Laudatio. In Honour of Distinguished Professor Gail Kligman, University of California, Los Angeles, on the Occasion of Being Awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa Title of the Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca

Abstract

It so happens that I am giving this laudatio towards the end of a semester when I teach a course on the History of Romanian Social Thought, in which I discuss the stages of thinking and the main accomplishments of the most remarkable Romanian sociologists. In the last lectures, I come to speak about the development of sociology in the years after the political changes of 1989 and I necessarily refer to the contributions of the numerous foreign researchers who have produced substantial studies from and about Romania. Their studies are already social documents. Their reports on the state of the Romanian society in the communist period, shared with the wider Romanian public only after 1989, are even more important for having been written under very particular circumstances, when autochthonous research was either repressed or distorted by censorship or self-censorship. These studies are embraced by the Romanian colleagues who salute in them an honest and objective reflection of the country under the communist regime observed by these professional witnesses. These analyses save the honour of the profession, partly lost and then partly regained after 1989, notably due to the essential contribution of these researchers. In a wider perspective, they continue along the lines of the Romanian sociological tradition and its production from even before 1945 – the field research of the Sociological School of Bucharest, of Gh. Em. Marica in Cluj and of others, work that has become today a collection of documents of an era and of the manner in which this era was able to gaze upon itself. All these