POSTSOCIALISM OR WHEN ‘HAVING’ IS ANOTHER WAY OF ‘BEING’. THE RECONFIGURING OF IDENTITY THROUGH LAND RESTITUTION AND THE NARRATIVES OF THE PAST Cover Image

POSTSOCIALISM OR WHEN ‘HAVING’ IS ANOTHER WAY OF ‘BEING’. THE RECONFIGURING OF IDENTITY THROUGH LAND RESTITUTION AND THE NARRATIVES OF THE PAST
POSTSOCIALISM OR WHEN ‘HAVING’ IS ANOTHER WAY OF ‘BEING’. THE RECONFIGURING OF IDENTITY THROUGH LAND RESTITUTION AND THE NARRATIVES OF THE PAST

Author(s): Elena Chiorean
Subject(s): Sociology of Culture, Transformation Period (1990 - 2010)
Published by: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai
Keywords: property; ideology; selfhood; socialism; liberalism

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I examine the consequences of the 1989 political overturn in Romania on the selfhood. To this purpose, I initiate a twofold analysis: the official discourse of both socio-political systems, socialism and liberalism, and the individual’s quotidian discourse. The first one will enable a comparative view, over the ’bottom-up’ constructed realities, and the second will account for the degree of pervasiveness and naturalization of ideological views and, in this way, of a “top-down” identity construction and its configurations. One of the most apprehensible provisions through which liberalism endeavoured to institutionalize its own way of setting out reality is land restitution. Thereafter, I will discuss the way re-appropriation was experienced and its various subjectivization trajectories, but also the wider frame of the postsocialist economic transformations: rethinking work, money, the state and the interrelations between them. This particular angle of sight will disclose the mechanisms through which liberalism has deconstructed the system of socialist meaning and representation, at the same time replacing it with a socio-political order which reconfigured these meanings.

  • Issue Year: 60/2015
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 39-56
  • Page Count: 18
  • Language: English
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