Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses upon the analysis of the recent past and the present of a transylvanian microregion (Romania): the understanding of the social and cultural attitudes of the rural communities of Transylvania, the memory practices, and the political ideologies and discourses about the forms of rurality.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses upon the analysis of the recent past and the present of a Romanian microregion. Our research investigates the social and cultural changes, and memory practices after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. It tries to answer the question relating to the way in which the rural area has experienced these changes and to identify the new as well as the surviving (similar, different, and complementary) forms of rurality, peasant or post-peasant modes of thinking and practice.

Certainly, the analysis of memorial practices can be carried out from many standpoints and discerned into various categories; for the present study I have chosen two major ones. My research focuses on production of heritage as a process, and analyses the practices of locating the (created) past in public spaces. Performing memory, regarded as ritual usage and symbolical seizing, opened another perspective for my research. By following how the elements of heritage is preserved and performed (public celebrations), I intended to present the actual cultural mechanisms that are connected to the past.

My analysis encompasses the events of creating a tradition, ways of interpreting new histories and memories, the attitudes of commemoration and the strategies of neglecting and legitimizing. It shows – first of all – how are these represented in narratives about past, history and life,and the social use and functions of heritage, as they occur in rural (and transnational) contexts.

What happens with tradition in the classical sense, and what counts as tradition in the age of translocal networks and transnational lifestyles? What does the transformation of tradition (i.e.thedetraditionalization, the post-modernization, the religious life, the cultural/collective memory, the individual and communal identity strategies, everyday lifestyles) mean in the context of increasing transfrontal migration, in the presence of changing medial environments? What social and economic consequences does the change of tradition have at the community level? And how does it influence the situations of ethnic cooperation and community resilience?