Capitalism and Ethnicity

This book explores the transformation of a small town in South East Transylvania, Sighi oara, historically defined through a strong German presence. Despite the small number of Germans remaining in the region after the massive migrations of the last decades, historical German privilege (made visible through and materialized in the long-lasting architecture) is reformulated and re-configured in the present precisely through processes connected to valuing and producing this built landscape as historical heritage. By analyzing the gentrification of the historical citadel, transformations in public spaces, and NGO and historical preservation funding, I argue that Germanness offers a discursive space in which local desires for a developed West are able to articulate, productively, with Western nostalgias for a developmental do-over, as well as with fears for an endangered European heritage at the margins of Western civilization.

Autorentext

Claudia N. Câmpeanu is an anthropologist interested in ethnicity in Romania, in particular in Transylvania. She has taught cultural anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and Southwestern University in the US and Universitatea Bucuresti in Romania.