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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography from a Szekler subalpine area, this paper shows how people in a partly depopulated peripheral region creatively combine local networks, state benefits, and landscape resources to face uncertainty, revealing resilient practices that challenge deficit views of marginality.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines everyday life in a subalpine region of Szeklerland (Transylvania), where a small population inhabits scattered villages in a historically and geopolitically peripheral area. Transylvania has long been shaped by imperial legacies, shifting borders, and competing nation-building projects. Socialist modernization intensified these dynamics through depopulation and the restructuring of agricultural and labor practices, disrupting earlier forms of land use and locally embedded identity ties. More recently, residents have become partially detached from their surrounding environment while simultaneously confronting new ecological pressures, such as the increasing presence of wild animals within village territories.

Despite these processes of marginalization and decline, the region has not been abandoned. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (and using also literary examples, e.g. Stefánsson), the paper explores how inhabitants mobilize dense local networks and creatively combine diverse resources, ranging from state benefits to informal and experimental income-generating strategies. Landscape and remoteness, often framed as obstacles, are reworked into assets through tourism. Cultural performances and the social circulation of locally produced food are revived. Community-based practices are re-signified as pragmatic responses to economic and demographic uncertainty. These strategies can be understood through the lens of débrouillardise: a flexible, often improvisational mode of survival.

By foregrounding the coexistence of peripherality and centrality, scarcity and multiplicity of resources, vulnerability and resilience, the paper challenges deficit-based approaches to marginal regions. It argues for moving beyond dichotomous frameworks of center and periphery and proposes to approach such locations as sites where alternative configurations of belonging, value, and well-being are actively negotiated.