Ideas of culture: Romanian para‐anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century

Two scholars—outsiders to anthropology in a strictly disciplinary sense—provide a comparison with their contemporaries, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn, and others who formulated ideas of culture. Anthropogeographer Simion Mehedinţi devised an ecological definition and analysis of the concept in 1928. Poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga (1895–1961) analyzed Romanian folk culture by means of a “stylistic matrix” and elaborated a metaphysical definition of culture. The two figures' systematic thinking, growing out of European traditions, underlines the direction that anthropologists elsewhere chose to take the study of human culture. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.