The Romanian Nation in Transylvania: Its History and Social Memory (USA)

The organic conception of nationhood that came into question in the middle of the twentieth century has been further discredited by recent scholarly works on nation building and nationalism. These works reject the essentialist or primordial notion of nationhood and describe how empowered groups pursuing their own interests constructed modern nations. The primary intention of these "constructionist" approaches is to contrast the conceptualization of nationhood with a population's sense of pre-modern identity and to demonstrate how and why elites instituted the concept of the nation throughout the world. They explain especially well the initial emergence of nationalist movements, but they largely ignore the agency of non-elites who are all too often regarded as disinterested, passive subjects. By focusing on elites, scholars have been able to describe cultures and traditions as "retrospective inventions" without explaining how or why the masses came to accept "artificial creations" as part of their natural heritage. Their arguments do not account for either the initial attractiveness or the persistence of the national paradigm for non-capitalist, non-elite communities, like rural nineteenth-century Transylvania. A better understanding of how the national paradigm in rural societies achieved widespread acceptance is gained from an investigation of the connections between living social memories and deliberate efforts to make the idea of the nation meaningful for the entire national community.

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