Browsing by Author "Iancu, Bogdan"

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Commoning the gardens by the Bloc. Informal gardening practices in the collective housing districts of a post-socialist city
(Taylor & Francis, 2025) Axinte, Alex; Rafanell, Martin; Iancu, Bogdan
This article investigates the persistence of gardening by the bloc, an informal urban gardening practice in the green spaces of collective housing districts of post-socialist Bucharest. Although often reduced in public discourse to a leftover of socialist survival strategies, this research reconsiders it as an everyday social interaction that supports communities amid urban transformations. Following Tsing and De Angelis, the article views gardening by the bloc as a local form of ‘latent commons’, reflecting broader socio-political shifts in a post-socialist city. Based on qualitative research, it documents how residents use, adapt and manage green spaces, along with their relations with institutional actors, revealing how they engage these areas under increasingly neoliberal governance. The study argues that the overlap between a market-oriented regulatory project, inherited socialist structures, and collective spatial practices shaped a distinct way of living together. As an emerging form of urban commons, gardening by the bloc can maintain a shared practice of communal life against an increasingly individualized society, laying the groundwork for bottom-up regeneration of housing estates across diverse social and political contexts. However, through the lens of gardening, the article also reveals the contradictions inherent to latent commons, drawing attention to their internal tensions and ambiguities.
Do you like where I brought you? : disenchantment and re-enchantment in Vintilă Mihăilescu’s anthropological teachings
(Expert Projects, 2020) Iancu, Bogdan; Stroe, Monica
"Always provoking, creating disruption, advocating for inclusiveness, questioning elite assumptions and often going against the grain of dominant intellectual voices, Vintilă’s pedagogical lessons remain a source of inspiration for those whom he has shaped as students and infl uenced as colleagues. The bulk of the students still come from a diversity of professional and educational backgrounds, ranging from the humanities to technical fi elds. What they seek are answers; what we still aim to provide, in keeping with Vintilă’s legacy, is the ability to ask the right questions and to think anthropologically, no matter the fi eld."
From peasant workers to amenity migrants : socialist heritage and the future of mountain rurality in Romania
(Association pour la diffusion de la recherche alpine, UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes, 2017) Membretti, Andrea; Iancu, Bogdan
This article investigates the legacy of state socialism and the post-socialist transformation inside the Romanian Carpathians by reviewing sociological literature on new inhabitants of the Alps and anthropological literature on ruralism in Romania. Today, after a period spent adapting to socialist agricultural and industrial policies, several rural communities of the Carpathians are facing growing waves of amenity migrants and urban tourists. In 2015, in order to investigate the potential role of these dynamics relative to the resilience of mountain dwellers, we collected qualitative data by means of in-depth ethnographic interviews with Romanian academics, tourist entrepreneurs, residents of and immigrants to the mountain village of Fundata in Transylvania. We recognise amenity migration and rural tourism as important but also ambivalent and as driving change with respect to the interrelated socio-demographic local change. Whereas the Carpathians have been losing population dramatically since the 1990s, and the remaining population has aged, rural tourism has brought new permanent and temporary inhabitants (often young people) and significant economic resources. Together with accommodation infrastructure, tourism has transformed several mountain villages’ physical and cultural landscape. As cultural brokers and economic resource bearers, amenity migrants and tourists represent both a threat to and an opportunity for post-socialist territories, which are facing long-term socio-economic and demographic crises. As we will discuss in the conclusions of the paper, also with regard to ongoing transformations in the Alpine regions, it seems clear that one cannot ignore the relevance of these urban actors (nor of the renewed urban-rural connection) to the revitalisation of mountain areas.
Introduction : a place for Hay : flexibility and continuity in Hay-Meadow management
(National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, 2016) Iuga, Anamaria; Iancu, Bogdan; Stroe, Monica
Aware that in interpreting landscape, researches should be oriented both towards the present, but also towards the remains of the past in the landscape, be they natural or cultural, Tim Ingold has suggested the use of a “dwelling perspective”, which stresses that “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of–and testimony to–the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves”(1993: 152). The present and past connection is even more obvious since, as established by historical ecologists such as Urban Emanuelsson (2009), human society has been actively contributing for centuries to the creation and shaping of the landscape, which, in turn, had a direct influence on the people and their ways of perceiving space. The “dwelling perspective” is therefore concerned with researching the immediate involvement in the landscape (Ingold 1993: 152), the everyday life, as a starting point. Daily activities have a direct influence on the landscape, as humans have used local resources, have modified and controlled space in order to provide food. The “dwelling perspective” allows the researcher to see the landscape not only in its physicality, but its temporality as well, which can be traced in the tasks associated with the landscape. The “taskscape”, as defined by Tim Ingold in his seminal work, is a “pattern of activities” that can be traced into an array of features found in the landscape, including what we can hear (Ingold 1993: 162). As a result, human beings are seen as active agents and producers of change in a territory, by means of their activity and interactivity.
Ipostaze si etnografii ale carantinei in pandemie
(Pro Universitaria, 2022) Iancu, Bogdan; Stroe, Monica; Mihail, Andrei
The whole wave of restrictions and adaptations to what was to be called the new normality, inspired us (and even forced us), following the examples of Vintila Mihailescu, to propose to the master's students a collective research project to document the transformations brought by this new regime of everyday life. This volume brings together the early contributions of the students of the Anthropology (SNSPA and UB) and Visual Studies and Society (SNSPA) Masters programs to the research on the social effects of the pandemic in the early stages of the declaration of the state of emergency and in the months that followed.
Out of one, many: hydro-economic logics in a World Bank-financed irrigation project in Romania
(Taylor & Francis, 2024) Iancu, Bogdan; Stroe, Monica
The study of irrigation systems has been relatively absent from research into socio-ecological transitions in ex-socialist countries, with a few exceptions. Using a World Bank designed and financed irrigation system constructed by a British contractor in 1974 in southern Romania as an entry point, we work with what we term hydro-economic logic to understand the economic and ecological transformations supported by large-scale irrigation systems in the context of rapid post-socialist change. While the socialist-era hydro-economic logic reflected the property regime over land during state-socialism, post-1990 processes of government-backed land restitution and land privatization, the collapse of the vertically-integrated economy that accompanied the network of the canals, pumps and pipes, and the advent of European Union farm payment schemes, created three distinct hydro-economic logics: independent vertical irrigation by small landholders; land grabbing next to the canals; and water grabbing by large agro-industrial business. This suggests that a long-term analysis of infrastructure systems yields unique insights into their changing techno-political rationalities and world-making capacities and may help future efforts to assess the ecological legacies of high modernist infrastructural mega-projects.
Rural communities and traditional ecological knowledge
(Cambridge University Press, 2017) Iuga, Anamaria; Westin, Anna; Iancu, Bogdan; Stroe, Monica; Tunón, Håkan