Chorographies of Memory: Everyday Sites and Practices of Remembrance Work in Post-socialist, EU Accession-era Bucharest

Chorographies of Memory:
Everyday Sites and Practices of Remembrance Work
in Post-socialist, EU Accession-era Bucharest

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Ph.D.
in the Faculty of Humanities

2010

Alyssa R. Grossman
School of Social Sciences

Contents
List of Figures....................................................................................................3
Abstract..............................................................................................................5
Declaration.........................................................................................................6
Copyright statement..........................................................................................7
Acknowledgements............................................................................................8
Chapter 1: Introduction....................................................................................10
Chapter 2: Urban Landscapes..........................................................................47
Chapter 3: Forgotten Interiors.........................................................................78
Chapter 4: Money Events..............................................................................110
Chapter 5: Affective Tastes...........................................................................144
Chapter 6A: Lumina amintirii (In the Light of Memory) [Film, 40’]............168
Chapter 6B: Memory and the Visual.............................................................169
Chapter 7: Concluding Remarks....................................................................193
Bibliography...................................................................................................203
Filmography...................................................................................................232
Appendix A: Memory Objects.......................................................................233
Appendix B: Memory Meal Invitation (Romanian).......................................239
Appendix B1: Memory Meal Invitation (English).........................................240
Appendix C: Memory Meal Responses.........................................................241

Final word count: 61,041

2

List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Scaffolding on Victoria Street...........................................................55
Fig. 2.2 Skyscraper on Mihalache Boulevard.................................................55
Fig. 2.3 New thermopane in old house............................................................56
Fig. 2.4 Shop window, Luterana Street...........................................................57
Fig. 2.5 Neon advertisements in Victoria Square............................................59
Fig. 2.6 “New home. New habits”..................................................................60
Fig. 2.7 “Living in a block isn’t what it used to be”.......................................60
Fig. 2.8 Armenian Street: “The street where I banged up Dad’s car”….........61
Fig. 2.9

Hyacinths in Dan’s courtyard, Berceni district..............................63

Fig. 2.10 Replacing the cobblestones..............................................................64
Fig. 2.11 National Theatre (1930s).................................................................71
Fig. 2.12 Novotel with reconstructed National Theatre façade.......................71
Fig. 2.13 Hunger Circus, Rahova district........................................................73
Fig. 2.14 Hunger Circus-turned-mall, Vitan district.......................................73
Fig. 3.1 Advertisement in Tabu Magazine………..........................................84
Fig. 3.2 Tania and Marius in their living room..............................................88
Fig. 3.3 Inside the bench/storage space...........................................................89
Fig. 3.4

Tania’s collection of knitting needles............................................92

Fig. 3.5

Zoltán in his basement storage room...........................................95

Fig. 3.6 Chamber of Horrors, Peasant Museum basement..............................99
Fig. 3.7 Marx/Engels/Lenin statue, Peasant Museum courtyard...................102
Fig. 3.8 Busts of Lenin, Chamber of Horrors................................................104
Fig. 3.9 Transporting Lenin from the Chamber of Horrors..........................105

3

Fig. 4.1 10,000 lei, post-communist paper banknote from 1994..................112
Fig. 4.2 1 leu (RON), post-communist plastic banknote from 2005.............112
Fig. 4.3 50 lei, communist banknote from 1966...........................................118
Fig. 4.4 1,000 lei, post-communist paper banknote from 1991....................121
Fig. 4.5 2,000 lei, post-communist plastic banknote from 1999...................122
Fig. 5.1 “Super sensations from 1964. In a bigger bar” billboard.................156
Fig. 5.2 “Surf DERO. The fragrance from the best years” advert................157
The images in this thesis are mine, unless otherwise specified.

4

Abstract
Chorographies of Memory: Everyday Sites and Practices of Remembrance
Work in Post-socialist, EU Accession-era Bucharest.
Alyssa R. Grossman
Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester
This thesis explores processes of remembrance work in contemporary
Bucharest, while considering memory’s relationships to cognitive, discursive,
sensory, material, and visual realms. Through writing and film, it draws
attention to memory’s social, political, corporeal, and immaterial trajectories.
This thesis posits memory as both entity and activity, continually constituted
through physical and mental processes, in material objects and spaces of the
imagination.
Focusing on the current EU accession-era context, I address how
changes in Romania’s global framework intersect with remembrance practices
at local, individual levels. By analysing Bucharest residents’ lived experiences,
recollections of the past, and anticipations of the future, I seek to unravel
complex dynamics of contemporary post-socialist “transition.”
I explore the active, contingent ways that personal memories weave in
and out of social and ideological rhetoric, often taking on unexpected,
idiosyncratic forms. Rather than viewing the boundaries between individual
and collective memory and between official and unofficial commemoration as
exclusive barriers, I interpret them as sites for engagement and interaction. I
follow memory’s presence through objects, discourses, and spaces, and trace
its movements between overtly commemorative and inadvertently memorial
realms. My attention to arenas where memory is less obvious or visible—
ordinary city landscapes, disregarded personal storage spaces, and
commonplace interactions around money and food—sets my thesis apart from
literature that disregards remembrance work outside explicitly commemorative
contexts.
My film Lumina amintirii (In the Light of Memory) problematises
notions that memory is a straightforwardly visual phenomenon, and that it may
be represented literally through visual means. The film incorporates creative
shooting and editing techniques to reflect fragmentary, haptic, multi-layered
experiences of recollection. Transcending film’s representational capacities, I
mobilise its affective, evocative modes of operation, to draw viewers into more
emotionally intimate and analytically complex understandings of memory.
Central to my work are imaginative experiments I devised to provoke
“felt” memories in my collaborators and to enable me to grasp their sensory
and corporeal implications. These methodological innovations define my
fieldwork, my film-work, and my writing as dynamic, relational processes
shaping—rather than merely reflecting—my research.

5

Declaration
No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in
support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other
university or other institute of learning.

6

Copyright statement
i.

The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules
to this thesis) owns any copyright in it (the “Copyright”) and she
has given the University of Manchester the right to use such
Copyright for any administrative, promotional, educational, and/or
teaching purposes.

ii.

Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts, may be made only
in accordance with the regulations of the John Rylands University
Library of Manchester. Details of these regulations may be obtained
from the Librarian. This page must form part of any copies made.

iii.

The ownership of any patents, designs, trade marks and any and all
other intellectual property rights except for the Copyright (the
“Intellectual Property Rights”) and any reproductions of copyright
works, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which
may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and
may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property Rights
and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use
without prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant
Intellectual Property Rights and/or Reproductions.

iv.

Further information on the conditions under which disclosure,
publication and exploitation of this thesis, the Copyright and any
Intellectual Property Rights and/or Reproductions described in it
may take place is available from the Head of School of Social
Sciences (or the Vice-President) and the Dean of the Faculty of Life
Sciences, for Faculty of Life Sciences, for Faculty of Life Sciences’
candidates.

7

Acknowledgements
My doctoral research was funded by a School of Social Sciences
Studentship, an Overseas Research Student Award, and a North American
Foundation Award from the University of Manchester. During my fieldwork, I
received additional financial assistance from the Romanian Cultural Institute in
Bucharest. A Europa Fellowship from the New Europe College in Bucharest
helped me complete this thesis.
I wish to thank my supervisor Sarah Green for her invaluable insights
and constant support, and for encouraging my work from the very beginning.
Many thanks to Andrew Irving, my co-supervisor, for his useful suggestions
and for continually pushing me to grapple with new ideas. Stef Jansen offered
constructive research guidance, and filled in as supervisor while Sarah was on
sabbatical. Weekly research seminars at Manchester and the New Europe
College in Bucharest provided stimulating environments in which to develop
and discuss my writing.
I appreciate Paul Henley’s and Sue Brook’s expert editorial advice on
my film and their steadfast help throughout the filmmaking process. Gary
Kildea offered wise counsel and unwavering encouragement as I struggled to
find my way through my film. Ileana St!nculescu and Artchil Khetagouri
provided much moral and technical support; their documentaries and our
conversations were an inspiration. I am especially thankful to Selena Kimball
for our many years of artistic and intellectual collaboration, for creatively
challenging disciplinary conventions, and for engaging me on so many levels.
In Bucharest, Alina Ciob!nel made time when I sought her professional
and personal advice, and has been a true friend. My kitchen table discussions
with Zoltán Rostá" were always so enjoyable, and taught me much about
everything. Ioana Vlasiu, Nicu"or and Fotinica Gliga, Marius and Tania
Gomoiu, Cristina Crinteanu, Adrian Vasilescu, Irina B!descu, Elena R!dulescu,
Paul Drogeanu, and Ruxandra Catinca R!dulescu offered much kindness and
greatly assisted my research. With Eugenia Brenda, Sorina Chiper, C!t!lin D.
Constantin, Dan Diojdescu, Diana Georgescu, Domnica Macri, Claudia
Popescu, and Lucian Stratulat I shared many thought-provoking conversations.
I am extremely grateful to the Fulbright Commission of Bucharest for
granting me a fellowship in 1999-2000; this helped set my research in motion.
Ioana Iieronim, Mihai Miroiu, Barbara Nelson, and Corina Danaila-Guidea
were particularly generous with their resources and time, and have continued to
involve me in Fulbright-related activities in Romania.
Friendships made at, and through the Museum of the Romanian Peasant
enriched my fieldwork in imaginative and inventive ways—thanks to #erban
Anghelescu, Ana Birta, Adina Br!deanu, Ioana Daia, Daniela Gherghina,
Ruxandra Grigorescu, Gabriel Hanganu, Kazimir Kovács, Cosmin Manolache,
Maria Mateoniu, Vintila Mih!ilescu, Roxana Moro"anu, Lila Passima, Monika

8

P!dure$, Ioana Popescu, Dorel Rusti, #tefan Sîrbu, C!lin Torsan, George Turliu,
and Ciprian Voicila …and to the memory of Horia Bernea and Irina Nicolau,
for cultivating the spaces for these connections to grow.
I wish to thank my parents, Mary MacArthur and Richard Grossman,
for their love and support, and for copy-editing the final version of my thesis
with fine-tooth combs. I am especially grateful to Mark Bingley for seeing me
through the ups and downs of all of it, and for cooking all those delicious meals,
especially during the final stages of writing.

9

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

Opening
In October 2007, during the final stretch of my fieldwork, I attended the
premiere of “Amalia Takes a Deep Breath,” a one-woman play at a small,
independent theatre in Bucharest. The play consisted of monologues by the
fictional character Amalia, spanning her life from when the Romanian
communist regime was instituted in 1947, through the 1989 Revolution,1 to the
contemporary post-socialist “transition” era. It was followed by an open debate
entitled “Romanian communism: between living memory and cultural
memory.”
The play’s references to the past were similar in tone and subject matter
to stereotypical discourses of recollection in the local media and other public
spheres. Yet the post-performance discussion revealed a more intricate,
multifaceted picture of memory and its operations. As I consider below, the
performance and debate together provide a framework for many of the issues
explored in this thesis. They offer a lens for ethnographically examining how
commemorative activities in present-day Bucharest both conform to and
challenge broader theoretical classifications. They demonstrate how individual
and collective memories, as well as “official” and “unofficial” practices, are
often deeply intertwined.
Amalia’s story included commonplace narratives about youth,
education, work, family, relationships, and death, with her personal
experiences positioned against the backdrop of broader and more exceptional
social, historical, and political forces. Born into a bourgeois family, Amalia
had a carefree childhood until the state nationalised and confiscated her house.
1

There is much debate about whether the events that took place in Romania in December 1989
constituted a spontaneous, popular revolt against Ceau"escu’s communist dictatorship, or a preengineered coup organised by officials from international states. Although the latter theory has
strong evidence to confirm it, to call it a “so-called” or “stolen Revolution” (as it is often
labelled) fails to acknowledge the very real and courageous participation of many ordinary
citizens in these momentous events. While I keep this controversial history in mind, I use the
term Revolution (without quotation marks) throughout my thesis.

10

She spent the rest of her life in a working-class block of flats in Bucharest, with
a series of proletarian jobs. Her monologues conjured up what it was like to be
a young communist Pioneer, to wait in long queues for food, to maintain a
household in the midst of controlled shortages of heat, water, and electricity,
and to hunger constantly for greater access to the “outside” world. Descriptions
of everyday events were coloured by references to politics and propaganda,
such as in this ironic comment by Amalia at the age of twenty:
Thank you for teaching me what to speak and how to speak—beautiful words
such as “division of labour,” “multilaterally developed socialist society,”
“agricultural co-operative,” “class struggle,” “monolith,” “five-year plan,”
“industrialisation,” […] “three-day queue,” “censorship,” “Chernobyl,” “edible
chicken claws,” “Dacia 1300,” “eight square meter luxury studio with toilet and
shower,” “evening TV news” – and to forget ugly words such as “passport,” “Cocacola,” “chocolate,” “King,” “psychoanalysis,” “Greek Catholics,” “Mercedes,”
“oranges,” “Europe,” “freedom,” “me,” “God” (Nelega 2005: 22-24).2

The play presented post-Revolutionary Romania as an unmanageable
ruin: chaotic, impoverished, and desperate, with people struggling to repair the
“damage” from 45 years of communism. In the early ‘90s, at the age of 55,
Amalia found employment as a janitor at Otopeni airport. While scrubbing the
toilets, she observed, “Sometimes it’s hard to take a deep breath, because now
that we have liberty, and the borders have opened, lots of foreigners come and
go, but shit still smells like shit” (Nelega 2005: 39). The story ended in the
early 2000s, with Amalia on the verge of death in a retirement home, babbling
incoherently about a past that now seemed to her like a “dream.”
Amalia’s narratives of the past resembled those I had encountered time
and again during my visits to Romania over the last decade. Such repetitive and
recognisable discursive patterns, as Green describes in her own fieldwork on
the Greek-Albanian border (2009: 1), may be interpreted as performances of
certain stereotypes and ideologies, indexing particular social and political
positions. As she notes (ibid 4), they serve as a counterpart to Herzfeld’s notion
2

Some of these references are, in fact, anachronisms, presumably unnoticed by the playwright.
Amalia would have been twenty in the early 1960s, which would place this statement long
before the Chernobyl disaster, the prevalence of chicken claws in Romanian butcher shops
during meat shortages, or the production of the Dacia 1300 line of cars (all commonlyreferenced features of the communist 1980s). Yet the anachronism significantly reveals how
individuals’ memories (those of the playwright, in this case) do not always follow “unidirectional movement[s] from past to present to future” (Schwarz 2003: 141), as many
institutionalised discourses often attempt to do.

11

of “structural nostalgia” (1991, 1997), where reminiscence patterns draw upon
structured and romanticised ideals of social solidarity. The more conventional
recitations of cultural memory I encountered in my fieldwork tended to follow
similar lines, at times assessing the communist past as a period of stability and
security, when the state provided its citizens with education, jobs, and housing,
and people bonded together in times of hardship. At other times the past was
cast in a moralistic light, pathologised as unhealthy and damaging, judged as an
“aberrant” interruption of “normal” community life, its political and social
impacts positioned within frameworks of victimisation.3
Yet as Green observes (2009: 14), such predictable, public recitations
necessarily co-exist with idiosyncratic, personal recollections. In the debate
following the play, the spectators’ remarks confirmed but also contradicted
Amalia’s narratives. The commentary was lively, sometimes contentious, and
by no means consistent or unified. Particularly noticeable were the rifts
between generations, sparked when an older audience member pointed out the
irony that Amalia was played by a young actress who undoubtedly shared very
few memories with the very character she was supposed to embody. Another
spectator asked whether anyone under the age of thirty could have understood
the play at all, without having been a “victim” of the recalled events. A student
in his early twenties interjected, saying he considered himself a victim of
capitalism, not communism. There were audible sniggers of disbelief
throughout the room. “Things like censorship may have gone on before,” the
young man insisted, “but they still happen now, only in different ways.”
Not just the younger generations expressed a need for more nuanced
critiques of the past. As one spectator stated, “Some of us suffered from
communism. Others benefited from it. Naturally the past will be remembered
differently by different people.” One middle aged woman commented how
communism should not be viewed as a homogenous historical experience, as
Romania’s communist leaders had followed different agendas, and even
Ceau"escu’s own policies had been inconsistent over his four decades of rule.
As the evening came to a close, an elderly man observed that the discussion
3

The 1950s and the 1980s in particular tend to be categorised as periods of intense political
repression and hardship (Kligman 1998; Verdery 1991a, 1996). I often heard about the “three
F’s” of communism: frica, frig, !i foame, or “fear, cold, and hunger.”

12

had provoked him to reach beyond the clichés depicted in the play, and instead
of judging the past, or declaring whether communism was good or evil, to
reflect about more fundamental, existential human experiences such as “life,
death, and salvation.”
As this conversation indicates, the audience members demonstrated a
highly reflexive awareness of the dynamics of remembrance work in
Romania’s public sphere. Even the debate’s bifurcated title, “Romanian
communism: between living memory and cultural memory,” points to growing
local concern not just for discussing a particular past, but also for examining
the ways in which this past currently is being discussed. While this audience
consisted primarily of urban intellectuals and artistic elites, who undoubtedly
had a more heightened consciousness of public memory work than other
segments of the population, their contributions brought the evening closer to
incorporating the multiple, conflicting, and reflexive remembrance activities I
had been encountering in the messy, informal processes of my fieldwork.

Dichotomisations of Memory (1): Individual vs. Collective
My research seeks to soften two major dichotomisations perpetuated by
much of the related literature: individual vs. collective, and official vs.
unofficial, forms of memory. Most 19th century investigations of memory,
focusing on its biological and psychological properties, neglected the role of
social relations in processes of remembrance. When Halbwachs (1992 [1925])
introduced the concept of collective memory in the 1920s, he was one of the
first to suggest that remembering was not just an individual, intellectual means
of retrieving information, but a socialised activity, consisting of constructions
and revisions of the past adhering to the “totality of thoughts” of larger groups
or the “predominant” ideas of society. According to Halbwachs, networks such
as families, religious orders, social classes, and generational cohorts all utilise
shared sets of logic to recall and reproduce the past (Lowenthal 1985).
Subsequent research has drawn upon this concept of “collective” or “social”
memory to analyse the ways in which remembrance work functions in the

13

interests of certain power structures and operates within particular groups—
from peasant settlements to women’s movements to national communities—
contributing to constructions of personal and political identity (Fentress and
Wickham 1992).
This definition of the “collective,” however, seems too simplistic and
all-encompassing for contemporary analyses. Even when referring to a specific
association of people, a group does not necessarily comprise a fixed or
enduring entity. Neither are individuals limited to mutually exclusive
collectivities; they may be members of multiple groups simultaneously, or
possess marginal, atypical, or dissenting positions within a group. Nor does a
“group mentality,” no matter how powerful, automatically eclipse individual
agents’ understandings and expressions of their own experiences.
It is more effective to identify the influences of the collective as shared
or social “frames” of memory (Goffman 1986, cited in Misztal 2003: 91; Gross
2000: 81; Irwin-Zarecka 1994), implying that recollections may be
simultaneously individualised and coloured by the “prevailing customs,
conventions, and institutions of one’s time and place” (Gross 2000: 83). The
majority of participants in the post-performance discussion, for example, could
identify with the topics in the play, whether they had lived through these events
or learned of them second-hand; these feelings enveloped us all into a
provisional yet discrete space of collective memory. At the same time, the
varied comments reflected diverse generational, social, cultural, and national
experiences, but also different personalities and temperaments. Any commonly
held recollections circulating in the theatre undoubtedly carried distinct
connotations for each individual.
In this thesis, I contest Halbwach’s portrayals of social memory as allpervasive and determinative, and individual memory as subservient to the
interests of a larger group. I interpret “social memory” or “collective memory”
as societal frameworks that provide certain “structures of recall” giving us
“memory cues” (Gross 2000: 133), but do not completely control the contents
or operations of these memories. They may enable certain groups to feel a
“unity and particularity” of identity (Assmann 1995: 132). But this identity
must be seen as plural, involving numerous intersecting and competing systems

14

(Foucault 1977: 161). It is necessarily transient and contingent (Canefe 2004;
Delich 2004; Neyzi 2004; Todorova 2004), involving paradoxes and
ambiguities, with any broader consensus accepted for the sake of “convenience
and solidarity” (MacDougall 1994: 268-9). Such a shared body of knowledge,
representations, and commemorations of the past is never settled. Rather, it is
continually updated, depending on the shifting values and goals of individual
citizens and the state.

Dichotomisations of Memory (2): Official vs. Unofficial
Just as memories are intricately bound up with social dynamics, they
are also often deeply entangled in political and institutionalised contexts. While
many discussions of memory tend to treat “official” and “unofficial”
remembrance practices as separate realms, the combination of formalised
performance and impromptu discussion in the Bucharest theatre pointed to the
enmeshed nature of these arenas (also see Jansen 2002: 77). The production
was professionally staged and formally organised by a cultural institution, but
the spontaneity of the debate gave it a less “scripted” air. Yet even though
Amalia’s memories and the spectators’ recollections were grounded in separate
discursive registers, it was impossible to cleanly divide the recited monologues
from the spontaneous commentaries. By agreeing with certain narratives, and
questioning others, the theatre-goers simultaneously engaged with stereotypical,
“dominant”

accounts,

considered

each

others’

more

idiosyncratic,

individualised recollections, and generated alternative ones of their own. Taken
in its entirety, the evening illustrated the complex ways in which memories
filter in and out of ideological rhetoric and personal narrative.
In this sense I position my own work against studies of the politics of
memorialisation which focus exclusively on formal, public discourses,
underlining state and institutionalised roles in inventing and sustaining
traditions linked to social and national identities (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
Such analyses evaluate how official commemorations demonstrate hierarchies
of power, class, race, or gender (Davis 1994; Zerubavel 1994), reinforce

15

hegemonic notions of cultural heritage (Koonz 1994; Sherman 1994), or
commodify and commercialise memory (Gillis 1994; Nora 1989; Wieseltier
1993).

Others

point

to

“anti-monument”

movements

that

counter

institutionalised memories through alternative interventions (Boym 2001;
Young 2000), or through the “re-appropriation” of state authorised spaces or
landmarks (Barris 2001; Rozentals 2008; Stratford 2001; Verdery 1999). Many
such investigations regard institutionalised and state-directed memorialisations
as

spaces

of

resistance,

with

individuals

challenging

standardised

interpretations and attributing new significance to old commemorative forms
(Crapanzano 2004; Edkins 2003; Wanner 1998; Werbner 1998). While such
approaches may contribute towards broader understandings of the power
relations integral to any memorial practice, they tend to perpetuate black-andwhite models of “true” and “false” traditions (Mizstal 2003: 61), or simplify
the act of official commemoration as a mere “cheat, something which ruling
elites impose on the subaltern classes” (Samuel 1994: 17).
Such enquiries also raise key issues connected to ongoing debates about
the distinctions between “history” and “memory.” For centuries, both processes
were regarded as equivalent and interchangeable routes to “truth.” In the preliteracy age, the oral transmission of memory was the sole means for storing
and accessing knowledge about individual identities and cultural traditions
(Gross 2000: 1-2). Ancient Greek theorisations of memory (Casey 1987: 14)
cast it as a scientific avenue into “empirical” reality (Aristotle), as a secular
“faculty of knowing” (Plato). Such positivistic models prevailed in much
subsequent research. The bourgeoning presence of documents, archives, and
museums in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries secured the positions of
memory and history within modernist paradigms of realism and objectivity
(Misztal 2003: 42).4 However, the recent fixation with memory in the social
sciences and humanities, often referred to as the “memory boom” (Berliner
2005: 197; Boym 2001: 61; Cattell and Climo 2002: 6; Radstone 2000: 8),

4

Notable exceptions to this trend include Walter Benjamin’s and the French surrealists’
understandings of memory, which I will explore in greater detail below.

16

signalled a fundamental shift in the “late-modern” age

5

from viewing

recollections as transparent, objective, and dispassionate records of the past, to
regarding them as more subjective phenomena (Misztal 2003: 46), unstable and
unreliable

(Gross

2000:

4).

These

approaches

highlight

memory’s

“equivocations and ambivalences concerning truth” (Radstone 2000: 7-9), its
“contestatory […] and subversive qualities” (Fabian 2007: 77), its lack of
critical distance and analytical rigour (LeGoff 1992: xii), its “personal” and
“emotional” elements (Archibald 2002: 80), along with its ties to fantasy,
subjectivity, and the imagination (Johnson 1991: 76; Pardo 1991: 53).
Although I support the ways in which such perspectives embrace the
contingencies, indeterminacies, and particularities of the processes of memory,
I take issue with their tendency to separate “true” memories from those
“manufactured” in the interests of political ideology or national identity.
LeGoff, for example (1992: xi), views memory as the “raw material” of history,
more “dangerously subject to manipulation” than history because it functions
in the realm of the “unconscious.” In his monumental study of symbolic
constructions of the French past, Nora (1989: 12) claims that society’s
obsessions with archiving has transformed “living” memory, or unspoken and
unselfconscious traditions, reflexes, and habits, into a “reconstituted object
beneath the gaze of critical history.” In Nora’s eyes, these contrived “sites of
memory” are the result of positivist and nationalist reconstructions, detached
from reference points in living reality.
Such positions rely on extremely restricted definitions of history and
memory. On one hand, they simplify the idea of an “historical reality” (Nora
1996: xvii), overlooking evidence that the “historical imagination” incorporates
numerous subjective and phenomenological influences more akin to the realms
of memory than many academics would care to admit (see critiques by
Assmann, in Alloa and Goppelsröder n.d.; Papailias 2005: 5; Samuel 1994: 339; Schwarz 2003: 141). They also tend to describe memory discourses as
symptoms of a monolithic “modernity” where increasing instabilities of time
and space under the alienating effects of late capitalism generate new
5

Gross (2000: 155) defines this term as referring “roughly to the period since 1950 […] in the
West, in which most of the ideals, values, and aspirations of the last three centuries have been
exhausted without being transcended.”

17

“obsessions with the past” (Huyssen 2003: 6), accompanied by the “historical
emotion” of nostalgia (Boym 2001: xvi), the “effacement” of memory
(Connerton 2009: 87), “cultures of forgetting” (Gross 2000: 109), and
structural amnesia (Huyssen 2003: 21). These perspectives undervalue the
potential for memory (and forgetting) to diverge from nationalist or political
agendas, and to be just as strongly influenced by local, generational, popular,
linguistic, or individual factors. They additionally underrate the presence of
uncalculated (and sometimes even inadvertent) remembrance sites and
practices occurring in unofficial, private, or transient spaces.
I am concerned with how “telling the past” may be a “highly political”
and contested activity (Natzmer 2002: 161), a “site for struggle over meaning”
(Hodgkin and Radstone 2003: 5) where people strive to meet certain needs of
the present (Cattell and Climo 2002: 16). But polarising the private and the
political on a large scale may only wind up preserving structures of power and
domination, and neglecting the ways in which people often challenge and
transform those relations in everyday ways (Ludtke 1982: 47). As Fabian
argues (2007: 96), the “politics of memory does not begin when memories are
being used and contested but when presenting memory as collective makes it
usable and contestable.” I move away from reproducing the stark dichotomies
of history and memory, from viewing modes of remembrance as either
dominant or subordinate. My work gravitates towards a more processual and
interactive investigation of the dynamic and contingent ways that ordinary
people are interpreting, perceiving, remembering, communicating, and
questioning elements of their daily lives.
Although I subscribe to the “collapsing of personal and public”
domains (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003: 8), and view the line between official
and unofficial realms as blurred and ambiguous (Ballinger 2003: 21), I still
acknowledge distinctions between them. Such boundaries need not be seen as
barriers, but rather sites for their engagement and interaction. I use the term
“cultural memory” to refer to realms of institutionalised or public remembrance
work (Assmann 1995), including both first-hand and indirect experiences
(Misztal 2003). These memories materialise primarily in institutions such as
libraries, museums, schools, archives, and monuments, and permeate

18

discourses in politics, religion, mass media, academia, and the arts. This
designation, however, does not assume a loss of personal agency or a
subordination of individual, private recollections to collective, authoritative
ones, but rather an overlapping and permeability of these dimensions (Canefe
2004: 78; Fentress and Wickham 1992: ix). In this vein, I employ the phrase
“sites of memory” not as Nora (1989) defines “lieux de mémoire,” or
formalised spaces of memorial heritage that have replaced “living” memory,
but rather as a broad range of locations where official and unofficial forms of
remembrance work may occur.
I regard the interchangeable terms “communicative memory” (Assmann
1995), “non-commemorative memory,” (Misztal 2003: 69), “oppositional
memory” (Gross 2000: 134), and “counter-memory” (Boym 2001; Fabian 2007;
Foucault 1977) as distinct from cultural memory. According to Assmann
(1995), communicative memories are not always deliberately commemorative;
they tend to occur in non-specialised, spontaneous contexts, through jokes or
gossip, in waiting rooms, at the dinner table, in passing conversations. In
Foucauldian terms (1977: 146), counter-memories challenge the search for
origins, teleologies, and fundamental truths about the past. They dispute
perceptions of time as an “unbroken continuity that operates beyond the
dispersion of forgotten things,” revealing instead the “unstable assemblage of
faults, fissures […] accidents, and deviations” that make up people’s lives.
They are identifiable through approaches resembling Benjamin’s notion of
“historical materialism,” reading the intersections of past and present as
dialectical, non-progressive “constellations,” legible only at certain moments,
and detectable not through authoritative master-narratives, but by sifting
through overlooked cultural forms and devalued fragments of ordinary life
(Pensky 2004: 77-83).

The Everyday
Unremarkable settings and incidental happenings of day-to-day life
were key focal points of my fieldwork in Bucharest. I did encounter cultural

19

memories mobilised in political discourses, commercialised as commodities
and brands, materialised in public monuments and museum exhibitions, and
exploited in literary, artistic, and academic works. I preferred, however, to
delve into the less obvious communicative memories residing in casual
exchanges, informal narratives, household objects, and unremarkable
landscapes outside of official or institutionalised spheres. These remembrances
wove in and out of banal conversations that I participated in and overheard;
they materialised in the regular paths I traversed throughout the city. Often
inadvertently invoked, sometimes only fleetingly acknowledged or recognised
as memory, they nonetheless formed a perceptible backdrop to my daily
routines. By focusing on ordinary spaces such as city landscapes (Chapters 2
and 6), domestic interiors (Chapter 3), and interactions around commonplace
artefacts such as food (Chapter 5) and money (Chapter 4), I investigate realms
where the political is inextricable from everyday settings and activities.
I regard politics as more than the mere imposition of impersonal
superstructures onto people’s personal lives (see Gardiner 2000: 9). My
attention towards everyday aspects of remembrance work pursues a “micropolitics” of daily life (Burawoy and Verdery 1999: 14; Koshar 1994: 215),
revealing how Bucharest residents are currently negotiating and redefining the
structures in which they live. Investigating the relationship between individual
experience and larger social forces may show how Foucauldian apparatuses of
governance and power operate at ground level, but it can also highlight
people’s roles as creative agents taking charge of and influencing such
processes (see de Certeau 1984; Gardiner 2000; Mirzoeff 1998). As Gardiner
writes (2000: 16), it is the very “‘messiness’ of daily life, its unsystematized
and unpredictable quality, that helps it escape the reifying grip of nomotheitic
social sciences and technocratic planning.” According to De Certeau (1984:
34), subjects do not unconsciously or passively absorb the habitus of their
culture, or “cohere with the constructed, written, and pre-fabricated space
through which they move.” On the contrary, they often are highly aware of the
“infinitesimal procedures” and “tactics” they can use to transform, invert, and
manipulate ordinary activities such as “dwelling, moving about, speaking,

20

reading, shopping, and cooking,” giving them subversive or alternative
meanings (ibid 40).
The everyday has, of course, been the primary focus of anthropological
attention from the discipline’s beginnings. Many contemporary ethnographic
accounts, however, tend to regard the everyday as a means to an end, as an
avenue for understanding deeper structures, principles, and belief systems. My
research challenges such a perspective. I borrow from the work of sociologists
such as Benjamin and Simmel, philosophers such as Lefebvre and De Certeau,
and artists/ethnographers such as the French surrealists and the British mass
observationists, all of whom focus less on such a-temporal generalisations and
more on the textures, qualities, and particularities of everyday life itself. Such
alternative strategies of research and interpretation have proven more
conducive to capturing the sensory, fragmented, and impressionistic qualities
of the mundane than most conventional anthropological approaches (Highmore
2002). Though my own practices varied widely, I utilised particular procedures
and techniques from the above sources, to inspire my fieldwork processes as
well as the written and visual articulations of my findings.

Chorography
“Chorography” refers to a process of regional mapping (Casey 2004:
261). First coined by Pomponius Mela in 44 C.E., it became known as a
narrative genre of human and cultural geography (Glick, et al. 2005: 186). In
the 17th century, a group of British scholars revived the practices of
chorography, re-establishing it as a short-lived yet significant school of
“antiquarian-historical” study (Mendyk 1986: 480). Their works describe not
just cities and towns, but also characteristics of the land, its flora and fauna,
and its human inhabitants. Their preferred methodology was “perambulation,”
wandering around and visiting places (both in person and through documents),
gathering impressions of architectural forms, landscape features, artefacts, and
historical events, as well as collecting regional anecdotes, poetry, legends,
customs, even etymologies of local words (ibid 468). They focused on the

21

commonplace features and happenings of local regions, preferring to analyse
ordinary people rather than elite or royal lines of descent (Helgerson 1992,
cited in Samuel 1994: 46).
Just as important as the physical proportions of landscapes are the ways
they are lived in and perceived by their inhabitants. As opposed to charting a
topographic site, which by Cartesian, metric dimensions may be interpreted as
empty or “vacuous,” a chorography encompasses an inhabited region, where
“the body imports its own implaced past into its present experience” (Casey
1987: 194). My thesis similarly endeavours to chart diverse emotional and
imagined geographies. As my analyses of Bucharest’s public and private
landscapes demonstrate (Chapters 2, 3, and 6), I am concerned with people’s
embodied experiences of local realms, and the relationships between place and
perceptions of the present, memories of the past, and projections of the future.
In my discussions about literal and perceptual constructions of the city
(Chapter 2), and interpersonal interactions around money (Chapter 4), I explore
the impacts of the passage of time upon space, which other “topographical”
studies of the past tend to neglect.6 I also embrace the artistic sensibilities of
the early chorographers, employing my own experimental and innovative
research methods to access the sensory dimensions of remembrance work
(Chapters 3 and 5).

Field Methods
Although each of my chapters details its own methodologies, I provide
here an overview of the theoretical frameworks underlying my varied practices.
My doctoral fieldwork occurred during the fifteen months between August
2006 and December 2007, the primary time frame informing the writing in this
thesis. My experiences in Romania, however, date back to 1997, when I first
travelled there for a month as a tourist. This experience and my subsequent
visits over the next decade shaped my own repertoire of memories of the
country’s post-Revolution history. Particularly significant were the fifteen
6

For example, see Fabian’s (2007) critique of Zerubavel’s Time Maps (2003).

22

months between October 1999 and December 2000 when I had a Fulbright
grant to research Romanian ethnographic museums, and was based at the
Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest. I went back in 2004 and 2005
to make two short ethnographic films as part of my MA at the University of
Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. I also returned to
Bucharest after my fieldwork, with a Europa fellowship from the New Europe
College, where for six months I attended weekly seminars and continued
writing-up my thesis.
When I arrived in Bucharest in 2006 for my doctoral fieldwork, I was
fluent in Romanian, and enjoyed an extensive network of social and
professional contacts, which helped connect me to a wider sphere of
individuals and institutions. This personal history greatly facilitated my ability
to settle into the daily rhythms and routines of fieldwork. While my
perceptions inevitably filtered through my outsider’s perspective, my own
memories of Romania’s previous decade amplified my understanding of my
collaborators’ recollections, and deepened my appreciation of the complexities
of the phenomenon of memory itself. Although I had not experienced Romania
under Ceau"escu, my presence there in the late ‘90s and early 2000s gave me a
closer acquaintance with people’s descriptions of the communist past, as many
people agreed that it was not until 2003 or 2004 that Bucharest began to
undergo drastic and more distinctly “post-socialist” transformations. As its
literal and symbolic contours continued to rapidly change, I was also faced
with the challenges of unlearning what I thought I already knew about the city,
and was constantly revising many of my expectations about living there.
Because of my previous experience collaborating with the Museum of
the Romanian Peasant, I took as my fieldwork “base” one particular office at
this museum, shared by about a dozen staff members in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
This setting was a hub of social, literary, artistic, and anthropological activity,
with food, drink, and music often stemming from the big, round table in the
middle of the room. Everyone divided their time between the office’s three
computers; nobody seemed to have a fixed schedule; outsiders were constantly
stopping by to chat. While the bulk of my present research does not connect to
the museum’s official policies or practices, having such regular and close

23

interactions with this group (mainly anthropologists who were also writers,
artists, and musicians) became an important part of my programme, helping me
to meet other Bucharest residents of all ages from a wide array of professional
backgrounds.
Other people I had known over the years, such as my former landlady
and her relatives, parents of friends, and colleagues’ acquaintances, expanded
my contacts beyond predominantly intellectual spheres. Rather than targeting
specific groups or categories of people to observe or follow, I let my daily
activities and personal connections drive my fieldwork. As I describe in
Chapter 6, for example, my decision to film in Ci"migiu Gardens was inspired
by the fact that I lived just a few minutes away from the park. This proximity
had led me to consider it a familiar extension of my own living space, with the
park taking an affective place in my own repertoire of memories about the city.
As with studies of everyday life, researching the topic of memory
requires a departure from traditional fieldwork practices. Many of my activities
involved a material and corporeal engagement with field sites and collaborators
going beyond the scope of participant observation. In order to supplement my
intellectual understandings of a past that I had not experienced, I had to
facilitate my own visceral and emotional recollections “by proxy,” or
“knowing through someone else’s accounts” (Casey 1987: 81). I improvised
certain experiments, actively provoking my own and other people’s memorial
capacities using sensory stimuli such as food (the “memory meal,” described in
Chapter 5), material artefacts (Chapters 3 and 4), and interactions with my
surrounding landscapes (Chapters 2 and 6). These activities led me to treat
such objects and places not as records or reminders of the past, but as “inducers
of reminiscence” (Casey 1987: 110), to set further processes of recollection in
motion. Exploring remembrance work through filmmaking additionally gave
me access to ideas and emotions (as well as methods for communicating them)
that I otherwise would not have encountered. As my own memory was
simultaneously triggered through these activities, I gained a more embodied
knowledge of my collaborators’ recollections, which enhanced my empathic
understanding of the objects and narratives that were meaningful to them.

24

As I explain in Chapters 2 and 3, my investigations of Bucharest’s
urban landscapes and household interiors were influenced by the surrealist
custom of flânerie, which could be interpreted as a specifically urban version
of the “perambulations” of the British chorographers. The French surrealists
considered their home city of Paris a “complex, unstable organism” with
marvellous and banal qualities, a “mysterious, unsettling, and intriguing place”
to explore as flâneurs (Walker 2002: 114). They often roamed its neglected
corners, searching for connections between “architectural form, psychic charge,
and social mythology” (Foster 1993: 170). Benjamin (1999) was also an
advocate for using flânerie to interpret the historical and psychological
significance of city streets, shopping arcades, and interiors of dwelling spaces
(Rice 2004: 278). As flâneurs typically engage in the deliberate act of
undirected wandering, absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells of
“metropolitan modernity, with its myriad cross-cutting interactions, its
momentary shocks, and its fleeting impressions” (Frisby 1984: 100), it is
logical to liken such behaviour to that of an anthropologist in the field. As
Frisby notes (ibid 97), the flâneur’s practices of “reading, recording, extracting,
ordering, reconstituting, deciphering and the like” are comparable to
ethnographic activities.
While my own adoption of flânerie involved a higher level of emotional
involvement than the term customarily implies, my explorations of Bucharest
similarly veered towards its disregarded, undervalued spaces as I scoured the
“cultural detritus” of the city (Foster 1993: 159) for “wish images” (Benjamin
1999), social histories, and communicative memories. Rather than regarding
such a practice as a form of “salvage ethnography,” or part of an
anthropological, imperialistic longing to hoard and dissect decontextualised
fragments of “disappearing” objects, memories, and cultural traditions, I
maintain that piecing together such traces of the past may also be a holistic,
constructive process of interpretation. The surrealists themselves were less
concerned with salvaging society’s ruins than with awakening a “revolutionary
desire” to recover and reclaim what capitalist culture had deemed oldfashioned, irrelevant, or useless (Foster 1993: 165). Valuing such trivial
phenomena as flea market trinkets, outmoded architectural structures, and

25

marginal urban spaces highlighted their function as “little disruptions” in the
current social order (Foster 1993: 161). As Benjamin observed (1999: 205),
gathering these remains and reconstructing them through new, creative forms
may contribute to deeper understandings of the “epoch, the landscape, the
industry, and the owner” from which they have come.
My fieldwork practices also drew upon certain information-gathering
techniques of the mass observation movement, a British sociological
association

formed

in

the

1930s.

This

movement’s

founders—an

anthropologist, a journalist, and a poet—employed paid and amateur
researchers alike to collaborate with the “man in the street” in order to compile
information about everyday habits and social behaviours (Madge and Harrison
1939: 10). Combining artistic and scientific sensibilities, they used
experimental methods of data collection they called “continuous observation”
(echoing the surrealists’ “automatic writing” techniques), and kept diaries of
“dominant images” from day-to-day life, such as gestures, symbols, and daydreams. In addition to my anthropological field notes, I kept mass observationstyle personal diaries, recording impressionistic descriptions of people, images,
thoughts, and experiences. I also kept collections of news clippings,
photographs, copies of letters I had written from the field, and random scraps
that had accumulated in my pockets at the end of each day.
My fieldwork extended beyond more conventional activities of semistructured interviews and participant observation to encompass seemingly
trivial or inconsequential situations, such as waiting for the bus, buying stamps
at the post office, listening to the radio, or walking through the park. This
approach led to the unsettling but curious feeling that I was constantly doing
fieldwork at every moment, yet at the same time never really “doing
fieldwork.” I remained open to memories wherever and whenever they might
surface, rather than anticipating them in particular contexts. Whenever I
organised activities to provoke people’s memories and discussions about the
past, I asked my interlocutors to write brief statements reflecting on these
events (see Appendices A and C). This practice evoked the mass observationist
penchant for using questionnaires and written self-evaluations to stimulate
people to reflexively articulate elements of their lives they normally took for

26

granted. The written statements I received often contained subtler, more
contemplative accounts and reminiscences than verbal elicitations alone.

“Imageric” Writing
Depicting the everyday through writing “in a way that doesn’t destroy
it” (Highmore 2002: 39) is no easy task, particularly when one is situated
within traditional academic paradigms that privilege and reward detached,
jargon-filled analyses. In the wake of the “writing culture” debates from the
‘80s and ‘90s, anthropologists concerned with producing engaging and
innovative texts still struggle to find alternative models that nonetheless fulfil
disciplinary requirements and conventions. Stewart offers an inspiring example
of “narrativizing a local cultural real” (1996: 3) in her ethnography of an
Appalachian coal-mining region. Using ethnopoetic notation, narrative
interruptions, and lyrical descriptions, she constructs a written account that
serves as an “allegory of the cultural processes it is trying to re-present” (ibid
7). DeSilvey (2007: 404) writes about processes of recollection using
associative leaps and poetic descriptions, what she calls “writing through the
grain of things.” Similarly, Pesmen’s ethnography of the Russian “soul” (2000a:
16) incorporates textual layering, evocative language, and shifts in narrative
direction as alternatives to typically Western academic tactics of calculation
and precision, echoing the transcendental, elusive, contradictory, and
surrealistic qualities of her subject matter.
The surrealists themselves were notorious for appropriating scientific
discourses for their own ends in their writing, paintings, and films (Kelly 2007).
Their subversive manipulations of ethnographic and documentary modes of
realism aimed to “shake up settled ways of thinking” (Breton 1969 [1930]: 152)
by simultaneously utilising and destabilising claims to academic and scientific
authority.7 They had a particularly charged relationship with the discipline of
anthropology, producing their own controversial versions of ethnographic

7

See Bate (2004); Cardinal (1986); Kelly (2007); Stoller (1992); Walker (2002); and Williams
(1981) for discussions of the surrealists’ subversions of scientific paradigms.

27

journals8 and museum exhibitions after field expeditions to “exotic” places.9
Although I do not reproduce their blatantly “audacious”10 antics in my own
texts, their playful and irreverent questioning of conventional representations
of reality has influenced my research, informing the spirit with which I
approached my fieldwork, film-work and the writing-up process.
The actual writing in my thesis does not directly incorporate the radical
games of the surrealists, or even the more subtle experimentations with
language found in the work of Stewart, DeSilvey, and Pesmen. It rather seeks
to emulate the early British chorographers’ vivid and expressive prose,
gravitating towards a cultivation of language’s “imageric and sensate” qualities
(Taussig 1992: 8). Following Benjamin, I employ language to engage and
transcend the intellect, conjuring up not only ideas, but also mental and
figurative pictures (Weigel 1996: 148). Through such evocative language, I
wish to “[hail] the body of the reader” (Farquhar 2002: 290) to empathically
relate to the material in ways that my own body was “hailed” during my
fieldwork. I have endeavoured to develop a language of ekphrasis, using the
“thought-images” of my prose not only to provoke the vivid, sensory
experiences of fieldwork, but also to connect to the visual and corporeal “bodyspaces” of recollection.
I combine storytelling techniques with analytical processes in order to
construct my arguments and assemble the contextualising fabric of my thesis.
As Jackson argues (2002), building upon the ideas of Arendt and Benjamin,
stories often serve as a form of social critique, fusing external and internal
worlds as well as private and public narratives, reshaping the past as they are
reinvented and retold. I consider such alternative approaches to academic
writing conducive to generating imaginative, sensory, and affective insights
into the processes and products of my ethnographic investigations. They also
seem especially appropriate tactics when dealing with the subject of memory.

8

For example, Documents (edited by the surrealist/anthropologist Michel Leiris), and
Minotaure.
9
See Mileaf (2001) for descriptions of two surrealist “counter-colonial” exhibitions in Paris,
which criticised anthropological practices by ironically juxtaposing and comparing “tribal” and
“European” objects.
10
“Audacity, audacity, and still more audacity!” was Andre Breton’s motto (Rosemont 1978:
122).

28

Vicissitudes of Memory
Memory studies cover an enormous field; in anthropology alone, the
concept of remembrance work is mobilised in multiple and often contradictory
ways.11 As Fabian notes, memory is an “omnivorous, insatiable concept” (2007:
139) so ubiquitous, it seems impossible to pin down. In the face of such
semantic elusiveness and ambiguity, I find it more interesting and productive to
explore what memory does, rather than determine what it is. I investigate how
memories actively move between places, people, and artefacts, rather than
studying their existence as passive, stored impressions (Casey 1987: 272).
Although memories themselves have no palpable existence, their presence
tends to involve the bodily senses and provoke visceral, emotional responses
(ibid 310; Misztal 2003: 16). They are often realised in discourse, both in
spoken language and in written texts (Casey 1987: 116), but they may also
manifest in physical gestures, activities, and rituals; in inanimate objects,
edifices, and landscapes; or in the detritus of material ruins and remains.
While Teski and Climo maintain that memory is a “territory of
ethnographic investigation that lies beyond space and time” (1995: 1), I would
argue that memory lies at the heart of space and time. Casey notes that there
are few occasions in which we are not “steeped in memory” (1987: ix); yet at
particular places and at certain moments, the past comes more sharply into
relief against the present (Benjamin 1999: 462). Remembrance work often
escalates in the extended aftermath of crisis or social instability, or as a
reaction to spatial and temporal dislocation (Cattell and Climo 2002;
Connerton 2009; Edkins 2003; Huyssen 2003). But despite its situated
relationship to time, space, and materiality, memory still remains an invisible
product of the imagination (Fentress and Wickham 1992; Gourgouris 2002:
324).

11

Berliner aptly observes (2005) that anthropological literature ought to employ more precise,
responsible, and “matured” uses of the notion of memory.

29

How, then, does one go about analysing memory? As Fentress and
Wickham ask (1992: 2), “Do we hunt it with a questionnaire or are we
supposed to use a butterfly net?” Its very presence paradoxically implies an
absence of what is being recalled. Different individuals often possess very
different recollections of the same past. Some memories might seem fixed and
clear, while others have vague and hazy overtones; yet they all inevitably
undergo revisions and transformations over time. Memories may be
deliberately summoned, or they may unexpectedly surface, triggered by
particular odours or tastes or sounds. People, places, and situations are
conjured up in fleeting and fragmented mental constellations. Even if the
proper equipment did exist, and memories could somehow be captured, how
would an anthropologist manage to evaluate something so invisible, immaterial,
and intangible?
As Pesmen argues, the Russian concept of dusha or soul (2000a: 9)
both “is and is not a thing.” I propose that memory has similar propensities,
though it will never serve as a substitute for a material object itself. It may
manifest in physical entities, but it is also a “shifting focus of beliefs, practices,
discourses,” a way of “being in the world” (ibid 9). My thesis attempts to
account for such alternating and inconsistent qualities and behaviours:
intertwining substance and process, the objectified and the imagined, the
aesthetic and the ideological, the poetic and the political. Observing its
relationships to visual, material, and sensory realms provides a means to locate
and analyse the phenomenon of memory, and particularly to investigate the
(often overlooked) remembrance work occurring within everyday, less
explicitly commemorative contexts.

Memory and Visuality
The relationship between memory and the visual is far from
straightforward. The ancient Greek concept of “ars memoria,” or the art of
memory, originally attributed to the poet Simonides in 500 BCE, defines

30

recollection as the act of picturing of images in one’s mind.12 This metaphor
has remained in present-day conceptualisations of remembering. The popular
notion of “flash-bulb” memories as photographs capturing frozen moments in
time is reinforced by frequent media usage of images to evoke and “re-enact”
episodes from the historical past. Particularly in the current technological era,
when computerised and electronic images expose us to visual phenomena we
might not otherwise encounter, our memories are increasingly “supplemented,
shaped, structured, and recomposed” by such imagery (Cooke, et al. 1992: 23).
Nora has observed (cited in Gillis 1994: 15) that modern memory “relies
entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the
visibility of the image.” Even as recently as the 1990s, LeGoff (1992: 89)
insisted that imagistic technologies have “revolutionised” memory, giving it a
“precision,” a “truth,” and an ability to “preserve time” like never before.
Contemporary visual theorists have problematised such assumptions on
several grounds, which I discuss in Chapter 6. In my film, Lumina amintirii (In
the Light of Memory), my efforts to visually address memory through motion
and time conform to a Bergsonian “non-archival” understanding of memory
(Burton 2008) as a “moving continuity” of simultaneous permanence and
change, as opposed to a static essence lodged in matter (Guerlac 2006: 161).
For Bergson, the past manifests in the present through bodily movements and
actions, but its visual representations exist only in the imagination (ibid 125).
My decision to incorporate film as an analytical instrument and interpretive
medium in my thesis similarly draws less upon film’s powers of representation
and more upon its abilities to transcend its own visual properties and operate in
emotional, sensory, evocative realms (Crawford 1992; MacDougall 1994;
Schneider and Wright 2006).
In Chapter 6, I build upon arguments that the eye is a conduit for the
rest of the body, and that mimesis is not just a visual experience but a physical
one as well. I suggest that the camera’s mechanical “eye” can transcend sight
and sound to offer a uniquely “tactile and habitual” consciousness, not only of
the external world (Taussig 1992: 11), but also of the internal, visceral

12

Casey (1987); Fentress and Wickham (1992); LeGoff (1992: 66); Misztal (2003: 30); Weigel
(1996: 148); Yates (1966).

31

experiences of memory and the imagination. Using this medium to approach
the affective dimensions of social experience, rather than considering it a mere
“pictorial” means of illustrating ethnographic information (see Ruby 2000), has
led me to introduce new kinds of knowledge practices into my research.

Memory and Sensoriality
Investigating memory’s sensory properties is an integral aspect of my
thesis. Memories make us feel as well as think (Watson 1994: 8), provoking a
synaesthesia of sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound (Casey 1987: 31). Fentress
and Wickham (1992: 47) divide memory into two categories: “semantic” and
“episodic.” While semantic memory is theoretical and abstract, recalling its
object through symbols and words, independent of personal experience,
episodic memory is more subjective and concrete, recognising its object
through movements, images, and sounds. According to these authors, episodic
recollection, which is personal, sensory, and connected to the body, underlies
all other forms of memory; it is an active and dynamic force, rather than a
passive storage system or a repository of information. Connerton argues that
“personal,” “cognitive,” and “habit” memories similarly may become
“sedimented” in individuals and communities through bodily practices and
rituals (1989: 72). Table manners, facial expressions, and talking with one’s
hands are all examples of embodied cultural attitudes and behaviours that
convey and sustain memories through physical means by drawing upon a
“currency” of remembered gestures (ibid 3).
This concept brings to mind Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, or culturally
internalised and “embodied dispositions of social order… progressively
inscribed in people’s minds” (1984: 471). As habitus operates “below the level
of consciousness and language” (ibid 466), I found myself accordingly
searching outside the realms of discourse and narrative in order to locate,
identify, and analyse remembrance practices. By investigating the interface
between the physical world of ordinary objects, interior spaces, exterior
landscapes, and everyday behaviours, demeanours, and performances, I have

32

attempted to merge a Foucauldian concept of the body as “imprinted by
history” (1977: 148) with a Benjaminian idea of memory as tangible “bodyspace” (Weigel 1996: 153). Rather than interpreting “habit” memories as direct
expressions of a larger community’s “master-narratives” (Connerton 1989: 70),
or Bergsonian “habitual” memories as consisting merely of passive, automatic
motor mechanisms (Gross 2000: 42), I examine the ways in which
commemorative practices, discourses, sites, and objects are constantly
produced and creatively revised, taking on unexpected, idiosyncratic forms.
Such a perspective attributes more innovative and unstable capacities to
memory than both Connerton and Bergson imply.
Instead of reducing the act of remembering to a mere “cerebral
process,” a “mental operation” (Halbwachs 1992 [1925], cited in Gross 2000:
82), or even a social, political, or historical construct, I explore its embodied,
cognitive qualities, and how these sensory and social elements may or may not
interrelate. In a phenomenological line of inquiry, remembering operates as a
fundamental form of existing, a sensing of physical movement and space, a
Heideggerian being-in-the-world (Casey 1987: 259). If we accept the
proposition that physical and corporeal modes of perception precede mental
and intellectual ones (Casey 1987; MacDougall 2006), then the body becomes
of “centralmost concern in any adequate assessment” of memory (Casey 1987:
147). In seeking to acknowledge these embodied experiences of memory, I also
wish to move beyond a phenomenological approach by tracing the ways in
which visceral qualities of recollection play themselves out through personal
associations, social relationships, and historical and political configurations. By
looking at communicative memories within specific contexts, and at a
particular period of time, I hope to add my own insights into the corporeal and
cognitive capacities of memory, and contribute to discussions about people’s
lived experiences, perceptions of the past, and expectations of the future during
Bucharest’s current moment of post-socialist “transition.”

33

CONTEXTS:
Post-socialism / Post-communism13

As Gross observes (2000: 11), it is impossible to analyse the
significance of memory as an abstract concept; its full meaning is always
dependent upon the “what” that is remembered. It was not my original
intention to confine my research solely to memories of Romania’s communist
period; in fact, I deliberately remained open to other personal and political
recollections. Yet in a country that until two decades ago endured over 40 years
of communist-authoritarian regimes, it is not surprising that much of the
current remembrance work is heavily weighted towards this element of the past.
As the material traces and ideological remains of communism wear away, the
era becomes more distant in people’s minds (Crowley and Reid 2000: 18),
inspiring the desire to prevent this experience from passing into oblivion. In
Romania’s current climate, when new “European” regulations are coming into
effect and impacting people’s daily lives, the activation and deployment of
memory (including its offshoots of nostalgia, forgetting, and projections of the
future), take on additional socio-cultural meanings and forms. Provisionally
demarcating this temporal terrain as “post-communism” may serve as an
effective tool for examining how such large-scale events are played out in
small-scale, on-the-ground ways.
As one friend noted to me after I returned from the field, Romanians
tend to use December 1989 as a reference point, distinguishing the
“communist” and “post-communist” eras, and dividing historical time into
periods “before” and “after” the Revolution. The fact that this turning point is
lodged in the minds of those who lived through it and of those who now live in
its wake points to the significant and enduring impacts of these processes on
people’s everyday lives. On January 1, 2007, I witnessed another key turning
13

The period between 1947 and 1989 in Romania is often categorised as “socialist” in Western
academic texts, and “communist” in local popular and academic discourses. After coming into
power in 1965, Ceau"escu distanced his own policies from broader Soviet agendas, developing
his own arbitrary, authoritarian, quasi-Marxist style of rule. Because this era is described as
both “socialist” and “communist,” I use the terms loosely and interchangeably. However, I
favour the term “socialist” when engaging with broader theoretical discussions, and
“communist” when referring to Romanians’ particular evaluations of their own past.

34

point: Romania’s acceptance into the European Union. As my research
spanned the months immediately before, during, and after this occasion, I was
able to gauge how this broader cultural moment served as a conceptual
springboard towards anticipations of change in the country’s future, again seen
against the backdrop of this “before” and “after” history. With hindsight, the
two decades following the 1989 Revolution may be conceptualised as a
discrete phase of post-socialist, pre-EU flux marked by distinct political,
cultural, economic, social, and material transformations.
As was the case in many other Eastern European countries, postrevolutionary Romania was characterised by a rapid collapse of certain social
and economic institutions and a withdrawal of particular state surveillance
mechanisms (Humphrey and Mandel 2002: 3). Yet some scholars have
critiqued the sweeping label “post-socialist” for its connotations that the
socialist or post-socialist periods could be uniform across national boundaries
or constant over time (Berdahl 2000a: 3). Others have rejected the category
altogether, claiming it describes societies as what they are not, rather than as
what they actually are (Kideckel 2002: 115). Sampson (2002: 298) has
suggested the phrase “post post-socialism” to express the point when the
“shock of the new” has worn off, and people have begun adapting to largescale political and cultural changes, such as the appearance of technocratic and
cultural elites, or the integration of communities into new global frameworks.
However, there is still a significant body of current literature that continues to
use the term “post-socialism,” with the understanding that the broad
transformations in social institutions, political organisation, and systems of
meaning may play out in multiple and contradictory ways, and that the word
itself may even develop other implications over time. As Verdery argues (Hann
et al. 2002: 16), preserving the concept within academia may engender new
critical perspectives similar to those emerging in post-colonial studies, such as
turning people’s attention towards how socialism helped shape certain images
of the West.
By describing Romania as “post-socialist,” I do not wish to reduce its
current identity to one that is simply trying to “shake off” the legacy of its
former political regime. Contemporary Romania is the product of numerous

35

legacies—the post-socialist period could also just as legitimately be called a
post “pre-socialist” period, or a post “Ottoman” period, and so on, back into
ancient history. In my own experience, the post-socialism of twelve years ago
when I first visited Romania was distinct from the post-socialism during my
Fulbright grant two years later, which was radically different from the various
post-socialisms of my subsequent visits between 2003 and 2009. While I have
reservations about the term, I nevertheless view it as a critical marker of
Romania’s contemporary social and political configurations that are deeply
connected to its current productions of memory. It may be an artificial
construct that does not capture the nuances of people’s experiences across time
and space, but I consider it an academically justifiable one. Socialist and
communist systems have existed in both ideology and practice; they have had
very real impacts upon individuals and communities; and they have not been
entirely eradicated or replaced (Hann, et al. 2002: 12).
I have deliberately qualified this term with the supplementary words
“EU accession-era” in my title. Situating this particular moment of postsocialism within the period of Romania’s accession into the European Union
highlights the role that new, evolving dynamics play in eliciting and shaping
people’s memories, and calls attention to future realms of possibility, rather
than using the past as the sole reference point. It also situates the current phase
of post-socialism within a concrete, historical context, encouraging more
precise definitions of the related concept of “transition.”

“Transition”
I

wish

to

avoid

interpreting

Romania’s

“transition”

as

an

undifferentiated, twenty-year block of time following the 1989 Revolution.
Over the course of my fieldwork, I noticed a marked change in people’s
assessments about the state of Romania’s supposed transition. In 2006, when I
explained to people that I was researching constructions of memory in the
contemporary period of transition, nobody questioned my use of this phrase. In
2007, many people began to respond with comments such as, “Really, don’t

36

you think the transition is over by now?” Several people noted that Romania
seemed to be in a different sort of transition from before, one that was more
related to EU accession than to the end of Ceau"escu’s regime. Were such
perceptual shifts triggered by Romania’s actual entry into the EU, or by the
accumulation of many smaller changes over the last two decades? Did people’s
different responses to my research explanation over time provide evidence of
the transition’s transition?
While in theory it is feasible to discuss the implications of a cultural or
historical revolution, in practice it is impossible to isolate discrete social
processes, or delineate concrete boundaries around a particular era. Such
frames become arbitrary, artificial forces having little to do with people’s dayto-day experiences. Lampland notes (2000: 210) that “drawing a sharp line
between socialism and the post-socialist period violates the complex flow of
memory, continuity, family, politics, and culture in which people live their
lives”; the same could be said for the shift between the late post-socialist and
EU-membership eras in Romania. At the same time, the concept of transition
still translates into palpable feelings and experiences that are recognised by
those who are living in its midst. As Pelkmans observes (2003: 121),
“transition ideology” has been so ingrained in contemporary post-socialist
discourses, ideals, and behaviours that people’s own invocations of transition
sometimes belie existing evidence that little in their lives has actually changed.
The idea of transition, he argues, must therefore be analysed as the constantly
reconfigured space existing between real and imagined processes of change
(ibid 132).
Transitology theorists have tended to evaluate the shifts from socialist
to capitalist systems as evolutionary, teleological progressions.

14

Many

anthropologists have warned against interpreting the recent transformations in
Eastern Europe as the inevitable collapse of monolithic, totalitarian models
leading to a “free” neo-liberal future, or the “magic” solutions of development
14

The Romanian sociologist C!t!lin Zamfir (2004: 18) distinguishes such upheavals from
“normal” processes of social change, defining Romania’s current transition as the deliberate act
of “returning” to a condition that had been “interrupted by the communist experiment.” The
American political scientist Michael Mandelbaum (1996: 9) describes transition as a
“westward” process, describing the free market as a “natural” development that springs from
“what is basic, almost biological, human nature.”

37

and democracy (see Berdahl 2000a; Hahn 2002; Kideckel 2002; Verdery 1999).
As Verdery argues (1996: 16), the “fall” of socialist regimes was less due to
inherent deficiencies in their organisation, and more about the dynamics of
their historical encounters with a particular type of capitalism. Though the new
market economy has benefited certain classes, it also has brought poverty and
exclusion to others (ibid 16). As people are faced with incorporating postsocialist reforms into their lives, evidence of preserving or returning to “old”
socialist practices should be recognised as deliberate and strategic negotiations
of the present-day context, rather than as chaotic or confused inabilities to let
go of an outdated past (see Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Creed 1999; Dunn
1999; Hann 2002; Humphrey 2002).
In this vein, I analyse Romania’s “transitions” as less connected to the
abrupt end of large-scale structures and institutions, and more about smallscale “evolutions, hybrid societies, [and] adaptations” (Verdery 1999: 1) within
the “incremental acts” of daily life occurring among individuals and local
communities (Hann 2002: xi; Lampland 2000: 209; Humphrey and Mandel
2002: 1; Watson 1994: 4). Such a perspective allows for alternative
interpretations of the operations of time, forsaking attention to the “high
points” in historical development in favour of the “actual intensities and
creations of life” (Foucault 1977: 161). Transition is a ubiquitous process
existing at every moment in every society, and only “after the fact” can we
begin to examine what exactly has been transitioned from and to. Yet even
when using hindsight to reconstruct what has already happened, refusing a
“certainty of absolutes” about historical development challenges the dangerous
assumption that anyone can be sovereign over the past (Foucault 1977: 153),
thereby opening up the possibility for alternative power dynamics and
unexpected patterns to emerge in the future.

The EU Accession-era
Romania officially became the 26th member state of the European
Union on January 1, 2007, an event widely touted as a crucial step in the

38

country’s

supposed

Eastern/Balkan/communist

move

away

identity,

from
and

a
towards

predominantly
a

more

Western/European/capitalist one. The accession “event” in and of itself served
as an impetus for widespread reflexive evaluations of Romania’s current status
in the world, a kind of “commemoration of the present” which generated a
ripple-effect of reflections about the past, and both hopeful and cynical
speculations about the future. Rather than being an overnight transformation,
however, it has consisted of an ongoing, subtle set of shifts in mentality and
incremental day-to-day reforms. With the twentieth anniversary of the
Revolution in December 2009, evocations of the past became increasingly
commonplace, routine, and sometimes even obligatory in certain contexts.
Against these broader backdrops, I was curious how such changes in
Romania’s global framework intersected with remembrance practices at local,
individual levels.
In the months leading up to the accession, debates in everyday
conversations and in the media drew upon people’s memories of recent history,
and postulated about what EU membership might mean. For example, many of
my friends worried that urban open-air markets would be forced to close for
“sanitary” reasons, or that peasants would be prohibited from slaughtering their
pigs the “traditional” way with a knife, and be required to use more “modern”
and “humane” methods such as lethal injection. While some people expressed
reservations about losing their “cultural identity” and local “customs” to a
larger, anonymous Europe, most were enthusiastic about the prospect of
integration, as they hoped it would allow them to leave behind difficult times
and attain superior standards of living coupled with a higher international
status. The prospect of EU membership also stimulated public dialogue (locally
and internationally) about Romania’s need to “reform” its justice system, its
public administration, and its broader “culture of corruption.” People often
attributed bureaucratic inefficiency, incompetency, and dishonesty to the
“communist illness,” advocating a return to the moral standards of Romania’s
pre-war, “properly European” heritage.
In the autumn of 2006, I came across a fair bit of political propaganda
on EU membership that overtly drew upon nationalist sentiments and

39

discourses of modernisation. One November day as I walked through
Bucharest’s University Square, I was handed a brochure entitled, “Romania in
Europe,” featuring a message from Prime Minister C!lin Popescu-T!riceanu.
His text compared the upcoming EU integration of 2007 to the unification of
Greater Romania in 1918, 15 describing this event as the country’s “first
modernisation,” when Romania regained its “national dignity,” and EU
accession as a “second modernisation,” another “fundamental national project”
(Popescu-T!riceanu 2007). The Prime Minister urged Romanians to start
thinking and behaving as “European citizens,” and promised that there would
be a “rapid increase” in local standards of well-being (ibid). Another leaflet
explained that membership would provide billions of Euros in funding
opportunities, and grant Romanians the same rights as other EU citizens for
travelling and residency within the member states (Romanian Foundation for
the Promotion of Community Development 2006). “To be European,” it stated,
“does not mean the uniformisation of customs and culture, but rather to believe
that what unites the European people is more important than what divides
them” (ibid).
Considerable rifts flared up, however, during the period immediately
prior to accession, particularly among Romanian politicians. While it was
widely acknowledged that most current government officials were either excommunists themselves, 16 or had close ties to the former nomenclature or
secret police, Tr!ian B!sescu’s election to the Presidency in 2004 represented a
symbolic break from such a legacy. Many people regarded B!sescu’s
background as a Merchant Navy captain as a confirmation of his personal and
political distance from the communist regime (though this of course is
debatable), and they were drawn to his charismatic, down-to-earth personality.
He was also the first post-communist leader to open up the country to foreign

15

At the end of WWI, the territories of Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia were annexed
to the Romanian Old Kingdom (Wallachia and Moldavia). This unified region was referred to
as “Greater Romania” until 1940, when some of these territories were lost to the Soviet Union,
Hungary, and Bulgaria. Romanian nationalists often evoke this inter-war period as a glorious
era when the country possessed its “rightful” dimensions.
16
The National Democratic Salvation Front, headed by Ion Iliescu, was the first party to take a
major leadership role after the Revolution, though it consisted primarily of former communist
bureaucrats. These individuals were often referred to as “communist dinosaurs,” or as I was
told many times over the years, “They’re the same guys, now just wearing different hats.”

40

investors, giving Romanians some hope over the next few years as their
economy skyrocketed to one of the fastest-growing in Eastern Europe (Ben
Rockwell, personal communication, 1 February 2007).
B!sescu’s decision to deliver a public condemnation of Romania’s
communist past just weeks before the accession, however, had serious
repercussions, both for his personal and professional reputation, and for the
broader dynamics of remembrance work in Romania’s public sphere. Drawing
upon findings from the Final Report of the Commission for the Study of the
Communist Dictatorship in Romania,17 B!sescu denounced the regime to the
Romanian Parliament as “illegitimate and criminal,” and introduced a set of
proposals for state-funded projects to officially commemorate the “victims of
communist terror and repression”18 (B!sescu 2007: 6; Smith 2006). Amidst a
cacophony of boos, whistles, and applause filling the Parliamentary chamber,
his speech concluded, “I thought that we would be able to forget about
communism, but it didn’t want to forget about us. As such, the condemnation
of this past is a priority of the present… All I want is to pave the way for
democracy in Romania and our national identity with a clean slate” (B!sescu
2007: 6).
The President’s statement proved to be highly controversial. Many
Romanians expressed appreciation that an elected official finally had made a
formal, public apology, and had called for atonement for past grievances. A
significant number of Romanian politicians, however, were outraged at
B!sescu’s gall to question their present-day credibility by “naming names” and
publicising their connections to the previous regime. They reacted with their
17

In March 2006, B!sescu appointed Vladimir Tism!neanu, a political science professor at the
University of Maryland, to direct a team of interdisciplinary researchers for this Report.
According to one of the members of this Commission, they were given seven months to
produce a coherent synthesis of the “methods and institutions of totalitarian communism,”
documenting particular individuals’ roles in the “crimes and abuses” perpetuated during that
period (Cristian Vasilescu, personal communication, 19 June 2009).
18
These plans included raising a new monument in Bucharest to honour these “victims”;
setting aside a national day of commemoration; founding a new museum (a “place of memory”)
containing archival documents essential to understanding communism; preparing a series of
university conferences to present the contents of the “Final Report” detailing the former
government and Securitate members’ “crimes against humanity”; creating an Encyclopaedia of
Romanian Communism; awarding twelve grants per year to young scholars interested in
studying aspects of the communist dictatorship; and developing the first textbook on
Romania’s communist past to be taught in schools throughout the country (B!sescu 2007: 6).

41

own televised political offensives, which according to many public figures
confirmed that contemporary Romanian society was “even more loaded with
residual communism” than it previously had seemed (Blandiana 2007: 6).
The response among intellectual circles was divided. Democracypromoting institutions defended B!sescu’s actions, praising the Final Report’s
“well-researched” and “scientific” foundations. In February 2007 the Group for
Social Dialogue (GDS) published an appeal signed by 65 scholars who blamed
the growing “political crisis” on the defensive reactions of politicians who felt
threatened by the President’s recent initiatives. They urged Romanian citizens
to stop allowing “political rubbish accumulated during the transition years” to
be “shoved under the rug of history” (GDS 2007). Others lamented that the
chaos in Romania’s Parliament was particularly shameful when legislators
should have been adhering to the more “civilised” codes of the European
Union (Ciucu 2007: 5; #imonca 2007: 4; Vasilescu 2007: 3). Still other
critiques emerged, blaming the President for focusing too much on the
repressions and injustices committed under communism, and for not conveying
a more balanced picture of the past (Cristian Vasilescu, personal
communication, 19 June 2009).
Existing rivalries between B!sescu and Prime Minister T!riceanu
intensified, and in April 2007, the Romanian Parliament voted to suspend the
President, on the pretext of violating the Constitution for an unrelated reason.
A public referendum for his impeachment was held in May 2007, but nearly
75% of the electorate voted to keep him in office. The longer-term political
repercussions of these events are complex, and extend beyond the scope of my
thesis, but I describe these dynamics in order to outline the political context of
Romania’s flourishing culture of recollection in 2007. As I already have
mentioned, such political discourses may influence those existing in everyday
realms, but they are also challenged by them. Together, they formed a dense
and complicated web of remembrance work in Romania’s public sphere that
may be traced back through the past two decades.
As Georgescu has observed (2009), the 1990s were dominated by a
“first memorial wave,” documenting the injustices of the past and confronting
them in a “morally responsible” manner. This earlier period featured

42

mobilisations of memory to identify the perpetrators of communist crimes and
seek retribution, or to educate future generations on avoiding similar “traumas”
in the future (see Blandiana 1999: 311, Constantinescu, et al. 2000). The
subsequent decade evidenced a “second memorial wave,” hosting more diverse
and “polyphonic” forms of public recollection (Georgescu 2009), involving
“reflective” forms of nostalgia (Boym 2001) and memoiristic essays exploring
individuals’ personal experiences of the past. Literature,19 films,20 plays,21 and
museum exhibits22 demonstrated slightly more individualised and multifaceted
responses to everyday life under totalitarianism, supplementing the clichéd
references to the past already flooding Romanian newspapers, cultural journals,
research projects, 23 scholarly publications,24 television shows, websites, 25 and
commercial arenas.26 Yet as Georgescu has suggested (2009), the majority of
these cultural and intellectual discourses still contained moralistic overtones,
subscribing to and perpetuating public frameworks of cultural memory
emphasising the need to overcome Romania’s “damaging” and “unhealthy”
past.
19

Cernat, et al (2004, 2005); Ernu (2006); Istodor (2007); Manolache, et al (2007); Manolescu
(2008).
20
A fost sau n-a fost [12:08 east of Bucharest] (2006); Amintiri din Epoca de Aur [Tales from
the Golden Age] (2009); California dreamin’ (nesfâr!it) [California dreamin’ (endless)]
(2007); Cum mi-am petrecut sfâr!itul lumii [How I celebrated the end of the world] (2006);
Hârtia va fi albastr" [The paper will be blue] (2006); and 4 luni, 3 s"pt"mâni !i 2 zile [4
months, 3 weeks and 2 days] (2007).
21
Dinulescu (2005); Mihailov (2008); Nelega (2005).
22
„Metamorfoza unei metropole: ‚Micul Paris’” [“Metamorphosis of a Metropolis: ‘Little
Paris’”] exhibition at the “Sala Dalles” art gallery in Bucharest (2006); „Epoca de aur: între
propagand" !i realitate” [“The Golden Age: Between Propaganda and Reality”] exhibition at
the National History Museum in Bucharest (2007); Dacia 1300: my generation (2003), a video
installation by #tefan Constantinescu at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in
Bucharest (2007).
23
“Remembering Communism,” a three-year research project involving academics from
Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, headed by Maria Todorova and Stefan Troebst (2006); the
“Urban Remembrance and Memory of Europe” (URME) project, involving collaborators from
seven Central and East European cities, initiated in Bucharest (2006); “Regimes of
Representation: Art and Politics beyond the House of People [sic]” conference at the National
Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (2007); „Comunismul a fost condemnat: ce
urmeaz"?” [“Communism Has Been Condemned: What’s Next?”], a colloquium organised by
the Civic Alliance in Bucharest (2007); a call for papers on the “Politics of Memory in Postcommunist Europe,” for the Fifth Yearbook of the Bucharest Institute for Communist Crimes
and the Memory of Romanian Exile (2010).
24
Anghelescu, et al., eds. (2003, 2005); Câmpeanu (1994); Constantinescu, et al., eds. (2000);
Mih!ilescu (2006); Neculau (2004); Sandqvist and Zahariade (2003).
25
http://www.rememberingcommunism.org/; and http://www.latrecut.ro/ are two of the more
popular ones currently in operation [accessed 01 February 2010].
26
I observed images of Ceau"escu on billboards and in television advertisements, used to
market products from chocolate to mobile phones to laundry detergent.

43

This observation reinforces the notion that most discussions of
remembrance

work

are

inevitably

value-laden

activities.

Romanian

assessments about how the past should or should not be addressed intersect
with wider debates about whether the act of remembering may have positive,
regenerative qualities, or unhealthy, dysfunctional ones. As Gross observes
(2000: 32), after the rise of “modernity” in the 17th century, historians and
philosophers began to view the act of remembering as an inability to live fully
in the present, rather than as a grounding or creative force. Yet Gross falls into
similar patterns of weighing out the “value of memory” in relation to the
“value of forgetting” in contemporary society, asking, “Should we late
moderns be advised to remember our past or forget it?” (ibid 137). While I
refrain from asking such questions in my own thesis, identifying and
delineating current discussions about memory work in the context of postsocialist, EU accession-era Bucharest illuminates dynamics that are specific to
a particular framework, leading to deeper understandings of the social and
political configurations of one small segment of the world’s “late-modern”
population.

Summaries and Conclusions
Rather than concentrating on the norms of recall perpetuated through
official, cultural memories, my thesis leans more towards evaluating the
substance and significance of unofficial, communicative memories. While the
performance and debate of “Amalia Takes a Deep Breath” illustrates that
official and unofficial modes of remembrance work are often inextricable, my
thesis is less concerned with institutionalised, state-directed practices.
Although it is important to acknowledge that remembrance work does fall
along dividing-lines of social class, generational cohort, and national and
political affiliation, or may be commodified, politically mobilised, or exploited
in artistic, literary, and academic discourses, I have chosen to highlight
memory’s appearances within ordinary objects, spaces, and landscapes, and the

44

ways in which it may move between inadvertent and deliberate evocations, and
take on commemorative and non-commemorative functions.
My attention to mundane realms points to the importance of everyday
material practices in and of themselves, rather than viewing them as a means to
access underlying social structures and processes. Such a perspective is less
about making moral pronouncements or uncovering fundamental “truths” about
the past, and more about delving into its varied interpretations, into its
nebulous, sometimes disjointed, and often contradictory qualities. It posits
memory not as a mere enduring trace, but as a dynamic and active social force.
It also takes into account that this topic often involves a reflexive attention
towards the practice of memory research within mnemonic communities
themselves, as Romanians are increasingly attentive to how memories are
continuing to surface in their own lives.
While memory may be interpreted both as a cultural process and an
historical artefact (Cattell and Climo 2002: 12), it is essential to consider its
corporeal properties as well. My thesis draws attention to the particular and
concrete operations of memory itself: its methods of appearing and
disappearing; its relationships to the visceral and the visual; its sensory aspects
and incarnations; its varied materialisations in everyday life. My approach is
not a purely phenomenological one, however, for I view these embodied
experiences as part of memory’s broader trajectories through varied social,
political, and historical contexts. By addressing such experiences through
writing and film, I explore these processes on individual, corporeal, and sociocultural levels. By instigating situations in the field that provoked and
generated “felt” memories in my collaborators and in myself, I treat my
fieldwork as an active and contingent space, which instead of being dictated by
pre-established hypotheses, as in most other anthropological projects, itself
plays a key role in shaping the textures and dimensions of my research.
Chapter 2 explores urban, exterior landscapes of Bucharest and the
ways in which people have constructed and reconstructed the city over time.
Chapter 3 analyses neglected and forgotten collections of objects within
domestic and private interiors. Chapter 4 investigates Romanian money as a
material object and as an element of everyday practice invoking strong

45

Chorographies of Memory: Everyday Sites and Practices of Remembrance Work in Post-socialist, EU Accession-era Bucharest

Chorographies of Memory: Everyday Sites and Practices of Remembrance Work in Post-socialist, EU Accession-era Bucharest

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