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Our paper presents a series of theoretical reflections generated by the task of conducting anthropological research on food traditions and practices in a network of villages in Romania, in the context of restrictions on movement and social interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research was carried out as part of the Digital collection of Romanian food heritage and transfer to society - FOODie project. The pressure to respect both contractual deadlines in relation to the funder and health safety rules led us to the solution of online interviews. Due to the specific nature of our research, the people targeted by the interviews were aged and had minimal digital skills, which led us to call on a second member of the interviewed community, a PC user, who was ready to moderate the relationship with the informant and provide technical assistance. Based on these research experiences, we will discuss (a) the advantages and disadvantages of remote fieldwork; (b) the dynamics of the relation between the researcher and the respondent in this new methodological context; (c) the collaborative nature of the ethnological document, which is the result of the intersection of the researcher's thematic interests, her/his availability and skills and, in this case, the flair, intuition and persuasiveness of the actor mediating the meeting between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tradition-brands are cultural constructs launched in Romania around the year 2000, which bring into play a repertoire of conventions and “myths” shared nationwide and proposed to the market, increasingly and more intensely in the late years, by large-scale industrial operators, who in this manner simulate and menace small-scale producers (those actually in the right to claim this tradition as their own). Previous work in the anthropology of consumption has theorized that commercial communication associated with tradition-brands represents a space of negotiation between the Big Industry and traditionalist consumers. The present paper resumes, after more than a decade, the previous thesis, with Mark Fisher's conflict theory tools. In this perspective, traditional brands are forms of Big Industry colonization and naturalization of artisan culture. The case analysis of the Matache Măcelaruʼ charcuterie brand reveals multiple levels of realist-capitalist processing of the commercial message. The key understanding of Fisher's theory of consumerism as a sensitive interface between the capitalist system and the public leads to sharp conclusions about the alienation and disintegration of social actors (consumers, small artisans and merchants) and about the removal of small businesses from the current economic landscape. The possibility of a breach in capitalist totalitarianism lies, hypothetically, in the Romanian public's inertia towards globalization. A conscious reaction is also needed, which arises from civic initiatives regarding the realization of a short producer-consumer chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Especially after the fall of communism in Romania, Romanian theatre artists were referring nostalgicallyvindictively to what they considered to be a recognition of the importance of their own activity: the inclusion of actors/performers in the categories of hard or harmful labor, just like miners, in the 1950s and generally before 1977. The legend of the similitude between actors and miners is, in fact, part of the symbolic competition with the industrial working class, in which intellectuals felt engaged especially in the 1980s and which played an important role then and in the following decade (a subject which I elaborate in a larger research). This paper investigates the factual basis of this narrative of State legitimation of cultural labor, starting from the legal codification of the miners' central position in the ideology and public discourse of the communist regime and exploring the wage and retirement conditions of (theatre) actors from 1948 until 1989, including through the lenses of their non-public positions, as reflected in the archives of the secret police. Part of a larger framework of the intelligentsia’s antagonism and lack of solidarity with the working class, which has been analyzed at length in post-communism but which tends to not include the specifics of the performing arts in the general cultural framework, it examines the foundations of the persistent discourse placing theatre artists (alongside writers, filmmakers, etc.) as the righteous beneficiaries of the post-1989 transition, aiming to replace miners at the center of the new, capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to achieve their functional purpose – that of organizing the urban landscape and helping locating people and geographical objectives through an efficient addressing system – street names are bound to remain stable spatial landmarks. On the other hand, street names are also semiotic devices of signifying space with the political and commemorative agenda of the ruling power. This latter characteristic renders them vulnerable to successive renaming following important power-shifts and especially regime changes. What happens when the ideological imperative of politicizing the street nomenclature undermines its functional requirement of providing spatial orientation through extensive renaming? Such a tensional situation is examined in the case of postwar Sibiu between 1945 and 1948, when the city endured a thorough redefinition of its toponymy under the political regime of communist “popular democracy” in Romania. The paper quantifies the scope of toponymic revision and then evaluates the content of these street name changes in terms of three major concepts: class, ethnicity, and gender. Grounded on the results of this analysis, the paper advances the notion of “mercurial street names”. It concludes by arguing that such a concept should complement the existing metaphoricity underpinning the scholarship in place-name studies, which draw on “text”, “discourse”, and “palimpsest” to conceive of the processes of street (re)naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore how multilingualism is explored in Bessarabian literature and the way in which these phenomena can create cultural and identity crisis in the collective imaginary of The Republic of Moldova. Thus, it can be observed that in the Soviet period, but also after the fall of the empire, speakers of “Moldavian” language, afterwards named Romanian, are treated as inferior to Russian speakers, Moldavians becoming a periphery. Approaching multilingualism the way it is presented in Multilingual Literature as World Literature edited by Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang, a second objective of this paper is to investigate the identity crisis of the teenagers of Perestroika and the fall of the URSS, but also of the young adults that were brought up in the unsteady world that followed after these events. In doing so, the way in which the Bessarabian people were peripheral. According to the fact that this type of literature is insufficiently discussed, there will be analyzed three such novels, in order to offer a wider image of Chisinau between the 80’s and the 2000 and its transition: Grădina de sticlă (The Glass Garden) by Tatiana Țîbuleac, Sălbaticii copii dingo (The Savage Dingo Kids) by Vasile Ernu and Perestroika boys by Dinu Guțu. The other aspect that will be explored is the image of Romania and its literature in the Soviet Bessarabia, two neighbour countries that did not have an intercultural dialogue until 1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the discourse on banditry (haiducie) articulated by the romantic elite of 19th century Romania. By relying on the various literary productions of the era, from short stories to memoirs and travel literature, I posit that the image of the noble bandit is rather manufactured by the elite to fit their political agenda, if not actually imported from ready-made west-European bandit models. The reason behind the cosmetic treatment of robbers and highwaymen that the Romanian elites perform in their writings, is the same as that of their western counterparts: noble bandits are easily integrated in the emerging nation-state narrative of the era and are useful as precursors of the political claims of the elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employed in the study of national or transnational literatures, the relevance of digital humanities, computational analyses, and quantitative sociology can no longer be ignored. In this paper, we aim to argue that, in spite of it still being seen as a niche endeavor, the digital or quantitative study of literature generates paradigmatic shifts in literary scholarship, both in literary criticism and comparative studies. In order to demonstrate this statement, the following study will illustrate how three core principles of digital humanities are actively shaping humanities as we know it. These principles – openness, replicability, and collaboration – challenge the way we understand the role of the literary historian and their „traditional” tasks. To consolidate this argumentation further, we will briefly present an example of how digital humanities start changing the dominant narrative in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationships between journalism and sustainability are seen as interdependent and mutually beneficial. On the one hand, sustainable development also includes a free, autonomous and strong press that can support itself economically, and on the other hand, responsible journalism brings the problems of the current world to the public and it can also involve experts to talk about the solutions possible to these issues, which generates a media discourse about sustainability and resilience now and in the future. The present paper examines the conceptualization of constructive journalism, interrogating, at the same time, its normative and societal role, as well as the resistance of this alternative direction, in the current context, marked by political instability and post-pandemic economic crisis. In Romania, the DoR experience, its course, but also the announced end of this journalistic project, shows the difficulties that constructive journalism encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1934 and 1939, several hundred voluntary student teams went to Romanian villages to perform “cultural work,” i.e., to help and guide peasants to work more productively and to live healthier lives. In 1938, the Law of the Social Service was passed, stipulating that all university graduates, irrespective of gender and academic specialization, were required to take part in social intervention activities in villages to obtain their diplomas. In this paper, I argue that a new constellation of gender ideas, norms and expectations was drawn up in order to allow for enough room for young middle-class women to be part of student teams that were going to spend a couple of months away from their families and in the unknown settings of the rural areas. Therefore, I explore the discourses used in the main information and propaganda periodical published by the Social Service and I identify and illustrate some strategies and mechanisms employed in the production of the gender model needed for the social and national construction of the new and improved Romanian village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I highlight mostly ignored aspects of the work of H. H. Stahl: his stance on the issue of “national specificity,” on village culture, and on the modernization of Romanian villages through “culturalization”. Reviewing some of his popularization and scientific texts from the 1930, but also his late contributions from the 1980, show a remarkable continuity and consistency of Stahl’s vision on these subjects. And it is not the kind of vision someone would expect from a socialist or Marxist social scientist. For Stahl, the village culture was the true (and unique) Romanian culture, a peasant culture that he was very fond of. In some respects, and, in fact, not so surprisingly, Stahl, what regards “national specificity” and village culture, is much closer to (the reactionary, traditionalist, autochthonous) Mircea Vulcănescu, his monographist fellow and personal friend, than any other leftist thinker in interwar Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses the emergence of a novel field of interest in the philosophical aesthetics of the 1960s in Romania: the aesthetics of everyday life. As such, it first starts by drawing out an overview of the aesthetic discussions in 1950s Romania by closely reading several articles from the main philosophical journal of the period: Cercetări filozofice. In this regard, I focus on two main aspects, namely the theory of reflection, which was the guiding principle of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, and the theory of the social function of art. Further on I will sketch out how these two aspects defined the main traits of the local aesthetics of everyday life, a topic which took the center fold of aesthetic interest for almost a decade, and which has ever since the early 2000s found renewed interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]