Alexandru M Iorga | Romanian Academy of Science (original) (raw)

Papers by Alexandru M Iorga

MARTOR (The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review), 2024

Although pastoralism has a special place in Romanian history and national mythology, shepherds “o... more Although pastoralism has a special place in Romanian history and national mythology, shepherds “occupy a complicated position” (O’Brien and Crețan 2019) in contemporary technoscientific capitalism (Birch and Muniesa 2020). As their age-old shepherding routes shrink (Săgeată et al. 2022), new devices need to be adopted and associated with traditional shepherding methods to meet the new market challenges and industrialised model of sheep farming. Opting for an approach that combines science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology, our paper examines how a New Pastoral Regime (NPR) was assembled with the help of a small piece of technology: the ear tag. EU norms, market imperatives, scientific innovation, financial subsidies, political interests, and technical devices become entangled in a political and scientific network of governing nature and the future that produces different kinds of sheep as techno-natural entities. By opening the black box of ear tagging technology our paper reveals what was left out, what was included, and with what consequences.

Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review, 2019

Martor (The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Journal) is a peer-reviewed academic jour... more Martor (The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Journal) is a peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1996, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology, museum studies and the dialogue among these disciplines. Martor Journal is published by the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, it provides a rich content at the highest academic and editorial standards for academic and non-academic readership. Any use aside from these purposes and without mentioning the source of the article(s) is prohibited and will be considered an infringement of copyright. Martor (Revue d'Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain) est un journal académique en système peer-review fondé en 1996, qui se concentre sur l'anthropologie visuelle et culturelle, l'ethnologie, la muséologie et sur le dialogue entre ces disciplines. La revue Martor est publiée par le Musée du Paysan Roumain. Son aspiration est de généraliser l'accès vers un riche contenu au plus haut niveau du point de vue académique et éditorial pour des objectifs scientifiques, éducatifs et informationnels. Toute utilisation au-delà de ces buts et sans mentionner la source des articles est interdite et sera considérée une violation des droits de l'auteur.

Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review

In 2016, the Mihai Pop Fonds was established as part of the Image Archive at the Romanian Peasant... more In 2016, the Mihai Pop Fonds was established as part of the Image Archive at the Romanian Peasant Museum, and this past year has seen a real effort to organize the documents left behind by the scholar. The Fonds brings together key documents: a rich correspondence with Romanian and foreign research¬ers; Mihai Pop’s field notes from the sociological research campaigns; his PhD thesis, which has yet to be published; documents related to his participation in national and international congresses; his notes for the folklore lectures he gave at the University; and many other documents. The paper aims to present how an interdisciplinary team of ten researchers and artists organized various types of documents from the personal archive of Mi¬hai Pop in order to make it accessible to both specialists interested in the topic and the general public. The paper highlights the contents of the Fonds and focuses on the difficulties involved in organizing a personal archive. The paper will show not ...

Meridian Critic, 2023

The book that is the subject of this critical reflection on the relationship between photographic... more The book that is the subject of this critical reflection on the relationship
between photographic art and ethnographic practice is called Electro+(Guide), written
by Agnès Birebent (text) and Nicu Ilfoveanu (photography) and published in 2011, in
Bucharest. The book is just a reason for reflection because it offers an attractive
framework for questioning the interferences between the arts (especially photography),
literature and the practice of social sciences in Romania. Hence, its content is profitable
for critical discussions in relation to the ways in which ethnography and anthropology
are practiced in Romania, to the understanding of field research and to the ambiguous -
still increasingly widespread - relations between art and anthropology on the one hand,
and between the familiar and the exotic on the other. Often used in the social sciences in
Romania and less practiced as a scientific method, photography seems to be,
unintentionally, an auxiliary element of the written text or, in happier cases, a harmless
witness or an ethnographic document. Photography is practised and then used by
anthropologists, ethnographers, ethnologists, sociologists but more often as an auxiliary
element that is supposed to speak and tell stories by itself, thus becoming illustration.

Vârstele timpului, vârstele omului. Profesorul Ion Ghinoiu în slujba etnologiei (coord. E. Țîrcomnicu, R. Toader ), 2021

Rolul Academiei Române în instituționalizarea și continuitatea etnografiei ca disciplină

Mythusmotive in einigen rumänischen Volksbräuchen .... STANCA FOTINO, Essay sur le modèle de cons... more Mythusmotive in einigen rumänischen Volksbräuchen .... STANCA FOTINO, Essay sur le modèle de construction et le modèle logique dans le conte fantastique roumain .

Cargo Journal, Jan 31, 2021

Martor : Revista de Antropoligie a Muzeului Taranului Roman (2005-), 2019

Archives are not all the time talking about themselves—as if a self might be forced on them until... more Archives are not all the time talking about themselves—as if a self might be forced on them until their disappearance. Why are we so much into archives, museums, collections, and accumulation? What is the purpose of individual and public archives? How are they imagined, built and used? What are the ends of archives and museums in an era of breaking off with the past? The paper aims to discuss some possible answers to these questions. It scrutinizes the ways in which archives are storage places and knowledge producers, as well as the manners in which they are and can be instrumentalized. It will examine the meanings of archives and museums in post-colonial, neo-colonial and national environments.

Martor : Revista de Antropoligie a Muzeului Taranului Roman (2005-), 2016

In this essay I will provide an account of haymaking and animal husbandry practices in a post-soc... more In this essay I will provide an account of haymaking and animal husbandry practices in a post-socialist village from the Romanian Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the summer and autumn of 2011 in the village of Caraorman. Photographs presented in this paper were taken by the author in the same year, using different cameras. They are situated representational fragments of a quotidian that I participated in, which have emerged from my engagement with the site.

Revista de Turism: Studii si Cercetari in Turism, 2015

In this paper I discuss how tourism takes various shapes in a rural protected area from Romania (... more In this paper I discuss how tourism takes various shapes in a rural protected area from Romania (one of the typical, most vulnerable of the post-socialist period). Though tourism is advocated by Romanian officials and economists as a powerful tool, which provides economic and community development in rural, deindustrialized and protected areas, ethnographic examples presented in this paper show that â€˜real tourismâ€™, still regarded as a panacea, is far from fulfilling the localsâ€™ needs and expectances (in terms of economic and social development in the Danube Delta). By using a political ecology perspective I will emphasize various local practices regarding tourism, demonstrating that there are several political layers of legality that do affect the perception and the tourism practice.

Teaching Anthropology

The processes of disciplinary institutionalization emerged from practices of preserving written a... more The processes of disciplinary institutionalization emerged from practices of preserving written and oral documents, establishing local and national museums, and developing university courses. In the last 100 years, archives’ development assured the professionalization of scholars interested in disciplines unrepresented at the university level, such as ethnography and anthropology. After the 1990s, as the South-Eastern European countries could not imagine an alternative path of development, a westernization process emerged as the main strategy for catching-up with Western Europe. My paper discusses the institutionalized anthropological and ethnographic research agenda in Romania, questioning its relationships with other social sciences in the context of national development of ethnography as a distinct branch (e.g., from anthropology). Secondly, I argue that institutionalized ethnographic and anthropological practice in Romania during communism significantly lacked reflective assessm...

Sociologie Româneasca = Romanian Sociology, 2013

Anuarul Universitatii Petre Andrei Din Iasi Year Book Petre Andrei University from Iasi Fascicula Drept Stiinte Economice Stiinte Politice Fascicle Law Economic Sciences Political Sciences, 2012

Caietele ASER nr. 9/ 2013, Bucureşti: Editura Etnologică, 2014

Introducere Prin acest articol propun re-deschiderea discuţiilor despre un subiect mai puţin abor... more Introducere Prin acest articol propun re-deschiderea discuţiilor despre un subiect mai puţin abordat în cercetările de istorie socială a României, de până în acest moment, punând în prim-plan mai multe direcţii teoretice legate de istoria socială a aşezărilor umane din România. Mai clar, îmi propun să discut -prin prisma observaţiilor de teren realizate de-a lungul ultimilor 12 ani, câteva chestiuni legate de aşezările temporare din zona munţilor Carpaţi de pe teritoriul României. Una dintre mizele importante din acest articol este legată de procesul sau, mai precis, procesele specifice prin care sate noi au luat iau fiinţă. Apelul la aşezările temporare, discutate comparativ cu procesul de roire pune în lumină noi ipoteze în legătură cu naşterea aşezărilor umane permanente (cătune, ulterior sate).

Zece teme de nişă în explorările tinerilor sociologi (coordonatori: Dumitru Sandu şi Ioana-Alexandra Rusu), 2013

Undoubtedly, the transformations and changes that took place in the postsocialist Romania have af... more Undoubtedly, the transformations and changes that took place in the postsocialist Romania have affected the whole rural in many different ways. The withdrawal of the state in the position of mediator, the need for a developed private sector, the laws concerning denationalisation and re-appropriation, adopting public policies based on best practices, etc. represents just few examples. In this paper I propose a discussion about economic development in protected natural areas.

Using field data I will try to explore the mechanisms of identity construction through tourism, i... more Using field data I will try to explore the mechanisms of identity construction through tourism, in a Magyar village from Romania, focusing on two dimensions of the tourism: cultural and economic. On the one hand I bring arguments that the village is an ethnic enclave, and that the tourism practiced here is a cultural/identitary one. On the other hand, I am trying to show that the tourism as it is practiced here is adopted by the community as a strategy for local development. However, some implicit aspects of this process can be seen as pertaining more to an Â“ethnic economyÂ” (I. Light). In the final part of the paper I will try to discuss the applicability and relevance of the definition of the ethnic economy given by Ivan Light, within the context of this village.