<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In line with socio-anthropological theories meant to deconstruct the secularization teleology (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_subbs-2016-0014_ref_001_w2aab2b8b4b1b7b1ab1b1b1Aa">Berger, 1997</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_subbs-2016-0014_ref_018_w2aab2b8b4b1b7b1ab1b1c18Aa">Luckmann, 1967</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_subbs-2016-0014_ref_023_w2aab2b8b4b1b7b1ab1b1c23Aa">Shah, 2015</xref>), this paper aims to document recent transformations in the field of Spirituality and Religion. Inheriting the analytical dichotomy between neo-liberal and anti-capitalist forms of spirituality, introduced by <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_subbs-2016-0014_ref_004_w2aab2b8b4b1b7b1ab1b1b4Aa">Carette and King (2005)</xref>, I aim to emphasize both the common points and the ruptures between the subjectification technologies used within transformative self-development and self-help programmes, on the one hand, and a form of alternative Neo-Pagan spirituality, which opposes the capitalist way of organizing social, economic, political and cultural life, on the other hand. The rupture between anti-capitalist and neo-liberal forms of spirituality rests on identifying the extent to which the spiritual domain is colonized by an economically mundane ideology, in which the subject is invited to look upon spirituality as an internal resource meant to satisfy all the tropes of the neo-liberal economic imagery: optimization, efficiency, amplified productivity, abundance and prosperity. In addition to the ethnographic justification of this theoretical construct that supports the existence of two opposed poles of constituting a spiritual self, I will adjoin the cultural relationship between spirituality and capitalism to the wider problem of secularization, by arguing that spirituality is a byproduct of late modernity and a leitmotif of the power technologies through which the neo-liberal subject is produced. <xref ref-type="fn" rid="j_subbs-2016-0014_fn_001_w2aab2b8b4b1b7b1ab1aaAa">2</xref></abstract>

The Quest for the Spiritual Self: Anti-Capitalist and Neo-Liberal Forms of Spirituality in Contemporary Romania

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This paper looks at a set of documents produced in the early 1950s in the Gold Coast to establish land boundaries in a region and to contribute to the crystallization of customary law for future reference and use. The material is placed in a longer historical flow and seen as one of the results of transformations in the metropole, in the colony, and in their relationship over the first decades of the century, and as a significant landmark collection that has been used in land transactions ever since. The analysis pleads for treating the archives in an ethnographic and not just in an extractive manner (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_subbs-2017-0011_ref_019_w2aab3b7b4b1b6b1ab1ac19Aa">Stoler, 2002</xref>, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_subbs-2017-0011_ref_020_w2aab3b7b4b1b6b1ab1ac20Aa">2009</xref>), suggesting that the making, the form, the authors’ stances and the use of the documents can be useful supplementary tools in making sense of the already heavily edited representations of the past that we have access to. The focus on this particular archival material contributes to the discussions about the pitfalls of basing land management on, as Sally Falk Moore would put it, “customary” law.</abstract>

How Foreign of a Country is the Past? Colonial Archives, Customary Law and Land Transactions in Ghana

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In this paper, I suggest an alternative form of periodization of Romanian history. My aim is not to move around historical posts; rather I propose a different way of understanding Romanian history as such. This is the research agenda. I seek to write a world history from the perspective of a peripheral place like Romania has been. Therefore, this is not simply an attempt to insert a local, neglected, silenced or distorted history into a wider, European, global story (that is, to discover the history of “people without history”), just as it is not another attempt to “provincialize Europe” in favour of a view from its repressed margins. Instead, following Coronil (2004), I believe it is indispensable to globalize the periphery, to understand its worldwide formation. My investigation draws upon the conceptual toolkit of world-system theory and its underlining philosophy of history (Wallerstein, 2011). In the same vein, the guiding principles of my periodization elaborate on Andre Gunder Frank’s insight that the exchange (or rather direct transfer) of surplus between societies is what links regions and societies as whole (Frank, 1978). The focus then shifts from a given society/state and its internal relations to the wider world-system, or world-economy, in which it is embedded. The unit of analysis is not a geographical location, but relations and networks and their historical development.</abstract>

An Alternative Periodization of Romanian History. A Research Agenda

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>What have been the conditions of production for a political theatre to appear in post-1990s Romania? How and why contemporary theatre in Romania ended up ignoring or dismissing the leftwing, engaged or militant theatrical movements active before 1945? Why local theatre history and theory entirely obliterated, also, the politically-engaged theatre forms active during communism itself? What kind of tradition forms the contemporary political theatre, what is the politics that informs their working practices and collaborations, how do the artists engage with the groups they choose to give voice and with the audience? Using a broad and on-purpose multi-faceted definition of political theatre, the article focuses on theatre artists, practices and performances that question capitalism as a social and power structure, sometimes from an intersectional perspective, but always framing this criticism in a class approach. Largely a practice-based analysis, the text gives a comprehensive on-going history of a strong performative movement and its challenges, from the representational strategies and the financial and positioning issues to the scarcity of critical covering and reviewing and the extending of an (opposite) political engagement in the mainstream theatre in Romania.</abstract>

Genealogy of Political Theatre in Post-Socialism. From the Anti-“System” Nihilism to the Anti-Capitalist Left

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Suppressed on ideological grounds, banned as academic discipline, and dismantled as scientific infrastructure in the first postwar years, sociology was re-institutionalized in communist Romania during the 1960s, largely on political grounds. Subsequently, the discipline developed and augmented within an impressive scientific infrastructure - several university departments were established, research centres and facilities initiated, and specialized periodicals issued. Still, the prosperous period of Romanian sociology concluded after just one decade, through another political decision, which confined the study of sociology to post-graduate specialization and restricted research. My paper explores sociology’s institutional infrastructure, as it was established after the discipline’s renewal, focusing on the institutions created, but also on the biographical analysis of those involved within these processes. My paper will address the matter from a historical perspective, discussing the developments and the evolutions in the field by circumscribing to the political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts.</abstract>

Sociology in Communist Romania: An Institutional and Biographical Overview

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This is a biographical account of my work in Romania and the influence it had on my research that followed. I focus on the impact that my almost five years in Romania had on the framework and orientation of my anthropological practice that I employed in the United States. I suggest that anthropologists have a moral imperative we must carry out when we choose to conduct research among the most vulnerable in society. In doing so, we must also come to understand the conditions that have made them vulnerable in the first place (Nader 1969). I assert here that as anthropologists of the twenty-first century we no longer may stay on the sidelines, but we must engage our work as allies with the vulnerable, supporting them in their self-identified struggles for dignity, liberation, and sustainability as part of a unified global effort. This entails the transformation of participant observation into a participatory research approach.</abstract>

Reflections on Research in Romania

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Personal development has become an industry in neoliberal capitalism, used to help employees adapt to the constant pursuit of growth, such as increased productivity, creativity, time management and business development. As part of my doctoral research, I documented how this type of practice works and how it restructures individuals’ social lives and their perspectives on the world. Personal development, as shaped by neoliberalism, serves as a tool for personal empowerment and adaptation to the restructuring of the welfare state. It is also a means of promoting neoliberal values among people. However, during the containment measures during the pandemic, criticisms of this growth-based approach emerged, leading to a resurgence of ideas about personal care. Self-care developed particularly in marginalised communities, where it was defined as a form of resistance to capitalism through caring for oneself as a member of an oppressed community, with Audre Lorde (1988) defining the concept as having a power of resistance to capitalism. In this presentation, I will explore what happens to personal development, which is a key factor in the construction of capitalist ideology, if neoliberalism is coming to an end. I will also consider whether this is a good time to reclaim personal development and how it can be used to create tools for self-building beyond the intrinsic individualism of the process.
</abstract>

Searching for Authenticity: Critical Analysis of Gender Roles and Radical Movements in Personal Development Practices in Contemporary Society

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
What is knowledge and how can we analyse it from within social sciences as social knowledge? Our socially driven intuition tells us that knowledge is a special relation that humans have with their surrounding world. Its specificity lies primarily in the fact that it implies a direct interaction with the environment. Another important and interesting characteristic of knowledge is its tendency to replace interactions with reality with interactions between pieces of knowledge produced about that specific reality. Connected to this, regarding the issue of truth, paraphrasing both Einstein and Smith, this article argues that ‘an invisible hand’ of the realities of social phenomena makes it so, that the accepted truths of a certain society are those and only those that are functional for the survival and reproduction of that society. And for this to happen it is a must that the elite designated with the production and the legitimation of ‘the truths’ exists and produces those ‘truths’ that support the ‘general interest’ of that respective society. Most importantly is to understand that the consistency of the legitimated truths with the dominant values of the society imbedded in its social order is far more important that their consistency with the empirical observations of the reality.
</abstract>

Science and Social Knowledge or What We Do Not Know About What We Believe We Know

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The article dissects the subject of online social support exchange on social networking sites, or SNS (mostly Facebook and Instagram) through the eyes of the platforms’ active users. Drawing on 20 semistructured in-depth interviews with SNS users from Ukraine, it discusses both the benefits of support exchange in the online realm, such as speed, resilience, unobtrusiveness, and its drawbacks, such as depersonalization, ‘ghosting,’ and privacy concerns. The text also explores the sentiments towards some of the main digital instruments of exchanging support on SNS, in particular posts and various forms of “likes,” as well as the perceived effectiveness of online social support in general. Additionally, it provides some context on how the phenomenon has been impacted by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
</abstract>

Pros and Cons of Online Social Support Exchange on Social Networking Sites: A User’s Perspective

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The article examines how deindustrialization as economic restructuring and housing regime changes evolved interconnectedly in Romania during the Great Transformation from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. This article also explores how they acted as conditions for the emergence of a real-estate-development-driven housing regime (REDD-HR) alongside other factors. The analysis is from the perspective of the geographical political economy on the variegated pathways of these phenomena across borders and secondary statistical data collected by two research projects conducted in Romania in the past two years. In the Eastern semiperiphery of global capitalism or a country of the Global Easts with a socialist legacy, after 1990, the state restructured the economy by privatizing industry and public housing. During state socialism, the housing regime supported industrialization-based urbanization, whereas deindustrialization-cumprivatization in emerging capitalism facilitated the appearance of real estate development. On the one hand, the article enriches studies on deindustrialization by highlighting the role of housing in the transformation of industrial relations; on the other hand, the paper revisits housing studies by analyzing deindustrialization as a process with an impact on the changing housing regime. Altogether, deindustrialization-cum-privatization and the changing housing sector are analyzed as prerequisites of the REDD-HR.
</abstract>

Deindustrialization and the Real-Estate– Development–Driven Housing Regime. The Case of Romania in Global Context

Book Reviews

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The political field seems to prefer the intellectual resources offered by Political Sciences and Economic Sciences because they fit well into the habits created by the daily practice of power. Assuming that it is not just about self-censorship, the current perspective offered by these scientific fields has some blind spots, and risks legitimizing an unfounded optimism regarding the effectiveness of the means used in the crisis generated by the Russian-Ukrainian war. That is why I consider the perspective offered by materialist anthropology to be very useful for describing the complexity of the power relations, and for a fine-tuning of what-is-at-stake. This perspective, which looks at long-term trends, can highlight the differences between imagined power (given by habits, abstractions and the assumption of continuities) and real power (given by the technologies and resources that matter, real scarcity and international competition). I concluded that the imagined power relations of today are a <italic>survival</italic> of the real power relations from the near past (when the GDP in the Western world was correlated with powerful local manufacturing and a complete dominance in high-tech research). Our mindset, habits and biases created a blind-spot that made difficult to grasp the complexity of the situation and to react accordingly.
</abstract>

War and Sanctions. Some Economic and Political Lessons to be Learned From Materialist Anthropology

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Forced evictions have been recognised as a relevant process in Romanian post-socialist urban transformations. Housing privatization, including restitutions, represents the key driver. Some attempts in grasping the scale of the process have already been made. This article brings extensive quantitative data stemming from national and local levels, which can support improved estimations of the scale: reports of the National Union of Bailiffs and answers to public information requests from multiple municipalities; archival data, local press monitoring and accounts of the process in the city of Cluj-Napoca. At least 100 thousand forced evictions are estimated to have taken place at national level between 1990-2017, comprising several hundred thousand individuals, the Roma population being disproportionately affected. Qualitative data produced through activist research complements the picture. The findings contribute to the debate regarding postsocialist urban transformations, indicating that the role of the state in the production of the housing market through forced evictions-based gentrification has been insufficiently acknowledged. The results are relevant to policy debates, as well as to housing activist practices2.
</abstract>

Countering Illegibility: A Brief History of Forced Evictions in Postsocialist Romania

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> The paper combines the historical analysis of the social transformation of rural Hungary with the evolution of the sociological concept of ‘peasant embourgeoisment’. The authors highlight the long lasting impact of the concept in the understanding of academic knowledge production. The concept was the product of thorough ethnographic studies in the inter- and postwar periods by scholarly intellectuals, whose aim went beyond academic purposes and translated into a political agenda of rural modernization. To make such a methodological combination the authors demonstrate that the global historical context is necessary in the understanding of how knowledge production occurs and interacts at various historical conjunctures, especially during periods of crises.</abstract>

The Concept of ‘Peasant Embourgeoisement’ in the Perspective of Different Historical Conjunctures

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This paper is an inquiry into the blooming sector of personal and spiritual development in contemporary Romania. It is based on interviews with providers of such services, on content analysis of blogs and books dedicated to the topic, and on participation in several workshops. The critical literature linking the proliferation of the field of personal and spiritual development with the increasing pervasiveness of neoliberal logic has highlighted some of the features of the subjectivity invoked in these programmes: the sovereignty of the self in relation to its environment, the lack of importance of social ties and solidarity, and the lack of importance of the community. This analysis explores the empirical material in searching for the main points of ambivalence in relation to these desiderates, as well as the mutations that can be identified in the privileged sites of production of individuality that are personal and spiritual development workshops and trainings. <xref ref-type="fn" rid="j_subbs-2016-0008_fn_001_w2aab2b8b8b1b7b1ab1aaAa">2</xref></abstract>

Personal and Spiritual Development in Contemporary Romania: In Search of Ambivalence

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Recent demographic changes such as ageing, low-fertility, and large out-migration from Eastern European countries, brought into discussion the vivid question of the future of intergenerational solidarity within families. In the context of increasing geographical mobility of young people in search for better paid jobs, the unmet need for personal assistance among the elderly, the underdeveloped system of care services, Romania knows new dynamics of intergenerational support. Contrary to perspectives that consider spatial proximity between adult children and their elder parents the indisputable enabling factor for intergenerational support transfers (Rossi and Rossi, 1990), emerging literature on transnational families highlights that such tight kinship relations continue to exist even across borders (Baldassar et al., 2007). Using recent data from the nationwide survey “The Impact of Migration on Older Parents Left Behind in Romania” (2011), this paper examines the complex dynamics of intergenerational solidarity involving adult children as transnational migrants and their elder parents who remain at home. The statistical models used indicate the migrants’ role as providers of remittances, but also the ways in which other forms of support are distributed among the dyads. Despite a possible presupposition that parents who were left at home might only be beneficiaries of support, the data show the opposite: elderly persons, depending on their age, were active providers of help as well.</abstract>

Elderly Parents, Adult Children and the Romanian Transnational Family: An Intergenerational Solidarity Approach

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>After the fall of the socialist bloc some authors celebrated the advent of Romani nationalism, emphasising its Eastern European roots and its potential force to foster emancipation among an ethnic minority oppressed for so long. There is another perspective on the community organisation among the Roma from actors who had much less sympathy towards collective claims on behalf of the ‘Gypsies’. Recently published documents from the archive of the secret police testify that <italic>Gypsy nationalism</italic> (“naționalism țigănesc”) was systematically denounced in Romania. Roma leaders suspected of being its proponents were persecuted during the late period of the Ceaușescu era. This article is an attempt to interpret a contested category in the context of late socialist Romania.</abstract>

Was There a ‘Gypsy Problem’ in Socialist Romania? From Suppressing ‘Nationalism’ to Recognition of a National Minority

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This paper focuses on the recent neo-liberal transformation in the Romanian education system and analyzes the genealogy of a new form of academic governance that has been implemented in higher education institutions in the past decade. It examines the role quality indicators and supplementary funding have played in the gradual embedding and naturalization of neo-liberal disciplinary reforms in universities and the specific quality enhancement policies that aimed at increasing the productivity of academic workers by stimulating the competition among them. The main argument of the paper is that in order to understand the extensive academic management based on scientometrics and recurrent evaluation of academics we need to look at the structural mechanisms that have shaped higher education institutions in accordance with market rules and at the generalization of competitiveness throughout the system in the context of budget cuts and decreasing resources allocated to education.</abstract>

Competitiveness and Research-Oriented Teaching in Romanian Universities: The Neo-Liberal Transformation of the Higher Education System

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Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia

The journal welcomes multidisciplinary and comparative approaches in the fields of sociology, social work, social policies, anthropology, urban and rural studies. Articles that address...

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The journal welcomes multidisciplinary and comparative approaches in the fields of sociology, social work, social policies, anthropology, urban...