Being (how is that for a pompous title? ;o))

“Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay.
[…]
Is it not your breath that has erected and hardened the structure of your bones? And is it not a dream which none of you remember having dreamt, that built your city and fashioned all there is in it? Could you but see the tides of that breath you would cease to see all else. And if you could hear the whispering of the dream you would hear no other sound.”
(K.Gibran)

I guess this kind of thinking makes clear the point about the limits of agency, and could make clear how Plato came to think about eternal shadows of being that we can know only through a glass, darkly.

Giovanna Reggiani

On TV, the funeral of Giovanna, the story around an Italian woman (47) murdered by a Romanian rrom/gypsy (24) has dominated news reports of the last few days. Images: the grief-stricken husband is held by two friends while the coffin is moved into the church. Lots of politicians and notabilities attend the funeral service. In Bucharest, Realitatea TV has made a panel for Prayers for Giovanna, where people leave flowers, candles, and write messages on a whiteboard. Romanian officials react. Italian people make comments. The Romanian Foreign Ministry gives statements. On the outskirts of Rome bulldozers flatten the quasi-shantytowns built by Romanian rromi/gypsies. The rromi/gypsies in Italy are in distress because they may be expelled, and their dwellings destroyed. The Romanian premier accuses the Mayor of Rome of exploiting the events for his own purposes.
Populist, racist and moderate voices all shout at each other. As usual, the media does not just make the news, but is an arena for more engrained views, giving a (very specific) perspective. I think there are plenty of reasons, all not very flattering to ‘Europeans’, for which this story broke.

In Romania, discrimination against rromi/gypsies is a daily encounter. The word used in everyday speech is ‘tigan’. Never have I heard anyone use, in a non-parodyings way, any other word. Mass media (opportunistic and relatively emotional and populistic) uses a mixture. It is admitted that there are also ‘tigani cuminti’ (nice, well-behaved rromi/gypsies) who do not display any criminal behaviour, but they’re exceptions to the rule. Romanian Romanians who break laws are not criminals (except if they’re politicians), but they merely are resourceful (se descurca) or they are clever (destepti). Please note the hypocrisy inherent in this view denouncing a high degree of nationalist-exclusive sentiment-conviction.
I am routinely confronted with statements combining the following: dirty gypsies/they cannot do any work properly, they are bad craftsmen/they steal/they have made our nation a gypsy nation in Europe/they are not civilised/they refuse to work/they refuse to send their children to school/we know what it is really like to live with gypsies, not like those people in the EU who accuse us of discrimination/if we are not careful, we are going to be a minority in our own country, because the gypsies are still making children, even though they are too poor to raise them/go and have a look in X (insert village with majority of gypsies here), I was shocked, I thought this cannot be Romania, this must be Zimbabwe/………/
This type of attitude goes right across gender, age, class, and level of education.
The rrom/gypsy is, as others have pointed out too, the incarnation of a very hierarchical viewing of society, and it is pretty much equivalent with foreigner of the worst kind. You cannot get much more alien than being a gypsy.
I keep forgetting how much racism there is in large parts of any population.

The Gândul of Friday 2nd November contains an editorial by Bogdan Chirieac that renders the Romanian angle very well. This newspaper is not a tabloid. I read this, I understand all the words, and yet, I think, this is weird. Back to the rhetoric that I still strive to understand. The article in question is entitled ‘The punishment of Romania for Rrominia?’
I’ll translate it entirely.
“A raping criminal, of Romanian citizenship, of rrom ethnicity, has horrified Italy again. To the horrible crime against a woman of 47 years of age, committed by this man, can be added other frightening crimes committed in the last months of other Romanian citizens of rrom ethnicity. Rome’s government, assembled in an emergency meeting, as happens only in the case of war or natural disaster, has taken the firm decision to expel foreigners. The word ‘Romanian’ is not pronounced in the decree. But three quarters of arrests in Rome this year – 2700 persons – are Romanian citizens. All the Romanians commit 37 percent of thefts of Italy and over 15 percent of the murders [rendered as: asasinate]. The Italians, and, along with them, the French, Spanish, British, German, have every right to be angry. In their home, citizens of an Eastern state admitted at the limit into the European community affect their way of life in a concerning way: they steal from them, they plunder them, they kill them.
The Europeans have every right to be angry, but not the right of making the mistake of condemning the Romanian people [popor= people] in its entirety, for the mode of life of rrom minorities. The preservation of the rights of minorities, the encouragement of their respective languages and cultures are European values. Romania was judged harshly during the entire process of EU integration, for the fact that it discriminates against the rromi, that it does not respect their laws and traditions. Today, Europe is confronted with the problems of the rromi that were, until now, hidden from view. In the name of political correctness, Europe hesitates to describe things as they are. The gypsies (tiganii) are nomadic populations throughout Europe, not only in Romania. The way of life of some of them severely affects the European model. Stealing is learnt at the same time as walking, the children are not let to go to school, the little girls are married and even give birth when they are 10-11 years old. The gypsies live in tents, horse carriages, and, more modern, in caravans. There is a parallel justice system with an immediate carrying out of the sentence. The social integration is, as such, refused under all aspects in relation to education, family planning, medical assistance, professional development. These are the traditions of some gypsy populations of Europe. Does the EU want to preserve this way of life? If yes, then the public opinion needs to be prepared and informed in this direction. If not, the solution is not, under no circumstances, neither the condemnation of the Romanian people, nor the deportation or isolation of gypsies at the margins of the cities, as has been proposed by Mister Gigi Becali [Party of the New Generation and owner of Steaua Bucharest, a shepherd who got fantastically rich after 1990, known for his populist ‘policies’ consisting largely in money donations to deprived people to catch votes and for his lack of a programme] in Romania. The solution can only be found in the passing from an NGO policy priority to a European strategy, similar to the process of integration of the other minorities of the EU. The results will not be, however, spectacular or fast. In France, the integration of Maghreb minorities is a half-failure. The brother of the French Justice minister, Mrs Rachida Dati, of Moroccan origin, are or have been in prison. In the last years, the ‘garbage’, as Sarkozy has called them, of the peripheries of Paris have lit up, in a revolt, over 10000 cars. In strong and rigorous Germany, the integration of the Turks has not happened even after 40 years. The Turkish quartier of modern and cosmopolitan Berlin looks like an ill-famed suburb of Istanbul, and a lot of its inhabitants do not speak German, even if they were born and raised here.
The simple truths known by any police officer of Europe are not told by the politicians except by whispering and in the absence of TV cameras. President Basescu, for whom gypsies are ‘stinking’, does not have the courage to tell Europe that in the nomad tribes having a bath is not a normal tradition, and that people smear tallow over their bodies for protection from illnesses and charms. The Romanian people can be called thieving, raping and criminal, but this will not bring peace and security to the streets of Rome, Paris or Madrid. This is only possible by the recognition of the problems of the gypsies and their solving through a European way [pe cale europeana].”

A lot could be said about this piece. I do not question that integration is a delicate and difficult topic, but I am personally concerned with the increasingly restricting legislation as far as migrants are concerned. I think as far as internal migration within the EU is concerned, it is wrong to impose restrictions. I see it as a consequence of an increase of xenophobia, in an increasingly unstable economic environment, and, let me put it this way, I might be left-wing, but not entirely opposed to necessary reforms as far as work is concerned, as long as certain conditions are fulfilled. But this is an entire discussion for which there exist better arenas than this post.
Let me keep the comments brief, all in the line of ‘deux poids, deux measures’ really…

- Note the exhortation not to confuse Romanians and gypsies, juxtaposed with the conflation of Europe and the EU
- Note the conflation of EU accession and integration in the case of Romanians, and the rhetorically empty use of ‘integration’ meaning assimilation
- Note the value-laden, and spatially differentiating descriptions of the progressive West and the backward, unmodern East (epitomised by the Turks). Note, in the same vein, the juxtaposition of the EU as a torchlight of progressiveness, and that will solve Romania’s national problems as well as every other country’s
- ‘The solution can only be found in the passing from an NGO policy priority to a European strategy, similar to the process of integration of the other minorities of the EU’ – what on earth does he want to say? As far as I
- Note how the Europeans are, collectively, angry at the rromi
- There is a lurking feeling that it is the gypsies’/Turkish immigrants/Maghrebians fault that they are at least poorer than average (note that this does not enter the discussion), and that it is because of inherent deficiencies (e.g. weird, unprogressive traditions)
- As usual, I have a high level of mistrust in the way in which the Romanian press uses statistics, and gives sometimes distorted information that results from lack of rigour and/or overgeneralisation, e.g. the bit where gypsies are universally characterised as living in horse carriages, marrying off their children early, etc.
- The non-integration of gypsies is viewed as a refusal, but the engrained, interiorised views on gypsies (at least in Romania) do not help ‘integration’ in the best possible way because even key people like teachers or priests have these kinds of views…
- It does raise questions about certain aspects of political correctness that may, at first, be used to gloss something that might be unchanged in practice, but that might change over time, just by giving it a new frame and vocabulary, attitudes to follow shortly. In other words, Wilde’s phrase that the truth is rarely pure and never simple holds true, and I believe that even while there may be proportionally more gypsy criminals in Italy, I do not think that someone has done the statistics how many of the Romanians citizens arrested by Italian police were, actually, ‘of rrom ethnicity’. I have a hard time imagining Italian carabinieri asking the suspect, ‘please fill in this ethnicity questionnaire, thank you very much, Sir’. And I find it funny how police officers are transformed, suddenly, in a country where the police force is known for their lingering corruption and violence, in the keepers of the truth
- Hopefully the discussion will mature a little…

My apologies for exceeding normative post word count.

The Fall. Reprise.

[caption on photo: Rumaenische Bauern vor ihrer Huette - postcard from the interwar period i would guess, maybe earlier]
In interviews I have recurrently encountered a certain kind of story about the ‘sat romanesc’, the Romanian village, as well as the Romanian peasant. It is a story remindful both of Christian mythology such as the Fall, where the taint of sin remains, and portrayals of the ‘noble savage’ where the subject in question oscillates back and forth between being pure, being fallen, and needing to be saved.
As in other mythical stories, this typological village is presented, despite numerous pieces of evidence to the contrary, like a unit that has existed since the beginning of time, where there have been no substantial changes since recently. Of course… Define recently. Define change. Define beginning of time.
But let us consider the grounding of the hypothesis for a moment. It is a story of innocence, corrupted, of eternity, interrupted, of paradise, lost, of angels, fallen. ‘Vesnicie s-a nascut in sat’ (eternity was born in the village). I dramatise to make the point, which is allowed. Example: ‘People have made cheese in this way for thousands of years’.
A presumed horizon of permanence is invaded with a sense of change, spiced up with loss, confusion and the shifting of boundaries and moralities. ‘Back in the days, we used to have ‘hore’, none of these discos, where no one is supervising’. ‘People have always made cheese like this and now they’re saying we’re not allowed anymore’. ‘… and now the eternity has been ended by us/them’.
One old guy tells me, well you know, this modern lifestyle isn’t very healthy, look at how many people are ill! There’s never been so many illnesses around. If this argument is made, it is often omitted that, actually, life as a peasant is pretty rough, because the state, the emperor, the landlord were never particularly forthcoming vis-à-vis this category of people. More cake for the peasants! More life span! More medication! (I just wrote a typo ‘meducation’, which screams for a post of its own… passons!)
When you look at nineteenth century sources (from Durandin 1995), despite agrarian reforms, people were not doing so well in the countryside. The rural idyll, in close-up, is lessened. Modernity plays in cities, not on the fields.
‘Les temps où l’on disait: “si vous voulez voir un type d’homme bien portant, allez dans les campagnes” sont passés. Sur toutes les physiognomies, enfants, vieillards, on ne lit que fatigue physique, langueur, chloroanémie, ils sont vieillis avant l’âge et one le moral très abattu. J’ai tâché de connaître la cause, et partout j’ai vu la misère. Tous ont tant de dettes qu’ils ne savent comment les payer’ (p.165).
A study of the ‘Economic and Social Situation of the Peasant in Romania’ (much like those published by the European Commission these days… ;-)) published in 1895 has a bit of statistics that tell ofs the physical state of the peasantry.
‘Reprenant les résultats des recencements des années 1869, 1874, et 1879, il indique qu’en 1869 un tiers des conscripts n’atteignent pas la taille de 1,57m requise pour le service; en 1879, un tiers se situent au-dessous de 1,54m. Il déplore aussi la multiplication des cas d’idiotisme [linked to lack of iodine, and thyroid dysfunction from birth] et de syphilis’ (p.165).
Agrarian revolts were never mentioned in the interviews, even though a lot of them happened in Romania in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and one particularly violent one in 1907. We are at the limits of narrative life-story methodology, because it does not go back far enough in time to appreciate, and so history books and historical sources are important supplements to go back further in time than 70 years at most. This spans, at best, a bit of time before communism was established. The horizon of reference of the interviews can be communism – post-communism. The nationalist, populist, and fascist politics of the turn of the century and anything earlier do not get an appreciation, also taking into account the way in which history education under communism had its own twist, legitimating the regime in place.
A few points emerge:
In Romania a complicated mythology exists around people’s historical origins, usually to be found in the countryside. Livelihoods: peasantry, agricultural work, commerce.
This mythology is both appropriated by the people left out by the recent changes in legislation due to European Union demands, and national policy, to affirm that the conservative, traditional elements have a value, and that they need to be protected, without, however, having much leverage power to put this into practice on their terms.
It is also appropriated not only by people representing the authorities, but also by people living in the countryside who are not peasants (who may consider themselves ‘intellectuals’ or city people who have worked in industry) that the people in question (‘peasants’) are inappropriate, that they need to modernise, to change, to adapt, in order to profit. They are considered backward, uncivilised, uneducated.
Funnily enough, the people who fall into the second category are also arguing for the salvation of the Romanian village, because it is the seat of the traditions, of popular music, poetry, architecture and dance. What exactly is there ‘to save’? So we save the traditions in a purified form and we discard the peasants? To me it sounds a bit like fission that removes the characteristics of the original substance and creates something else altogether. If, that is, substance is the right word to use here.
There is, it seems, nothing new under the sun. The French-educated historian Nicolae Iorga, who played a role in creating nationalist sentiments in pre-Balkanic-wars-Romania, directs, from 1903, the periodical ‘Samanatorul’, which promotes a socially and morally engaged national literature. In it, rural values are celebrated: the peasant is the vector of continuity, of collective memory and of respect of tradition. He is the figure of resistance against decadence, foreign pollution, and the anonymity and misery of the cities.
I am reminded of Justin Kenrick’s lectures and the idea of closure, that it had to be either idealist and pure, or materialist and wicked. I want an appreciation not centred on these opposites begetting opposites begetting opposites and not much light, though I understand that people want to make one argument, not the other. I have the anthropology illness, of not wanting to decide for one side… doesn’t make me a good interviewee as I recently found out… ;-)

Anthropologie, rhétorique et limitations du milieu ambiant

L’individu incertain (1995) d’Alain Ehrenberg est un ouvrage dont la thèse centrale soutient que la responsabilité accrue exigée de l’individu contemporain représente à la fois une libération aussi bien qu’un fardeau. L’auteur soutient que, pour alléger ce poids et pour faciliter les capacités d’agir nos sociétés offrent les possibilités suivantes. Il distingue entre moyens d’action sur soi de la pharmacologie (drogues licites et illicites, anxiolytiques, antidépresseurs), et entre les mises en scène de soi des technologies de la communication (interactivité, reality-shows, cyberespace).
C’est un ouvrage qui s’inscrit dans le même champ d’intérêts que d’autres publications qu’a réalisées Ehrenberg (ouvrages qui incluent les enjeux plus larges, notamment Le culte de la performance qui traite le sport dans la « société contemporaine », La fatigue d’être soi portant sur la dépression, ainsi qu’une série d’ouvrages qu’il a dirigés portant sur la maladie mentale et la consommation de drogues). L’ouvrage perpétue, malheureusement, quelques-unes des faiblesses des autres livres-Ehrenberg. L’Individu incertain n’arrive pas à sortir du domaine théorique, et, par conséquence, présente trop peu de liens réels entre l’argument et des études de cas. Bien que son orientation se veut sociologique, il relève plutôt du domaine de la philosophie. Il cherche à s’inspirer de démarches anthropologiques, dont il qualifie néanmoins les instruments d’enquête inadéquates et inadaptées pour l’étude de ‘collectivités… bien entendu trop grandes et trop complexes’ (p.27). Dommage que les sociologues et les anthropologues ne cherchent toujours pas à vraiment à se comprendre mutuellement et d’apprendre les uns des autres…
Pour moi, portant volontiers mon fardeau ( ?) d’éducation anglo-saxonne, l’argument académique à la française, si vous me permettez un peu de caricature, m’embête, ressemblant, trop souvent, à un marmonnement soutenu, gonflé de généralisations exagérées qui perdent toute signification en cours de route. Souvent sous-tendu, une arrogance latente mais persistante qui surgit dans des interjections telles que ‘bien entendu, il n’en est pas ainsi…’ et dans des formulations qui ne sont pas destinées à jeter une lumière nouvelle sur un argument, mais à faire allusion à la culture générale e-x-t-r-a-o-r-d-i-n-a-i-r-e de son auteur. Si ces jeux rhétoriques resurgissent trop souvent, je me fâche. Le génie réel ne dépend pas de publicité (voir littératures, poésie de première classe, par exemple…). Je me souviens de ces modèles atomiques, au cours de chimie au lycée, qui faisaient référence à des « nuages électroniques » un flou indéterminé qui correspond à la situation des électrons à un moment donnée. Je vois devant moi un professeur qui tient un discours à un institut académique français quelconque et j’écoute, sans pouvoir cerner vraiment à quoi bon toutes ces gesticulations, tout ce brouhaha et tout cet indéterminisme. Allez – qu’on prenne le chat par la queue, qu’on arrête de circuler comme des lâches autour du Bräi (voilà les luxembourgismes tant attendus !). Ce qui ne revient pas à dire qu’il faut succomber à un populisme souvent senti dans l’espace académique anglo-saxon. Je ne soutiens non plus que « vulgarisation » et « populisme » sont identiques. Il revient à admettre que, mon habitus (voilà encore un terme à perdre beaucoup de temps de discussion – un autre jour si vous insistez) engendre des difficultés à cerner et à bien comprendre la structure des arguments en français. Ils manquent de densité et qu’ils ne répondent pas aux enchaînements rhétoriques attendus, tout en présentant souvent un excès de zèle stylistique ainsi que cette propriété qui me suffoque tel un milieu ambiant rempli d’ouate, d’une viscosité encombrante.
Or, vu son originalité d’approche et d’analyse, il faut voir plus loin que ces faiblesses largement dues à l’enracinement de l’auteur dans un milieu académique français. Ehrenberg sait inspirer et il fait preuve d’une intuition fantastique de « vérité scientifique ». Avec son flou habituel, il trouve le moyen de condenser, dans une toute petite phrase banale, ce que les anthropologues peinent à voir uniquement après de longues périodes de terrain, d’innombrables interviews et un nombre hallucinant de cafés pris ensemble avec les gens. Il dit ainsi, en conclusion :
« parce que nous nous appuyons de plus en plus sur nos ressorts internes, elle [la politique] est la condition pour ne pas être prisonnier d’une subjectivité dont les deux risques sont l’apathie dépressive qui multiplie les risques d’autodestruction, et la non-limitation des rapports de force qui rouvre grande la porte à toutes les dominations des forts sur les faibles et à toutes les violences qui peuvent en découler. Le manque de politique dans une démocratie avancée, c’est le risque d’implosion par le bas. »
La manière de procéder des anthropologues (ces populistes en herbe ?!) est inverse. Elle part d’un tel constat et le traite comme une boîte noire. On l’ouvre pour voir ce qu’il signifie lorsqu’il est mis en rapport réel avec la vie de tous les jours des Hommes, ou, plus exactement, les habitants d’une certaine localité située dans tel et tel pays dans une telle conjonction économique, politique, sociale, religieuse, et à un tel moment de l’histoire. C’est une question d’instances spécifiques, de détails, de commentaires assez peu réflexifs et très réflexifs, de rapports sociaux concrets. A l’horizon, cependant, on n’oublie jamais que ces personnes avec qui ces anthropologues travaillent sont aussi des Hommes, surtout dans leurs rapports réciproques. Qu’en pensez-vous ?

Taking Care

I met this beautiful eighty-year-old woman. It had been her birthday the day before. She lives in a two-bedroom house with a terrace, and some painted outside walls. She has a well and a garden that she still works in. The strawberries were twinkling between the green leaves, and the orange fire flowers had grown almost a metre high. She told me how her husband had died thirty years ago, and how life now was not good anymore, because she could not do anything anymore. Take no decisions and not enough action. She was showing me all her crafted blankets, of wool, and cotton, and the costumes she had sewn. She told me her daughter was unhappy about her wearing torn jumpers, because she did not understand what she was keeping the good clothes for. She did not want to dress up because she did not leave the house. Her loom showed a piece of cloth in the making that was white, with the occasional stripe pattern. She was working on the finely-grained cotton towels that are used on the occasion of orthodox burials. She was not angry at her life, or bitter, but when it would be time for her to leave, she would be ready.

‘It’s always been like this’

I will try to express to you how much I dislike this kind of explanation. Variants of it may be the following: ‘humankind is like this’, ‘the mentality here has always been like this’, ‘people are x,y or z’. I realise that it is often understood that I need to describe and analyse what is going on and what people are saying to me and not take sides. Write it all down, as it was put to you. I confess that sometimes I am an anthropologist who doesn’t shut up. My usually very calm, bordering-on-indifferent attitude to certain people making arguments with which I couldn’t disagree more gets disrupted at times. I lose my temper with some people, and I forget about politeness, and cannot just say to myself, let it go, you need not pay attention to this silliness. I have been trained to be sensitive to the world, due to my job, and the boundaries are permeable. I am involved in this world.I especially dislike when authoritarian males are trying to teach me about this, that or the other do not give me any credit, or think it needs convincing that they are the man for me, … just because they have made up their mind that I am a combination of a.young, b.female, c.foreign, d.blonde. I need to speak up against the cynical views so prevalent here that people have always been thieves, opportunists, and that politicians have always been out to get their own share by means of the office they occupy. I need to disagree with the idea that there have always been differences between people and that this is a good thing in the face of (and entirely ignoring) widening and deepening relative and absolute inequalities in a global economy that continues to be labelled ‘capitalism’. I need to hack at aristocratic pretensions and the ideas that some people are necessarily, by birth, masters or servants. I need to believe that the world is getting readier for meritocracy. I need to disagree with local bureaucrats who tell me bullshit about laws, public office and maps. I need to show a reaction to lies, excuses and lack of good will. I need to scream in the face of biological determinism and ‘it’s in our genes to be like this, that or the other’. I need to speak up against views that assert that men are more violent than women and have always needed, in situations like wars, to rape women. I need to shut out drunkards who interrupt me in my conversations with other people and who patronise me like I know nothing about the world and the language I have been living in for the last six months. I need to speak my mind about the casualness with which is mentioned the following: ‘I do not beat women’. I want a world in which this is impossible to even think. I need to encourage women who ask me whether I am not frightened to be alone, and to walk and live among strangers. I need to at least assert what I think (sometimes), even if I have no power to change any/much of it. Mentalities and people can change very quickly, and I refuse to believe that the people are all bad. I have a lot of faith, though I may lose courage and temper sometimes. This is why I fight.09.04.07

And think not...

...that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
(Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

How does this statement correlate, firstly, with a certain existing, dominant understanding of self-made, individual-driven realisations of the modern, separate, rational self, and, secondly, with ideas of self as carried by forces, impinged upon by all kinds of wonders and disasters? Two disclaimers/premises. A. Allow me to caricature. B. Presuming one has a certain amount of choice to start with, dependent from location, economic and social status, sex, age, etc.
The question: is it more desirable, easy, comfortable, ‘good’, morally convincing to see one’s self as a closed container with thoughts, emotions and a past, striding on a path he (I am choosing this pronoun here as the archetype of male modernity, if I may…) has chosen, rationally, with premeditation, with amassed former knowledge?
Ensuing questions which still mesmerise me: What makes this so? Who decides this? In whose interest is it? What are the problems with this conception?
How does he include other people in his choices? How does he include irrationality in his choices? How can he deal with unconscious desire, fear and complex proclivities? How does he get involved with people if he does not let them into his being? If we take this further, how does he subsist if he does not get involved, a social being raised by others, educated by others, influenced by others, helped by others all the way to the present and into the future?
Note that I am very unknowledgeable about psychoanalysis (see below the result of a test I took a while ago with ZEIT online), but willing to be educated about it…

24.03.07

are you speakin’ my language?

The allusion to the song with the vegemite song I come from the land Down Under is intentional. Before I will acquaint you with the wonders of Romanian, this is an appeal to pity the anthropologist, deprived of food she loves, and send her a jar of that disgustingly salty marmite. I have had cravings for weeks now, not at the stage of dreaming of it just yet (like Pele did of meat in India), but getting close...
Romanian had me fooled, looking and sounding a lot like a Latin language. I am still struggling with speaking it, possibly because it creates interference with languages I am familiar with. The grammar is partially in line with Latin, having a vocative case, as well as genitive and dative inflexions, and accusative case is also marked. So it is a synthetic language in some grammatical features. In others, it is something altogether different. There are a lot of formulations that inverse the whole idea of subject-owning-action, and would be literally translated as 'to me is', e.g. to me is hunger, to me is longing. In terms of agency (I know it is a term used excessively in British social science) it has all kinds of fascinating repercussions. Another maddening thing is that the syntactical constructions often require the double expression of the direct or indirect object. This means that the nouns or their substitutes carrying the lexcial meaning are duplicated by a so-called 'unstressed' form of the personal pronoun in the accusative or dative, which acts as a kind of early warning system for the actual pronoun. I think it is very stressful indeed though. As far as I understand this feature is necessary because the word order is relatively free, due to the inflexions carried by the cases, but it appears a redundant feature nevertheless, in a lot of examples. Then again, me not liking it will not make it go away. Romanian is the only Romance language that has kept the neuter from Latin, but which now presents a nice levelling mechanism, by which the neuter noun takes a masculine modifier in the singular and a feminine one in the plural.
As far as vocabulary is concerned, Romanian presents borrowings from what is popularly called 'Dacian' (e.g. brânză – cheese, and vărză - cabbage). The substratum then used to be Dacian and the superstratum Slavic (Bulgarian, Russian, Serb..., e.g. sfat, sfaturi – advice, val, valuri - wave). In the course of time Turkish (e.g. geam, geamuri - window glass; one more great word is neskedil, denoting a person with an embroidered heart), Germanic (aparat, aparate), French (fenomen, fenomene), Hungarian (pahar, pahare - glass), Greek (scop, scopuri - goal) borrowings happened. Due to nineteenth century nationalist efforts, 'intellectuals' latinised the language, reacting against the Slavic elements in it. What you read in the papers (or on the internet on Romanian-language BBC) is a lot more Latin-based than the thing they actually speak here, much to my frustration at times. I suppose the situation, historically, is somewhat (broadly) comparable to how, in the British Isles, words of Germanic origin were paralleled with Norman French words, and reflected a sharp social rank differentiation.
As a continuation of my love for words, their sounds and usage, here are some of my Romanian favourites. I like the word a ciufuli (pronounced with an Italian sonority of the letter c as tʃ in front of i), meaning to dishevel. Also a great word a toarce, which means both to spin and to purr. See here for speculations on possible origins of a dezmierda, meaning 'to caress'.
A great pair of words, used in all kinds of specific senses would correspond to the French se débrouiller and its opposite s'embrouiller, in English to manage in a resourceful way: a se descurca, also with the literal meaning of disentangle (much nicer than 'to get on top of things'). It is also used for a crafty person who knows how to use the 'system' for her own ends, and who is well-networked. The opposite a se încurca means to tangle, to trouble, to flummox, to confuse, to puzzle, to encumber. I find the image of the tangle very appropriate to describe both the way in which we create relationships in the world and the way in which we navigate in labyrinths that never fully reveal themselves. As we âdisentangle ourselves from one thing, we are already getting caught up in the next one. And no, I am not talking about Geertz's / Weber's 'webs of significance'.
Teaching and learning, on the other hand, means a preda and a învața, and, for some obscure reason I keep confusing them. Embarrassing when you want to use one, and accidentally say 'I want to teach how it works', when actually you have no idea, and want to learn how it works. Being an anthropologist away from home means to continually fall prey to moments of shame, awkward silence, and bad grammar.
Last week at some point I had obviously cracked a magnificent joke as my host burst into a laugh so loud it made the walls shake. My problem was that I was an innocent comedian, not having grasped what I had said. It turned out to be something about a maimuță (monkey) – I had gotten the word wrong from the start, and have been mistakenly calling monkeys for a while now muță, and I was quite puzzled as to why something should be 'more monkey' than something else... hard to explain out of context, but made me happy to see her happy.

OGM GMO - food and industry

please take some time to watch this (in french) it was not authorised to be screened by CANAL+. at the moment i am working with an NGO dealing with these sorts of issues in romania, and it is alarming how much complicity there exists of the authorities with the private sector.

de bicherwuurm ass rem do...

a new essay collection has been translated into german by siri hustvedt (the original is called 'being a man), probably very different from What I loved, but most likely just as beautiful in its voice. her husband, whose work i much admire also is celebrating his 60th birthday today. interview here about the relationship to readership, the invention of solitude and The Invention of Solitude (highly recommended) and the creation of and living together with fictional characters. if you need something funny, fast-paced and full of loveable and hateable characters, i warmly recommend lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. for those of you who do not read fiction, something less fictional reviewed here. good news for today: only 180 days to wait for the reapparition of the most famous wizard of the 21st century and the resolution of remaining mysteries regarding hogwarts....

in the museum: troglodytes, civilisation and the balkan

As I waited for my friend to finish his meeting yesterday, I hid from the wind and snow in the Palace of Culture in Târgu Mures, and had a look at the History Museum there. History here is reduced to an archaeological collection of ceramics and iron-made ‘tools’ that more often than not are very silent about possible uses in daily life. I got very frustrated by the glass boxes as I attempted to reconstruct some kind of social life around these objects in my imagination. The collection is concentrated mainly on the glorious distant past, and the places of discovery are indicated on light-faded maps. This is definitely something Umberto Eco should have included among his brilliant excursions on ‘How to organise a public library’ and the like. I did a bit of collecting myself and present to you here the most interesting ‘explanatory comments’, presented on laminated beige posters in a very poetic English voice, as you will discover. How to make a museum as dusty as possible:

The Starcevo-Cris culture is representative for the beginning of the Neolithic. This culture is characteristic through the painted ceramics tools made by cut and polish rocks. The smalls settlements is formed by cottage.
(…)
The funerary habit was represented by incineration in plane or tumular graves.
(…)
The economy was mixted.
(…)
The tibula was used as a dress decoration. For the first time appeared in the Bronze Age and it was used until the Great Migrations (7^th Century)
(…)
The 2^nd Iron Age.
The ferrous metallurgy would reach its climax in La Tène due to the Celts and progressively generalise, to a large extent beginning with the 2^nd Century B.C. The Dacian iron civilisation is undoubtedly one of the most remarkably civilisations of the ‘barbarian’ Europe.
(…)
The Roman epoch (106-271 A.D.) signified the moment of outmost interaction with the universal history, as the history of the Roman province of Dacia is part of the history of the Roman Empire. Accomplishing the role of a strategic bastion positioned in the barbaric world, Dacia had the statute of imperial province.
(…)
I especially like the Polish rocks, and I want a plane grave too, please! Also amazed at the (very ambivalent) emphasis on how proto-Romania was already more European / civilised than its barbaric neighbours, something reproduced in the nationalist discourse of the nineteenth century, and in the Romanisation efforts of the language at that time. This is most likely largely an issue of historiography, and of the timing at which these posters were put up. I suspect just after the revolution… but maybe someone has a more definite idea on this? Very revealing also considering the large Hungarian population of this town, and the bloody confrontations in 1990 on the Piata Trandafirilor between Hungarian students and peasants sent in from the countryside by Romanian group Vatra. Finally, what on earth are laypersons like me supposed to think about the generalised climax of ferrous metallurgy? Sound and fury… signifying and teaching nothing.

'Es ist die Kultur, ihr Trottel!'

On the topic why natural sciences alone may not suffice to understand humans, the German quality daily Zeit wonders today about the image and purposes of Geisteswissenschaften in the real world here, and also has a site dedicated to the (German) Year of the Human Sciences, and questions related to this. Only in German, I'm afraid!