Beschreibung
How do rural communities remember a socialist past marked by coercion, adaptation, and creativity? This book explores the memory of Romanian rural socialism (1949-1989) through life stories, archival documents, and local museums, revealing competing and complementary ways of remembering the past.
Focusing on peasant revolts, deportations, land collectivization, gendered labor, Roma social worlds, consumption, and nostalgia, it uncovers the cultural textures of everyday socialism that often remain absent from official histories. The book shows how ordinary people negotiated state power, reworked traditions, and forged meanings that continue to shape post-socialist identities.
Combining ethnography, oral history, textual analysis, and museum studies, this innovative study offers a rich basis for transnational comparison and contributes to broader debates on memory, socialism, and its afterlives in Eastern Europe and beyond.
Raluca Mateoc is Senior Research Associate in Religious Studies within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.