The condition of anthropology in-between
institutional structures and individual performances.
Elements of politics of anthropology in Romania

Enikö Magyari-Vincze, Associate Professor, University Babes-Bolyai, Cluj

The institutionalization of any discipline always happens within a network of power relations, it involves debates on naming and processes of positioning inside the academia, but is also under the impact of the broader political and social context. Wherever appears, anthropology is a product of its times, its concepts and perspectives are socially embedded. It is shaped by the existing disciplinary field and the power relations into which it wants to integrate, but as well by the political/ social context that facilitates certain researches and makes impossible others. That is why anthropology always and everywhere has its own politics (of naming and positioning). It is exactly the politics of anthropology in Romania that I would like to address in my paper, focusing briefly (1) on the disciplinary reference points of doing anthropology in our country, and (2) on the broader academic and social conditions in which this discipline is performed.

The case of cultural anthropology in Romania, and in particular at Babe_-Bolyai University from Cluj – to which I refer in this paper – is a mirror through which one may see the ways in which a subject under making reflects and produces the general trends of the formation of the local “scientific community” under the conditions of the post-socialist transformations. It will be my conclusion that while anthropology seems to be in vogue in the whole region, there are several institutional and personal obstacles that prevent the constitution of anthropology departments in our country. And there are many reasons for why anthropology is developed as a set of individual performances not always integrated into formal institutional structures, i.e. it exists in-between institutional structures and individual performances. One may say that this trend might be discovered everywhere in the world, but in our case is a very mechanism that structures the field.

1. Talking about the disciplinary context of anthropology I would like to consider here three major reference points: the condition of anthropology as a Western product, the paradigm of local traditional ethnologies, and the current developments of other disciplines.

1.1. As far as the first issue is concerned – anthropology as a Western product – let me emphasize here three concerns to be considered by a local politics of anthropology:

• the link between anthropology and colonialism, which was nicely exposed by many so-called “Third World” scholars, who stressed that anthropology as a Western discipline was a product of the colonial encounter between the “West” and the “Rest” of the world;
  
  
• the changing positions of Western anthropology in the post-colonial world, the ways in which it tried to transform itself into a discipline practiced “at home”, in the Western complex societies and aimed to cope with the process of globalization while being trained to research localities;
  
  
• the Western anthropological knowledge produced in and on Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular in and on Romania, which transformed this region – as David Kideckel put it – into the “utter otherness” of the West (Kideckel: “Utter Otherness: Western Anthropology and East European Political Economy”, in S. Parman, ed.: Europe in the Anthropological Imagination, Prentice Hall, 1998: 134-147; see the Romanian translation of the article in “Întâlniri multiple. Antropologi Occidentali în Europa de Est”, edited by E. Magyari-Vincze, C. Quigley, G. Troc, Cluj: EFES, 2000).

1.2 Further on, when we think about the politics of our discipline in the neighborhood of local traditional ethnologies, there is a need to evaluate – among others – the following aspects:

• the link between ethnology and the formation of nation-states and the production of national cultures, and eventually the complicity between ethnology and nationalism to the extent to which both essentialize and reify national identities;
  
  
• in the case of Romania, beside this general feature, we have to observe the ways in which the Romanian and Hungarian folklore studies maintained the boundaries between “Romanians” and “Hungarians” considered as internally homogenous ethnic groups; we could see that the focus on folklore, on the description of the cultural forms through which the so-called “national character” is reproduced resulted in the neglect of the cultural exchanges and in considering cultural mixture as an anomaly;
  
  
• the changes occurred within “European ethnology” have to be considered as well in this context, to see a “good practice” of renewal both in theoretical and methodological terms (like the case of the team of ethnologists from Lund University working on the construction of Swedish national identity and its existence as a cultural battleground).

1.3. At last but not least, locating our discipline in the context of other social sciences one may observe that since 1990 at each major university from Romania the newly established sociology, psychology and political science departments managed to define their sphere of interest, to be recognized as such and to get financial support within the academic environment under re-making. Definitely it was history and philosophy that have lost terrain due to this restructuring but are still struggling for maintaining their hegemony. In this context some scholars formed in these fields started to introduce first some introductory and methodological courses on anthropology, then some dealing with different subject matters, while many topics addressed by sociology, psychology, political science, history, philosophy started to be anthropologized.

As far as the academic human potential is concerned in these terms, one may observe at least three categories of people (“generations”, but not necessarily defined by age), who are defining themselves as performing anthropology, and may have different understandings of it. The “old generation” of scholars, belonging to the university’s status quo before 1989, linked previously to folklore studies and to sociology, who for many times are doing qualitative research of a monographic style that serves the idea of “national culture”. The “middle generation” of faculty who got positions within the university structure after 1989, followed the strategy of building up at the same time new institutions and their personal career, and tried to catch up the Western anthropological production without having a formal education in this domain. The “new generation” of scholars, who, after graduating in Romania on several fields, enroll into different Ph.D. anthropology programs from Western Europe and United States, and, completing that, fail to re-integrate “at home”.

Under these conditions in which anthropology exists everywhere and nowhere – being likely to be absorbed by other disciplines not necessarily interested to allow anthropology to occupy its own room –, one has to be able to define its particular features, which might make others to accept that this discipline is worst to be developed in its own terms and not only as an appendices of other disciplines. Let me stress here the ability of anthropology to have a very specific contribution to the following performances:

• to over-come what the already mentioned Orvar Löfgren called “home blindness” (because the rich ethnographic material and the comparative study of different cultures help us to turn our familiar, taken-for-granted conditions into object of study and to learn to take a distance towards our naturalized experiences);
  
  
• to raise the awareness of the social embedded nature of the concepts and methods that we use while researching our own society (because athropology developed a critical and self-reflexive apparatus that is able to perform that);
  
  
• to deal with the challenge of the passion for difference but without entering into the trap of the culturalist approach (because social and cultural anthropology is a terrain within which debates on the link between the cultural, the social and the political dimension of human life prevented the constitution of the hegemony of pure cultural explanations);
  
  
• to combine detachment from and involvement into different societies and cultures by the means of doing fieldwork on a foreign terrain and developing a comparative understanding of “us” and “them” (however this traditionally very particular anthropological practice encounters obstacles of different kinds in a country like Romania, local scholars might dare to want to do and should have the chance to really do investigations in remote places becoming equal partners with their institutionally more better placed Western colleagues).

2. In order to outline some features of our broader academic and social environment in which anthropology is performed I would like to emphasize the following:

• the ways in which disciplines are struggling with each other to gain financial and professional recognition;
  
  
• the lack of communication between individuals, groups and university centers;
  
  
• the low social and financial prestige of the academic work and the need to look for them in extra-academic spheres;
  
  
• the difficulties of integrating new generations of researches into formal university structures;
  
  
• the decrease of the financial resources that support empirical research;
  
  
• the inequalities that underlie the co-operation between “East” and “Vest”.
  

These are among the main factors, which shape the field where individual scholars perform their work on anthropology, imagine their possibilities and limits in doing fieldwork, participate on theoretical debates and/or belong to formal scholarly communities. Under these conditions one might observe that “cultural anthropology” covers multiple understandings, and several institutional and individual strategies that cope with an environment where decisions are taken for to many times according to the interests of people holding key positions within the academic establishment (having more or less explicit links with different political concerns/ ideologies). Occasionally being appropriated by sociology, other times by history and every so often by ethnology – from time to time anthropology is considered as a threat to the “national sciences”, other times is used to prove the “Europeanness” of local endeavors.


Talking about anthropology at Babe_-Bolyai University from Cluj in the light of the above-mentioned general features, it is to be mentioned that it exists through several university courses, publications and events, through individual/ collective researches, informal networks and some formal institutional structures. However there are some institutional performances to be recognized as successful, one has to have a critical insight towards them. The educational part on this domain was organized since the academic year 1996-1997 within an M.A. program on cultural anthropology, that changed its name for three times (once into European Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, then into Anthropology and Multicultural Studies), eventually becoming a set of dispersed courses (some of which are reproducing the spirit of the old style folklore studies) with a shifting theoretical orientation. The “Section on Cultural & Social Anthropology” of the Institute for Cultural Anthropology (see http://www.antropologie.salve.ro, or http://www.anthropology.salve.ro) tries to re-connect the educational and research potential unused within the formal university structure, but fails to imagine a long-term development plan of institutionalization. Eventually it depends on the capacity of individuals to belong to an institution that doesn’t give academic positions (and, as such, on the degree to which they can afford this luxury). Paradoxically, it seems to be more capacity on cultural anthropology than the university is able to institutionally use, and there is more will to build up new programs under the name of anthropology without valorizing this potential. At the same time it looks to be a stronger interest of students for anthropology than the capacity of Romanian institutions to employ them, and one may expect that many graduates will emigrate after unsuccessfully trying to get hired at home. For many times, our graduates experience their studies on anthropology at the masters level as a great professional adventure that forms their perspective and generates knowledge to be used in other fields. Anthropology, turned into a personal passion, at the best case, makes a difference in the way in which they perform their jobs and perceive themselves wherever they manage to work.

Under these conditions, and due to the vogue that anthropology enjoys, there is the risk of running programs on this domain without the necessary infra-structural support, without good libraries, without financial background for doing fieldwork even in Romania and not to speak about the impossibility to do it abroad, without national Ph.D. programs on anthropology, and so on and so forth. And there is a hazard in using the term “anthropology” as if it would have a taken-for-granted meaning for everybody, or even the danger to perform something else under this masque.


Knowing that there are quite many initiatives of “domesticating” anthropology in Romania, at this moment the question is whose anthropology will have the chance to institutionalize at different universities? Who will have the power to take decisions within the existing academic establishment, who holds key positions that allow this? Who will remain “outside”, constructing alternative institutions of education, research and/ or of any kind of social and cultural activism? Who will leave for good from Romania at the best considering it as a place where to do fieldwork from time to time? And, beside its theoretical and methodological baggage, which is going to be anthropology’s social agenda? What will be its social significance beyond occupying a prestigious location in the academic environment? The latter issue is as important, as are those regarding its scientific condition. Because, as already mentioned - being shaped by a political background -, anthropology always struggled to occupy a responsible position in-between participative involvement into and critical detachment from its subject.

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