Paper short abstract:

By telling the history of two museums exhibiting rural life in Bucharest, Romania, this paper engages with the interplay between the social sciences governing exhibition making, history and politics, and its effect on the representations of the peasantry.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the intricate life, intersections and conflicts of two museums exhibiting rural life and culture in Romania, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the post-communist period. The Museum of National Art, founded in 1912 by an art historian, later transformed into the Romanian Peasant Museum by an artist, and an open-air museum - The National Village Museum-, founded in 1936 by a renowned sociologist. These two museums have proposed competing ways of exhibiting and imagining the peasantry, which in turn reflected the socio-political transformations of the Romanian state from a semi-democratic to a totalitarian communist regime. After the fall of communism, The Romanian Peasant Museum, proposed a new, yet equally controversial interpretation of post-communist rural Romania, showcasing an idealised image of the peasant frozen in an immemorial past.

This paper shows the competition between disciplines over the representation of the peasantry in different historical/ political contexts. It will answer the following question: who is the peasant that both institutions tried at the same time to represent and to avoid?