СТАНЧЕВО: НАРАТИВИ О РАДУ И СИРОМАШТВУ
STANČEVO: NARRATIVERS ON LABOUR AND POVERTY

Summary/Abstract: Banat Montenegro belongs to the relatively poor, mountainous part of Banat, but here Serbs were in a relatively more favorable social position than their counterparts in West Banat, as they were not included in the forced deportation to Baragan in 1951. The settlement of Stančevo in Banat Montenegro was chosen as place of research due to its specific isolated speech, but also equally isolated and insufficiently investigated traditional culture. For the anthropological-linguistic analysis, we selected narratives about life and labour before and during communism from older participants who spent most of their lives in the village (“Before the cooperative was good, we have worked our land, nobody commanded us, we earned in accordance with our labor”). The topics of life and work in the village during communism, accompanied by different perceptions of work and work ethics (“We must behave how the state leads us”), should show the specifics of nostalgia for communism when it comes to the Serb minority, since our field research has shown that trauma from this period still exists, together with criticism of contemporary life and work. Particularly analyzed are attitudes about work that implicitly point out the pride of a successful job (“We did a lot of work”) and poverty – not perceived as stigma, but as a matter of pride. The linguistic part deals particularly with lexical borrowings from Romanian related to life and work in the communist era. Namely, quite naturally, the narratives contain significantly more borrowings when the topic is working in a cooperative than in matters of traditional culture The paper is based on the field research conducted within the project of the Center for Scientific Research of the Culture of Serbs in Romania supported by the Union of the Serbs in Romania during May 2018.

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