Into the Grey Zone, Or: How to Track Fading Multiculturalism in Southeastern Europe On Language as a Dwelling and Inclusive Cultural Identities (original) (raw)
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Into the Grey Zone, Or: How to Track Fading Multiculturalism in Southeastern Europe
Südosteuropa, 2020
The exhibition ‘“We Live Word to Word.” Banat – Transylvania – Bukovina. Ethno graffiti of Southeastern Europe’ resulted from an interdisciplinary project seminar at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, based on a team ethnographic journey to Romania and Ukraine. Participants in the seminar, initiated in 2018, investigated how communities and togetherness have been constructed in multiethnic societies. The purpose was to find out what has remained of the region’s multicultural nature after the political changes of 1989. The team made their own observations, recorded interviews, and took notes, the resulting fragments of cultural diversity being later pieced together in the exhibition. Some contributions were colourful—even garish—while others were tender and withdrawn. Combined and linked, the final result seemed like a fleeting picture such as might have been sprayed from the aerosols of a street-artist—a sort of ‘ethnograffiti’. In this article, the authors reflect on how the e...
'Identities under Threat': Lecture delivered at the Romanian Cultural Institute, December 2016
East Central Europe has an exceptionally broad, deep and centuries-long legacy of ethnic mixing, one that was shattered by radical and often violent ‘unmixing’, along theoretically sharper ethnic lines after 1945, on Stalin’s instructions. These legacies mean categories of belonging are especially freighted, and politically scrutinised right into the present. It also makes the region particuarly relevant to the study of complex, hybrid phenomena that result, but that are hard to categorise in strict ethno-national terms as ‘German’, ‘Polish’, ‘Romanian’ and so on. In today’s political context [2016-17, post-Brexit vote, and after the election of Donald Trump], the phenomenon of subtle, blended identities suddenly has new piquancy. This new contextualisation of the case studies is the focus of the lecture.
Romania and EUrope: Roma, Rroma and igani as sites for the contestation of ethno-national identities
In November 2002 a Romanian journalist published an editorial attacking the Romanian authorities for 'playing the democratic card' and failing to prevent 'thieves, hooligans and criminals' from going to the West and disgracing all Romanians. The journalist, Lia Epure, entitled her article 'Rromania', a play on the Romanian government's spelling of Roma (i.e. 'Rroma'), and concluded that, if Romanians 'continue to accept identification with abnormals, then we will be become Rromania'. In response to vocal Romani and human rights group protests, Epure published a second article defending her right to say what 'even the president of the European Commission knows', that Romanians are not accepted as EUropean 'because of igani'. Woodcock explores how both elite and popular levels of Romanian discourse blame Romania's continued marginalization in EUrope on the actions of the igan, a fantastic Other, historically constructed out of ethno-nationalist Romanian discourses at moments of crisis for national identity. The discursive struggles for meaning with regard to the constructed ethnic Other highlight the paradox of post-socialist Romanian ethno-nationalism in an era of European Union accession: in order to be recognized as EUropean, Romanian discourse must relinquish the igan Other, even when it is this precise construction that has historically enabled Romania to claim a European identity.
Sociologie Româneasca = Romanian Sociology, 2015
From a cross-cultural perspective, my text attempts to establish the degree to which a number of ethno-linguistic and religious groups from Romania and Bulgaria (Kalderashi, Rudars, Tatars, and Turks) could be equated within similar or identical ethnicities from the two countries. In discussing historical and ethnographic evidences relevant for the aforementioned ethnic communities, I consider and investigate (1) their demographic situation and geographic distribution, (2) their cultural trait variability, and (3) the current understanding of ethnicity in the anthropological literature of Southeastern Europe. My approach also takes into account the legislative framework of the ethno-demographic evolution in Romania and Bulgaria (1992-2011). Another objective of my research is to represent the distribution of the Kalderash, Rudar, Tatar, and Turkish groups across Romanian and Bulgarian regions. Based on such contextualization, the ethnic characteristics are interpreted in terms of ho...
Social Sciences
This article sets out to highlight the way in which the phenomena of co-construction and territorial deconstruction make themselves apparent locally. We focused our study on Timiș County, core of the historical Banat region, for the reason that it is still an ethno-cultural mosaic linked to its cross-border space. We based our analysis on the exploitation of a specific bibliography and, especially, on a survey through questionnaire and interview. The regional socio-cultural identity of Banat was founded on the dialogue and intercultural co-construction that have been practised since 1718. The repeated processes of socio-spatial co-construction and deconstruction, due to the changes of sovereignty and limits, prove a remarkable identity resilience, Banat being a model of continuity of regional territoriality. In the current context of European integration and of regionalisation, these processes have been reactivated, with the ethnic minorities cultivating solidarity with their co-nat...