University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2018 LABOR MIGRATION AND INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN POSTSOCIALIST RURAL ROMANIA Alin Rus University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Eastern European Studies Commons, Folklore Commons, Migration Studies Commons, Rural Sociology Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Rus, Alin, "LABOR MIGRATION AND INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN POSTSOCIALIST RURAL ROMANIA" (2018). Doctoral Dissertations. 1270. https://doi.org/10.7275/11947803.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1270 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LABOR MIGRATION AND INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN POSTSOCIALIST RURAL ROMANIA A dissertation presented by ALIN RUS Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2018 Anthropology © Copyright by Alin Rus 2018 All Rights Reserved LABOR MIGRATION AND INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN POSTSOCIALIST RURAL ROMANIA A dissertation presented By ALIN RUS Approved as to style and content by: ________________________________ Krista Harper, Chair ________________________________ Jacqueline Urla, Member ________________________________ Richard W. Wilkie, Member ________________________________ Jacqueline Urla, Chair Anthropology Department For my patient wife and my caring parents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is based on research funded by the National Science Foundation‘s Office of International Science and Engineering, and by the UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology, through European Field Studies Program, Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces - Multiculturalism, Migration, and Heritage in Europe, Award #OISE- 0968575. Besides, the Graduate School and the Department of Anthropology of the Massachusetts Amherst University offered me six travel grants allowing me to take part in a series of cultural heritage conferences organized in America, Portugal, England, and Mexico, that broadened my horizons and improved my knowledge of heritage studies. The Township Hall of Heleșteni also provided me with constant logistical support, without which this research could have never achieved its objectives. The same logistical support was provided to me by the leadership of the two schools in the Heleșteni comună when I implemented two educational events involving the schools' pupils: a photo elicitation and an essay writing event on international labor migration topic. I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Krista Harper, for her intellectual guidance, insightful comments on my papers, for her patience and investment of time and energy into seeing the finalization of a project distant from the current trends and directions in Cultural Anthropology. Many thanks go to Dr. Jacqueline Urla for her suggestions, advice, and comments on my papers during many years in a row. I owe many thanks to Dr. Richard W. Wilkie who encouraged my creative thinking, and who believed from the beginning in my strength to accomplish a project that seemed difficult to comprehend during its first phases. I will always be grateful to my good friend and committee member in the first phase of this dissertation, Dr. David A. Kideckel. He has constantly encouraged me to work hard, while at the same time making me aware that a few ideas and arguments in my dissertation, although self-obvious to me, could not be that clear for those who might read my work. I thank Dr. Ventura Perez, too, who gave me many valuable ideas in the field of the Anthropology of Violence. Several other professors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Anthropology Department, have given me their advice, comments and thoughts for shaping parts of this project. Among them, I would like to mention Dr. Bob Paynter, Dr. Elizabeth Chilton, Dr. Kevin Anderson, Dr. Michael Sugerman, Dr. Felicity Aulino, and Dr. Neal Silberman. In this list of professors, I must add the name of Dr. Cristina Amescua, from the National University of Mexico's Regional Center for Multidisciplinary Research. She was the v organizer of several Intangible Cultural Heritage conferences in England and Mexico where we had an interesting exchange of ideas on heritage themes. I also owe my whole gratitude to Dr. Bogdan Neagota and Dr. Ileana Benga, two Romanian friends and collaborators, founders and members of the ethnological association Orma Sodalitas Anthropologica. Throughout my doctoral years, I had a fruitful exchange of ideas with both of them, and that helped me outline and clarify some concepts and theories of European Folklore. Bogdan was for me not only a simple friend and collaborator but also a spiritual master from whom I had learned enormously all these years. He is a man who created around him and his ideas a real school of ethnology and folklore in Cluj-Napoca city. I owe the same acknowledgement to two friends and collaborators from Indiana University, the doctoral students Elena Popa and Julian Carrillo who, during the last few years, read various parts of my thesis and generously offered me their advice and ideas. I have to add to this list the name of Dr. Monica Heintz, my friend, and collaborator for more than a decade. In December 2010 - January 2011, we worked together in the villages of Heleșteni to make the filming of the documentary Behind The Masks. It was a fruitful collaboration that ended with a 44-minute film about Pantomimic Mummers in this rural locality. All these extraordinary friendships and fruitful collaborations proved once again that I was a lucky man. I owe special thanks to my childhood friend Ioan Apostu, and also a member of Orma Sodalitas Anthropologica. Along with him, I started the first phase of my field research for this project. In addition to this, he has always helped me to systematize and archive my substantial video material collected from the field, consisting of videos and photos. Do not think your efforts will be forgotten, my friend! I had an excellent cooperation with Elena Cărbunaru-Butușină, a professional translator and reliable collaborator. She was the one who struggled with translating some Romanian carols, wishes and folk expressions into English. She also read my entire dissertation and often gave me her advice as a philologist and connoisseur of Romanian folklore when translating to English expressions and concepts from the local folklore of Romanian peasants. I owe a special gratitude to the entire Hâra family in Heleşteni: Constantin, Doinița, Evelina, and Dana. During my repeated stays in their village, they always hosted me and vi offered me the warmth and hospitality of their home and, above all, their expertise in the field of local traditions. Besides them, Florin Chiperi and his wife Andreea always offered me their unconditional support and knowledge in understanding local culture. I am connected to these two families not only through a close collaboration, but also through a friendship for life. In Ukraine, I also owe thanks, together with my appreciation, to Mr. Gheorghe Stratulat and Ms. Olga Bruja Avdochimova, together with her whole family. They impressed me with their hospitality, openness and kindness. If all people were like them, we would all live in a better world today. Next to these close friends, I am also grateful to many people from Heleșteni, Ruginoasa, Cucuteni, Strunga, Crivești, Sticlăria, Bădeni, Iași, Sarmisegetusa, Crasna, Carapciu, Patrăuții de Sus, and Cernăuți. Their simple enumeration would cover almost an entire page. By their side, I experienced moments of intellectual satisfaction accompanied by the joy of understanding the rural world and the humanity of the people within it. Many of them generously offered me the hospitality of their home at least for a few hours. Some of them, older ones, are now gone to the world of shadows, but I hope their voice will remain forever alive in the pages of this study. All of them have made me think differently and change from the one I was at the beginning of this project; thanks to knowing them, I am now a person with a broader and more complex vision of the world and life. From my wife Florentina I have received constant moral and intellectual support, along with encouragements. She had spent many of her school holidays in a village in Western Romania where her grandparents lived; thus she became a good connoisseur of the rural world in that area of Transylvania, and was later able to provide me with pertinent advice on rural folklore and the way of thinking of village inhabitants, tempering my idealistic tendencies and hasty generalizations. A simple thanks would not be enough to express my appreciation for her help. Last but not least, I have to thank my parents, Maria and Simion Rus, for their constant moral, spiritual and material support over my years of study, and throughout the challenges I have been going through. I am convinced that there are few people who have the privilege of having such wonderful parents, so my gratitude will never be able to reward their efforts. My brother Octavian, too, has always encouraged me in my struggle to complete this project. I want him to always remember the lyrics of a song we used to listen as children: ―Nu vii există in lumea asta frate ca al meu/ Și la bune și la rele, e fratele meu!‖ (eng. "In this entire world there's no brother like mine/ To all good and bad, he remains my brother."). Finally, my eternal gratitude, appreciation and esteem go to my grandmother, Elena Murarek, the one who helped, encouraged, and supported me with an abnegation worthy of all admiration. She was the one who always believed in my lucky star.