Noi culturi, noi antropologii - Humanitas

contentious nationalist politics and official ethnic categories.
They arrive at explanations that make use of the marked/
un-marked logic and the conclusion that ethnicity is about
experiencing this markedness and particularity (with their
hierarchical inflections) by all but Romanians (unless they
are placed, situationally, on a sensitive bottom, as in my
Sighişoara example). While this is a useful and productive
starting place, I argue that it stops before really useful analysis
begins, by unintentionally reifying the ethnic categories,
taking the focus off the cultural labor being performed, and
making ethnicity the exclusive experiential domain of the
ethnically marked subject. They do maintain, though, and
this is something I take as an inspiration, a methodological
focus on all kinds of people and all kinds of social interactions,
even if they don’t have a nominal or explicit ethnic
content. Hence, the focus on the “everyday“.
This paper also aims to focus on mundane moments —
like the ones I mentioned — paying attention to these spaces
and moments of ambivalence when people are forced to
make sense of situations, to impose categories and meanings
onto a world that is unnervingly ambiguous. My argument,
here, is that this is how ethnicity is actually made, in
moments like these-ethnicity, with all the national histories,
with all the institutional and structural forces (which I do
believe in) would not exist without such moments and the
cultural labor they involve. In this sense, the act of using
a category is an act constitutive of that category, and we
should think of people as active cultural agents. Moments
like the ones I described are collective exercises of remembering,
rehearsing, reproducing categories and their social
significance, and also collective exercises of recreating them
anew. The ambiguity of the social situation is key here, as it
highlights anxieties over belonging and difference that need
to be sorted out (I should probably just mention the national
anxiety over the rrom/român “confusion“).
From here, I would like to make three suggestions/questions
about researching ethnicity in Romania, which I hope
will be later taken up and debated:
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