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: Based on a diary, I will try to reconstruct some fragments of the everyday reality in the collectivized village during communism. This contextual methodological perspective, of local features analysis, is important for surpassing the inherent epistemological precariousness shaped through a post-festum analysis, so specific for social and human sciences. It does not eliminate subjectivism, there is no doubt about that, but it does significantly reduce it. The analysis suggested below attempts to capture the characteristics of the rural daily life during the last period of Romanian communist society based on the following directions: the dissolution of the traditional peasant type village and the end of peasantry, the appearance of new social value systems, the de-structuring of rural collectivism, the rupture between urban and rural and between the social actors bearing this rupture, the effects of the eighties’ economical crisis upon rural and urban areas. The premise I use for starting this analysis is that the communist period cannot be judged by reductionist labeling of nominal type; it has to be approached from inside its own specificity, by attempting to reconstruct the mechanisms of social articulation, which generate new phenomena, having their own specificity, some of them continuing during post-communism.

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