Noi culturi, noi antropologii - Humanitas

not even in the context of the anthropology of Transylvania
or Romania, in particular in reference to property regimes
(of land, and, in my work, real estate, property restitution,
and tourist development in Sighişoara). But, this historical
materialist approach, while laying a useful foundation to my
analysis, did not take me as far as it could have, and did not
shed much light on how ethnicity actually works in the every
day, how it is produced and reproduced in the lived experience
of the people I worked with. It also did not provide
sufficient analytical tools to help me recognize the processes
that I, myself, as a Romanian, living and working in a multiethnic
context, was participating in.
In trying to figure this out, I arrived at what we, as cultural
anthropologists, do best: analyze and tell stories. So
here’s one of them.
I was walking home, through the citadel, when someone
called me right as I entered the small square in front of the
Clock Tower. Lia, Zsuzsi, and two other women were sitting
right around the corner, in the street. They were mostly facing
each other, chatting while paying a distracted kind of
attention to the possibility of tourists–potential customers
for Zsuzsi’s husband’s paintings.
One of the women, visibly pregnant and the only one
who didn’t live in the citadel, stood up and left, leaving behind
a plate with pizza remnants. We chatted for a while and
almost didn’t notice Hans coming out of the German Forum
building. I asked him how he was doing, expecting an elaborate
response and a prolonged participation in our chatting.
He did stop to talk to us, but seemed very stiff and a bit uncomfortable,
stiffer than usual, anyway. He obviously wasn’t
in a chatty mood this time, and just stood there, awkwardly,
with us, for a minute or so, without saying much. He didn’t
quite look directly at any of us, either, keeping his head high
and moving his eyes to the side, over and around all of us.
“He’s checking up on us“, both Zsuzsi and Lia said in a
choir after he left, and Lia rushed to explain defensively, as
if Hans had still been there, that she just brought pizza for
the pregnant woman “because I know she would crave it if
she saw me eating“.
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