We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
GUIDE@HAND is an audio tourist guide mobile application providing tools and interactive services for mobile exploring of cultural places and objects. The aim of the GUIDE@HAND’s guided walk is to enable the visitors to change their perception of new or familiar locations, objects and motives and explore the past and present of their own area in an entertaining and exploring way. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is used to exactly determine the location of the traveller.
More...
The purpose of this study is to investigate the interplay of ethno-cultural stereotypes in processes of identity construction by studying auto-stereotypes and hetero-stereotypes of relationship, sexuality and marriage among individual Romani women in western Romania. Following an ethnographical methodology – problem focused guided interviews within the framework of three-month participant observation – the hermeneutical analysis suggests that Romani women are reorganizing the mostly negative hetero-stereotypes in order to create and maintain flexible pictures of the self. However, their heterogeneous identity constructions also reflect fundamental cultural notions of the gendered and ethnicized self. Consistent with anthropological approaches to the intersection of social categories in every-day lives, the results furthermore mirror the interdependency of ethnicity, gender and class within the Romani women’s discursive constructions of identity.
More...
The present paper aims to uncover the post-1948 intellectual career of the main exponent of Orthodoxism, namely Nichifor Crainic. After spending a period in the Communist prisons, Crainic began to write articles in the Communist sponsored newspaper ‘Glasul Patriei’(The Voice of the Fatherland) addressed to the Romanian émigré communities. The Communist regime had chosen intellectuals of the former regime that enjoyed remarkable prestige in the Romanian Diasporas to promote the liberalization of the approach towards the intellectual life and an emphasis on elaborating a Communist version of interwar nationalism.
More...
The article analyzes the 1964 Romanian edition of Karl Marx entitled Notes on the Romanians in the attempt to recover its contexts and significance. For that, it focuses on two distinct historical moments. First, it analyzes from a genealogical perspective Marx’s annotations on the Romanians and detects their origin in the Romanian Romantic nationalists’ historical narrative concerning the politics of tsarist Russia vis-à-vis Romanian Principalities in the nineteenth century. Secondly, it examines the instrumentalization of these annotations by the Romanian official historiography at the beginning of the 1960s, focusing on the new political stakes that were in play at that particular moment in the Communist block. Spanning almost two centuries of charged history and various intellectual spaces and traditions, the article methodologically recovers a case of ‘entangled history’ – or ‘histoire croisée’ – that eschews attempts of unilateral appropriation.
More...
Jesuit Artisans of the Union with Rome and the Transylvanian Romanians’ Religious Identity at the Beginning of the 18th Century. Stereotypal Perceptions and Historical Realities
More...
The paper consists of four parts, of which the first serves as an introductory “chapter”, dealing with the role of foreign ethnic groups, mostly Latins and Germans, in the process of urban development in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. It also examines the term hospes, stressing that the meaning of this word went through profound changes in the eleventh to the thirteenth century. The second part of the paper discusses the history of Temesvár/Timisoara, centre of Temes county, located south of the River Maros/Mures and about 80 kms from Szeged. The author stresses that Temesvár was originally a comital castle, where Charles I, King of Hungary found a temporary residence between 1315 and 1323. Nevertheless, the development of the town was severely impeded by the Turkish victory at Nicopolis in 1396, which resulted in Temesvár/Timisoara and the region around it becoming the permanent target of Ottoman onslaughts. The third part of the paper deals with the history of Szeged, located at the confluence of the rivers Tisza and Maros/Mures. The development of Szeged, which had become by the late fifteenth century one of the richest and most populous royal towns of Hungary, may serve, according to the author, as an analogy, in several respects, to the history of Temesvár/Timisoara. In the fourth part, containing the conclusions, the author states that no populous communities of Walloons, Germans or other foreign ethnic groups played an important role in the development of the towns of Szeged and Temesvár/Timisoara in the Middle Ages. The author also stresses that the Hungarian burghers of these towns spread the urban way of life and urban institutions in general, among the non-Hungarian peoples (Serbs, Romanians) of the southern regions of the realm and even beyond its borders.
More...
Maria Todorova has warned against assuming a homogeneous view of Eastern Europe among Western Europeans. This article argues that Irish discourse on Eastern Europe was more positive than British discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While those who supported the closure of the separate Irish parliament in the Act of Union of 1801 echoed the Orientalism dominant in Britain, those who opposed it sympathised with the struggles of subject nations in Central and Eastern Europe for self-determination and even posited a parallel between Ireland and these nations. Irish nationalists were drawn especially to Poland and Hungary, whose political paths seemed to match Ireland’s most closely. They also displayed a distinct preference for the Christian, particularly Catholic, communities of the region. The minority who chose to side with Germany in World War One had to jettison their sympathy for its Polish minority, however, in an effort to justify the alliance. With few opportunities for direct contact, the Irish used Eastern Europe predominantly as a foil for their own political struggles. Thus the main emotion Irish nationalists felt when they observed the establishment of new states in the region by the Paris Treaties of 1919 was envy. Only after fighting the War of Independence from 1919 to 1921 did Irish nationalists have their own state to boast of.
More...
The Treaty of Craiova was imposed to Romania by Nazi Germany. The Treaty of Craiova was signed on September 7, 1940, between Romania and Bulgaria. Under its terms, Romania ceded the southern part of Dobrudja (the Cadrilater) and the 2 states agreed to participate in the organization of a population exchange. The 108,000 Romanians and Aromanians, were forced to abandon their houses in Southern Dobrudja and resettled in the northern part, while 65,000 Bulgarians of the northern part had to leave their houses and resettle in the Cadrilater (Bulgaria). Under the terms of the Treaty, Bulgaria had to pay 1 million lei to Romania, in order to compensate Romanian important direct investments in Southern Dobrudja. Also, Bulgaria had to respect some Romanian properties in Cadrilater. However, the diplomatic documents used in this article prove that Bulgaria did not respect its obligations.
More...
This paper rethinks the center-periphery relationship in post-Cold War literature and culture. The author argues that the last two decades have freed our topographic imagination of traditional ideological polarizations, but have often replaced these polarized mappings with cartographies of a nationalistic or ethnocentric kind that promote resentful cultural divisions; or with “globalizing” ideologies which reinforce the “international division of labor and appropriation . . . benefiting First World countries at the expense of the Third World” (Teresa Ebert). The literary and artistic examples this paper considers, taken from both the US and East-Central Europe, transcend both leveling globalism and ethnocentric separatism, celebrating crossroads, bridges, cultural “hybridity” and “potentially limitless mappings”. The fiction of Thomas Pynchon, for example, from Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland to the more recent Mason & Dixon, has been concerned with the search for an alternative cartographic vision that scrambles the “borderline[s . . .] between worlds,” interplaying centers and peripheries. Likewise, the literature written more recently in East-Central Europe reflects the conflicting pulls towards world integration and selfdifferentiation "on the margins". The city characteristically plays a "marginocentric role" in many of these writings, emphasizing its own eccentric position in relationship to the dominant paradigm, while at the same time restructuring that paradigm from the margin. Much recent urban literature and art behaves like a hypertext (in some cases it is a hypertext) that emphasize geocultural interfaces (crossroads, borderlands, multicultural cities and regions) and dialogic interactions among various cultural entities. As such, it demands a hypertextual reading attentive to its intercrossed discursive modes.
More...
If we establish a number of 19 sub-zones in the Transylvanian Plain depending on the geographical situation of the localities, they can be grouped according to quality of the soil in the Western part of the Plain, with a fertile soil, and the Eastern part, less fertile. The cultivated land, with the exception of a small number of localities (8 villages with a “mediocre” and “poor” soil, and 2 localities with a “poor” soil), was generally favorable to the cultivation of the plants known in Transylvania. It is not by chance that the Plain was called the “granary of Transylvania”.
More...
The “Eyes on the East” Policy: The Frontier between Romania and Poland in the Establishment of the “Cordon Sanitaire” System. The Romanian-Polish relations officially established shortly after the end of World War I (January 1919) were based on strategic and security interests: joint action against an unprovoked attack by Soviet Russia and the reopening of the road linking the Baltic to the Black Sea. During the conflict with the Red Army (1919- 1920), the Polish diplomacy focused the creation of a strategic North-South axis between the two seas, which would have enabled efficient communication between Romania and Poland. A program drawn up by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in April 1919 was putting forward the setting up of what Quai d’Orsay had termed a cordon sanitaire: “it is essential, in the interest of peace and of Europe, that a strong barrier should separate Europe from Russia and Russia from Germany”. Romanian-Polish common border, officially institutionalized just in 1935, can make real bilateral policies toward Kremlin and its Red Army, from the end of World War I to 1939, and became the most important element of the so-called “cordon sanitaire” international affairs system. Poland’s breakaway from the project of the Little Entente in 1923–1924 and the development of the trilateral alliance (Romania-Yugoslavia-Czechoslovakia) into an effective diplomatic community led, a few years after the end of World War I, to the creation of two blocs of victorious states in Central and Eastern Europe, centered on the Vistula (the Romanian-Polish alliance) and the Danube (the Little Entente). Although each of these blocs had as a main goal the preservation of the status-quo, this simple fact was not enough to make them unite. The Intermarium (creation of the ‘30’s Polish diplomacy) sought to capitalize as much as possible on the alliance between Bucharest and Warsaw, and to attract all the potential forces that may have been affected by the strategies and interferences of the neighboring totalitarian Powers, Germany and the USSR. The disintegration of Poland in September 1939 and the profound changes occurred in the geopolitical configuration of Central and Eastern Europe (as a result of a direct agreement between Berlin and Moscow in the case of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) canceled all these projects and forecasts.
More...
During the Middle Ages travel was considered to be moral challenge in England. It was with the advance of Renaissance that, with the reintroduction of the Graeco-Roman ideal of travel, it occupied an important place in the education of young gentlemen. Shortly after graduating from Cambridge or Oxford they would take the grand tour and visit European countries like France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. These grand tour travelers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century were then imitated by the tourists of nineteenth century when travel became available to more people as the transportation technologies develop and travel became less costly. The present study investigates how grand tour as the concept of travel open only to the wealthy classes of society has evolved in time and become affordable for the less fortunate classes of society in the form of gap year.
More...