<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This study analyses the practice of medical pluralism in contemporary Romania, addressing the phenomenon of alternative medicine through the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Employing in-depth interviews with general and alternative practitioners from two towns in Transylvania, and participant observations in spaces where they practice their knowledge, I describe how certain discursive acts reformulate the body and the subject-patient. Alternative therapists construct their practice in direct opposition to several parameters of biomedicine, such as the logic of diagnosis, treatment, and the praxis of patient’s visit to the general practitioner’s office, discussed in the paper. They define their approach as psychosomatic, and set-up the medical space as a confessional space, envisioning a holistic corporeality and the idea of the “inner doctor” in each patient. This conduct would supposedly make the subject “active” and “empowered”, as opposed to the “passive” patient succumbed to the diagnosis of conventional doctors.</abstract>

Alternative Medicine as Counter-Conduct: Therapeutic Spaces and Medical Rationality in Contemporary Romania

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Even if concepts of marriage and motherhood are subject to continuous changes and reinterpretations, women and men still marry and have children following more traditional or more unconventional patterns. My major interest in this research was to unveil Romanian middle-class women’s narratives regarding their perceptions over their own bodies and identities, by focusing my analysis on lived experiences, intimate scenes, daily practices and activities within marriage and motherhood. Qualitative empirical work was conducted in 2012 and 2015 in a post-socialist suburban neighbourhood, known as a place mostly inhabited by young, middle-class families. The analysis unfolds women’s class affinities and dispositions, their perception of the marital experience, identity and corporeal transformations, and their reflections on maternity as a transformative stage in terms of subjectivity, agency and body.</abstract>

Reflected Bodies: Women’s Perspectives on the Marital Experience and the Transformation of the Maternal Body. A Case Study of Middle-Class Women in Suburban Romania

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">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.</abstract>

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

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">According to official data, Romanian voter turnout decreased by half for the period 1990-2012. Gaps between official and self-reported turnout are larger than those from similar countries. Starting with these findings, this paper questions the official data regarding turnout and brings evidence that turnout in Romanian elections is increasingly underestimated. Three factors are responsible for this: the quality of the electoral registers, ineligible voters and emigration. The effect of these factors grew over time inducing the idea that turnout is sharply decreasing. In fact, the decrease is less pronounced, and most of it took place between 1990 and 2000. In the last part, I discuss the implications of the findings in three domains: theoretical debates, methodological and practical issues.</abstract>

Turnout Decline in Romanian National Elections: Is it that Big?

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on consequences of uneven development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties located in the historical region of Transylvania. It presents the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators, the construction of composite indexes and the profiles of localities according to their values. We explore the statistical correlations between our indexes and the poverty rates measured for 2002 (CASPIS, 2004), as well as the Local Human Development Index proposed by Sandu (2011) and revised by the World Bank (2014). Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements, but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the entire administrative unit. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our data reveals that, after controlling for poverty and local resources, the share of the Roma ethnic minority is a strong statistical predictor of registered unemployment, however, it does not correlate with the frequency of granting social assistance benefits.</abstract>

Sociology Department, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca

PhD candidate in Sociology, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca

Department of Sociology and Social Work in Hungarian Language, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca

Mapping Deprivation in Rural Areas from Transylvania: Reflections on a Methodological Exercise

Book Review: Dependency and Development. The Political Economy of Romanian Capitalism

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. 