The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in ...the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation's forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.
The rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century
forged a new ecological order in North American and Western
European states, radically transforming the environment through
science and ...technology in the name of human progress. Far less
known are the dramatic environmental changes experienced by Eastern
Europe, in many ways a terra incognita for environmental historians
and anthropologists. A New Ecological Order explores, from
a historical and ethnographic perspective, the role of state
planners, bureaucrats, and experts-engineers, agricultural
engineers, geographers, biologists, foresters, and architects-as
agents of change in the natural world of Eastern Europe from 1870
to the early twenty-first century. Contributors consider
territories engulfed by empires, from the Habsburg to the Ottoman
to tsarist Russia; territories belonging to disintegrating empires;
and countries in the Balkan Peninsula, Central and Eastern Europe,
and Eurasia. Together, they follow a rhetoric of "correcting
nature," a desire to exploit the natural environment and put its
resources to work for the sake of developing the economies and
infrastructures of modern states. They reveal an eagerness among
newly established nation-states, after centuries of imperial
economic and political impositions, to import scientific knowledge
and new technologies from Western Europe that would aid in their
economic development, and how those imports and ideas about nature
ultimately shaped local projects and policies.
The material relics of socialism continue to affect present-day rural Romania. This article explores the nexus of socialist/post-socialist agricultural infrastructure, groundwater, soil ...transformations, the privatization process and the constitution of power relations along the Lower Danube rural areas. Positioning ourselves in the anthropology of infrastructure, we document both ethnographically and with Geographic Information Systems tools the social and political consequences of broken agricultural infrastructure in a village located on the banks of the Lower Danube, Romania. We show how the local political elite is able to exploit the surfacing of groundwater in their favour, resulting in economic loss only for small landholders and villagers without power. The interface of the multiple temporalities inherent in infrastructure with the various materialities of groundwater – its propensity to leak, infiltrate and surface – precipitated the emergence of a new ecological order. The new hybrid ecology is made up of pre-socialist feral groundwater, the socialist ‘hydraulic society’ that reclaimed agricultural land, and the post-socialist political economy. We engage a more-than-human perspective in order to offer a more sophisticated – and realistic – picture of post-socialist rural power relations.
This article explores the aspirations of a small community in rural Bulgaria, devastated by postsocialist economic decline. The community's economic and moral aspirations are linked to the ruins of a ...thermal bath and the existence of a "miraculous spring"- formerly the source of local prosperity and pride. In the context of a vanishing agro-industrial sector, deindustrialisation and a mass exodus of the local population, the bath is the locus of capitalist fantasies for the villagers, who believe foreign investments will revive the entire community.
This article seeks to explore the responses of villagers from north-western Bulgaria to neoliberal policies promoted by the post-socialist state in rural areas. We show the two strategies people ...mobilise in order to defend their interests. A first method is the everyday peasant strategy of resistance: quiet, covered and unopened acts of defiance against the neoliberal policies concerning food acquisition and food production. A second method of reaction is the open protest organised against a newly established polluting enterprise, which is feared to threaten their livelihoods. In both cases villagers use historically formed transnational networks based on friendship and kinship.
Climate change perception in Romania Cheval, Sorin; Bulai, Ana; Croitoru, Adina-Eliza ...
Theoretical and applied climatology,
07/2022, Letnik:
149, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the last decades, anthropogenic drivers have significantly influenced the natural climate variability of Earth’s atmosphere. Climate change has become a subject of major interest for different ...levels of our society, such as national governments, businesses, local administration, or citizens. While national and local policies propose mitigation and adaptation strategies for different sectors, public perception is a key component of any implementation plan. This study investigates the CC perception in Romania, based on a national-scale online survey performed in the spring of 2020, aiming to outline the prominence of environmental and CC issues, level of information and interest, perceived causes, changes perceived in meteorological phenomena at the regional scale, perceived impacts, and the psychological representation of the CC. The study investigates single causal factors of perception. We found that particularly (i) the regional differences on climate change intensity strongly bias the perception of CC causes; (ii) age is very likely to influence the acceptance of CC, the importance of environmental issues, and the levels of information and interest; while (iii) age, gender, and place of residence (rural–urban) are very likely to control the changes perceived in the occurrence of various meteorological phenomena, and their impact. This research is the first statistically relevant analysis (± 4%, statistical significance) developed at national and regional scales and the only study of climate change perception performed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania. Its results may represent the baseline for more in-depth research.
This article tells the story of possibly the first ecological restoration project in the postsocialist world (1994), which is an example of a broader set of ecological restorations carried out in ...Eastern Europe. By exploring the two intertwined processes of the ecological restoration of an island in the Danube Delta and the advancement of neoliberal economic ideas through land reform, decollectivization, and land privatization, we contribute to the understanding of ecological restoration in societies in turmoil. We engage a social sciences perspective in order to show the entanglement between ecological restoration processes and institutions, political arrangements, and various forms of land tenure. This theoretical perspective also shows a model all too often present in ecological restoration projects: a proclivity for adopting a neoliberal approach toward administrating natural resources at the expense of local ecological knowledge and the local administration of natural resources.
Workings of the State Dorondel, Ştefan; Popa, Mihai
Social analysis,
12/2014, Letnik:
58, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this article we analyze local distribution practices within an EU food aid program in Romania. We show that an understanding of this program's implementation can contribute to our understanding of ...how the state works in present-day Romania and, more generally, to the anthropology of the state. We examine the ways in which local-level bureaucrats gain discretion and exercise it when implementing the program. By securing greater control over a scarce transnational resource, local officials are able to shape national policy according to local distributive models. The described distribution process is conducive to community building, although in very different ways in the two rural settings being studied. We argue for a relational analysis of the workings of the state that explores the embeddedness of local actors and their participation in historically shaped power relations.
Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, ...from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources.When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.
