Between Loneliness and Survival. An Everyday Life Fragment in the Collectivized Village
Between Loneliness and Survival. An Everyday Life Fragment in the Collectivized Village

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I will try to reconstitute some aspects of the everyday reality in the collectivized village in the seventh and eighth decades of the last century. I will focus on Aluniş village from the Benesat commune, Sălaj County, a village situated on Someş Valley, on the railway connecting cities Jibou and Baia Mare. The reconstruction is based on the memories, written almost daily, of a villager, Paşca Alexa, who was a former political prisoner. Beyond the inevitable subjectivity of such notes, they point to the daily fight for survival of the villagers, the strategies used to meet the challenges of the communist regime, and also they capture the acuity end of the peasantry, against the background of major social processes of the communist period. Using a contextual-localist methodological perspective based on everyday life testimonies, I tried to show that the communist regime cannot be catalogued in a reductionist and abstract way. It is, like any social structure, a builder of historicity, even if it implied a great human drama. Within the proposed approach I have tried to restore fragments of everyday life during the communist regime. I followed both relations of population with the authority and interpersonal relationships within the rural communities, which constitute the subjects of the diaries.

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