Professor Corin Braga
Dean of the Faculty of Letters, “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca
I entirely agree that the process of globalisation must not imply massification and uniformisation of values, but rather the conservation and capitalization upon collective individuality and local specificity. In this regard, it is my pleasure to bring to your attention a volume I had the honour of coordinating as part of a national project, an Encyclopedia of Romanian Imaginaries, published last fall by Polirom Press. Its starting premise states that our collective representations are soundly structured from a symbolic standpoint, with a clear evolution through time (constituting a series of so-called “semantic basins”). They are defining factors for our group, collective and national personalities and original individuality. The work is structured in five volumes, each dedicated to one broad field of the Collective Imagination, Literary Imagination, Linguistic Heritage and Imagination, Historical Imagination, Religious Imagination and Artistic Heritage and Imagination, respectively.
In the introductory article of the Encyclopedia, I highlighted the very fact that such an endeavour represents a valuable instrument for identifying and capitalising upon specificity, a mandatory requirement if we wish that the European Union not become a massifying monolith but, rather, an intercultural network that respects and highlights our “cultural biodiversity”.
