Noi culturi, noi antropologii - Humanitas

that make research practically and emotionally difficult. For
me, as a Romanian woman, looking critically at Romanians
and Romanianness could be one of those choices, especially
if it exposes processes that I am implicated in and benefitting
from.
My third and last point builds on the previous two, that
we should be thinking about the different scales of cultural
analysis involved here and also about their significance.
Thinking about ethnicity in Romania in a globalized/European
context raises questions about new cultural repertoires
being invoked, about a slippage into a differently racialized
thinking, anxieties and yearnings over participating in a
global whiteness and its perceived privileges, and so on. I
believe approaching ethnicity and race transnationally can
yield valuable results–and it already did, in work on the Roma’s
migration to France and Italy. In particular, I think it
is worth exploring the globally informed, yet local production
of “whiteness“ and racial difference and its articulation
with local historical understandings as well as with globally
inflicted formulations of race and racial difference. I see this
process as emerging at the intersection of historical processes
of producing ethnicity, an institutional and discursive
alignment with the EU, processes of class formation, and
various global pressures and influences. In other words, this
is an invitation to both systematic archaeologies of ethnicity
and race in Romania and studies that would fall under
the broad category of cultural studies and would explore
the productive tensions between these newer cultural repertoires
and the dynamics of the local context.
In some ways, this modest piece is a call to courage, creativity,
and curiosity in thinking about ethnicity in Romania,
and I insist on ethnographic solutions, solutions that pay attention
to the ordinary, to a social reality beyond the ethnically
marked, and to cultural dynamics of varying scales. As
costly as ethnography might seem–in terms of time and effort–it
holds the promise of attending productively to these
concerns.
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