{"title":"The “Good Marriage” among Gabori Roma: Between Aristocratic Ideology, Egalitarian Utopia, and Singular Contingencies","authors":"Martín Olivera","doi":"10.57225/martor.2020.25.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2020.25.02","url":null,"abstract":"The Gabori Roma of Transylvania present themselves and are perceived as a “traditional Roma community” claiming to be highly endogamous. For these Roma, as for others, marriage constitutes the “crucial point” of their society, to borrow Patrick Williams’ phrase: marriage validates, publicly embodies, and reproduces belonging to the group. This article focuses on how Gabori marriage practices accommodate two essentially dissonant sets of values: on the one hand, the brotherly utopia that proclaims absolute equality among Roma, and, on the other, the ideology of descent that describes a “Gabori nation” structured along noble ranks. The two repertoires variously materialize, clash, or mix within the realm of marriage, revealing how Roma society never ceases to develop in complex and dynamic ways.","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114675663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constraints on “Free Choice”: The Role of Marriage in a Hungarian Romungro Community","authors":"Cecília Kovai","doi":"10.57225/martor.2020.25.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2020.25.08","url":null,"abstract":"Marriage has been studied by anthropologists usually in so-called “traditional” Roma communities. These communities are said to have “successfully” avoided assimilation and the process of proletarianization. According to classical anthropological studies, marriage plays an important role in maintaining the organization of these communities and their “cultural system” (Gay y Blasco 1999; Okely 1996; Sutherland 1976; Tesăr 2012; Williams 2000). Based on longterm ethnographical fieldwork from 2000 to 2013, my paper will discuss the meanings that marriage takes in a Hungarian Romungro community,1 which is highly affected by processes of assimilation and proletarianization. I will point out that although the concept and practice of marriage here are different from those of non-proletarianized communities—for example, the notion of “arranged marriage” does not exist among Romungros—marriage seems to be the most significant institution in the everyday life of the community. The institution of marriage can be interpreted through intersectionality, along with the kinship system and gender relationships, but it should not be separated from ethnic identity, everyday practices of ethnic distinctions, and class position either. Drawing on two case studies, I will show how the institution of marriage relates to the extended family, the Gypsy/Hungarian distinction, and the class positions within this community, and how the process of proletarianization affects the role and concepts of marriage.","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121705989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Lăutar Space”: Marriage, Weddings, and Identity among Romani Musicians in Romania","authors":"Margaret H. Beissinger","doi":"10.57225/martor.2020.25.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2020.25.06","url":null,"abstract":"This article treats, through the lens of marriage and nuptial practices, how lăutari (professional male Romani musicians who perform at Romanian weddings) and their families self-identify as Romanianized Roma. Lăutari assume hybrid forms of identity, drawing on both traditional Romani and mainstream Romanian culture as they perpetually create and recreate their own composite sense of “lǎutar space.” Lăutari, like many Roma, preserve basic norms of traditional matrimony, and weddings provide an arena in which they express emblems of Romani culture. Yet lăutari also invoke their “elite” status vis-à-vis “other Gypsies” by refuting what they view as “backward” marital praxes. Moreover, they both appropriate certain Romanian nuptial traditions as well as sustain a basic distrust of Romanians as non-Roma. While lăutar culture has evolved significantly over the twentieth century, younger family members are carving out their own shifting forms of “lǎutar space” in unprecedented ways, often fueled by educational opportunities. This article examines how lăutar identity is nurtured through a dynamic merging of Romani and Romanian cultures and how marriage and wedding practices inform these intersections.","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114425149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Free Choice” in Marriage-making among Romanianized Roma","authors":"Andreea Racleș","doi":"10.57225/martor.2020.25.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2020.25.05","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropological research with Roma has consistently shown the significance of marriage-making practices in the reproduction of distinctiveness relative to non-Roma. Yet, my research with Ursari Roma—who identify as Romanianized Roma—indicates that marriage-making and family ideals can also bring out commonalities between Roma and non-Roma, thus complicating the notion of clear-cut Roma/non-Roma distinctions. In this article, I analyze how free choice claims assist Roma in negotiating similarity and distinction between “we-Romanianized Roma” and other Roma, non-Roma, and own ideals of the past. I suggest that the claimed freedom to choose whom to marry/love and the asserted capacity to choose between “viable” and “unviable” practices are central to the repertoire of self-identification as Romanianized Roma.","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124452465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“What’s the Point of Studying Kinship if You Don’t Connect It to the Broader Power Structure?” A Dialogue","authors":"A. Kóczé, A. Chirițoiu","doi":"10.57225/martor.2020.25.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2020.25.10","url":null,"abstract":"Angela Kóczé, one of the leading sociologists associated with the “Critical Romani Studies” direction, and director of the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at CEU, has a dialogue with this issue’s associate editor, Ana Chirițoiu. They discuss points of contention between “Roma ethnographies” and “critical” scholarship, especially with a view to the relevance of marriage and kinship, this issue’s topics, in relation to the broader issues that Roma are facing. Kóczé argues for an approach that pays more attention to the racialization of the Roma and to the structural processes that shape their lives, and criticizes the euphemistic overtones of the term “ethnicity.” She is decidedly against any “romanticization” of poverty and modes of making-do and of approaches that celebrate “cultural distinctiveness.” Instead, she says, we need to understand the processes of exclusion and dispossession that cause some Roma communities to become closed or isolated. Moreover, Kóczé argues that the reliance on kinship and neopatrimonial practices are just as frequent, if not more, in broader society, and would be best understood comparatively and in a more extensive analysis, rather than through a monolithic focus on Roma.","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121039539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dare to Record! The Ethics of Decision Making in Fieldwork Documentary Practice","authors":"Ileana Gabriela Szasz","doi":"10.57225/martor.2020.25.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2020.25.13","url":null,"abstract":"The ethics of documentary practice is often brought into discussion after the screening of the film, when the production is already finished. Except for a minimum formal requirement of consent, there is no standard set of rules that filmmakers are compelled to follow during fieldwork, regulating their relationship with the people in front of the camera. Viewers make ethical judgments based on cultural expectations regarding consent, disclosure, motive, and structure. The diversity of fieldwork situations is considered the main reason for the lack of formal guidelines in this practice. Fieldwork behavior is shaped by the responsibility the practitioners assume towards the people filmed, the other team members, and their personal professional goals based on their own set of moral standards. Grounded in my experience as a cinematographer for a documentary shot in a Cortorari Roma community in a Transylvanian village, the article discusses the ethical challenges I faced in the decision-making process while filming on location. Accounting for the particularities encountered during this fieldwork—from the language barrier, secrecy and rumors to tensed conversations and open conflicts—I discuss the factors that influenced my choices. The analysis aims to reveal how the perception of responsibility and power roles that emerged in this context determined when and what was to be recorded and made available for editing and disclosure.","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"595 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133236627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Aliyah of 1949: Unpublished Migration Requests of Jews from Romania as Vehicles of Memory","authors":"R. Mateoc","doi":"10.57225/martor.2019.24.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2019.24.08","url":null,"abstract":"In 1949, the political context of the People’s Republic of Romania and of the newly founded Israeli state formally provided a framework for the immigration of Romanian Jews to Israel, upon the opening of the Israeli Legation in Bucharest in 1948. Our paper proposes an analysis of the Aliyah in 1949 as portrayed in migration requests addressed by members of the Jewish community all over Romania to the Israeli Legation in Bucharest. The requests, never published before, have been hosted since 1997 by the Center for Research on Romanian Jewry within the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. First, we address the history of the fonds, the hypotheses of historians on the submission of the requests, the shape of the material and characteristics of the documents. Second, our in-depth textual analysis allows a refined understanding of writing patterns, engagements, and reasons for requesting migration. Overall, our study contributes to the understanding of archives as “vehicles of memory” (Confino 2011) and of individual and group responses to historical transformations.","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124029394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sounding Out the Personal Archive","authors":"C. Câmpeanu, Mara Mărăcinescu","doi":"10.57225/martor.2019.24.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2019.24.09","url":null,"abstract":"\"This paper is about working with archives—finding, accessing, making them intelligible, producing and curating them—and what this process looks like when we privilege sound as material, process, instrument, and logic. In our audio project, we took personal archives as a starting point and through audio recording we produced two more related archives: a carefully edited and curated one, the podcast Americanii, and an unedited “rough” one, the totality of audio recordings (and some photographs) we produced in several weeks of fieldwork. Americanii is a curated oral archive that preserves personal stories gathered in the field while creating new narratives from them. It employs different sto¬rytelling structures that show the potential of the sound medium as a way to access and mediate these oral histories. Through this project, we interrogate the way personal archives can be under¬stood and approached, not just as material collections but rather as complex assemblages of objects, stories, memories, and sounds purposefully collected, managed, and produced in non-institutional settings. We show the potential and limits of the intimacy inherent in the process of audio recording, and how intimacy can be a way not just of accessing archives, but also of producing them.\"","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115039460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Little White / Black Book of the Ethnological Archive of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. 2009-2019","authors":"Iris Șerban, I. Popescu, Andra Tarara","doi":"10.57225/martor.2019.24.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2019.24.10","url":null,"abstract":"In the last 10 years, the Ethnological Archive of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant has gone through different stages during a period marked, on the one hand, by the settling down of the Museum, and on the other hand, by the passing of the torch from the “old” to the “new” generation. At present, the Archive is facing an ambiguous era: while the team blossoms, the lack of vision and financial resources in the wider Romanian cultural context pulls it back. We tell the journey of an Archive kept constantly alive by the people who managed, explored and contributed to its growth; we look back at the successes and the failures, in order to open up the Archive for reflection and possible solutions.","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131243096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The “Socialist Modernism” Platform: Online Archives and Knowledge Production in Central and Eastern Europe","authors":"Maria Cristache","doi":"10.57225/martor.2019.24.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2019.24.05","url":null,"abstract":"\"In this article I explore the relationship between online archives and the process of knowledge production by looking at visual representations of modernist architecture. I focus on the project “Socialist Modernism,” developed by the Bureau for Art and Urban Research (B.A.C.U.) with the purpose of collecting photos of buildings erected in Central and Eastern Europe. The goal is to determine what this project reveals about the built environment in socialism and its post-socialist transformation. For this purpose, I look at the content produced and disseminated by the project team through a visual studies methodological approach. Namely, I am interested in how the images are received, used, and (re)interpreted in visual studies. I discuss the case study of the Romanița Collective Housing Tower from Chișinău with the aid of theories of landscape, space, and architecture as a form of knowledge. This entails analyzing the content generated by B.A.C.U., the pictures themselves and the ways in which the public reacts to the material circulated. In addition to the visual and textual forms of knowledge produced by B.A.C.U., the viewers place these images into a wider context, reinterpret their significance, and sometimes contest the claims made by the project team. Based on these observations, this new type of archive seems to be shaped by the interaction between different actors, such as users of digital content, professional groups, and the state.\"","PeriodicalId":324681,"journal":{"name":"Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123673089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}