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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]

The Students’ Society of Ethnology and Folklore from Romania organized field research in some villages belonging to the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic between the 2nd and the 18th of August 1991. One of them was Cornova – the Moldavian village where the field research of the Sociological School from Bucharest had taken place in 1931. Although the Students’ Society revisited a famous field six decades after Gusti’s team, its work remained completely unknown for the academic community until now. Otilia Hedeșan has been present on this field as a young assistant of the Department of Ethnology of the West University of Timișoara. During an extended interview on google meet, on the 30th of October 2021, she recalled the research conducted in Cornova. The text resulted from our dialog recovers, in a subjective manner, the contexts of the research and evokes events in which a part of the villagers was involved. On the challenging new field, the young researcher was confronted with a series of experiences and real situation which made her learn, the hard way, some important lessons about the practice of anthropology in the post-socialist times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a synthetic presentation of a field research conducted by the author between 2nd and 18th of August 1991, in the village of Cornova. The research needs to be approached from a multiple perspective imposed by different contexts. The first one is the fact that the research was conducted six decades after the field campaigns of the Sociologic School of Bucharest in Cornova. The second context is given by the fact that the village was included in the Ungheni district of Moldavian SSR, therefore it was a soviet territory at the time. The third context places the research between the first ethnological campaigns outside de Romanian borders in the post-socialist era. The article presents representative excerpts from a series of interviews recorded in the summer of 1991. The topics are: the main lineages of răzeși (free peasants) who had founded villages since legendary times; the deportation to Siberia of some families from Cornova; the random contacts between the Moldavians and their families left on the other side of the Ural Mountains, during the soviet period. Although these topics were intensely studied in the last decades, the value of the excerpts briefly analyzed in this article is given by the nature of the records they belong to – oral testimonies on subjects which could put the interlocutors at risk in the last days of the soviet regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades (after the 2000s), Sanda Golopenția dedicated herself to editing and publishing the papers and articles of her father, Anton Golopenția. A very important personality of the Romanian intellectual world between the two world wars, Anton Golopenția was one of the most famous representatives of the teams of the Sociological School in Bucharest (coordinated by Dimitrie Gusti), a researcher at the National Institute of Statistics, but also a victim of the communist regime in Romania (he died in 1951, at only 42 years old, in Văcărești prison as a political prisoner). Sanda Golopenția's activities include, first, a sharp restitution of Anton Golopenția's scientific work, whose articles and reports are published as complete works (Opere complete) in several massive volumes, depending on the fields to which they belong: sociology, demography, aesthetics and literature. At the same time, in addition to this scientific and cultural text editing activity, Sanda Golopenția has opened, in the last two decades, a real construction site meant to reconstruct the activity of Anton Golopenția in the context of the socio-cultural and intellectual environment in which he worked, but also in the political circumstances of his time. In this direction, she identified, transcribed, commented and published a series of documents from various archives, such as family archives, archives of family friends, archives of the National Institute of Statistics, and the former archives of the Securitate. Thus, Ultima carte ("The Last Book", 2001) contains the transcripts of Anton Golopenția's declarations in the case of investigations during the months of political imprisonment, Rapsodia epistolară ("Epistolary Rhapsody", 2002–2014) contains both the letters sent by Anton Golopenția between 1923 and 1950 and the letters he received, while Românii de la est de Bug ("Romanians at the East of the Bug River", 2008) includes field notes and reports, personal letters, disparate attempts to interpret the facts, short articles never published before, but also the answers to the Security inquiry about this research (from the East of the Bug). Sanda Golopenția thus passed from the simple memorial text to what she calls the polyphonic specificity writing, inserting, together with Anton Golopenția's texts, speeches from the context of the production of the texts, as well as immediate or remote reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]