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Accepted Paper:

Challenging rurality: modern intrusions and responses to them  
Alina Ioana Branda (Babes-Bolyai University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper is the result of an intensive fieldwork conducted in Săvădisla, a village placed near Cluj, in Transylvania, the western part of Romania.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is the result of an intensive fieldwork conducted in Săvădisla, a village placed near Cluj, in Transylvania, the western part of Romania. In the last few years, the community of Săvădisla and the neighbor ones had been exposed to different changes, triggered by the highway construction in their immediate vicinity.

Despite the fact that the entire project has produced and still produces debates, arguments, political splits, all these being much reflected in media, with different connotations, seen with subjective eyes, distorted in and by different political discourses, its consequences on the exposed communities are not so much discussed and even less approached scientifically.

Analyzing current narratives on highway construction, I am going to approach issues such as: new meanings of properties, inhabitants relations with material goods, cultural patrimony, the dynamics marginal groups-prosperous ones in new conditions, material responses to new challenges, ethnicity as a good.

In particular terms, my presentation offers answers to certain interrogations: are there big changes in the life conditions, in constructing and representing social networks, organizing households, rural economies? Are there any modifications in the meanings of private properties, in the owner's views or, generally, in the social imaginary: houses, households, old costumes, rituals, other patrimonial goods?

Panel P31
Empirical research of modern rurality: towards multilocality and interdisciplinarity
  Session 1