The Museum of Childhood

The Small World of the Small Child

The second exhibition, the second room

3 May – 3 June 2012, The Irina Nicolau Room

The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant

In the old world of the village it was believed that the infant, once baptised, symbolically came under the protection of the Lord, although this did not mean that evil spirits ceased to haunt the child’s space, time or even its normal growth and development. For this reason, the immediate family, relatives and often the entire village community continued to make sure that customs and traditions were respected, in order to eliminate any risk of accidents connected to the child’s health and future.

From the magical and ritual point of view, childhood consists of successive phases of growth, demarcated by thresholds of passage, each with its own rules and inventory of symbolic objects. Each threshold signifies the evolution of the small child within a new space and the marking of new stages of growth and greater physical/bodily autonomy.

In today’s villages and the urban world, what has become of these symbolic stages that the child traverses with the help of its social group? Has anybody considered, for example, that the unisex smock that is the sole garment worn by the infant in the countryside up until the age of one or two (and whose symbolic explanation resided in the attempt not to draw attention to the infant through any particularising feature – social status, sex, etc. – in order to protect it from the invisible forces of evil) is not very different from the unisex romper suits of the contemporary baby in the city, distinguished only by its pink or blue colour, although such distinctions are often deliberately ignored?

And so, in order to get to know ourselves better, we propose that the second room of the Virtual Museum of Childhood be dedicated to The Small World of the Small Child, with the six thresholds it used to involve, but which, we argue, the collective mentality only fragmentarily respects in today’s urban world: the hearth, the window, the door, the gate, the crossroads, the boundary.