Speech Given on the 12th of October 2017 on the Occasion of Being Awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa Title of the Babeş-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca

Abstract

Thank you for your most-beautiful words and for this wonderful occasion. It is an unequalled honour, for which I am deeply grateful – especially to my fellow sociologists. Even though I call myself not a sociologist but a “social-cultural anthropologist,” my relationship with Sociology is a long and cordial one. It began at university when I took the course “Introduction to Anthropology,” only to learn that much of the material had been written by sociologists. For the rest of my career I have maintained a certain confusion about the division of labour between these two fields of investigation of human life. Today you confirm their resemblance, acknowledging the kinship relation between them. In a word, you have adopted me, and it’s good: I feel at home. If you do me this great honour, I should thank you in your own language. I apologize for the unavoidable mistakes and for the fact that this speech is given in a simpler language – a language that was learned not primarily from books, but in a village, talking with people. Because my audience today is mixed, I thought that rather than presenting a summary of my work in Romania, I would offer something more personal, about this work’s “infrastructure” in my relations here. Instead of giving a new interpretation of some material, I would like to present a brief homage to a few people in Romania who supported the career that I built here and without whom I couldn’t have advanced much in my projects. Because the list is very long, I will mention only a few names. You will see that my talk also concerns the methods of ethnography.