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The paper assesses the intellectual profile of Romanian ethnologist Mihai Pop, from the doublefold perspective of theoretical thinking and institutional work in his field. Lettered in Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism during the inter-war period, Mihai Pop managed to accomplish his formation in a remarkable structuralist-semiotic setting in postwar Romania, in a theoretical stance which remained singular in Romanian research during communism and acquired a well-deserved international recognition. Among others, this stance enabled Mihai Pop to rebuild the domain of Romanian Folklore studies, after the 1948 education reform, and safeguard the field against ideologization, which was about to return in full force after 1971 and after his 1975 retirement . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper approaches from an epistemological perspective (and in relation with contemporary theories in the area of literary history, historical anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology etc.) the theory of "synchronism" developed by Eugen Lovinescu in the 20s of the 20th century in order to re-construct its main statements and ideas. Thus we were able to determine the true meaning this theory holds for the romanian culture: that it is a part of a larger theoretical paradigm in romanian modern culture, a paradigm to which the theory of "forms without substance" proposed by Titu Maiorescu in the last decades of the 19th century and the idea of "protochronism" formulated by Edgar Papu in the 70s of the 20th century equally belong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]