
However, women were also meant to embrace and promote the project’s rational agenda of change in terms of health, hygiene, work, and mind whilst preserving the local customs, traditions, and the connection to God and the church. The category of domestic work itself, which addressed the role of the woman as “manager” of the household, raised two main apparently contradictory issues: on the one hand, the work of women was conceptualised as labour and thus treated equally with that of men, while on the other hand, by defining the woman as domestic worker the project sought to restrict her duties, shape and confine her to the roles of wife and mother. 76
Sent to teach the locals the virtues of being a good wife, mother, and housekeeper, the domestic scientists took their role seriously, working in the spirit of the project guidelines. 77 In their reports, they often portrayed themselves as agents of change, working towards “the healing of the village” as the domestic scientist in the village of Moişeni stated. 78 In line with the project guidelines, the domestic workers sought to turn peasant women into good housewives, in charge of domestic rather than other types of work, as well as guardians of the health, hygiene and tradition in their homes. 79 Peasant women were convened for theoretical and practical courses meant to benefit their families as a whole. The stress on the knowledge of health, hygiene, and nutrition belonged to the general modernising agenda discussed so far. Yet, in parallel to this, the work of the domestic scientists rejected any feminist ideas, often seeking to reverse any urban influence and generally trying to revive the taste for folk dress and traditions. This mixed agenda, fully embraced by the female agents working in the villages, was part of a vision of modernity that wished to keep the woman in her place—both in the home and in the countryside.
*
In 1938, the first year of the royal dictatorship, 80 Gusti was able to transform the cultural work project into the Social Service (Serviciul Social), a programme of compulsory work experience in the countryside for all university students, graduates, and civil servants. The Social Service Law, passed in October that year and revoked in late 1939, made the reorganisation of the countryside a matter of state. 81 Although it lasted only a year, this was a clear indication of Gusti’s goals and ambitions for sociologia militans. The transformation of cultural work into the Social Service and therefore into an imposed “social duty” meant abandoning the idea that social solidarity could be based on free will and giving in to the desire to engineer it. It also marked a short-lived victory for the new concern with the social as a category extending across all classes, connecting the educated with the uneducated and offering an expansive playground for the academic sciences to roam in and experiment with. This move from voluntarism to imposition also shifted the attention from social right to social duty, making intellectuals into the midwives of a new “people’s culture.”
Nevertheless, the demise of the project in 1939 marked the limits of the Gusti’s utopian ambitions. During and after the war, sociology gradually lost ground, being banned by the communist regime from 1948 to the 1960s and then marginalised again in the 1980s. However, despite this marginalisation, the transformation of the rural world remained a priority for the communist and even post-communist regimes, who addressed rural issues in different ways. Both collectivisation and de-collectivisation were processes that involved an important cultural dimension, and the continuities between these periods remain an area that requires more attention.
Conclusions
Generally regarded as a time of a failed democratic experiment, a period of great intellectual and cultural ferment, but also of rising extremisms, the interwar was also a period of glory for the social sciences that aspired to take a prominent role in deciding the country’s pathway to modernity. Gusti’s sociology profited from this moment of transformation, integrating the interest in the rural world with the sphere of the social, both in terms of research and reform. The concept of sociologia militans, developed into the cultural work project, reflected the discipline’s ambitions to play a part in managing the processes of rural transformation.
The cultural work project expanded the sociological imagination to a wider public and to many disciplines and professions, aiming to make it the hegemonic vision of social reform in the countryside. However, the application of Gusti’s ideas to social reality brought out several contradictions and incongruities. Firstly, despite Gusti’s ambition to transcend politics, the realisation of his social scientific vision proved to be very much connected to and dependent on the political context of the time: cultural work was funded partly to compete with the Legion and partly as a propaganda tool for King Carol II and it was abolished because of the volatile political climate. Secondly, the project displayed a great trust in the transformative power of culture as a pathway to individual and national self-realisation and as a source of social solidarity. However, instead of resolving the contradictions of Romanian society, it simply reproduced them. This was due to the fear of radical change and disorder that lay at the heart of the project’s holistic theory, one that was translated into an emphasis on social order and on the preservation of existing hierarchies and power structures. Since the peasantry occupied the delicate and important position as the heart of the nation, but on the margins of society, its transformation combined two opposed drives, to change rural life and, at the same time, to preserve it. This was reflected in the project’s ambiguous use of the term culture: at times, culture in its broader meaning entailed “civilising” or disciplining the peasantry, but at other times, it presupposed the safeguarding of customs, traditions, but also of existing social hierarchies.
This in turn led to two main problems. In terms of change, the focus on culture, however all encompassing, meant that the project failed to address the “real” problems of rural life, especially material and political conditions, such as property fragmentation, lack of capital, and the peasants’ double dependency on the market and on a state legal system biased against them. 82 The project did not offer incentives or, more importantly, did not promise a redistribution of the means of production to support cultural change. This was connected to a second problem stemming from its drive towards preservation. Ultimately, the project sought to keep peasants in their place, both in the countryside and in a subordinate social position. These limits were clear both in the fact that peasants had little or no say in what the agenda for cultural work was and in respect to existing hierarchies that defined peasant life: class structures, the family, and the relation to the state. The gender dimension of the project illustrated this most clearly: although essential in the process of change, the peasant woman was at the same time expected to know her place and not challenge the existing structure of authority.