Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will explore the ordinary as an instrument for tracking social changes, through examples of rapidly diverging lifestyles in a village from Romania.

Paper long abstract:

The inhabitants of the studied village have experienced a Socialist and then a Capitalist industrialization in the past fifty years. In the early 1990s deindustrialization abruptly hit the former Socialist countries, including Romania. Closing factories resulted in a high unemployment rate. A significant part of the unemployed urban population fled to the countryside, where life and economic activity, following the eradication of collective farms, was determined by decollectivization, repeasantization, demodernization processes. Two decades later th1e spread of the internet, the personal computers and the smartphones created local varieties of globalization, the so-called “glocality”. The main question: what does this “glocality” mean from the perspective of everyday life? One of the most exciting feature of today’s re-modernization in Romania consists in the layering of changing processes. While in the Western world the modernization processes came successively, then in most of the Romanian rural world the different modernization processes take place simultaneously – a process called by Hermann Bausinger “parallel polychronicity” (Bausinger 1989). For example: wideband internet has reached the village earlier than piped water.