Regional thinking in the Gustian movement of lifting up villages
The dominant pattern to present Gusti school of Romanian sociology was to consider it as defined by the use of village monographs. Tenatives of Anton Golopentia, younger member in the elite of the sociological school, to use more flexible research tools (reduced monograph, survey, typologies) were considered as marginal deviations from the mainstream of the group. The article provides empirical evidence that the regional approach was largely promoted in the Gusti movment starting with 1927. Different forms of regions were adopted by Henry Stahl and Anton Golopentia, especially, to frame the selection of villages for monographs or for practical interventions, for data analysis or for understaning specific local profiles of villages. Two of the basic paradigmes of Dimitri Gusti – referring to total monograph and to building social atlas of the country by monographying all the localities – are considered in the paper as creative utopias with a large impact in the development of Romanian sociology.
Keywords: Gusti social movement, regional thinking, creative utopias, total monography, sociological atlas