Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the making of domestic textiles intersects with a range of dilemma around materiality, value, personhood & belonging in the context of complex social transformations and changing everyday lives in rural Romania.

Paper long abstract:

Textile making and repair, performed predominantly in households, continue to be one of the most ubiquitous forms of DIY across Eastern Europe. Under socialism, textile material cultures were embedded in diverse and conflicting discourses, practices and values (Crowley and Reid 2000, Bartlett 2010). This paper asks what the changing domestic textile production can tell us about the shifting notions of personhood and belonging in post-socialist contexts.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with home-based textile makers in rural Romania, this paper situates the materiality and practice of textile projects in the wider processes of negotiation, adaptation and DIY entrepreneurialism. Firstly, textile making will be situated in a historical context of dramatic post-war & post-1989 transformations of the Romanian countryside. Secondly, textile projects will be discussed as forms of performance, making do, economising, strategizing and exchanging textiles that can shed light on the significance of material culture as a reflection of changing notions of labour and private & public life. Thirdly, textile-making will be explored in the light of significant shifts in forms of kinship and community, as well as the constitution of personhood and belonging. Finally, the paper will reflect on how notions of subjectivity and community, work and skill (or lacking skill) are embedded in wider material ecologies and diverging everyday lives in a Romanian village.

References:

Bartlett, D. (2010). FashionEast: the spectre that haunted socialism. MIT press.

Crowley, D., & Reid, S. E. (Eds.). (2010). Pleasures in Socialism: leisure and luxury in the Eastern Bloc. Northwestern University Press.