Speech Given on the 25th of May 2017 on the Occasion of Being Awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa Title of the Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca

Abstract

Thank you for these laudatory words, deeply appreciated if perhaps unmerited. I am profoundly honored by this extraordinary recognition of my academic contributions. For forty-one years, I have been doing research in Romania. How did I then a doctoral student from the United States of America, an imperialist country, end up doing research in a formerly communist one? I would like to take advantage of this special occasion to share with you some thoughts about my intellectual history, as well as some of my experiences while I pounded the streets of Romania’s cities and wandered about the paths of its villages. I would also like to reflect briefly upon the impact my research here has had on my understanding of what is currently happening in the United States. Knowing that some of you are not English speakers, I will give my talk in Romanian, asking your indulgence for whatever mistakes you hear and for my accent, most surely a mixture of American English and the vernacular speech of the region to which I will always remain affectively attached, „my” Maramureș. I proudly refer to it in this possessive form my because in 1994, I was made an honorary citizen of Ieud, a large village with a rich history, located in the Iza Valley. A question is often posed to me, both here and in the US, „why Romania?” As far as I know, my family has no roots in Romania. What then accounts for my having come here? When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I wanted to pursue my dissertation research on the medical system in what was then the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. At the time, the Yugoslavs were seemingly suspicious of the work of two American anthropologists, in consequence of which they