Before the Deluge: Ştefania Cristescu-Golopenţia's Pioneering Work on Women, Magic, and Peasant Household Integrity in the Inter-War Years

This essay seeks to locate the person and scholarship of Ştefania Cristescu-Golopenţia in the tumultuous scientific and historical conditions of inter-war and immediate post-war Romanian society and social science. I suggest how Ştefania's promising career was cut short by political transformation and personal tragedy, represented by the imprisonment and death of her husband, sociologist Anton Golopenţia. Subsequently I evaluate the work of Şt.C.-G., focusing on her description and analysis of women's quotidian magical and ritual practices as critical for the strength of the Tara Oltului peasant household. This magic was directed to keep the household safe and ward off danger. I discuss the ideas of Şt.C.-G. in the context of my own fieldwork in the region in the 1970s and try to consider how and to what effects socialist state policies might have articulated with women's magico-religious household ritual

Coal power: Class, fetishism, memory, and disjuncture in Romania’s Jiu Valley and Appalachian West Virginia

This essay compares the social disjuncture of coal’s decline in Romania's Jiu Valley and southern West Virginia/Appalachia. In both regions coal is fetishized, concentrating belief and creating a paradigm of meaning. But when fetishes lose power, social dislocation results. Coal's decline is often thought to produce common conditions in former coal regions. However, we suggest four factors shape regional variation: 1) political economy of class and industrial control; 2) state power over mining; 3) extent and diversity of non-governmental organizations related to the industrial control system; and 4) gender activism, emerging from political economy. We examine social conditions, coal memory, and nostalgia related to the above. In the Jiu Valley, there is a weakening of organization, coal nostalgia, as well as decline in coal-related disjuncture with existing conflict now largely a province of regional elites. In West Virginia, however, a weak state, active organizational environment, and women's activism produce conflict between coal supporters and detractors. These circumstances also influence the regions’ futures. Jiu Valley people are protected by state intervention, but this weakens class identity and the intensity of change efforts. In Appalachia the tensioned organizational environment perpetuates conflict but creates an intensity toward the future.   L’articolo esamina le rotture sociali causate dal declino dell’industria del carbone nella valle del Jiu (Romania) e nella Virginia occidentale (USA). In entrambe le regioni il carbone è oggetto di culto feticistico, catalizzattore di fede e creatore di senso. Quando i feticci perdono potere, ne consegue una crisi sociale. Si pensa spesso che il declino del carbone abbia effetti comuni a tutte le regioni carbonifere. L’articolo individua quattro fattori responsabili delle variazioni regionali: 1) l’economia politica di classe e del controllo industriale; 2) il potere dello stato sulle miniere; 3) l’entità e la diversità delle organizzazioni non governative legate al sistema di controllo industriale; 4) l’attivismo di genere, così come emerge dall'economia politica. Rispetto a questi fattori sono prese in esame condizioni sociali, memoria e nostalgia. Nella valle del Jiu, si riscontrano indebolimento organizzativo e nostalgia del carbone, così come declino dei conflitti legati al carbone, ora appannaggio delle élite regionali. In Virginia, uno stato debole, un dinamico contesto associativo e l'attivismo femminile generano conflitto tra sostenitori e oppositori del carbone. Tali circostanze influenzano anche il futuro delle regioni. La popolazione della valle del Jiu è sostenuta dallo Stato, che tuttavia ne indebolisce identità di classe e tentativi di cambiamento. In Virginia la conflittualità dell’ambiente associativo è invece generatrice di energia tesa verso il futuro

Between Apprehension and Support: Social Dialogue, Democracy, and Industrial Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe

This article explores the attitudes of trade union organizations to restructuring and privatization of their enterprises to strategic foreign investors in Central and Eastern Europe\u27s biggest steel producers: Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia. Contrary to advocates of insulating technocratic decision-makers from social partners, this article argues that higher quality of democracy and concomitant social dialogue carried out at the level of the sector with union organizations that are autonomous of the government in power (as was the case in the Czech Republic and Poland), are associated with greater restructuring and with support for privatization to strategic foreign investors. In these circumstances, the unions actually pressure reluctant governments to accelerate the privatization process. By contrast, politically motivated capture of individual enterprise-level unions and splitting them from sectoral-level organizations, as occurred in countries with lower quality of democracy (Romania and Slovakia), weakens the autonomous sectoral-level organizations, which are generally supportive of restructuring. Conversely, captured unions remain far more resistant to reform than their counterparts belonging to autonomous sectoral organizations. Thus, higher quality of democracy and concomitant vibrant social dialogue safeguard industrial restructuring

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history

Fresh from the Factory: Breakfast Cereal, Natural Food, and the Marketing of Reform, 1890–1920

This dissertation, Fresh from the Factory: Breakfast Cereal, Natural Food, and the Marketing of Reform, 1890–1920, challenges dominant depictions of industry and environmental activism as adversarial by investigating producers who sought to reform capitalism with a new consumer good. Cereal companies at the end of the nineteenth century became some of the first manufacturers to distribute ready-to-eat food to consumers nationwide. Breakfast cereal’s ubiquitous advertising spoke of the virtues of “natural food” made in some of the country’s most impressive factories. Aimed squarely at women, this advertising preached the virtues of machine-made “natural food” by associating it with nutritional science, religious imagery, and stereotypes about the closeness-to-nature of women and racialized people. Selling a vision in which people could “return to nature” without going anywhere, industrialists persuaded consumers to pursue communion with nature by buying and eating packaged breakfast food. Breakfast cereal manufacturers became some of the world’s largest food processors— and among its most widely-read nature writers, health authorities, and social reformers. Fresh from the Factory follows the production and promotion of cereal as it developed in the early twentieth century. The first chapter tracks the cereal industry’s emergence out of a natural food movement that warmed to mass commerce over the nineteenth century. This movement’s spokespeople claimed to alone know what God, interchangeable with Nature, wanted people to eat. God’s authority proved useful for breakfast cereal producers, too, in branding their goods as “natural.” Subsequent chapters follow breakfast cereal from nature to table. To sell natural food, cereal companies spread new definitions of nature. These depictions rarely included plants or farms, instead emphasizing factories as the source of breakfast food and distribution in packages as the key to its freshness; in company nature writing, it was electric power, machinery, and pasteboard boxes that best mimicked the Garden of Eden. As cereal reached the table, consumers, regulators, and writers embraced, criticized, or even litigated against the product. Men often satirized the expensive grains in garish boxes, but many women found in cereal a more promising cure for sick children and arduous housework than the country retreats then favored by literary nature writers. By the early 1900s, breakfast cereal had become an American staple food, altering the country’s relationship to nature, cities, and the consumer economy. The dissertation ends in the 1920s. By this point, the federal government did more to protect national health, more people bought prepared packaged foods, and vitamins and calories had ascended over religion-infused ideas about nutrition. Still, the breakfast cereal industry’s ideas of nature persisted, and so the dissertation concludes by reflecting on continuing links between reform, business, and nature. I intend for scholars across fields to find this dissertation useful in considering how industry and the environment shape each other and the capacity of capitalism to reform itself

Functional Magnetic Resonance - and Diffusion Tensor Imaging Investigations of Pure Adult Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome

Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) is a chronic neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by multiple motor and vocal tics, affecting approximately 1% of the population. The precise neuropathology of GTS has not yet been delineated, but current models implicate subcortical and cortical areas - the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) circuit. The majority of studies in the literature have either dealt with GTS with comorbid conditions and/or children with GTS. As these factors are known to affect brain structure and function, it unknown what the neurobiological underpinnings of pure adult GTS are. The objective of this body of work was to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to characterize differences in brain function and structure in pure adult GTS patients versus age- and sex-matched controls. I employed a series of three distinct analyses for this purpose, based upon current models of CSTC circuit-related dysfunction in GTS. In the first, GTS patients and control participants executed three finger-tapping paradigms that varied in both complexity and memory requirements. These finger-tapping tasks were modeled after previous studies that showed CSTC circuit-related activity in healthy individuals. Using a multivariate statistical technique to assess task-related patterns of activation across the whole brain, I found that, while there was much overlap in brain activation patterns between groups, sensorimotor cortical regions were differentially recruited by GTS patients compared to controls. In the second fMRI analysis, I measured low-frequency spontaneous fluctuations of the blood oxygen level dependent signal during rest, and found that GTS patients exhibited greater resting state functional connectivity with the left putamen compared to controls. In the final analysis, DTI was used to provide a whole-brain assessment of regional diffusion anisotropy in GTS patients and healthy volunteers and to investigate the fractional anisotropy in predetermined ROIs. This analysis found no differences between GTS patients and controls. Overall, my findings indicated that several CSTC-related regions shown to be atypical in GTS patients previously, are also atypical in pure adult GTS, and that sensorimotor cortical regions and the putamen may be regions of functional disturbance in pure adult GTS.Ph

Functional Magnetic Resonance - and Diffusion Tensor Imaging Investigations of Pure Adult Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome

Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) is a chronic neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by multiple motor and vocal tics, affecting approximately 1% of the population. The precise neuropathology of GTS has not yet been delineated, but current models implicate subcortical and cortical areas - the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) circuit. The majority of studies in the literature have either dealt with GTS with comorbid conditions and/or children with GTS. As these factors are known to affect brain structure and function, it unknown what the neurobiological underpinnings of pure adult GTS are. The objective of this body of work was to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to characterize differences in brain function and structure in pure adult GTS patients versus age- and sex-matched controls. I employed a series of three distinct analyses for this purpose, based upon current models of CSTC circuit-related dysfunction in GTS. In the first, GTS patients and control participants executed three finger-tapping paradigms that varied in both complexity and memory requirements. These finger-tapping tasks were modeled after previous studies that showed CSTC circuit-related activity in healthy individuals. Using a multivariate statistical technique to assess task-related patterns of activation across the whole brain, I found that, while there was much overlap in brain activation patterns between groups, sensorimotor cortical regions were differentially recruited by GTS patients compared to controls. In the second fMRI analysis, I measured low-frequency spontaneous fluctuations of the blood oxygen level dependent signal during rest, and found that GTS patients exhibited greater resting state functional connectivity with the left putamen compared to controls. In the final analysis, DTI was used to provide a whole-brain assessment of regional diffusion anisotropy in GTS patients and healthy volunteers and to investigate the fractional anisotropy in predetermined ROIs. This analysis found no differences between GTS patients and controls. Overall, my findings indicated that several CSTC-related regions shown to be atypical in GTS patients previously, are also atypical in pure adult GTS, and that sensorimotor cortical regions and the putamen may be regions of functional disturbance in pure adult GTS.Ph