Ph.D, Corresponding Member of the Romanian Academy, Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy, email address: iliebadescu@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

The present study is part of the category of studies dedicated to the profile of a representative personality within the prestigious Romanian School of Sociology, Paul H. Stahl. Such an approach uses the method of classifying the work and individuals in the class of the tutelary spirits of this School, led by D. Gusti and H. H. Stahl, founders of the Bucharest School of Sociology. The study first establishes the ideatic profile of the School, then presents the methodological innovations and the stages of evolution of this School that were preserved throughout the interwar period until its prohibition with the establishment of the communist regime. In the second part, the study establishes defining elements of the paradigm created by Paul H. Stahl in a comparative research of Southeast Europe. This is the guiding paradigm that distinguishes Paul H. Stahl within that first sociological school of value and international recognition, the Bucharest Sociological School. One of Paul H. Stahl’s innovations refers to the studies of supra-village communities. This type of research is part of the ethnosociology that Paul H. Stahl refounded in his comparative ethnosociological research on the peoples of Southeast Europe. Another aspect of the methodological innovations concerns the use of the statistical method in determining the trends and regularities identifiable in the construction techniques of churches. During the Parisian period, his ethnosociological studies will be carried out over a vast area: “starting from the Pyrenees and passing through the Balkan and Romanian space, up to the Caucasus” (Șișeștean, 2000). Under the same paradigmatic framework we find his research dedicated to the historical ethnosociology of mentalities with references to social practices of hierarchization, to vendetta acts specific to the Southeast European area. The third field of studies in the same paradigmatic family that he founded is the one dedicated to the ethnosociology of housing (through which the direction of cultural ecology studies was somehow initiated). The studies through which he will announce the new direction are those dedicated to the Romanian peasant house. Paul Stahlʼs method replaces the static approach (pertaining to a static typology) with the study of the evolution of building plans and, in general, of the habitat, thus establishing a series of areas covering the entire Romanian territory. The same principle will be resumed, later, in the analysis of family forms (which he calls “domestic groups”), which he classifies not only according to formal-static criteria, extremely used in sociology, but according to an evolutionary principle (he presents this new sociological approach to families in various studies).

Keywords: Bucharest School of Sociology, Balkan ethnosociology, new comparatism, sociological monographs, comparative ethnosociology. 

DOI: 10.59277/RJSoc.2025.5-6.01

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