Paper short abstract:

My paper aims at analyzing the ways in which the ethnologists (Folklore Studies specialists and Ethnographers) displayed their activities, constructing and profiling specific forms and contents of their domains during the totalitarian regime, in Romania.

Paper long abstract:

My intention is to deconstruct different decades of the mentioned period, with a special focus on 50-ies and 80-ies, for reasons I am going to explore in the paper. Specifically I am going to deepen the topic, considering the scientific activities, researches planned, conducted around two institutions placed in Cluj-Napoca/Transylvania: the Cluj Archive of Folklore, and the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania.

In particular, my paper attempts to focus on the specific strategies developed by the totalitarian regime to control the ethnological scientific productions and research in general. How the totalitarian state did construct these strategies,how they were conducted and performed through agents of different institutions of control, which were their limits? - are main research questions, addressed in my paper. I also aim to analyze the ways in which the researchers working in the mentioned institutions faced these challenges, how they perceived all these intrusions and crossed over those times. Different levels of compromise and resistence they were exposed to and made, as well as the ways in which particular strategies of survival had been constructed in specific contexts, need to be put and addressed in the general political and ideological frames of that period and in their particular dynamics. Associated to these main research topics, my paper will tackle also the ways in which the relationships between the Western anthropologists and local/Cluj specialists in Folklore studies and Ethnograhy had been articulated and configured, questioning how deep the regime, through its agents, interfered, attempting to control them.