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

’Did You Arrive by Train or by Ship?:’ Transportation as Politics and Metaphor in Fieldwork in Socialist Romania

This essay considers how transportation and mobility model the character of Romanian-American interaction during fieldwork from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Transportation in socialist Romania was a register of modernization and regime legitimation as well as an absolute threat to that legitimation. Official suspicions of movement and political concern about transportation translated into differentially restricting, policing, and limiting availability of transportation. In contrast anthropological fieldwork is predicated on movement while Western culture also claimed free mobility as a cultural good. These different teleologies provoked diverse disjunctures in my interactions with Romanians. While I engaged with Romanians naively, my travelling together with people either gave them cover for resistance or provoked their fear of political exposure. Sharing transportation resources with Romanians encouraged others’ concerns about my alleged political bias or was used to affirm socialist superiority. In other words, transportation during socialism was never neutral, but freighted politically and culturally confrontational

BEFORE THE DELUGE: ŞTEFANIA CRISTESCU-GOLOPENŢIA’S PIONEERING WORK ON WOMEN, MAGIC, AND PEASANT HOUSEHOLD INTEGRITY IN THE INTER-WAR YEARS

This essay locates Ştefania Cristescu-Golopenţia in inter-war and post-war Romanian society and social science and shows how Ştefania’s career was cut short by political transformation and personal tragedy. I evaluate Cristescu-Golopenţia’s work, focusing on her discussion of women’s magico-ritual practices as critical for the strength and safety of peasant households. I then consider these ideas in the context of my own fieldwork, and how socialist state policies might have articulated with women’s magico-religious household ritua

Metaphors of America: Labor, global integration, and Transylvanian identities

Deconstructing the diverse meaning behind the common metaphor “Little America”, this paper explores widely disparate ethnic identity conceptions and inter-ethnic relations in two regions of Transylvania, showing them as dependent on the ways in which each region was integrated into changing patterns of global labor. Regional ethnic identity and relations in the Jiu Valley coal producing region and in the mixed agro-industrial Fǎgǎraş zone vary greatly. In the former, ethnic identity was downplayed and inter-ethnic relations always kept on an even keel owing to the particular process of regional settlement and the common integration of the region’s ethnic groups into the hard coal industry that dominated the Valley from the middle of the 18th century. In the latter region, ethnic relations were frequently tense due to a highly discrete ethnic-based division of labor and organization of political hierarchy. Despite these differences, citizens of each region expressed their ethnic dynamic through use of the “Little America” metaphor. However, in the Jiu Valley this referred to alleged ethnic peace of cooperating national groups, while in Fǎgǎraş this notion referred to the dream of struggling for social mobility and differentiation. The paper thus shows how such basic ethnic conceptions, shaped by the treatment of regional labor in successive phases of the global economy, influence a wide range of differing attitudes toward diverse social and political processes, including socialist development policies and the modern global labor market