Abstract

I had begun to be interested in the very peculiar history of the social sciences in Romania and generally, in Eastern Europe, a few years ago, as a PhD candidate, my doctoral thesis being mainly on the ethnographic, ethnological research tradition in Romania. To be more specific, I was interested to understand how these sciences (and the social sciences in general) had become committed to certain ideologies, beginning with the 19th century and in the 20th century as well. Mainly, I focused on the ways in which the relation in between them and national ideology had been developed from the 19th century till the second World War and how their image was then damaged in the totalitarian period. A normal evolution of these sciences had been impossible at that time, due to ideological control. Separate departments of Sociology had not functioned independently in Romanian Universities for some decades, the idea of social work was nonexistent, many top interwar specialists had been sent to prison for political reasons, and certain bibliography had been forbidden. I would say that this re-evaluation and analysis of these aspects has been, and still is, absolutely necessary in Romania and broadly in the East European context, as all social sciences are in the process of legitimating themselves, of defining their meanings and goals in new social and cultural contexts. “Indigenous ” Research