An Anthropologist in Communist Romania, 1973-1988
Secret-police surveillance redirected one scholar's research projects in ways that ultimately yielded a changed understanding of cold war Romania and its past.
Anthropological adventures with Romania's Wizard of Oz, 1973-1989
Throughout the Cold War, most people in the US saw the commu- nist party-states of the Soviet bloc as all-powerful regimes imposing their will on their populations. The author, a child of the Cold War, began her fieldwork in Romania in the 1970s in this belief. The present essay describes how her ex- periences in Romania between 1973 and 1989 gradually forced her to see things differently, bringing her to realize that centralization was only one face of a system of rule pervaded by barely controlled anarchy and parasitism on the state. It was not simply that the regime had failed to change people's con- sciousness; rather, the system's operation was actively producing something quite different. These insights contributed to the author's developing a new model of the workings of socialism.
Was the Peasant Uprising a Revolution? the Meanings of a Struggle Over the Past
“The only absolutely certain thing is the future, since the past is constantly changing” (Yugoslav aphorism).