Paper short abstract:

This study addresses the issue of nationalizing the peasants 'domestic universe by Romanian elites in the late XIXth and early XXth century when the nation-state was trying to find an official memory.

Paper long abstract:

This study questions the emergence of twentieth-century Romanian nationalism by investigating the conventional accounts of the representations of the past used to forge a unified national narrative that promotes a collective national identity. To address this question, we look into the process of building national heritage as a shared identity project of the Romanian people. The analysis of the logic through which a nation grafts its future onto a shared past means questioning the institutional and conventional thoughts referring to the modern Nation. More precisely, we are interested in identifying the heritage mechanisms involved in the process of the Romanian Nation-building, by studying the emerging heritage discourses on collective identity. Our argument is that the ideological over-determination and the unitary perspective on cultural heritage have limited the Romanian museological approach to a romantic and nostalgic perspective on the role of the Peasant in maintaining the national identity.