Traian Herseni, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Traian Herseni

Romanian sociologist, historian and psychologist (1907-1980)

Date of Birth: 20-Feb-1907

Place of Birth: Recea, Brașov County, Romania

Date of Death: 17-Jul-1980

Profession: historian, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher

Nationality: Romania

Zodiac Sign: Pisces


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About Traian Herseni

  • Traian Herseni (February 18, 1907 – July 17, 1980) was a Romanian social scientist, journalist, and political figure.
  • First noted as a favorite disciple of Dimitrie Gusti, he helped establish the Romanian school of rural sociology in the 1920s and early '30s, and took part in interdisciplinary study groups and field trips.
  • A prolific essayist and researcher, he studied isolated human groups across the country, trying to define relations between sociology, ethnography, and cultural anthropology, with an underlying interest in sociological epistemology.
  • He was particularly interested in the peasant cultures and pastoral society of the Fagara? Mountains.
  • Competing with Anton Golopen?ia for the role of Gusti's leading disciple, Herseni emerged as the winner in 1937; from 1932, he also held a teaching position at the University of Bucharest. Herseni became a committed eugenicist and racial scientist, who discarded a moderate left-wing stance to embrace fascism, and parted ways with Gusti over his support for the Iron Guard.
  • He was nevertheless protected during the anti-Guard backlash of 1938, when Gusti made him a clerk within the Social Service, part of the National Renaissance Front apparatus.
  • A leading functionary and ideologue of the fascist National Legionary State, and a figure of cultural and political importance under dictator Ion Antonescu, he proposed the compulsory sterilization of "inferior races", and wrote praises of Nazi racial policy.
  • Indicted by the communist regime in 1951, he spent four years in prison.
  • He made a slow return to favors as a researcher for the Romanian Academy, participating in the resumption of sociological research, as well as experimenting in social psychology and pioneering industrial sociology. Formally a partisan of Marxism-Leninism after 1956, Herseni was more genuinely committed to national communism.
  • The national communist policies instituted during the late 1960s allowed him to revisit some of his controversial theses about the ancestral roots of Romanian culture.
  • At various intervals, the regime appropriated his radical ideas on ethnicity, including some criticized as racist.
  • Herseni's final works dealt with ethnology, national psychology, the sociology of literature, and sociological theory in general.
  • In the 1970s, he also produced a body of works interpreting Romanian folklore, in which he emphasized the connections with Indo-European and Paleo-Balkan mythology.

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