Dr. Árpád Töhötöm Szabó (Department of Hungarian Ethnography and Anthropology, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
Otherness/remoteness in the Transylvanian countryside – about the uses of cultural anthropology in a post-socialist country
Transylvania and especially the Transylvanian countryside was/is frequently perceived as the last remote borderland of Europe, both in cultural and natural terms. The presentation will focus on this particular region of Romania, sketching very briefly its history (and its place in Romanian and Hungarian national imagination), ethnic composition and present-day situation. Using reflexivity and (self-)criticism the presentation will draw on the works of some anthropologists from US and CEE combined with my own field experiences and will investigate the meanings of and the ways of creating otherness/remoteness in time and space. This way I offer an insight into my work as a native ethnographer who constantly tries to commute between national ethnography and cultural anthropology (or in other terms: local language and English, small places and large issues), between Hungarian and Romanian culture and ways of seeing the world. While the first part criticizes somehow cultural anthropology, the last part will raise some questions about the potential benefits and barriers of our discipline in a post-socialist country.
Dr. Árpád Töhötöm Szabó works as an assistant professor at the Department of Hungarian Ethnography and Anthropology, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He received his PhD in ethnology and cultural anthropology from the University of Debrecen, Hungary. His main research interests are economic anthropology and rural studies. In a Norwegian-Romanian joint project (Culture and nature in Transylvania: past and future) he worked together with visual anthropologists from NAFA and the University Museum from Bergen. He published three books in Hungarian and several articles in Hungarian and English.