Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities

Department of Modern Languages and Business Communication, The Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Fieldwork in Socialist Romania: The Umass Romanian Research Group

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper, a revised presentation at a panel on academic exchanges at the 2018 Conference of the Society for Romanian Studies, discusses the challenges of researchers studying small, insignificant places, and particularly when our specific knowledge pushes us to become generalists. Since every country has a ‘<italic>La noi ca la nimeni</italic>’ (‘Nobody has it the way we have it’) discourse, how do we make Romania interesting?</abstract>

How I Became a ‘Romania Expert’

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This essay considers how transportation and mobility model the character of Romanian-American interaction during fieldwork from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Transportation in socialist Romania was a register of modernization and regime legitimation as well as an absolute threat to that legitimation. Official suspicions of movement and political concern about transportation translated into differentially restricting, policing, and limiting availability of transportation. In contrast anthropological fieldwork is predicated on movement while Western culture also claimed free mobility as a cultural good. These different teleologies provoked diverse disjunctures in my interactions with Romanians. While I engaged with Romanians naively, my travelling together with people either gave them cover for resistance or provoked their fear of political exposure. Sharing transportation resources with Romanians encouraged others’ concerns about my alleged political bias or was used to affirm socialist superiority. In other words, transportation during socialism was never neutral, but freighted politically and culturally confrontational.</abstract>

’Did You Arrive by Train or by Ship?:’ Transportation as Politics and Metaphor in Fieldwork in Socialist Romania

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This is a biographical account of my work in Romania and the influence it had on my research that followed. I focus on the impact that my almost five years in Romania had on the framework and orientation of my anthropological practice that I employed in the United States. I suggest that anthropologists have a moral imperative we must carry out when we choose to conduct research among the most vulnerable in society. In doing so, we must also come to understand the conditions that have made them vulnerable in the first place (Nader 1969). I assert here that as anthropologists of the twenty-first century we no longer may stay on the sidelines, but we must engage our work as allies with the vulnerable, supporting them in their self-identified struggles for dignity, liberation, and sustainability as part of a unified global effort. This entails the transformation of participant observation into a participatory research approach.</abstract>

Reflections on Research in Romania

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This discussion looks back at socialist Romania and the collapse of the Ceauşescu regime. It suggests that Romania, like all states, socialist, social-democratic and neoliberal are confronted by the same world systemic capitalism and that all states use a mixture of policies involving both capitalist and socialist, democratic and authoritarian features in the attempt to avoid the hazards and to gain the advantages of a global system dominated by capitalist accumulation. Using a diversity of assets and hampered by limitations inherited historically, some will fail and some will succeed as state projects. Cold War era analysis will not be useful as a way to evaluate or predict winners or losers. Likewise, the failure of Communist Romania as a state system could not have been predicted either by its authoritarian or by its socialist policy features.</abstract>

Socialist Romania and the Futility of Cold War Analysis

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper addresses one of the first translations of a US anthropological monograph into Romanian. Its author, John V. Murra (1916–2006), born into a Russian-Jewish family in Odessa, grew up in Romania, where he studied and became involved in the Communist movement before his departure for Chicago in 1934. His 1956 PhD thesis in anthropology at University of Chicago on the Inka state was a first step towards turning Murra into an influential figure in the field of Andean anthropology. His sister Ata Iosifescu lived in Romania and translated his PhD thesis into Romanian, published in 1987 as <italic>Civilizaţie inca: organizarea economică a statului incaş</italic>(Inka Civilization: the Economic Organization of the Inka State). Based on their correspondence kept at the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), I propose to reconstruct this translation’s story: the context, the constraints and the process of translation itself. I am also addressing the question of the book’s reception in Romania.</abstract>

Translating John V. Murra’s ‘The Economic Organization of the Inca State’ into Romanian as ‘Obra DE Amor’

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">After the fall of the socialist bloc some authors celebrated the advent of Romani nationalism, emphasising its Eastern European roots and its potential force to foster emancipation among an ethnic minority oppressed for so long. There is another perspective on the community organisation among the Roma from actors who had much less sympathy towards collective claims on behalf of the ‘Gypsies’. Recently published documents from the archive of the secret police testify that <italic>Gypsy nationalism</italic> (“naționalism țigănesc”) was systematically denounced in Romania. Roma leaders suspected of being its proponents were persecuted during the late period of the Ceaușescu era. This article is an attempt to interpret a contested category in the context of late socialist Romania.</abstract>

Was There a ‘Gypsy Problem’ in Socialist Romania? From Suppressing ‘Nationalism’ to Recognition of a National Minority

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Part of the mobility and migration process, family relationships and mutual support are subject of various transformations. Spatial separation between family members creates a specific setting for analysis which leads to the necessity of understanding how family practices are arranged and developed across time and distance. The present study focuses on the dyad emigrated adult children and non-migrated elderly parents living in Romania and on the types of intergenerational family practices that occur between these dyads across national borders. Our analysis of family practices relies on tracing certain set of actions taken by family members in order to maintain, consolidate, and ultimately to display family solidarity. We consider here various forms of practices, namely technological mediated contacts, visits, time-consuming practical support and financial assistance. Analyses are based on the national survey entitled <italic>Intergenerational solidarity in the context of work migration abroad. The situation of elderly left at home,</italic> which provides empirical data about the relationships from a distance between elderly parents living in Romania and their migrant adult children. Descriptive statistics are provided in order to assess the flow directions, the frequency and the intensity of each type of intergenerational support. Our empirical evidence highlights that transnational support is asymmetrical and multidirectional. Results also support that intergenerational support and family relationships can no longer be theoretically approached in terms of a simple dichotomy.</abstract>

Family Practices Across Generations and National Borders

Book Review

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 68 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 67 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 67 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 66 (2021): Issue 2 (December 2021)

Volume 66 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 65 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 65 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 64 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

Volume 64 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 63 (2018): Issue 2 (December 2018)

Volume 63 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 62 (2017): Issue 2 (December 2017)

Volume 62 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

Volume 61 (2016): Issue 2 (December 2016)

Volume 61 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

Volume 6 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015)

Volume 6 (2015): Issue 1 (June 2015)

Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia

The journal welcomes multidisciplinary and comparative approaches in the fields of sociology, social work, social policies, anthropology, urban and rural studies. Articles that address social issues from Central and Eastern Europe from a global perspective, develop historical comparisons or critical reflections, are particularly appreciated. The core of each thematic issue is composed of research articles with empirical grounding. Methodological discussion papers and book reviews compose distinct sections. A special section entitled Romanian Sociology Today publishes recent research papers relevant for the state-of-art of sociology in Romania.   Why subscribe and read  Studia UBB Sociologia was one of the first Sociology journals in Romania, fully published in English since 2008. The majority of articles are authored by Eastern European scholars who embrace a theoretically informed, empirically grounded, comparative and critical perspective on social changes in the region.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 