Collective Memory and Aristocratic Families in the XIXth and beginning of XXth Centuries in Craiova and Bucharest, Romania

The present study aims to analyse the way in which the registered social biographies of some personalities of Craiova influence the way of establishing the collective memory and implicitly, the valuation of the local patrimony, in our case the historical monument houses of the city. Specific theories and methodology of urban ethnography can provide useful oral accounts on local heritage, including insight on social changes marking the middle of the last century. The issue of the “open” ethnological document, of the collections of social biographies that can be consulted and later explored for various ethnographic and sociological reasons represents another direction studied in this article. Life stories, sometimes called “petty stories”, fascinate not only from an aesthetic or slightly nostalgic perspective, as is sometimes the case with memoirs, but with the variety of the approaches they make possible in the field of social sciences. Being the “lived history”, the descent to the individual-speaker who becomes the main actor in a broader socio cultural and historical context, the characteristics of the living phenomenon should be highlighted when recording, registering some of its marks. Archiving inevitably involves a standardization of the lived fact, so the researcher is required to pay special attention to the recording and preservation of life stories, taking into account the dynamics of the “open” ethnological document.