Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town

Capa
Princeton University Press, 2006 - 439 páginas

Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names.


Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Further developing the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, the book demonstrates that it is ultimately in and through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.

 

Índice

From Kolozsvar to ClujNapoca
31
Kolozsvar in Nationalizing Hungary
33
From Kolozsvar to Cluj
39
Once Again in Hungary
43
The Transition to Communist Rule
47
The Romanization of Cluj
51
Cluj after Ceauşescu
61
The Reemergence of Ethnopolitical Contention
64
Private Talk in Public Places
188
Language Choice in Mixed Company
193
Language Mixing in Intraethnic Settings
201
Conclusion
204
Institutions
207
Schools
211
Churches
219
Workplaces
225

The Struggle over Separate Schools in Cluj and TarguMureş
69
Gheorghe Funar and the Nationalization of Public Space
114
A Hungarian University in Cluj?
124
Counting and Categorizing
129
Conclusion
134
Everyday Ethnicity
134
Portraits
134
Emilia
134
Karcsi and Agi
134
Ana
134
Zsolt and Kati
134
Claudin and Lucian
134
Preoccupations
134
Everyday Coping Strategies
139
Getting Ahead
143
Accounting for Success
147
Conclusion
148
Categories
149
Asymmetries
153
Cues Embodied Ethnicity
159
Ethnic and Regional Categories
173
Conclusion
179
Languages
181
Interaction with Strangers
185
Associations
229
Media
232
Conclusion
237
Mixings
243
Disagreement and Conflict
245
Avoidance
249
Joking and Teasing
251
Choices
253
Conclusion
256
Migrations
258
Stigmatized Citizenship
263
The Ambivalent Homeland
268
Politics
275
Funar
281
DAHR
285
Autonomy
288
Status Law
292
Conclusion
299
Epilogue
307
An Example of the Interactional Emergence of Nationalism
317
A Note on Data
322
Bibliography
329
Index
371
Direitos de autor

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Passagens conhecidas

Página 15 - That view from below, ie the nation as seen not by governments and the spokesmen and activists of nationalist (or non-nationalist) movements, but by the ordinary persons who are the objects of their action and propaganda, is exceedingly difficult to discover.
Página 15 - By distinguishing consistently between categories and groups, we can problematize — rather than presume — the relation between them. We can ask about the degree of groupness associated with a particular category in a particular setting and about the political, social, cultural and psychological processes through which categories get invested with groupness (Petersen 1987). We can ask how people — and organizations — do things with categories. This includes limiting access to scarce resources...
Página 15 - Thirdly, national identification and what it is believed to imply, can change and shift in time, even in the course of quite short periods.
Página 15 - First, official ideologies of states and movements are not guides to what is in the minds of even the most loyal citizens or supporters.
Página 15 - Second, and more specifically, we cannot assume that for most people national identification — when it exists — 68 Figure 2.3 Protesters at St Patrick's Day Parade, New York, 1996 Source: Getty Images/Getty Images News excludes or is always or ever superior to, the remainder of the set of identifications which constitute the social being.
Página xiii - But, of course, they are not. The locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don't study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . . ); they study in villages.

Acerca do autor (2006)

Rogers Brubaker is professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Margit Feischmidt is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Pécs, Hungary and a senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of Ethnic and National Minorities in Budapest. Jon Fox is lecturer in sociology at the University of Bristol. Liana Grancea is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Informação bibliográfica