Paper short abstract:

My paper aims at analysing the impact of ideologies and cultural policies on the research and exhibitions projects, launched and completed around the Archive of Folklore and the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, in Cluj, Romania, after 1945.

Paper long abstract:

My paper aims at analyzing the impact of ideologies and cultural policies on the research and exhibitions projects, launched and completed around the Archive of Folklore and the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, in Cluj, Romania. I use these case studies, addressing how and why the policies of the focused on institutions, the exhibition projects and research plans had been altered under the pressure of centralized decisions in difficult historical, political and ideological contexts. Particularly, I aim at approaching the researchers' and museographers' coping and protesting strategies, configured and developed in the totalitarian period, in Romania (during the Cold War).

Radical changes of these perspectives had been produced in the research policies beginning with the 50-ies , I aim to approach the meanings and the follow-ups of the imposed "turn' and to analyze its impact on research and exhibitions tackling them also in the second half of the 60-ies, when another shift is produced. I intend to address how and why certain changes of cultural policies are produced, and to see the ways the researchers and museographers responded to them and to the related challenges of turbulent times: do they adopt strategies of coping or protesting, are they dissidents, do they internalize the new research horizons: if so- why? All these are questions permanently formulated in my paper. I also intend to update the discussion and to look at the nowadays perspectives and policies of the focused on institutions.