CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Kelly, Bridget |
|---|---|
| Title | "So That's How Life Abroad Made Me Look at Things Differently": Transylvanian Villagers and the Domestication of European Development |
| Summary | Since 1989, scholars and politicians have touted so-called East-West migration as a means of “Europeanizing” the former socialist states on the assumption that migrants will become accustomed to “Western” and “liberal” social, political, and economic cultures and transmit that knowledge back to “develop” their native communities. Through multi-sited ethnography following the transnational networks between Bistrița- Năsă ;ud county, Romania, southern Spain, and Vienna, Austria, I test this assumption by investigating how circular and return migrants from rural Transylvania judge the “development” of their communities after three decades of “transition” and migration. I argue that the things they bring back (their “social and economic remittances”; Levitt 1998) paint a mixed picture of “European integration,” as villagers embrace both positive and negative ideas from the “West” while also rejecting or reinterpreting others. Applying Garapich and Grabowska’s (2016) processual typology of remittances (“imitation, resistance, and innovation”), I show how acts of imitating the West (ranging from the adoption of “modern” infrastructure to embracing norms about entrepreneurship, professionalism, and racial hierarchies) are countered by attempts to resist Western values in favor of “traditional Romanian” (or rural, religious, and peasant) lifestyles. I argue that villagers recast this backward-looking romanticization of pre-socialist history into forward-oriented strategies of getting by and finding pride in their peripheralized region by vernacularizing Western concepts to transform ancestral practices (like peasant farming) into modern amenities (like organic agriculture). These findings, which emphasize how “transnationalism and nationalism, or globalizing and localizing processes,...shape one another both simultaneously and sequentially” (Verdery 1998, 292), sometimes contradict earlier studies of middle-class migrants in different Western cities and thus imply the need for more research into the ways social class, religious socialization, and sending-and-receiving- locality dynamics affect the transfer of ideas back and forth across the continent. |
| Supervisor | Miller, Michael |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/kelly_bridget.pdf |
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