Anthropological Adventures in Ceausescu's Romania

For the study of contemporary topics, the necessity to have a balanced and informed perspective of the daily reality is part of the research. The field research is useful not only to anthropology or sociology, but in political science, international relations and contemporary history as well. Not only the interviews with those who effectively took part to events might reveal important information for a specific study - for example, the way in which a certain decision was took, what the circumstances were, who were effectively involved and on what grounds - but also a certain atmosphere could offer valuable hints for contributing to a exhaustive conclusion.

Katherine Verdery extensively covered issued related to nationalism, ethnic relations and social system in Romania, starting with the 1970s. His personal human and academic experiences were presented in Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology (2004, 43: 134 - 145). Starting from her personal experiences with the communist system in Romania she had a broader perspective of the ways in which this system as such functioned in the real life. Far from the very theoretical approaches stating that, in fact, Ceausescu's Romania was a fully centralized country at all levels - a reality available from the point of view of the decision-making system - at the level of the society as such, they were areas where, rather anarchic forces were at work. The struggle for daily surviving, for example, made possible, through a system of snow ball dependencies, the individual initiative, even at the form of the bribe and corruption. In a way, the individuals part of the system were interested in allowing such "freedoms", because themselves were in sooner or later beneficiaries of this pre- and anti-economic ways of behavior. I wanted for me and my family a better lunch, so I needed to find those providers of products lacking from the market. The providers themselves were helped by individuals from the system, direct beneficiaries, to bring and distribute their products on the black-market as well as for the protection to do so safely. More carefully and in exchange of dramatic moral compromises, the system was operating in a similar way in the field of "market of ideas": allowed limited trips abroad, the writers learned how to bargain with the censorship in order to get published etc. The dying body was took out to get some fresh air, only for a very short period of time, and without previous acknowledgement, only to offer the illusion of a longer life, even not possible to move or to breath normally.