Romanian Village Research Articles

The Politics of Quotidian Gestures. Screening the Migrant and the Host in Marian Crișan’s Film, Morgen and Cristian Mungiu’s R. M. N

The article discusses two contemporary Romanian films which, in the changing contexts of globalized migration, address the question of encounter, conflict, and hospitality between the migrant and the local (community) by focusing on the perspective of the host. The encounter with otherness is discussed through the concept of the gestural understood as an imbrication between the somatic and the social. Marian Crișan’s Morgen (2010) focuses on the encounter between a security guard from Salonta and a Kurdish refugee, dismantling the anonymous, faceless image of the migrant. The encounter between the local and the foreigner occurs in the affective medium of quotidian gestures that engender an embodied, accented solidarity and hospitality. Mungiu’s R. M. N. (2022) tackles a conflict in which the inhabitants of a fictitious Romanian village oppose the employment of three workers from Sri Lanka by the local bakery. The film addresses the conflict not as a local instance of xenophobia but as a complex set of socio-economic relations within global capitalism and labour migration. If Mungiu’s film allows the viewer to recognize global relations in local occurrences, Morgen, through a micro-approach to the quotidian, enables the viewer to recognize the other as a face among global processes of displacement.

Aubergine time: A day in 1980s Romania

AbstractThis piece of creative nonfiction originates from a desire to salvage characters and situations that are slowly disappearing in Romania, for natural and social reasons, from aging to emigration. For decades, especially as part of the processes of industrialization and urbanization during socialism, children left villages in search of opportunities to study and work in towns and cities around the country. Their own children would return to these villages during their school holidays and would stay with their grandparents, men and women born in the first half of the 20th century. I was one of these grandchildren. Until I was 18 years old, I spent the whole summer break with my grandmother. In this piece, I draw upon my childhood memories and conversations with persons of my age about the days they spent in the countryside when they were children, their relationship to their grandparents and village life in socialist Romania. My aim is to take the readers back in time, to a summer day in the late 1980s that an 11‐year‐old girl spends in her grandmother's company in a southern Romanian village.

Changing Destinies by Fighting Against Bad Luck

"In the traditional Romanian village, misfortune (bad luck) was countered by the use of magic means. Those who took the lead in performing the magico-ritual act were women who possessed special powers that enabled them to identify, isolate and destroy evil and thus restore peace of mind and health to their clients by manipulating chance and changing their destinies. They were country women without special qualifications who healed a wide spectrum of ailments – themselves caused by ritual means – or made love charms. By contrast, the contemporary urban environment in Romania can show us modern witches who are widely advertised in the media, practise aggressive marketing, and are in most cases digitally literate (they make use of the Internet and digital applications to facilitate relations with clients); by employing sophisticated rituals and often also by drawing on black magic, they provide solutions to sickness, curses and being crossed in love, as also happens in traditional villages, but they are equally able to deal with unemployment, impotence, lack of money, hair loss, business failure and above the straying of unfaithful husbands, thus demonstrating that they are in tune with the times in which they live. Everything is possible, because people living in modern communities, despite the categorical appeal to reason, despite digitalisation, globalisation, bureaucratisation and the coming of the computer age, still feel the need to “explain the inexplicable,” in exactly the same way as peasants living in traditional villages do, and in addition feel the need for personal experiences, including of magic ritual and witchcraft. The coronavirus pandemic had the effect of strengthening this impression of a “magic mindset” and even of uninterrupted coexistence between the magic of the traditional village and modern urban life, influencing the relation between magic/religion and science – something seen at its clearest in the attitudes of large numbers of people towards the origin and treatment of the virus and above all the vaccines. "

Ora de pomană в погребальной-поминальной обрядности румын (влахов) Тимокской Краины

The article uses field survey finds collected by the author during her ethno-linguistic studies in villages from Zaječar and Bor counties (Serbia) in spring and summer of 2022. The article tells about the custom of dancing memorial hora (ora) that exists in Romanian villages in the Eastern Serbia. This custom can be observed on certain dates after death or on cetain calendar holidays. Field finds from Eastern Serbia are compared to the data published by Romanian, Serbian and Bulgarian researchers on similar customs observed in the neighboring countries and in other parts of Serbia.

The “Matilda Effect”: Women in Interwar Romanian Sociological Research and Social Intervention

AbstractIn the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, several sociological monographic campaigns were carried out in a few villages in Romania. It was for the first time that a large research group from Romania investigated rural social life using an integrated theoretical system and interdisciplinary methods and instruments. In the second half of the 1930s, a different kind of rural-oriented endeavour started to be undertaken: the “royal voluntary student teams”, whose work in Romanian villages was more oriented towards social action than social research. In October 1938, the Law of the Social Service was issued, providing that all of Romania’s university graduates were compelled to participate in organized cultural work in villages. In most of the activities undertaken by the Bucharest Sociological School and coordinated by Professor Dimitrie Gusti, women participated in large numbers – yet another new feature in Romanian scientific practice. In this paper, I explore how gender, conceptualized as a social, political, and material category, configures power relations within a research group, and I provide tentative and inherently partial answers to such questions as: What combination of social, economic, and political factors led to women’s massive involvement in the sociological monographic campaigns? How did women’s participation contribute to the research endeavours? What are the disciplinary and institutional mechanisms and personal strategies that produced women’s inclusion in, and later exclusion from, the research group?

Radu Umbreș: Living with Distrust. Morality and Cooperation in a Romanian Village

Radu Umbreș: Living with Distrust. Morality and Cooperation in a Romanian Village

Names of the romanian folk costume (District of Storozhynets, Chernivtsi Region)

Field research in the Storozhinet district, which includes the Romanian villages of Budenets, Cheresh, Chudei, Krasnoilsk, Izhivtsi, Nizhny and Verkhni Petrivtsi, as well as in the Hlybot district, in the village of Ropcha, convinced us that everywhere there is a special interest in preserving the Romanian language, names ancient folk clothing and Romanian culture in general by popularizing traditions and the Christian-Orthodox faith, which are the main components of spiritual identity, defining elements of Romanian identity not only in this zone, but also in other adjacent territories. The purpose of the article is to analyze the terminology related to folk clothing. The novelty of scientific research is due to the fact that the vocabulary for the designation of the Romanian folk costume in the valley of the Siret River is being studied for the first time. The relevance of the study is motivated by the need for an in-depth analysis of the terminology of traditional Romanian folk clothing from ethnographic, ethnological and ethnolinguistic points of view, which confirms the dynamics of the development of the Romanian language in Ukraine. Conclusion. So, after analyzing the specific terminology of the indicated ethnographic region, we came to the conclusion that language elements of Latin origin are the most productive. They testify that the investigated layer of vocabulary was formed a long time ago, and therefore reflects the mentality, linguistic and cultural features of the Romanians of Northern Bukovina, is part of their ethnographic and ethnolinguistic heritage.

Écrire pour guérir. Les formules magiques écrites dans la médecine populaire roumaine (XVIIe-XXe siècles)

In traditional Romanian society, where the vast majority of the population was illiterate, writing remained mysterious and inaccessible. For the peasants from the Romanian village, writing and the book have acquired separate meanings, being used in a particular way through magico-religious rituals. In order to defend against the action of evil forces and for the healing of the sick body, the traditional community instituted ceremonial, apotropaic and thaumaturgical practices, involving a set of alternative uses of writing. The clerics played an important role in consolidating these practices. The village priests made the written amulets (apocryphal texts, prayers and incantations) intended to be worn closest to the body to ward off unclean spirits which could cause harm to women who had just given birth and to the new-born. Books and writing were seen as repositories of healing forces that could ward off disease and trouble. In the Romanian rural society, between the two World Wars, it was still believed that evil spirits, agents of disease, could be drawn from the sick person's body with the help of “healing letters” (rom. “răvașe de leac”), containing prayers, various religious symbols, names of saints but also magic formulas, often presented in an enigmatic and incomprehensible way. The formulas are written upside down, from right to left, then from left to right (like the famous palindrome “Sator arepo tenet opera rotas” or “Abracadabra”) or distributed in geometric figures (spirals, triangles, crosses). These “healing papers”, with a strong iconic charge, were applied to the body or the text and the image were drawn directly on the skin of the sufferer. Drinking water in which one had washed a plate on the surface of which healing formulas had been written or swallowing the paper on which magic formulas were written were other common practices. Romanian ethnologists have documented the survival of these practices until the mid1970s. Similar practices are found in other parts of Europe.

REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN AND OF THEIR ROLES IN THE WORLD OF THE ROMANIAN VILLAGE. PICTURE POSTCARDS FROM THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY AND THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY

This study aims to explore the visual discourse about women and their roles in the Romanian village, a discourse created by the picture postcards from the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. To reach this aim, we considered the following objectives: to realise a typology of the used research material, to identify the main representations of women, to analyse the relationship between the representations of women and the other represented elements (men, children, rural landscapes, households, tools, etc.), to discuss the main features of the visual discourse about the women from the rural area, for the respective period, based on the previous identification of the elements that became iconic through repeated representation. We used a critical visual methodology and discourse analysis to explore the picture postcards that represented women from the Romanian village, underlining the connection between their meanings and the cultural reality. Our findings are useful for similar research on gender and its visual construction from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

The Bishops’ House in the Romanian Pastoral Village of Rășinari (Mărginimea Sibiului) and its Hidden Treasures: A Short Legal History of the Book of Village Boundaries and the Deed of Donation (1488, 1383) and Transmissionales in causa Possessionis Resinar contra Liberam Regiamque Civitatem Cibiniensem (1784)

The study aims to present legal aspects of the medieval and premodern history of Rășinari, the greatest pastoral village in Mărginimea Sibiului (lying at the foot of the Southern Carpathians), whose inhabitants (mărgineni) were considered the richest Romanian transhumant shepherds. Based on methods pertaining to Cyrillic and Latin palaeography, ecdotics, and legal history, we analyse precious documents discovered in the Church Museum of Rășinari, contained in the 18th century Orthodox Bishops’ House: 1. the extract of a deed of donation made in 1383 by Voivode Radu Negru to the Saint Paraschiva Church in Rășinari; 2. the Book of village boundaries of 1488, describing a perambulation for the separation of boundaries between the Romanian village and the Saxon one of Cisnădie; 3. the manuscript volume Transmissionales in causa Possessionis Resinar contra Liberam Regiamque Civitatem Cibiniensem 1784 (1,318 pages), a veritable legal mirror reflecting juridical relations, procedures and lawsuits specific to South Transylvania under Habsburg suzerainty. The examination of the medieval Cyrillic-Romanian documents’ variants, late copies and even 18th century Latin translations highlights the conclusion regarding the special historical, linguistic and legal value of the treasures hidden in the Bishops’ House of Rășinari.

Familia și rânduiala. Obiceiuri legate de femeia însărcinată. Situația demografică

Maramureş is a unique destination, located in the heart of Europe, which has carefully preserved the culture, traditions and lifestyle of the peasant from the past. The region is the place of a testament to the traditional, romantic era of simplicity and moral values that we read or hear from our grandparents today. Few habits have changed over the centuries that have passed. Families remain in the same village as their ancestors. The handicrafts and traditions are passed on from generation to generation. Hand‑woven clothing is still worn with pride. The church is still the soul of the village. Neighbors know each other and help each other. Maramureş is considered by many the soul of the typical Romanian village. In this context one can notice how the woman had to have a special education to be able to raise her family in the eyes of fellow villagers. With its picturesque settlements, Maramures concentrates everything that life means in the country. Traditional culture was formed through the experiences of countless generations and conveys deathless values. Visitors to these lands have the unique opportunity to come back in time, to be witnesses of times and a simpler life. The sources of information used are to a great degree part of the local oral history. Villagers found a purpose through order, they obtained the motivation needed for life. Their minds were opened to see the deeper meaning of things.

Rural Romania in the new capitalism: 1990-2020. Pro Universitaria, Bucharest, 2022. Iulian Stănescu & Flavius Mihalache (editors)

Authors and coordinators Stănescu Iulian and Mihalache Flavius capture a moving picture of the Romanian village, as it was inherited after the Romanian Revolution, transforming, and reinventing itself in an interesting story of an adventure between survival and authenticity of each land. The archetype of the Romanian peasant in the 21st century is the Odyssey of a lone wolf, alienated from the unitary vision of his mission of universality and at the same time motivated to live in the strangest challenges and in an endless European modernization. The coordination of such a volume is itself an adventure in the history of the most archaic place where Romanian-ness was born as a source of immortality and a return to the origins of a people tormented by the curse of finding own solutions to a global movement that has always caught it unprepared in its historical evolution. The authors who have subscribed to this volume are not just researchers, but voices that bring that mosaic of images to a complex picture, almost complete but never exhausted.

Ion Popescu-Sireteanu (13 septembrie 1934, Mănăstioara-Siret - 29 iulie 2021, Pitești-Argeș)

The following biobibliographical article is dedicated to the writer Ion Popescu-Sireteanu, one of the active collaborators of the periodical “Annals of Bukovina” and is signed by the former editor-in-chief (1993–2018) of the academic periodical from Rădăuţi. The biographical excursion is followed by a presentation of the writerʼs preferred fields of scientific activity, illustrated by his contributions to the knowledge of the life and work of personalities of modern, classical and contemporary Romanian literature, through studies and researches of linguistics, ethnography and folklore and of cultural history. Several articles published in the “Annals of Bukovina” capitalize on his field surveys regarding the toponymics of Bukovina. Interesting are the belletristic works (stories, fables, short prose, pamphlets and poems) signed by Ion Popescu-Sireteanu, some of them being printed in several editions. Several original writings, dedicated to the Romanian village on the outskirts of Bukovina from the 4th–5th decades of the last century, are representative for the author from many points of view: the plot structure, the art of storytelling, the artistic and documentary value. Others, such as the funny stories in the volume Păcală și ai săi (1994), are intended mainly for children and young people, often transposing events and characters into contemporary times. The volume File de jurnal, 1985–1990 (2018) offers interested users a lot of information, managed by a sensitive author, dramatically marked by events: “For a long time I feel a permanent weight on my soul. Iʼm looking forward and all the paths, all the light sources, are closed to me. I live by chance, like a human being carried away by giddy waves. I donʼt know how long this state will last, nor if it will be able to be easily remedied. In any case, we are in a time of total disorganization. [...] Our lives evolve from bad to worse”. (December 1, 1985, December 9, 1985). In his verses, intertwined by “an invading lyricism”, Ion Popescu-Sireteanu reveals himself to us as “a candid soul, an incurable romantic, immune to all models and pictures”. The article ends with the main critical references to his life and work.

Sustainable societal development perspectives for rural Romania in light of Horizon 2020

Abstract Developmental gaps between urban and rural areas are a trademark of nowadays times, accelerated by economic models that ensure advancement chances mostly to urban hubs, rather than being focused on rural life. The Sustainable Development Goals issued by the United Nations and their desired implementation by 2030 is a first guarantee for an equitable and inclusive societal and economic framework. Currently, Romania lacks rural investments and a forward-looking attitude is much needed to reach the sustainability objectives. In addition, smart rural development, which fosters knowledge, innovation and R&D at village level is a viable tool in laying the groundwork for rural welfare, in response to issues such as migration from rural to urban, demographic ageing and poverty. Despite the multitude of programs tackling rural development at EU scale, Romania appears to perform poorly, even if its population is highly ruralized. In light of these matters, the paper conducts literature review analysis on smart rural development and sustainable development in Romania, to highlight the current performance of Romanian villages in this concern. Using literature and document analysis of Horizon 2020 programs on rural development conducted in the European Union, the aim is to identify the specific points to be addressed by decision makers in order for sustainable advancement of Romanian villages to be further enhanced.

Recitindu-l pe Stahl

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.

„Nu știm decât foarte puțin ce este satul”

In this article, I look at Mihai Pop as an agent of continuity, but also as an agent of theoretical refreshment in the social sciences in communist Romania. Through his research activity, but also through his status as director of the Institute of Folklore and university professor, he ensured not only the connection with the past, but also a permanent connection of the local scientific field with research centers around the world. I have chosen to stop at some pivotal moments in the history of ethnology during the communist period that have Pop as the protagonist, whether it is theoretical disputes, the practice of discipline or the evolution of institutions. I want to show both the way in which the study of folklore was distorted by the ideology, but also the strategies by which the scientific field maintained, as far as the times allowed, a kind of autonomy. I will start from Mihai Pop’s vision of the village and of the folkloric reality showing that, despite the passing of the years, the changes in the political regime and the evolution of the social sciences, the researcher’s vision on the Romanian village has not changed fundamentally during his career. I will then show how the theoretical dispute between Mihai Pop and George Călinescu, from the early 1960s, imposed a new conception of the notion of literary folklore as an ethnological science and not a philological one. I will also point out how Mihai Pop’s double role – as director of the Folklore Institute and Folklore professor at the University of Bucharest greatly influenced the development of the field during communism.

Suave făpturi, cerbere, blânde mume, diletante agreabile, vivandiere… Femeile în publicațiile periodice ale Serviciului Social, România 1935–1939

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.

Geographies of Capitalism in Romanian Postcommunist Literature and Film: Villages, Cities, Markets

This article analyses the ways in which the rural – understood in its double nature, of traditional mythological space, and of degraded periphery of the urban – was both instrumentalized by the cultural and political discourses within Romanian postcommunism, and revealed as a symptomatic field in which the harsh economic realities of the post-1989 implementation of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe became evident. The first part of the article describes how misplaced public policies during 1980s’ communism favoured the underdevelopment of the rural. Later, the process of transition encouraged both external migration, which depopulated Romanian villages, and the internal migration of the urban middle-class to an economically more secure rural area. The second part of the article analyses – from a materialist viewpoint – corresponding topics developed in Romanian contemporary literature and films (authored by Adrian Șchiop, Lavinia Braniște, Bogdan Mirică, and Radu Muntean). These works envision the rural/periurban as an asymmetrical geography, where violence toward the vulnerable is enacted, where the loss of community values leaves black markets flourish, and the capitalist dismantling of social ties becomes striking.

REVIEW: Zoltán Rostás, Scrisori inedite adresate lui Dimitrie Gusti

The volume “Unprecedented letters addressed to Dimitrie Gusti” captures the world of the interwar Romanian village and episodes from the daily life of the monographers in 40 unpublished letters. It includes an introduction, notes and comments signed by sociologist Zoltán Rostás. The first part comprises the letters addressed by the villagers from Drăguș to Gusti between 1929-1954, while the second part reveals 26 letters sent by Traian Herseni between 1927-1942 to his mentor, the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti. The volume ends with 8 letters sent by other foreign disciples and researchers to the founder of the Sociological School in Bucharest. The letters reveal uknown facts about the inner organisational conflicts within the Monograhy School.

Certeze Village: The Dilemma of Traditional vs. Post-Modern Architecture in Țara Oașului, Romania

The traditional Romanian village has recently seen unmistakable transformations. The import of architectural styles from EU countries and the need to modernise dwellings, combined with considerable legislative voids regarding the protection of the built-up heritage, have strongly modified traditional architecture and resulted in irremediable losses in terms of rural authenticity and landscape aesthetics. This study aims to analyse the need for preserving existing traditional architecture in Certeze village, which has been severely jeopardised by the import of post-modern elements. The perception of both locals and tourists on these aspects was evaluated using the survey method. Results outlined more conservative views from the older inhabitants who are still attached to traditional constructing styles, while younger respondents preferred the more modern houses. Most tourists also showed an increased interest in the traditional architecture and criticised the newer constructed buildings. The contrast between old and new, which at this point is ubiquitous in the area, remains an element of intergenerational negotiations and risks the diminishing of the cultural authenticity of Certeze even further.