Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the ambivalent legacy of Romanian historical sociologist and anthropologist Henri H. Stahl (1901-91) not just for the village communities of Vrancea, which he studied in the 1920s, but also for the social sciences in contemporary Romania.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with the legacy of Romanian historical sociologist and anthropologist Henri H. Stahl (1901-91) not just for the village communities of Vrancea, which he studied in the 1920s, but also for the social sciences in contemporary Romania. As well as dozens of books and numerous published articles spanning the disciplines of anthropology, history and sociology, Stahl produced rich autobiographical writings and gathered a large collection of historical documents. We abstain here from a clear-cut separation between the communities of those being written about and those doing the writing: the former subjects of research are now themselves collectors and ethnographers, joining the social scientists in their attempts to build upon and, inevitably, re-write Stahl's legacy. Unsurprisingly, the constitution of an ethnographic archive inspires graphic agency in the form of selective appropriation, assimilation or even reenactment. Since Stahl himself was interested in telescoping the present into the past, it is perhaps fitting that his work should now turn into a temporal vector. In the process, the future of local forest commons as a social-material regime and that of the social sciences as a national disciplinary endeavor have become entangled. From our double perspective - revisiting Stahl's interwar fieldwork sites on the one hand (Mateescu), and engaging with the ambivalent institutional echoes of his Marxist historical sociology on the other (Guga) - we are interested in exploring the politics and aesthetics of knowledge practices that are defined as well as circumscribed by the potential of Stahl's work.