Abstract
This paper aims to analyze mainly how and why Western anthropologists conducted fieldwork in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. What motivated their particular research interest in this part of Europe, how they understood these societies and socialist systems, what specific factors made possible and facilitated the fieldwork they had conducted in difficult times. These are the main research questions addressed in this paper. Specifically, I refer to their work carried out in the 1970s-1980s in Romania. In particular, I aim at analyzing the works of three reputable US specialists in the field, who manifested a research interest, and conducted fieldwork especially (but not exclusively) in different rural settlements of this country. The paper attempts to identify the ways in which the Romanian socialism is understood in its peculiarities by these notable anthropologists, analyzing their studies as results of intensive fieldwork. Their works, published initially in English, in the USA, were translated into Romanian in the post 1989 decades, being received with high interest by “local specialists,” as well as by the broader public. They are present in representative anthologies on socialism and postsocialism, as valuable contribution to the understanding of these periods. Despite all these, comprehensive analysis of their contributions is still lacking, as well as the comparative frames meant to facilitate the identification of both specificities and recurrences in their works, in the ways they viewed the impact of socialisms on various, studied communities. It is a necessary and useful task to revisit their works (as well as the works of other anthropologists who conducted fieldwork in Romania and broader, in Eastern Europe) to understand in depth their views, their meanings and relevance in that particular context and afterwards, as well as their contribution to the Anthropology of Socialism and Postsocialism. Through this, other fields and topics are opening to the analysis, such as the contribution and particular roles of the Anthropology of Socialism and Postsocialism in structuring the Anthropology of Europe, as it is configured nowadays.
Highlights
The present study has the following aims: the first one is to discuss how and why anthropologists manifested a special research interest in East European topics during the Cold war, how they managed to conduct fieldwork and to live in different communities of this part of Europe in difficult times
A Case Study have at a glance the “social” /”cultural” images focused on communities, and at least a bit on the atmosphere of those periods,reconstructed both through the lenses of anthropologists and their interlocutors (I use, for instance, in one of the subchapters of this study, the anthropologists’ subjective experiences when facing the Romanian realities, as they are presented in various texts as result of self-reflection)
Having pinpointed the spatial-temporal frames of reference, we introduce the main questions we debate upon and to which we intend to–at least partially–provide answers to in this study: what image of Romanian socialism is being upheld in the scientific bodies of work of these specialists? Having emergedfrom outside the system, through direct contact with the very communities they were studying, Western anthropologists who showed a keen interest in Eastern European lands had had access to the “native’s point of view” as much as that was possible throughout the Cold War
Summary
The present study has the following aims: the first one is to discuss how and why (western) anthropologists manifested a special research interest in East European topics during the Cold war, how they managed to conduct fieldwork and to live in different communities of this part of Europe in difficult times. I attempt to identify and underline the specificities of their anthropological perspectives, both when conducting fieldwork, and when constructing broader understandings of how, in particular, the socialist system functioned as such in Romania. The third attempt is to put this specific analysis in a broader theoretical frame, placing the anthropologists’ work in the context of the anthropology of socialism and postsocialism, occasionally emphasizing their dynamics within the anthropology of Europe
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