Enacting Culture in a Romanian Village

Vrâncioaia House of Culture—Beginnings

In the Romanian countryside, the institution of the house of culture is deeply connected with the post-war communist cultural agenda, but it has a longer history, going back to the modernization and education project of the emerging nation-state in the nineteenth century. Many houses of culture were built during the interwar period, in close connection to school-building programmes, intended to bring high culture and education to all parts of the country. In the context of the consolidation of the Romanian state, and the centrality of the national question in this period, ¹⁰ the houses of culture built in the countryside were meant to determine an enhanced enculturation process whereby the countryside was made part of the Romanian nation-state. Gellner argues that acquiring “culture” in the context of the modern state (which is, by definition, a Protector of Culture) guarantees a person’s citizenship, employability, and dignity: Citizenship depends on “mastery of an ethnicity-defining High (that is, codified, script-endowed, education-transmitted) Culture” and on how that culture defines its members. ¹¹ While Gellner’s paradigm explains the role of these institutions in forging a sense of national identity and of turning peasants into Romanians, the specificity of this institution, and of the “culture” inside it, reveals the particular kind of citizens that the peasants were expected to be, and how their relationship with the state was shaped.

In Vrancea, as in many other parts of the Romanian countryside, the building of houses of culture is connected to the sociologia militans practiced in the mid-1930s by Gusti’s Royal Student Teams, ¹² which were aimed at determining the transformation of everyday life in the countryside. ¹³ National economic and political changes aside, it was through the house of culture that people’s everyday life was meant to be altered: People were taught about sanitation, about what was considered a proper diet, or about appropriate gender divides. In the area of Vrancea, elderly people can still remember the cooking lessons, sanitation campaigns, and attempts to introduce mountain peasants to vegetables or to keep them from drinking too much, most of which took place in the newly built houses of culture).

The house of culture in Vrâncioaia was built at the same time as the new school, church, road, bridge, headquarters for the local cooperative, a public bath, and a health house (the last two as part of the house of culture). Neculai Jechianu, an influential political figure who was a former local schoolteacher, and later became an MP, oversaw the modernization of the village. ¹⁴ Money obtained from selling the wood owned by the village community was used for the new institutions and infrastructure, whose construction was carried out by the villagers and overseen by some of the village elite.

As an institution, the house of culture in Vrâncioaia was officially established in 1938, but, in the absence of an actual building, its activities took place in the school building until 1941. ¹⁵ This points to the close connection between the school and the house of culture, and the educational purpose of the latter. In 1941, a proper house of culture was built, inaugurated on the same date as the other aforementioned institutions. The executive board included Jechianu himself, the priest, and school teachers. Having started as The House of Culture Carol II, the institution changed its denomination after the king’s abdication to Mitropolitul Veniamin Costache. ¹⁶ In 1948, its name was again changed, this time to Friedrich Engels, but by the mid-1960s, the title lost this communist addition, as a result of a new turn towards “national culture,” associated with the rise of Ceaușescu. From then on, it has remained Căminul Cultural Vrâncioaia.

The Hearth and Home

In the same way that printing tackled the problem of “the fatality of human linguistic diversity,” ¹⁷ the house of culture became the place that accommodated, changed, and centralized a variety of performances and rituals through which the community defined itself in relation to the nation-state. Anderson’s theory opens a path to understanding how the demands of citizenship and nationhood are experienced by people, and how a particular discourse on “culture” frames (by limiting, shaping, directing behaviour) the ways of identifying oneself as part of a community—be that the “imagined” one of the nation, or the concrete one of the village.

To understand the particular project of modernization as seen through the house of culture, we need to unpack the term “house” and its content—“culture.” The term used in Romanian for houses of culture located in the countryside is cămin cultural. Cămin is the Romanian for “hearth,” and so a word-for-word translation would therefore be “hearth of culture.” Meanwhile, their name in towns is casă de cultură (house of culture). To all intents and purposes, the institution is the same, consisting of a hall where most public gatherings are held, and where a variety of entertainment, educational, and political activities take place. But although the same kinds of activities took place both inside the cămin cultural and casă de cultură, the distinction between them was and still is maintained. According to the Organizational Regulations issued by the Ministry of Education in 1960, ¹⁸ institutions called cămin cultural existed only in villages and the far outskirts of towns. Cămin cultural, therefore, belongs to spaces defined as peripheral. But at the same time, cămin, translated as “hearth,” also situates the village in relation to the nation-state as the locus where folk culture is expressed and represented.

Unable to impose the same authority and grandeur as the houses of culture in towns, the cămin cultural seems to have been, from the outset, more open to syncretism. The very name carries associations of humbleness, but also retains something of the vision of a modern utopia of peasant communities, centred around a deep, organic core. On the national scale, the peasantry itself was considered to be the hearth of the nation. Indeed, the cămin cultural carries these ambiguities concerning the relation between the centre and the countryside in its very name.

The social history of the cămin cultural reveals the effort put into transforming this space into a kind of peasant house that would be open to the entire community. The private sphere of the house in the countryside is constituted by kinship relationships, even when it opens and becomes a public space. ¹⁹ By contrast, the cămin cultural is open for everyone at all times, sees the villagers as equal, and engenders an individual relationship between each of them and the state.

One example that illustrates this is the șezătoare activities. Șezătoare were “bees” ²⁰ organized by women in periods when there was a large amount of work to do, such as spinning thread, preparing wool, or weaving. Often taking place in wintertime, the șezătoare involved dozens of women gathering at the home of one person where they would work. The gatherings often extended into the wee hours of the morning, and were moments when stories or poems were told or sang. Folklorists often recorded these important social gatherings. But from the 1930s, Gusti’s Royal Student Teams visited the șezătoare gatherings not only to collect material from local women. The Teams began to organize șezătoare in the house of culture, where they would insert information sessions into the activities of the evening aimed at modernizing the peasants’ lives. Increasingly the name șezătoare came to mean gatherings organized at the cămin cultural. The audience for these events was not only made up of women but also of men, and the topics of discussion ranged from the spiritual to agriculture. After 1945, șezătoare, with the sense acquired in Gusti’s time, became the most important event through which information and communist propaganda was disseminated in the cămin cultural (see below). Another survivor from the activity of the Student Teams is the notion of muncă culturală, cultural work—which identified the activity of the people who directed and put into practice activities in the village house of culture.

In parallel, however, the șezătoare continued to be practised as a traditional work “bee” for a long time, especially in mountain communities that had not been collectivised, and where part of the labour that people did remained the same even after World War II. Today, these events no longer take place, except in ethnographic museums, where they designate folklore performances that are claimed to be “authentic.” The example of șezătoare shows how a local practice was put to work in modern institutions, while being carried out in parallel, by the villagers, later to become staged events that represent the pristine village life in ethnographic museums. It illustrates the process whereby the state, with its monopoly over the discourse on identity and culture—both in the 1930s and during the communist period—incorporated elements of local culture into centralized ideas of national identity. However, a historic view inside the house of culture shows inconsistencies in this centralized discourse over identity, and in the modernizing process too. Further down I analyse the one main publication connected to the house of culture, meant to express the official point of view on “culture,” but which, on close inspection, shows conflicts between different factions over the monopoly of the meaning of “culture,” and changes over the four decades of communism.

The Cultural Pathfinder—The Shape of Culture in Socialist Romania

By the mid-1950s almost every cluster of villages in Romania had its own cămin cultural, and there were almost three times as many of these institutions in the countryside as there had been in the interwar period. ²¹ Their fast pace of construction gave a sense of the urgent necessity to “change culture.” Schoolteachers remained in charge of the houses of culture in the countryside, while inspectors from the county headquarters, party officials, would often visit to check on the cultural work carried out.

A particularly revealing publication connected to the Romanian houses of culture is the Ministry of Culture’s official publication, Îndrumătorul Cultural (“The Cultural Direction” or “The Cultural Pathfinder”), ²² which contained precise details about the management of this institution. Effectively a textbook for the “cultural activist,” Îndrumătorul Cultural contained a wealth of informative and entertainment features. It was published without interruption from January 1946 until November 1989. ²³ The organization of the publication itself, as well as its evolution, constituted a blueprint for how official “culture” was expected to infuse everyday life. Seen through Îndrumătorul, the house of culture itself was a medium whose very presence was meant to change everyday life. This publication gives a visual sense of what was expected from the rural population, at different stages in the post-war history of the house of culture.

For the Communist Party of the Romanian Socialist Republic, culture was described in material terms, as a “collective good,” or “a collective commodity.” ²⁴ The use of a term characteristic of a capitalist system should not come as a surprise. ²⁵ “Culture” may not be a commodity to be bought and sold, but it certainly entails the notion of alienation, in the sense that it is objectified, identified as a discrete category. Moreover, it is something measurable, just like industrial production; the incredible amount of paperwork that recorded activities in the house of culture was meant to be a tangible proof of the existence of “culture.” This material, discrete character of “culture” is a characteristic of the Soviet house of culture where “alongside a myriad of texts and practices, the message is, in effect, ‘Here is our culture, come and get it.’ That is to say, the Soviet cultural project was unabashedly public, reified, intended for mass consumption and intended most importantly to be widely shared.” ²⁶

During its first ten years, each issue of Îndrumătorul Cultural condensed as much advice as possible on the transformation and enactment of “culture” through the house of culture. Texts from the magazine were to be read out loud to an audience in the house of culture (during șezătoare), or to be glued onto the local Wall Magazine. ²⁷ “Communist Culture” was to be achieved through “cultural work,” and it could only become effective when materialized. Articles explain exactly how the cămin has to be decorated with communist slogans (including exact measurements for them). The audience were not supposed to be the mere receivers of the message of communism but to participate, with their bodies and minds, in its creation (see Figure 1). Here is how the cultural activists are advised to embellish the inside of the house of culture, in an issue of Îndrumătorul Cultural from January 1948:

For the decoration, there should also be slogans. They should be written with beautiful letters, 4-5 cm long and 2-3 cm wide, in order to be seen and read from a distance. The letters can also be cut out. We recommend cutting them out of red cardboard, and placing them on a white wall in the house of culture with pins. The slogans have to be changed often, to enrich the knowledge of the ones who read them and to refresh and liven the background of work activities. The slogans shall be chosen from Îndrumătorul Cultural. ²⁸

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Figure 1

The cover of the first issue of Îndrumătorul Cultural, February 1948. The peasants, on the right side, and the workers, on the left side, forge the book “culture” itself with their tools. As they read from it, they make it. “Culture” becomes tangible

Much like the factories, the mines and the dams, “culture” was actively forged by the people and for the people. This active process of making ideology concrete and tangible was meant to “provide sensory experience” ²⁹ and change lives.

The issues of Îndrumătorul between 1948 and mid-1950s are dominated by images of joyful peasants, celebrating the new regime. Peasant dress identifies the characters in these illustrations as people from the countryside. Often when the images suggest change, the character in folk dress is a woman, at the forefront of change, while the agent of change is a young man dressed in modern clothes—the intellectual (see in Figures 2 and 3). Drawings and photographs of women carrying wheat, or among the fields of wheat, connect their supposed reproductive, nurturing qualities to the wider collective, and away from the family unit. At this point, characters dressed in folk attire were simply meant to illustrate or symbolize a reality of rural areas.

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Figure 2

Îndrumătorul Cultural, April 1949. Propaganda for an intense literacy campaign. The peasant woman is the central figure. She wears folk attire, while the teacher, in modern attire, is the one who activates the change, the embodiment of Îndrumătorul, the pathfinder

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Figure 3

Îndrumătorul Cultural, August 1949. Propaganda for collectivization. This time we have a photograph, illustrating a reality, not an ideal situation that the reader should aim for. The woman is the first in line to sign up for the collective farm, but the character in the shadow, the clerk, is the one who determines change. Bonnell remarks that collectivization in the USSR “is presented visually in the feminine idiom” to counter women’s resistance to the process (V. E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin, vol. 27, [Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999])

Later on, after the mid-1950 re-orientation toward national iconography, images of people in folk dress no longer signify real peasants, but performers of folklore, as we can see in Figure 4. The detail on their costumes makes them identifiable by region—in other words, by place, by ethnicity, and not as a class. After the 1960s, the visual sensibility changes too—from socialist realist to a slicker design (Figure 5). There is no longer a presupposed distance between the urban and the rural readership of the magazine, which is increasingly addressing a middle-class readership with hobbies. Folk dress becomes not something by which peasants are identified; more than a garb for performance, it is something to learn about. There is room for dissent within the pages of the magazine, as ethnologists, and even sociologists from the Gusti era such as Stahl, debate against party ideologues about the meanings of “authenticity,” the purpose of mass media, and even the purpose of the house of culture. Costumes and stage performances are very often criticized for their “lack of authenticity,” and particularly for allowing “kitsch” to permeate folklore (see below). Particularly at the dance and song competitions and festivals, folklore specialists and ideologues found it very hard to agree on what valuable folklore was, and how to strike a balance between “innovation” and “authenticity.” ³⁰

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Figure 4

Îndrumătorul Cultural, February 1955. The peasant dress is illustrative of performers, not real peasants

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Figure 5

Îndrumătorul Cultural, May 1962. Back cover. The slicker design marks the break from a socialist-realist style

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Figure 6

This cartoon appeared in Îndrumătorul Cultural, July 1976. The caption translates: Fashion? . . . At the horă in one manner / They wanted to be admired / Her, with a mini catrință / Him, with his flared ițari. (catrință and ițari are both traditional attire.) Incorporating modern elements in countryside activities is an aesthetic and moral offence

In Vrâncioaia, the local school teachers in charge of organizing the events at the house of culture have positive memories of Îndrumătorul Cultural in the 1960s and 1970s, as having an educational, rather than propagandistic, content. It is difficult to assess how these images would have been read at the time, but what they certainly do is construct a cultural repertoire, together with the texts that addressed the peasants (or peasant-workers), and the activities that were taking place inside and around the house of culture. While the dynamism and urgency of change instilled in these images tend to wither by the 1960s (in Romania as in the USSR—according to Buck-Morss, 2002 and Bonnell, 1999), ³¹ the iconicity and importance of the visual element remains in place.

Activities Performed

During the socialist period, folklore was, from the beginning, the activity prescribed by party ideologues as the solution to attract the villagers to the houses of culture, where they would also receive some educational information—including “political education.” Activities such as weddings or other local celebrations were officially discouraged, or frowned upon, even though all of the village houses of culture hosted them. In Vrâncioaia, at these events the locals wore folk attire up to the 1980s, when they were slowly replaced by modern clothes. The “folklore” that was accepted by ideologues was performed on stage, rehearsed, and learned from a teacher. The Romanian ethnologists of the time who were interested in pre-modern rituals and practices of the countryside argued that this modern “folklore” lacked authenticity. ³² Giurchescu and Rădulescu make the point that, by placing people on stage and asking them to perform for an audience, their music, dance, and attire changes its character, it cannot be “authentic.” ³³ Others too have argued that such practices of performing folklore were used by communist ideologues to legitimize socialist rule, and therefore were devoid of their old meanings. ³⁴

The idea of performance helps us understand the reframing of “folklore” during the socialist period. Theatrical performance was the most important entertainment activity, starting with theatre. Performing was not an activity in which the actors pretended to be someone else, but one that was actively meant to change the individual and the mass society. ³⁵ Stories meant to be read out loud or performed used mise-en-abyme techniques to show that engaging in the performance of communism equated with being active in the construction of communism.

One such story called “Grandpa’s Clothes” ³⁶ (Straiele Bunicului) is centred around a performance in which a schoolboy takes the lead role. For this, he needs his grandpa’s traditional clothing. The kind, but strict, grandpa tells him that these are things of great value, that the clothes are in fact for his burial and he cannot lend them. Torn between his grandpa’s wish and the excitement of the school play, the boy decides to steal grandpa’s clothes. Grandpa goes to the house of culture to see his grandson in the school play, and gets angry when he realizes what has happened to his straie (traditional folk attire). But when he sees the boy’s talent, he is impressed to the point of tears and forgives him. The grandpa realizes his grandson is indeed the future, the “sunrise,” while he himself is “the sun going down.” In this story, the modern institutions (the school, the house of culture) cut across kinship ties, and dismantle the old relations, replacing them with something new. The grandson might not use the straie in the village horă, but the clothes remain in use, on stage, in the house of culture.

This is how folklore becomes something to perform rather than a social activity among the villagers regulated by courtship and kinship connections. ³⁷ When performed on stage, folk choreographies enhanced the aesthetic qualities of the dances. The choreographies no longer brought the villagers in as participants, but rather produced a divide between spectators and performers. Folklore became a part of “high culture” in the house of culture. The structure and motivations behind the dance and the music changed.

In earlier issues, the theatrical performances suggested by Îndrumătorul Cultural have a clear moral purpose, to have the villagers enact the injustices of the previous bourgeois regime, and to illustrate the bright future ahead. But in later editions, after the 1960s, this changes dramatically, as the magazine invites the readers to try a wealth of new activities. These continue to have an educational element, and the moral incentive of bettering oneself, but communist ideology alone was no longer the core of this educational process. In fact, many were urban, middle-class activities: playing chess, learning to ski or do sports activities, photography, classical music, and fine arts. Outright theatrical performance of communist ideology changed to a more subtle, bourdieusian performance of the modern lifestyle. The publication of a booklet aimed at advising people on how to spend their free time in a pleasant and useful way is an indication of a historical moment when people had free time, and the problem of what to do with it. ³⁸ One of the most popular activities was the cinema. With the collectivization process finished, and the country on course for industrialization, “culture” resembled the hobbies and activities that people were likely to take up in western Europe too. Leisure and tourism gained importance as activities that the country’s citizens should all be able to afford, whether they lived in urban or rural areas. The cămin cultural was also included in this: Tourists were encouraged to go to the house of culture wherever they were visiting and check out the local entertainment scene.

In the mid-1960s, Îndrumătorul spoke to people about folklore with more than one voice. On the one hand, there were the set, spectacular, aestheticized choreographies, through which the villagers were enacting their “traditions” on national stages, in folklore competitions. But Îndrumătorul also presented a different understanding of folklore, as it explained the costumes of each ethno-folkloric area in detail, and emphasised the need for “authenticity.” “Folklore” equalled “culture,” and folklore needed to be learned about, studied, carefully preserved (see photo 3.13). By then, the educational aspect of the performance was no longer, or not exclusively, the alienation that was supposed to shake off the false consciousness of the previous ideology, nor an entertainment practice used to buttress the regime. Instead, people were being educated to distinguish good, authentic folklore, in an age where the village inhabitant was presumed to be just as modern as the urban one, and eager to engage in a variety of leisure activities.

From Friedrich Engels to Cîntarea României

Îndrumătorul Cultural tells us what was meant to happen inside the houses of culture, and any reports about the actual activities happening in these places referred strictly to the activities it proposed. Occasionally, it published negative reports from the cultural inspectors who travelled to the villages, who admonished the local intellectuals that there was too much entertainment and too little propaganda content. To understand what activities took place and how people were engaged in them in Vrâncioaia, I refer in the following section to the archives of the Vrâncioaia house of culture, and to people’s life histories. This is a history recovered from archives thought lost or unimportant—a consequence of the relocation of memory and archive practices in post-socialist Romania. Many of the people I spoke to were actively engaged in the performances and educational activities at the house of culture; most of the villagers, however, remember the weddings and parties, the film screenings, and the traditional bands, rather than the educational or political events.

Amongst the activities that took place in the cămin cultural, and which passed unremarked in Îndrumătorul, were the social gatherings and parties—ranging from wedding celebrations, baptisms, to school celebrations, the Sunday horă and balls. These took place throughout the country’s cămin cultural during the period after World War II. ³⁹ In fact, one of the distinctions between the urban houses of culture and the cămin cultural was that, in the former, the performance hall and the dance hall were distinct, whereas the latter brought all social activities to the same place.

Most of these social gatherings appear in the reports and official diary of the Vrâncioaia cămin from its very beginning in 1938. Weddings and baptisms were not mentioned, but the Sunday and Easter horă, New Year parties, or (later on) carol singing—activities that were organized by the head of the house of culture—were mentioned, and a special budget allocated for them. Despite constant pressure from the centre to restrict the number of local parties that were unrelated to politics, these were indeed the most frequent and important events hosted by houses of culture—with the approval and assistance of the manager.

The house of culture in Vrâncioaia was managed by Teodor (Dorel) Țibrea, a schoolteacher with a real passion for “cultural work”—as described by the villagers. Activities reported included listening to the radio, rehearsals with various artistic teams, public readings from literary texts, and conferences on agricultural matters. The activities that went on were highly organized, with members forming specialized teams: one team for the wall magazine, one for the humoristic brigade (brigada de agitație), one team for theatre performances, and one for dance. The Vrâncioaia house of culture also had a choir, a propaganda team, and a team of lecturers, meant to read scientific, agricultural, and political lectures to the peasants.

Even though the language of the reports pays lip service to the Communist Party, which presumably directed the cultural development of the citizens, the content of performances tended to be from classic texts that had been accepted as Romanian high culture since the interwar period (writers such as Rebreanu, Alecsandri, Caragiale). This continuity in the content of what was understood to be Romanian culture, along with the elevation of folklore to the pedestal of “culture” legitimated the house of culture among the village intellectuals and its educational project.

Speaking about the house of culture in its heyday, the current priest remembers the variety of activities and information sources available in the house of culture, which aimed to offer a distraction and a direction to the locals—especially the local youth. But in addition to the modern process of education and constructive leisure, the house of culture was also held to be important because it hosted the social gatherings that confirmed and created kinship ties in the village.

The people in Vrâncioaia remember the house of culture as being always full and active. It was the task of the committee—mainly the school staff—to constantly convince people to participate, each having “their own area of influence in the village,” according to one of the schoolteachers. Apart from their school activity, the schoolteachers needed to fulfil their hours of “cultural work,” by coordinating activities at the house of culture. But most of it was done through the charisma of Teodor Țibrea, the head of the house of culture, who used to “tell jokes, dance, sing, and could do everything.” People were very fond of him, according to my interviewees, and he was famous for attending every party and drinking opportunity. Even though the Communist Party cadres had certain expectations of “cultural work,” Țibrea responded firstly to what the villagers wanted or what he and the schoolteachers thought to be good activities. At the end of the day, it was not the state-imposed “culture” and rituals that helped constitute social relations in the village, and the imposition of a “culture” disconnected from existing social relations and practices was impossible.

One of the most popular activities throughout the life of the cămin cultural after the war was screening films. ⁴⁰ One person recalls: “the machines and the speakers had an engine, because there was no electricity. For one hour before the start of the film, [Teodor] Țibrea put the speakers outside the cămin cultural on really loud volume, so that people could hear from across the hills and come to the screenings.” The artistic teams—choir, recital, folklore, and the “humoristic brigade”—provided just as many opportunities for people’s hidden talents to come out, according to a former schoolteacher.

The activities in the house of culture included performances of theatre sketches, choreographies of local dances and songs, informative speeches and discussions about agricultural issues and celebrations for various religious occasions (including carol singing)—the latter with the tacit support of the management. Rather than instil communism in their minds, the activities slowly changed the social structure in the village, where the class of “intellectuals” formed of teachers and bureaucrats became more and more prominent, and whose position remained the same in the village today.

Folklore Reframed

In this last section, I briefly discuss folklore performances in the Vrâncioaia house of culture, in order to illustrate the diverse messages that the locals were receiving with regards to their performance of what was considered “their culture.” Folklore performances took place inside the house of culture from its establishment in 1938, but it was only after 1945 that a (more or less) permanent ensemble was established at the request of superior cadres. In mountain villages such as Vrâncioaia (not unlike the Maramureș village described by Kligman) folklore became a resource. ⁴¹ Theatre, singing, or fine arts were perhaps harder to perform at a competitive level outside the village in the absence of proper instructors, but a folkloric dance ensemble was much easier to set up and had a bigger chance to become successful in the national competitions.

During the first years of socialism, folklore choreographies prescribed by Îndrumătorul Cultural placed Vrâncioaia within the space of the communist bloc: alongside their own dances, the peasants were also invited to learn the folklore forms of other Soviet peoples. From the mid-1950s on, this understanding and usage of “folklore” was maintained, but with the state ideologues turning their attention to national values. This practice culminated with Cîntarea României, an all-encompassing festival-competition that dominated the cultural life at national and local levels from 1978 to 1989. It was set up to express and define national identity in communist Romania as theorized by the state ideologues, who merged communist and nationalist ideologies. ⁴² The stage of the house of culture became the stage of the nation-state, where each region was represented by particular dances and songs. Similarly to the Soviet Union, the house of culture “reveals changing configurations of governmentality and diverse technologies of the self.” ⁴³ Performing one’s culture on stage evolved into more than a practice of disciplining bodies, becoming an abstract language of “culture” and “ethnic cultural particularities.” To the performers, this “language” did not serve as a faithful representation of real ethnic traits, but it enabled people’s quest for recognition. ⁴⁴

This had specific consequences for the way folklore and traditions were thought about at a local level. A sanitized version of regional customs would be transformed into choreographies or staged expressions of folklore. Each village in Vrancea had to have its own distinct, discrete characteristic “folklore” by which it defined itself on the stage of the nation-state. The village of Nerej had “Chipărușul,” the wake dance of the village elderly, turned into a stage performance devoid of its ritual and social significance; Năruja too had a famous dance ensemble; Nistoreşti had bagpipers; and in Paltin they had Alpine horns and flutes. All these associations between villages and particular forms of folk performance continue today, with their reputation leading to further institutional support. The development of this division of folk art by distinctly bounded units came partly out of the research of local intellectuals into the “folk” forms of their village (as instructed by the Îndrumătorul), but also from textbooks written by folklorists and museum specialists, who often provided the managers of the houses of culture with a repertoire.

A folklore ensemble of 16 members was set up in Vrâncioaia in 1959, instructed by the head of the house of culture, Teodor Țibrea, who also managed the theatre and the choir teams. At the national round of Cîntarea României in 1976, Vrâncioaia won second place with its theatre performance, by staging a folklore poem thought to be at the core of Romanian national identity: ⁴⁵ Mioriţa. It is an iconic example of Romanian lyrical folklore where a shepherd laments his possible death and imagines his immersion into the landscape. The best-known version of this ballad was collected from the region of Vrancea. On stage, it was recited by actors dressed in the most authentic and spectacular costumes they could find. The team was made up of the village intellectuals, interpreting the poem through which they claimed to represent their regional identity as a core of national identity. “The only reason they did not give us first prize is because we did not praise the Communist Party and Ceaușescu, but we were happy with second place,” says the Romanian school teacher, who interpreted the part of the shepherd’s mother. The shepherd was played by the village doctor. The performance was underpinned by specific understandings of folklore, as performed for the festival. The Mioriţa performance brought out other features that “folklore” gained during this period: it became incorporated into modern art, and theatre, and it linked Vrâncioaia to the national narrative, to Romanian high culture through the choice of the poem. These modern features did not prevent it from winning plaudits from the jury for its authenticity and the costumes used.

At the local level, therefore, it was not only the voice of the state ideologues mobilizing a communist-nationalist version of “folklore” that made itself heard through the village houses of culture. Instead, there are different understandings of “folklore” along the lines of village class structures—between the intellectuals and the rest. The performers themselves were able to manipulate the vague definitions of “folklore” and “authenticity” to gain recognition and capital.

One of the main distinctions engendered through the house of culture, which comes through from all the sources that I have considered, is that between villagers and a class of intellectuals, who were to instruct the villagers and direct their cultural activity. But they were also the ones who actually ended up representing their village on the regional and national stages. It was through them that particular ways of evaluating “folklore” as a discrete category were disseminated among the villagers. Their understanding of the folk idiom was influenced by Îndrumătorul Cultural, where we find expressions of the state ideology, and where the local intellectuals are in charge of transforming the rural population. In our interviews and informal discussions, the local teachers talked about the pressures from the communist ideologues of transmitting the right “culture” to the locals, but also about the level of agency they had: at the end of the day, they carried out the activities that got a positive response from their audience, at least in the house of culture. With regards to other institutions (such as the cooperative farm), there are more accounts of coercion from the locals. Meanwhile, the teachers say, the register of the house of culture was filled in with all the activities that the cadres expected them to carry out. And yet, even the register contains evidence of dissent, when in 1987 two of the teachers refused to take part in more activities, on account of the political content and absence of educational activities in the house of culture.

Conclusion

The social life of the Vrâncioaia cămin cultural illustrates the way in which the notion of “culture” and the folk idiom changed during the post-war period. Indeed, this is the place that brought together the contradictory demands that the late socialist state placed on the peasants, to both modernize and be the retainers of tradition. The house of culture was the place where a discrete notion of “our culture” was located, it labelled the community as “modern” (incorporating high culture and folklore), but it was also the place where those community practices not sanctified by the state, and labelled as backward, took place as well.

Kligman remarks that through folklore performances, the ideologies of nationalism and communism accommodated to some extent the realities of the mountain villages where old customs were indeed strong, and gained the position of “living guardians of a Romanian cultural heritage.” ⁴⁶ In the village of Vrâncioaia, the locals used folklore performances as capital, that which connected them to the centre of the nation-state. Their owning and using this form of currency is also what contributed to the prominence that folklore took in the last two decades of communist rule in Romania. The local people’s positive response to the folklore performances meant that other activities, such as chess playing or rock ’n’ roll dancing, were never taken up, and in the 1970s they slowly disappeared from the list of activities prescribed by Îndrumătorul too. And while the first editions of Cîntarea României competition included a wealth of sections, such as “inventions” or pop music, it was folklore that got a national response, where both urban and rural inhabitants could compete. Their bodily participation in the project of performing the nation was more powerful than Anderson’s imagined communities, obtained through the spread of the printing press. By all means, the community remained “imagined”—as the inhabitants of Vrâncioaia would rehearse their folklore dance, they had in their minds all the other representatives at regional and national level that they were competing against, who were, simultaneously, rehearsing their chosen performances on the stages of their local house of culture.

The house of culture, Îndrumătorul, and the muncă culturală responsibilities of the local intellectuals worked to change the meanings of “culture” during socialism into something tangible, material, visible—not unlike the UNESCO World Heritage list of today. Although in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc this “culture” had a particularly propagandistic flavor in the years after World War II, it was not dissimilar to the processes of reification of “culture” elsewhere in the world, ⁴⁷ especially in the post-colonial world, and especially where the state had a vested interest in backing up traditional culture. ⁴⁸

A former folklore instructor from Vrancea county said that it was in the 1990s, in the first years after the fall of communism, and before the state retreated from funding the houses of culture, that the Vrancean and other Romanian ensembles participated in international competitions, finally attaining their well-deserved fame, and demonstrating the value of local and national culture. At that point, my interviewee said, the performers did not anticipate the fall that was to come, for the ensembles and the cultural activities were tied in with the centralized state, and in particular with people’s workplaces, organized through a centralized economy. In Vrâncioaia, people connect the decline of the local house of culture with the diminishing population of the village, largely due to migration. However, the growth of the church as institution and building in the village has partly replaced the house of culture as the place where hierarchies among villagers are visible, as the place of ritual and display, and, occasionally, as the place where “our culture” and folklore are performed. ⁴⁹ Yet its project is not seen as being about “culture,” but about spirituality and tradition. Mass media, particularly television, now supply all the entertainment people crave and also folklore performances, with a wealth of TV channels featuring folklore. Meanwhile the links of the village with the central state are perhaps no longer as relevant as with those places afar, such as Italy, where most of the younger generation have migrated. Those still dedicated to the house of culture as a project continue to be the local teachers, including the younger ones, such as biology teacher Săndica, who occasionally gets involved in cleaning up the space to organize school performances. To her, as to the other teachers, the decline of the house of culture goes hand in hand with people’s lack of interest in education, as young people’s hopes and dreams lie in migration. Similar to Grant’s informants on Sakhalin island, the Vranceans believe there is no longer a local “culture” that they can be proud of. In this sense, “local culture” is seen as a project carried out by keeping the house of culture active, and in connection to other far-off stages —regional or national—for whom this “culture” has relevance.