Serial Anachronism: Re-Assembling Romanian Forest Commons
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Serial Anachronism: Re-Assembling Romanian Forest Commons by Oana Mateescu A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology and History) in The University of Michigan 2017 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Matthew Hull, Co-Chair Professor Katherine Verdery, City University of New York, Co-Chair Professor Emerita Gillian Feeley-Harnik Professor Paul C. Johnson Oana Mateescu [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7604-569X © Oana Mateescu 2017 DEDICATION To my best friend, Puiu ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to my committee for their support and forbearance during the long process of researching, thinking and writing this dissertation. Without their lucid and penetrating comments, this text would surely be poorer. My two co-chairs, Katherine Verdery and Matthew Hull, have been incredibly generous with their time and interest, placing their trust in me even when I did not fully deserve it. Katherine Verdery has been a mentor since the beginning of my graduate studies at UM. I have been privileged to explore the intricacies of property relations under her expert guidance and to benefit from the example of her outstanding work on processes of property tranformation in Romania. I could not have asked for a more insightful interlocutor than Matthew Hull on the possibilities for dialogue between anthropology and adjacent fields such as ethnomethodology, actor-network theory and science and technology studies. His provocative questions have helped me place the commons in a wider spectrum of political action, but also to articulate the contexts of practice in which the relationships between wholes and parts are negotiated. I am grateful to Gillian Feeley-Harnik for showing me how to dwell on the temporal depths of long histories but also on the poignant intimacies of ethnographic encounters. Her endless curiosity, attention to detail and sheer enjoyment in the potential for expansive connections between anthropology and history have been a continuous inspiration. Paul C. Johnson focused my interest in knowledge practices and their shifts in time, encouraging me to connect my own evidentiary practices to those of the commoners I studied. I am in his debt for helping me articulate the notion of “forensic communities.” iii While not formally part of my committee in the last stages of dissertation writing, Webb Keane has been a wonderful guide through the process of articulating a persuasive research proposal and the theoretical experimentation it entailed. His comments on several drafts of this work encouraged me to aim for analytic subtlety without sacrificing the texture of social relations. In light of the subject of this dissertation, it seems only fitting to emphasize here the part played by the Anthropology and History Program in creating a shared environment for stimulating conversation. I am grateful to many professors, colleagues and friends for countless exciting exchanges in the setting of Anthropology and History reading groups: Dana Agmon, Chandra Bhimull, David William Cohen, Fernando Coronil, Krisztina Fehervary, Ema Grama, Bridget Guarasci, Daniel Hershenzon, Dong Ju Kim, Sonja Luehrmann, Edward Murphy, Monica Patterson, David Pedersen, Tasha Rijke-Epstein, Julie Skurski, Ann Stoler, Joseph Viscomi. Alaina Lemon, the director of the program, and Diana Denney, graduate coordinator, have made the experience of submitting and defending the dissertation as smooth as possible. I owe a special debt to those colleagues and friends who invested time and energy in endless discussions of my project at different stages and/or in comments on various drafts of this work: Luciana Aenasoaie, Dong Ju Kim, Josh Reno (UM), Irina Carabas, Calin Cotoi, Stefan Guga, Alexandra Ion, Narcis Tulbure (Bucharest), Norbert Petrovici (Cluj) and Don Kalb (Budapest). I must single out Luciana, Irina and Don – this dissertation would not have been completed without their enthusiastic support. Luciana and Irina have been steadfast friends, persuading and goading me into writing when I most needed it. Don has allowed me to exploit him to the hilt as a versatile and challenging intellectual sparring partner. iv My research has been generously funded by the Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, 2005), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, 2005) and the International Institute at UM (Summer Research Fellowship, 2004). During dissertation writing at UM, I have received funding from the Rackham Graduate School, the Department of Comparative Literature (in the framework of the Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar) and the Center for Russian and East European Studies. In Bucharest, I benefited from the assistance of the New Europe College where my experience as a fellow during 2010-11 introduced me to an interdisciplinary scholarly setting and to the generous support of Andrei Plesu and Anca Oroveanu. I owe more than I can say to all my interlocutors during fieldwork in Vrancea, particularly in Nereju and Paulesti. They invited me into their homes and lives, shared unstintingly of their knowledge and experience and trusted me with their stories. The present text can only begin to do justice to the richness of their gifts. This dissertation is dedicated to my best friend for the past two decades, Puiu Daniel Latea, and to the commons of ideas we created through countless hours of thinking, listening, talking, reading and writing together. v TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES viii ABSTRACT ix INTRODUCTION 1 Ontology without rigor 2 Field I: Anthrohistorical scaffoldings 8 Field II: Henri H. Stahl, contemporary 16 Field III: Old and new commons 23 Dissertation structure 27 CHAPTER I. SEQUENCE 30 Who is afraid of ghosts? 35 Dying commons 41 Succession, 1910 48 Succession, 2000 65 Emerging commons 72 CHAPTER II. TOGETHERNESS 77 Anonymous forests 81 Bad commoners, bad records, 1948 86 vi The boyar class 96 (In)divisibility, 1889-1913 100 Wild togetherness in the free forest 110 CHAPTER III. DISTRIBUTION 114 Proportional mountains, 1755-1995 115 Counting sawmills, 1890 129 Equal shares, 1921-1948 143 Distributive imagination 151 CHAPTER IV. FORENSICS 154 Disappearing forest 155 600 noisy trucks 159 Decomposition: Making time I 169 Recomposition: Making time II 175 Personal museums 178 Forensic communities 204 CONCLUSION 209 APPENDIX A 212 BIBLIOGRAPHY 213 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Paltin Festival, 2003 38 Figure 2. Register of “rights”, Obstea Nereju, 1926 56 Figure 3. Commoners on their way to the forest, Nereju 2006 78 Figure 4. Income statement, Obstea Nereju, 1928 93 Figure 5. Collective wedding with sociologist godparents, Nereju, 1927 181 Figure 6. Performing the museum, Barsesti 184 Figure 7. The Museum of Our Ancestors, Barsesti 185 Figure 8. Personal museum, Nereju 189 Figure 9. Home, Illustrated Romania, 1927 (left); Personal museum, 2007 (right) 193 Figure 10. The true portrait of Father Serban 199 viii ABSTRACT The ongoing global renaissance of the commons thrives on an implicit temporal hyphen: old and new commons are different and yet alike. Premised on untimeliness, commons oscillate between the deep past, the present and the distant, potentially utopian, future. For Romanian forest commons, brought back by legal fiat in 2000 amid debates over a troubling return to archaism, this hyphen condenses, at the same time, the reconstitution of a collaborative mode of ownership, a distributive politics and a practical understanding of the ways in which social relations aggregate into corporate entities. Re-assembling a historically layered object produces anachronism. But this is not simply the effect of historical forms surviving or being imported into present composites of commons practices. The resilience of commons is, in fact, grounded in serial anachronism. Focusing on the highland region of Vrancea, this dissertation brings together a succession of historical misalignments — 1755, 1801, 1910, 2000 and 2008 — the mathematical articulation of forest commons as a regime of proportional distribution, pragmatic redefinition as timeless ownership, contradictory legal codification, ambivalent reconstitution and, finally, recognition as historical patrimony. These are instances of creative anachronism that reveal not just the fraught coexistence of “archaic” with “contemporary” forms in the commons, but also the complex exercises in ix simultaneity that such coexistence requires. As a distributive politics, the commons stimulates ratios between the one and the many; as a politics of anachronism, it fosters constant movement between distribution (or dispersal) through time and assemblage. Persistent re-assemblage relies on forensic evaluation and thus, implicitly, on the accumulation and reconfiguration of multiple evidentiary artifacts (including narratives, documents, objects and sensory clues). This repertoire of proofs which commoners use, successfully or not, for bridging gaps of time, knowledge and power becomes a collaborative project of persuasion directed at state officials, forestry experts, environmental activists, academics and, indeed, the commoners themselves. The serial anachronisms intrinsic to contemporary Romanian forest commons have, thus, a double-edged potential: they are incongruities demanding practical synchronization via constant reassemblage as well as compelling materials that creatively employ the effect of untimeliness