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The following paper is a brief presentation of the Romanian research in rural sociology carried on by the School of sociological monographs led by D. Gusti. In its introduction, the author ranges Gusti's studies with the international framework of research in rural sociology. He emphasizes the growing interest in rural life displayed by Western sociology after World War I, and at the same time focuses on the East European, chiefly Russian, sociological practice of research in the field. According to the author, the literary and socio-political agrarian movements that have dominated, side by side with the national question, the Romanian public and intellectual life before 1918 should be ranged with the abovementioned tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is centrism and what kind of influences has the researcher's cultural model on his/her subject of investigation, and in which ways the given historical context gains different meanings in time, are some of the key questions of this paper. Taking into account the historians' socio-psychological biases when they do researches in the socio-humanistic realms, their (ethno)centrically embeddings, we can move away from a history of an unrepeatable contingency of events, towards a relativistic consideration of history's objects of study. By adding on this path a genuine cultural relativism, various socio-anthropological methods and techniques, thinkers of history could overpass the social-cultural influences (upon their investigated phenomena/groups/historical periods) of their belonging social groups, and catch up properly the "original meanings". Looking at various historical facts through the double opaque lens of sociology and history, I have emphasized the syntheticphenomenological solution/theoretical frame which could smooth the progress of (socio-historical) data examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]