Searching for Heritage, Building Politics: Architecture, Archeology, and Imageries of Social Order in Romania (1947-2007).

Abstract

This dissertation examines the representations of history and social imaginaries underlying three temporally distinct projects of “heritage development”: 1) the transformation of a central area of Bucharest into a “historical architectural reservation,” at a time (the 1960s) when the socialist regime aimed to transform Romania’s capital into a “socialist city of the future,” 2) the recent (2005) rehabilitation of the medieval city center of Sibiu/Hermannstadt, which is a lieu de mémoire for Transylvania’s Germans, and 3) the current reconstruction of the Bánffy baroque castle in the village of Bonţida, which is now a cultural pilgrimage site for Transylvanian Hungarians. The first part of the dissertation shows how the socialist state in Romania attempted to retrospectively create its own “heritage” that would fit a teleological vision of historical development. Whereas socialist modernist architecture aimed to reshape the social relations by changing how people inhabited the built environment, archeological data grounded an imaginary of “the origins” of these people, be they imagined as Slavic during the 1950s or “proto-Romanian” beginning in the 1960s. Since Bucharest captured most of the attention of the Politburo, significant resources were invested in the endorsement of a new history of the country’s capital. In the second part, I ask how the earlier forms of assigning political and cultural meaning to things inform the strategies of some ethnic groups in contemporary Romania, who simultaneously pursue economic decentralization and a more coherent cultural identity. At a time when property restitution participates in a broader individualization of rights, projects of “heritage revival” capture new meanings and practices of “community” in a EU imagined as “unity in diversity.” Thus, the shift between the two sections represents also a shift between two temporal and political regimes of heritage. The first part shows how socialist heritage had been formed through processes of centralization and rearrangement of cultural goods. The second illustrates how groups in Romania, currently a EU member, assign particular things a heritage value in order to set forth further claims of cultural recognition not only within national borders, but especially within novel transnational geographies.