Papers by Stefan Dorondel
Global environment, Jan 31, 2021
Revista d'etnologia de Catalunya, 2009
This paper explores the unintended local outcomes of the centrally designed land reform in postso... more This paper explores the unintended local outcomes of the centrally designed land reform in postsocialist Romania, examining two strands of this story in order to understand how land reform was thwarted at a local level. First it assesses villagers' local ecological responses to wider neoliberal economic changes, noting how villagers have revived pre-collectivization agricultural practices, such as intercropping and crop diversification, in their attempts to survive the changes. Instead of increasing animal husbandry, the mountain villager has reacted by changing the emphasis of the local economy to rural tourism. Secondly, this paper argues that local state bureaucrats had the power and the incentive to affect the desired results of restitution of land and forest to pre-socialist owners. The bureaucrats have made use of this power to thwart the intentions of land reform. Indeed, such local power relations have shaped the postsocialist agrarian landscape.
Ethnologia Balkanica, 2016
Südosteuropa. Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft, 2012
Routledge eBooks, Aug 18, 2008
Berghahn Books, Oct 11, 2022
University of Pittsburgh Press eBooks, May 3, 2022
Critique of Anthropology, Apr 20, 2022
The material relics of socialism continue to affect present-day rural Romania. This article explo... more The material relics of socialism continue to affect present-day rural Romania. This article explores the nexus of socialist/post-socialist agricultural infrastructure, groundwater, soil transformations, the privatization process and the constitution of power relations along the Lower Danube rural areas. Positioning ourselves in the anthropology of infrastructure, we document both ethnographically and with Geographic Information Systems tools the social and political consequences of broken agricultural infrastructure in a village located on the banks of the Lower Danube, Romania. We show how the local political elite is able to exploit the surfacing of groundwater in their favour, resulting in economic loss only for small landholders and villagers without power. The interface of the multiple temporalities inherent in infrastructure with the various materialities of groundwater – its propensity to leak, infiltrate and surface – precipitated the emergence of a new ecological order. The new hybrid ecology is made up of pre-socialist feral groundwater, the socialist ‘hydraulic society’ that reclaimed agricultural land, and the post-socialist political economy. We engage a more-than-human perspective in order to offer a more sophisticated – and realistic – picture of post-socialist rural power relations.
Wiley-Blackwell eBooks, Mar 17, 2010
Since the demise of socialism, countries of Central and Eastern Europe have experienced intense n... more Since the demise of socialism, countries of Central and Eastern Europe have experienced intense negotiations over access and property. This article uses four case studies on struggles over forest in Albania and Romania to examine how these negotiations intersect with processes constituting authority. The cases demonstrate significant variations in the configurations of property and authority regarding forest, but they also reflect the influence of national politics in the two countries. In Albania, custom not only competes with the state as an institution sanctioning rights to forest but actually emerges as an alternative politico-legal institution contesting state authority more broadly. In Romania, local struggles over forests play out the contestations between personalized and law-based exercises of state authority at the national level. These insights suggest that due to their radical nature and simultaneous occurrence, negotiations over property and authority have challenged the position of post-socialist states as primary politico-legal institutions and have generated different exercises of state authority. 1. The case studies draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2004. Stefan Dorondel (in
Berghahn Books, Oct 17, 2022
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Papers by Stefan Dorondel
an EU food aid program in Romania. We show that an understanding
of this program’s implementation can contribute to our understanding
of how the state works in present-day Romania and, more generally, to
the anthropology of the state. We examine the ways in which local-level
bureaucrats gain discretion and exercise it when implementing the program. By securing greater control over a scarce transnational resource, local officials are able to shape national policy according to local distributive models. The described distribution process is conducive to community building, although in very different ways in the two rural
settings being studied. We argue for a relational analysis of the workings
of the state that explores the embeddedness of local actors and their
participation in historically shaped power relations.