Audit Culture on the Periphery. Anthropology and Ethnology in Post-Socialist Romania

Authors

  • Vintilă Mihăilescu National School of Political Studies and Administration Autor

Keywords:

anthropology, ethnology, audit culture, nation building, periphery

Abstract

The present paper is revisiting what seems to be a shared cliché of Central/Eastern Europe (CEE) Sonderweg and its Western colonization by placing the academic field under scrutiny (anthropology/ethnology) in the global context of “audit culture” rather than in the common center-periphery frame. From this point of view, it is suggested that the problem is not as much the recycled divide between East and West, but much more so the common positioning of anthropology in the power field of audit culture hegemony. In doing so, we take Romania as a case study. 

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986, “Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28, 2: 356–374.

Baskar, Bojan. 1998, “L’anthropologie sociale dans l’‘autre Europe’. Incertitude et désagréments.” Terrain, 31: 113–128.

Benovska-Sabkova, Milena and Evgenija Krasteva Blagoeva 2014. Bulgarian Ethnology in the Wake of 1989: Ideas, Practices, Institutions. Ethnologia Balkanica 17: 55–83.

Berliner, David. 2014. Academic anxieties. Retrieved from http://davidberliner.overblog.com /2014/09/ academic- anxieties.html

Bîrlea, Ovidiu. 1969. Metoda de cercetare a folclorului. Bucureşti: Editura pentru literatură.

Bošković, Aleksandar and Chris Hann, eds. 2013. The Anthropological Field on the Margins of Europe, 1945–1991. Zürich–Berlin: LIT Verlag.

Boxenbaum Eva and Stefan Jonsson. 2008, “Isomorphism, Diffusion and Decoupling.” In The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, edited by Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Kerstin Sahlin, and Roy Suddaby, 78–98. London: SAGE Publications.

Buchowski, Michał. 2004. “Hierarchies of Knowledge in Central-Eastern European Anthropology.” The Anthropology of East Europe Review, 22, 2: 5–14.

Buchowski, Michał. 2005. “Correspondence: Reply to Chris Hann.” The Anthropology of East Europe Review, 23, 1: 198–200.

Buchowski, Michał. 2006. “The Spectre of Orientalism in Europe: From exotic other to stigmatized brother.” Anthropological Quarterly, 79, 3: 463–482.

Buchowski, Michał. 2012. “Intricate Relations between Western Anthropolo gists and Eastern Ethnologists.” Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Ant hropology, 63: 20–38.

Buchowski, Michał, Hana Cervinkova. 2015. “On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe: Toward Cosmopolitan Anthropologies in the ‘Peripheries’.” In Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe, edited by Hana Cervinkova, Michal Buchowski, and Zdeněk Uherek, 1–20. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Čapo Jasna. 2014. “Ethnology and Anthropology in Europe. Towards a Trans-National Discipline.” Cultural Analysis, 13: 51–76.

Chelcea, Liviu. 2012. “American Anthropology and the Central/East European Post-socialist Anthropologies: Immutable Mobiles and Mutable Immobiles?” Paper prepared for the conference of the American Anthropological Association. Retrieved from http://www.wcaanet.org/downloads/AAA2012/Chelcea_WCAA_AAA.pdf

Chelcea, Liviu. 2009. “A face familiarul exotic și exoticul familiar: o harta a cercetării antropologice din România [Making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic: a map of anthropological research in Romania].” Sociologie Românească 3: 13–19.

Cotoi, Călin. 2011. “Jottings on the History of Romanian Sociology.” Studia UBB Sociologia, LVI, 1: 135–149.

D’Ascanio, Valentina. 2014. “Performativity and Visibility: Shapes, Paths and Meanings in the European Higher Education Systems.” In Empires, Post-Coloniality and Interculturality. New Challenges for Comparative Education, edited by Leoncio Vega, 151–167. Rotterdam /Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers.

DiMaggio, Paul, and Walter Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review, 48, 2: 147–160

Elchinova Magdalena. 2010. “Sociocultural Anthropology in Bulgaria: Desired and Contested.” In Other People’s Anthropologies. Ethnographic Practice on the Margins, edited by Aleksandar Bošković, 70–82, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Geană, Gheorghiţă. 1999. “Enlarging the Classical Paradigm: Romanian Experience in Doing Anthropology at Home.” Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, 8, 1: 61–78.

Hann, Chris. 2005. “Correspondence: Reply to Michal Buchowski.” The An thropology of East Europe Review, 23, 1: 194–197.

Hannan T. Michael and John Freeman. 1977. “The Population Ecology of Organization.” American Journal of Sociology, 82, 5: 929–964.

Hofer, Tamás. 1968. “Anthropologists and Native Ethnographers in Central European Villages: Comparative Notes on the Professional Personality of Two Disciplines.” Current Anthropology, 9, 4: 311–315.

Kiossev, Alexander. 1999. “Notes on Self-Colonising.” In After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, edited by Bojana Pejic and David Elliot, 114–118. Stockholm: Moderna Museet.

Kürti, László. 2008. “East and West: The Scholarly Divide in Anthropology.” Anthropological Notebooks, 14, 3: 25–38.

Kürti, László, and Peter Skalník. 2009. “Introduction: Postsocialist Europe and the

Anthropological Perspective from Home.” In Postsocialist Europe: Anthropological Perspectives from Home, edited by László Kürti and Peter Skalník, 1–28. New York– Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Meyer W. John and Brian Rowan. 1977. “Institutional Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology, 83: 340–63.

Mihăilescu Vintilă. 2007. “Autochthonism and National Ethnology in Romania.” Working Papers Series, 1. Sofia: CAS.

Mihăilescu Vintilă. 2008. “A New Festival for the New Man: The Socialist Market of Folk Experts during the ‘Singing Romania’ national Festival.” In Studying Peoples in the People’s Democracies (II) Socialist Era Anthropology in South-East Europe, edited by Vintilă Mihăilescu, Ilia Iliev, Slobodan Naumovic, 55–80. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, Vol. 8, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Berlin: LIT Verlag. . 2016. “The double bind of audit culture in Romania.” ANUAC, 5, 1: 51–54.

Nigro, Claudio, Enrica Iannuzzi and Miriam Petracca. 2016. “How Universities institutionalize ‘good’ managerial practices? Some evidence from the Italian cultural sector.” Sinergie, 34, 100: 39–56

Pârvan, Vasile. 1920. Datoria vieţii noastre, Aninoasa: R.A.M.

Petrovici, Norbert. 2015. “Framing Criticism and Knowledge Production in Semi-peripheries – Post-socialism Unpacked.” Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 1, 2: 80–102.

Power, Michael. 1997. The Audit Society. Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell, Jon P. 2014. “Anthropologists Behaving Badly? Impact and the Politics of Evaluation in an Era of Accountability.” Etnográfica, 18, 2: 275–297.

Prica, Ines. 1995. “‘To be here—to publish there’: On the Position of a Small European Ethnology.” Narodna umjetnost: Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 32, 1: 7–23.

Restrepo, Eduardo and Arturo Escobar. 2005. “Anthropologies and Anthropology Other wise. Steps to a World Anthropologies Framework.” Critique of Anthropology, 25, 2: 99–129.

Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins, and Arturo Escobar. 2018. “Antropologie del mondo. Mutamenti disciplinari e sistemi di potere.” ANUAC, 7, 1: 9–41.

Rupnik, Jacques. 1993. L’autre Europe – Crise et fin du communisme. Edition revue et augmentée, Paris: Seuil.

Schriewer, Jürgen. 2009. “Rationalized Myths in European Higher Education: The Construction and Diffusion of the Bologna Model.” European Education, 41, 2: 31–51.

Scott, W. Richard. 1995. Institutions and Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Șerban, Stelu and Ștefan Dorondel. 2014. “Social Anthropology in Romania after 1990:

Shifting Frames.” Ethnologia Balkanica, 17: 209–240.

Shore, Cris. 2008. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropological Theory, 8, 3: 278–298.

Skalník, Peter ed. 2002. A Post-Communist Millennium: The Struggles for Sociocultural Anthropology in Central and Eastern Europe. Prague: Roman Míšek-Set Out.

Stocking, George W. Jr. 1982. “Afterword: A View from the Center.” Ethnos, 47, 1–2: 172–186.

Skalník and Žikić 2016 – add the IUAES conference reference from the beginning of the article [Anthropologies and ethnologies in post-communist Europe: Paradigm change or hoax? Panel discussion, IUAES Inter-Congress in Dubrovnik, 2016]

Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountabili ty, Ethics, and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge.

Şincai, Gheorghe. [1808], 1983. “Învăţătură firească spre surparea superstiţiei norodului.” in Şcoala Ardeleană, I, Ediţie critică, bibliografie şi glosar de Florea Fugariu. Bucureşti: Minerva.

Zarycki, Tomasz. 2010. “Orientalism and Images of Eastern Poland.” In Endogenous Factors in Development of the Eastern Poland, edited by M. Stefański, 73–88. Lublin: Innovatio Press.

Downloads

Published

2020-01-10

Issue

Section

Articles/Články

How to Cite

Audit Culture on the Periphery. Anthropology and Ethnology in Post-Socialist Romania. (2020). Cargo Journal, 18(1-2), 51-64. http://cargojournal.org/index.php/cargo/article/view/47

Similar Articles

1-10 of 33

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.