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

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

’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