Tradition

excerpts Many were the reasons of marriage in the countryside once, but the most important was the family of the chosen one. If the family – the seedling – was bad, the young people from such families had a hard time getting married, and only exceptional personal merits

When Mark Twain published the elaborate account of his Old World tour, The Innocents Abroad, America was still young, as a nation, and not yet proud of its culture. To avoid any tasteless outcry of admiration, driven by the contact with the vestiges of lost civilizations

The Romanians from Down Under To my Victoria from the South Pacific IslandsKo te mana o tenei matenga whetu aianeE poturi i ro o te rangi e piki mai* In Aotearoa (New Zealand), I met happy Romanians. Their happiness was either blended with sadness, or boosted up by it.

It will take us a lot of tenacity to modify wrong geographic notions, fanciful historical data, to prove to the Westerner that what we suffer from is too much instruction, that the Romanian intellectual is blasé and smiles condescendingly at the unintuitive foreign lecturer's

*excerpts THE SOPHISTICATED PEASANTS The Romanians are a social phenomenon. As a nation among nations, they are westerners evolved in the East. They are Latins surrounded by Slavs. They are Romans two thousand years away from Rome. They are contemporaries re-produced on

Chapter XII. The Current [1907] Psychological Traits of the Romanian PeopleAll foreigners that visited the Romanian countries were unpleasantly struck by the negative traits of our character. They don't care, says Mr. X. Marmier, for the name of their master. What they

excerpts There are quite a few psychological complexes which seem to shape nowadays the popular, maybe even intellectual mentalities and to badly distort people's behavior, as well as their political judgments. It won't hurt pointing our finger at them, speaking

In D. Draghicescu's terms, this transactional spirit (Cough up more, sir! – Knock some off, mister!, as a folk saying goes) is the legacy of the Orient, a stamp of the Levant on our past, present and, presumably, future. In this key, the transaction points to a polymorphous

Chapter XI. The Reforms of Romanian Institutions and their Psychological Consequences If, by using a certain amount of imagination, logic and common-sense, we reconstruct mentally what Romanians' life in the Carpathian or Balkan Mountains might have been, we easily

 I must admit I didn't quite understand in the beginning why, shortly after 1989, the Western mass-media has so hastily labeled us as suffering from a deep identity crisis. I was downright indignant: after having sadistically experimented Communism on us for half

Chapter 3Romania's Psychological and Historical Voids If it were true that the Romanian's spiritual disposition does not surpass the one evinced in the past and that the future is not going to uncover any hidden sides to the Romanian soul, then any attempt to

Chapter VIII – The vocation of Romanians1. Expressions through which a people demonstrates its calling2. Misguidance in the study of Romanian vocation3. Characteristics of Romanian culture in the past4. Romanian reality as opposing Europeanization5. Emphasizing individual