Noi culturi, noi antropologii - Humanitas

Second, I suggest that we should be thinking seriously
about looking for ethnicity not only in the ethnically marked
populations or explicitly ethnic social situations, but rather
in ethnographic moments like the ones I mentioned that
include Romanians and Romanianess. We should be thinking
about what it means to be Romanian in Romania as potentially
a question of ethnicity. It is not enough analysis to
say that to be Romanian is a privileged state of not having
to worry about being ethnically marked, a kind of cultural
silence or void, a blank not interesting or productive enough
for analysis. As my two examples show, being Romanian
means participating actively in the cultural dynamics responsible
for producing and reproducing ethnicity in the everyday
life. In the same way studying whiteness goes against
the grain of racial analysis yet offers interesting and useful
analytical results, studying Romanians and what it means to
be Romanian can offer valuable insights, especially when we
start thinking about it as a problematic and not homogeneous
category (as it intersects geographical region, citizenship,
class). Instead of taking Romanian/Romanianness for
granted, as a category, we should be documenting how it
has to be constantly reaffirmed and policed, how it cannot
exist on its own, but rather through the daily work of all
kinds of people.
This approach forecloses questions and concerns regarding
the politics of conducting and publishing research, both
in terms of subjecting people to the violence and intrusiveness
of research and in terms of giving voice to normally
silenced populations. We should be thinking critically about
who we research and why, especially in this moment, in Romania,
when vulnerable/accessible populations (the Roma,
the poor) are constantly mined by hit-and-run sociological
and ethnographic projects driven by the logic and mechanics
of professional project management and reporting. In designing
research projects, we should remain suspicious of a
population’s political and effective ability to say no to being
researched, and also of any claims of transparently representing
that population (even in the case of the best intentions).
This might mean making difficult choices, or choices
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