<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>In this paper I examine the consequences of the 1989 political overturn in Romania on the selfhood. To this purpose, I initiate a twofold analysis: the official discourse of both socio-political systems, socialism and liberalism, and the individual’s quotidian discourse. The first one will enable a comparative view, over the ’bottom-up’ constructed realities, and the second will account for the degree of pervasiveness and naturalization of ideological views and, in this way, of a “top-down” identity construction and its configurations. One of the most apprehensible provisions through which liberalism endeavoured to institutionalize its own way of setting out reality is land restitution. Thereafter, I will discuss the way re-appropriation was experienced and its various subjectivization trajectories, but also the wider frame of the postsocialist economic transformations: rethinking work, money, the state and the interrelations between them. This particular angle of sight will disclose the mechanisms through which liberalism has deconstructed the system of socialist meaning and representation, at the same time replacing it with a socio-political order which reconfigured these meanings.</p></abstract>

In this paper I examine the consequences of the 1989 political overturn in Romania on the selfhood. To this purpose, I initiate a twofold analysis: the official discourse of both socio-political systems, socialism and liberalism, and the individual’s quotidian discourse. The first one will enable a comparative view, over the ’bottom-up’ constructed realities, and the second will account for the degree of pervasiveness and naturalization of ideological views and, in this way, of a “top-down” identity construction and its configurations. One of the most apprehensible provisions through which liberalism endeavoured to institutionalize its own way of setting out reality is land restitution. Thereafter, I will discuss the way re-appropriation was experienced and its various subjectivization trajectories, but also the wider frame of the postsocialist economic transformations: rethinking work, money, the state and the interrelations between them. This particular angle of sight will disclose the mechanisms through which liberalism has deconstructed the system of socialist meaning and representation, at the same time replacing it with a socio-political order which reconfigured these meanings.

Postsocialism or when ‘Having’ is another Way of ‘Being’. The Reconfiguring of Identity through Land Restitution and the Narratives of the Past

MA in Applied Anthropology at the Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca and in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest

Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

In this paper I examine the consequences of the 1989 political overturn in Romania on the selfhood. To this purpose, I initiate a twofold analysis: the...

Postsocialism or when ‘Having’ is another Way of ‘Being’. The Reconfiguring of Identity through Land Restitution and the Narratives of the Past

Published Online: Jan 29, 2016

Page range: 39 - 56

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0009

Keywords
property, ideology, selfhood, socialism, liberalism

© 2015 Elena Chiorean, published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Postsocialism or when ‘Having’ is another Way of ‘Being’. The Reconfiguring of Identity through Land Restitution and the Narratives of the Past

Published Online: Jan 29, 2016

Page range: 39 - 56

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0009

Keywordsproperty, ideology, selfhood, socialism, liberalism

© 2015 Elena Chiorean, published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
property, ideology, selfhood, socialism, liberalism