Making the Documents Speak—A Creative Exploration of the Mihai Pop Fonds

Abstract

In 2016, the Mihai Pop Fonds was established as part of the Image Archive at the Romanian Peasant Museum, and this past year has seen a real effort to organize the documents left behind by the scholar. The Fonds brings together key documents: a rich correspondence with Romanian and foreign research¬ers; Mihai Pop’s field notes from the sociological research campaigns; his PhD thesis, which has yet to be published; documents related to his participation in national and international congresses; his notes for the folklore lectures he gave at the University; and many other documents. The paper aims to present how an interdisciplinary team of ten researchers and artists organized various types of documents from the personal archive of Mi¬hai Pop in order to make it accessible to both specialists interested in the topic and the general public. The paper highlights the contents of the Fonds and focuses on the difficulties involved in organizing a personal archive. The paper will show not only how the Mihai Pop Fonds was shaped in the process, but how the network of people interested in his work has grown and come together in this process, generating new knowledge and new perspectives.