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Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to focus on the most significant issues related to an at home social/cultural anthropology. It uses current Romanian context as a case study.

Paper long abstract:

The first aim of this paper is to focus on, in a diachronic way, the domain of Anthropology of Eastern Europe as a western construct, briefly analyzing the most interesting and involved moments it profiles (at this level, assessing mainly anthropologies of socialism and subsequently, post- socialism).

The second main goal of my paper is to see how and why an at-home social /cultural anthropology "appears" after 1990 and is created/accepted as such by several universities in Eastern Europe (I use the Romanian case as a detailed example). Who are the performers of this at home anthropology, why they choose to adopt such an identity, which are their professional and "ideological profiles"- are key questions of my approach.

It is, I think, compulsory to clarify also the relation between this "new type of research" and the cultural /social research traditions (local, "indigenous" ethnographies and folklore, and also, in a few cases, sociological approaches), how this at home anthropology and its performers view and confront to the traditional researches.

I am going to articulate all these questions and to offer updated answers to them, putting them in 2008 context, considering also the role of exchange programs and new educational policies profiled in a big part of Europe nowadays.