Academic literature on the topic 'Children's life in 1970-1980 in Romania'

The purpose of this paper is to present and analyse the biography of a passionate 20th century Romanian tourist who lived in Bucharest and travelled across Europe, bringing his (subjective) travel experiences of Western countries to private and public audiences curious about the unknown “abroad” during the 1980s. This case study is about the life and travel experiences of Vasile A. Marinescu, and deals with their visibility and interpretation during the communist era. The research is based on unpublished sources – visual and audio sources, as well as manuscripts (between 1970 and 1980), interviews – and other already published archive materials. The research describes, in particular, how the West was perceived and presented in those semi-private shows, and how (and which of) those unofficial sources influenced the imagination of Romanians, aside the official propaganda.

The text observes the process of integration-inclusion of immigration groups into macrostructures of the host society following the example of changes in the approach of an immigration group to education. There was the question of primary priority: How did specific social and economic conditions of a locality influence the approach to education in two communities emerging from a group which was originally only one? The analyzed immigration group was provided by Slovaks from Romania who resettled a number of villages of the Czech borderland after World War Two (in 1946-1949). The Slovaks had lived in Romania continually for 150 years. In the isolation of ethnically homogeneous, agricultural villages they preserved their language, a traditional, distinctive folk culture and their way of life. In this structure the value of education did not assume any significant place. The Slovaks who arrived in Czechoslovakia were largely illiterate and unskilled. By contrast, the development of education in the Czech Lands was consistent with central and west European trends. Basic education was taken for granted. Secondary andd higher education was regarded by Czechs as a precondition of a better career in work and in conjunction with it a means of advancing on the social ladder. The encounter of these approaches to education was enhanced by an interethnic and inter-group cultural conflict between Slovaks from Romania and the Czech population of the villages. Logically, it placed Slovaks from Romania on the lowest educational degree, which involved the poorest social position in the village, as evaluated locally. The open school system of Czechoslovakia was for the Rudá hora Slovaks a potential offer for changing their economic as well as social statute. This opportunity was also provided to Slovaks from Romania in two specific places. Although the two localities are adjacent, the economy and social situation in them-a village and a small town-were diametrically opposed, not only at the time of their arrival, but also in subsequent years, which were observed-between 1947 and 1990. The analyzed data on the achieved level of and approach to education in the considered localities were based on three sources: the population censuses taken in years 1950, 1970, and 1980; church and civilian registers from 1946-1990; and a field research conducted in the localities in 1988-1990. ln the first places under consideration Slovaks from Romania made up a majority of population, which they maintained even in subsequent years. Social isolation was reflected in professional self-sufficiency of the village. The situation in the neighboring small town was quite different. The majority was made up by Czechs of all types of professions and degrees of education. Due to their poor education Slovak settlers from Romania were placed in the competition to the lower position in the locality in economic as well as social terms. While in the former village Slovaks did not fully feel the social contempt by Czechs due to their culture - their distinctiveness - which involved illiteracy and a lack of skills, their fellow counterparts in the neighboring small town had to come to terms with negative acceptation by their new neighbors. The initial difference in the look at the Slovaks' poor education on the part of Czechs triggered in both observed groups a different development of the educational structure and approaches to education. Subsequently it caused Slovaks from Romania from both localities to adopt differing approaches to education. The change in the approach to education in the former locality (village) was prompted from outside, from the governmenťs effort to enhance the educational level of the population. This is why young people lacked any major backing from their parents. They were searching for their way slowly, depending on the transformation of social structure of their own community. Education chiefly became a means of fulfilling their own professional career, for which apprenticeship in a specific field was sufficient. By contrast, in the neighboring small town the effort to acquire better education was prompted by the own initiative of the community members as a reply to the contemptuous attitude of Czech neighbors. A rapid orientation in the opportunities offered by the educational system made it possible for both the old and young generations of Slovaks to enhance their own social prestige. The approach to education as a means of hierarchization of society eventually brought the descendants of Slovaks from Romania to universities.

The paper presents the process of language socialization and acquisition of grammatical categories through the Roma oral culture in which metaphors are extensively used. Roma children who grow up in extended Roma families and community learn the language through communication with speakers of different registers. Research with 22 Roma children between three and six years of age from Croatia was carried in order to find out what grammatical categories are learned in this period of the life of children. The children were tested with a specially designed language assessment test in Romani (Kyuchukov & de Villiers, 2014b). The results show that Roma boys perform the test much better than Roma girls. Boys learn Romani from folkloristic genres which are rich in metaphors and this helps them to acquire complex grammatical categories. References Beller, S. (2008). Fostering Language Acquisition in Daycare Settings. The Hague:Bernard van Leer Foundation. Black, B. & Logan, A. (1995). Links between communication patterns in mother-child,father-child, and child-peer interactions and children’s social status. Child Development,66, 255–271. Bloom, L. et al. (1996). Early conversations and word learning: contributions form childand adult. Child Development, 67, 3154–3175. Blount, B. (1995). Parental speech and language acquisition: and anthropologicalperspective. In: Language, Culture, and Society. A book of Readings. Second edition, (pp.551–566). B. Blount (ed.). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Bokus, B. & Garstka, T. (2009). Toward a shared metaphoric meaning in children’sdiscourse. The role of argumentation. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 40(4), 193–203. Bowdle, B. (1998) Alignment and Abstraction in Metaphor. In: Advances in AnalogyResearch: Integration of Theory and Data form the Cognitive, Computational and NeutralSciences, (pp. 300–307). K. Holiyok, D. Gentner & K. Kokinov (Eds.). Sofia: NewBulgarian University. Crystal, D. (1992). 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Prospect Heights, IL:Waveland Press. Ozcaliskan, S. (2014). Development of metaphor. In: Encyclopedia of languagedevelopment, (pp. 374–375). P. Brookse, V. Kempe, & G.J. Golson (eds.). NY: SagePublishers. Penalosa, F. (1981). Introduction to the sociology of language. Rowley, MA: NewburyHouse Publishers. Rácová, A. & Samko, M. (2015). Structural Patterns and Functions of ReduplicativeConstructions in Slovak Romani. Asian and African Studies, 24, 165–189. Reger, Z. & Gleason, J. Berko (1991). Romani child-directed speech and children’slanguage among Gypsies in Hungary. Language in Society, 20(4), 601–617. Reger, Z. (1999). Teasing in the linguistic socialization of Gypsy children in Hungary.Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 46(3–4), 289–315. Rondal, J. (1985). Adult-Child Interaction and the Process of Language Acquisition. NewYork: Praeger Publishers. Samko, M. & Kapalková, S. (2014). Analýza naratívnej schopnosti rómskeho dieťaťa vrómčine a slovenčine. 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Introduction As street protests and clashes between citizens and authorities in places as different as Ferguson, Missouri and Hong Kong in autumn 2014 demonstrate, everyday life in many parts of the world is characterised by conflicting and competing sets of cultural norms, values, and practices. The idea that groups create cultures that stand in contrast to “mainstream” or “dominant culture” is nothing new—sociology’s earliest scholars sought cultural explanations for social “dysfunctions” such as anomie and deviance. Yet our interest in this article is not about the problems that marginalised and non-normative groups face, but rather with the cultures that are created as part of dealing with those problems. Milton Yinger begins his 1982 book, Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down, by contrasting multiple perspectives on countercultures. Some thinkers have characterised countercultures as not only a mundane feature of social life, but as a necessary one: Countercultures and the many types of intentional communities they commonly create are not social aberrations. For thousands of years there have been attempts to provide alternatives for the existing social order in response to the perennial grounds for dissent: hierarchy and privilege […,] disgust with hedonism and consumerism […, and] a decline in the quality of life. (Yinger, Countercultures 1) Others, however, have discursively delegitimised countercultures by characterising them as something in between naiveté and unschooled arrogance. Speaking specifically about hippies in the 1960s, Bell argued that the so-called counter-culture was a children’s crusade that sought to eliminate the line between fantasy and reality and act out in life its impulses under a banner of liberation. It claimed to mock bourgeois prudishness, when it was only flaunting the closet behavior of its liberal parents. It claimed to be new and daring when it was only repeating in more raucous form […] the youthful japes of a Greenwich Village bohemia of a half century before. It was less a counter-culture than a counterfeit culture. (xxvi-xxvii) If Bell is at all right, then perhaps countercultures may be better understood as subcultures, a term that may not require the idea of opposition (but see Gelder; Williams, Subcultural). To tease this distinction out, we want to consider the value of the counterculture concept for the study of oppositional subcultures. Rather than uncritically assuming what counter means, we take a more analytical view of how “counter,” as similar to other terms such as “resistant” and “oppositional,” has been articulated by social scientists. In doing this, we focus our attention on scholarly works that have dealt explicitly with group cultures “that sharply contradict the dominant norms and values of the society of which that group is a part” (Yinger, Countercultures 3). The Relationship between Counterculture and Subculture Many scholars point to the Chicago School of sociology as developing the first clear articulation of subcultural groups that differed clearly from mainstream society (see for example, Gelder and Thornton; Hannerz, E.; Williams, Youth). Paul G. Cressey, Frederic Thrasher, and later William Foote Whyte each provide exemplary empirical studies of marginal groups that were susceptible to social problems and therefore more likely to develop cultures that were defined as problematic for the mainstream. Robert Merton argued that marginalised groups formed as individuals tried to cope with the strain they experienced by their inability to access the cultural means (such as good education and good jobs) needed to achieve mainstream cultural goals (primarily, material success and social status), but Albert Cohen and others subsequently argued that such groups often reject mainstream culture in favour of a new, alternative culture instead. Within a few years, conceptual distinctions among these alternative cultures were necessary, with counterculture and subculture being disambiguated in American sociology. Yinger originally employed the term contraculture but eventually switched to the more common counterculture. Subculture became most often tied either to the study of religious and ethnic enclaves (Mauss) or to deviance and delinquency (Arnold), while counterculture found its currency in framing the cultures of more explicitly political groups and movements (see for example, Cushman; George and Starr). Perhaps the clearest analytical distinction between the terms suggested that subculture refer to ascribed differences based upon socio-economic status, ethnicity, religion (and so on) in relation to the mainstream, whereas counterculture should refer to groups rooted in an explicit rejection of a dominant culture. This is similar to the distinction that Ken Gelder makes between subcultures based upon marginalisation versus non-normativity. Counterculture became best used wherever the normative system of a group contains, as a primary element, a theme of conflict with the values of the total society, where personality variables are directly involved in the development and maintenance of the group's values, and wherever its norms can be understood only by reference to the relationships of the group to a surrounding dominant culture. (Yinger, Contraculture 629) Even at that time, however, such a neat distinction was problematic. Sociologist Howard S. Becker demonstrated that jazz musicians, for example, experienced a problem shared in many service occupations, namely that their clients did not possess the ability to judge properly the value of the service rendered, yet nevertheless sought to control it. As a consequence, a subculture emerged based on the opposition of “hip” musicians to their “square” employers’ cultural sensibilities. Yet Becker framed their experiences as subcultural rather than countercultural, as deviant rather than political (Becker 79-100). Meanwhile, the political connotations of “counterculture” were solidifying during the 1960s as the term became commonly used to describe aspects of the civil rights movement in the US, hippie culture, and the anti-Vietnam or peace movement. By the end of the 1960s, subculture and counterculture had become analytically distinct terms within sociology. Cultural Studies and the Class-ification of Counterculture The reification of subculture and counterculture as ontologically distinct phenomena was more or less completed in the 1970s through a series of publications on British youth cultures and subcultures (see Hall and Jefferson; Hebdige; Mungham and Pearson). The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in particular expended a great deal of collective mental energy theorising the material base upon which cultures—and in particular spectacular youth subcultures such as mods and punk—exist. As with Marxist analyses of culture more generally, class was considered a key analytic variable. In the definitive theoretical statement on subculture, Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, and Roberts argued that “the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be […] ‘class cultures’” (13). Subcultures were thus seen as ideological reactions to the material conditions experienced and made meaningful within working class “parent culture.” This is what made youth subcultures sub—a part of the working-class—as well as cultural—the process of expressing their structural position. Given the Marxist orientation, it should go without saying that subcultures, as working-class youth cultures, were seen as naturally in a state of conflict with bourgeois culture. But that approach didn’t account well for counter-currents that emerged from within the middle-class, whose relationship with the means of production was markedly different, and so the concept of counterculture was appropriated to describe a distinctly middle-class phenomenon. The idea that counterculture represented an overtly political response from within the dominant culture itself fitted with work by Theodore Roszak and Frank Musgrove, and later Yinger (Countercultures) and Ulf Hannerz, who each defined counterculture through its political and activist orientations stemming from a crisis within the middle-class. To further differentiate the concepts, the CCCS dismissed the collective aspect of middle-class resistance (see Clarke et al., 58-9, for a list of phenomena they considered exemplary of middle-class counterculture), describing it as more “diffuse, less group-oriented, [and] more individualised” than its working-class counterpart, the latter “clearly articulated [as] ‘near’ or ‘quasi’-gangs” (Clarke et al. 60). And whereas subcultures were centred on leisure-time activities within working-class environments, countercultures were concerned with a blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure. This conceptualisation was problematic at best, not least because it limits counterculture to the middle-class and subculture to the working class. It also gave considerably more agency and consequence to middle-class youths. It seemed that countercultures, with their individualist tendencies, offered individuals and groups choices about what and how to resist, as well as some expectations for social change, while subculturalists, locked within an unfortunate class position, could only resist dominant culture “at the profoundly superficial level of appearances” (Hebdige 17). Beyond the Limits of Class Cultures By 1980 cultural studies scholars had begun disassembling the class-basis of subcultures (see for example, G. Clarke; McRobbie; Griffin). Even though many studies still focused on stylised forms of opposition, subcultural scholarship increasingly emphasised subcultures such as punk as reflecting a more explicitly politicised resistance against the dominant or mainstream culture. Some scholars suggested that “mainstream culture” was used as a contrastive device to exaggerate the distinctiveness of those who self-identity as different (see U. Hannerz; Copes and Williams), while others questioned what subcultures could be seen as existing independently from, or in assumed opposition to (see Blackman; Thornton). In such cases, we can see a move toward reconciling the alleged limits of subculture as a countercultural concept. Instead of seeing subcultures as magical solutions and thus inevitably impotent, more recent research has considered the agency of social actors to overcome social divisions such as race, gender, and class. On the dance floor in particular, youth culture was theorised as breaking free of its class-binding shackles. Along with this break came the rhetorical distancing from CCCS’s definitions of subculture. The attempted development of “post-subculture” studies around the Millennium focused on consumptive behaviours among certain groups of youths and concluded that consumption rather than opposition had become a hallmark of youth culture broadly (see Bennett, Popular; Huq; Muggleton). For these scholars, the rave and club cultures of the 1990s, and others since, represent youth culture as hedonistic and relatively apolitical. “Post-subculture” studies drew in part on Steve Redhead’s postmodern approach to youth culture as found in The Clubcultures Reader and its companion text, From Subcultures to Clubcultures (Redhead). These texts offered a theoretical alternative to the CCCS’s view of oppositional subcultures and recognition that subcultural style could no longer be understood as a representation of ideological strain among working-class youths. Carried forward in volumes by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl,,among others, “post-subcultural” scholarship criticised prior subcultural research for having objectified/reified mainstream/subcultural boundaries and authenticities, echoing Gary Clarke’s remark that the sharp distinction between us and them “rests upon [subculturalists’] consideration of the rest of society as being straight, incorporated in a consensus, and willing to scream undividedly loud in any moral panic” (71). Instead, the mixtures of punk, mod, skinhead and/or hippy styles among club-goers signalled “entirely new ways of understanding how young people perceive the relationship between music taste and visual style…revealing the infinitely malleable and interchangeable nature of the latter as these are appropriated and realised by individuals as aspects of consumer choice” (Bennett, Subcultures 613). Reincorporating the Counter into Subculture Studies The postmodern focus on cultural fluidity, individuality, and consumption highlights to some extent the agency that individuals have to make choices about the cultures in which they participate. To be sure, the postmodern and post-subculture critiques of class-based subculture studies were quite influential in the development of more recent subcultural scholarship, though not necessarily as they were intended. Much of the theoretical rhetoric of post-subculture scholarship (over-)emphasised heterogeneity, contingency, and play, which drew attention away from the collective identities and practices that continue to characterise many subcultures and groups. Fortunately, other scholars over the last decade have been critical of that approach’s failure to deal with perennial concerns related to participation in alternative cultural groups, including consumption (Buckingham), voice (Bae and Ivashkevich), education (Tuck and Yang), and group affiliation (Pilkington), among others. We want to follow this trajectory by explicitly reiterating the continuing significance of the “counter” aspects of subcultures. Two trends in social theory are exemplary in this reiteration. The first trend is a growing interest in re-theorizing resistance to refer to “a contribution to progressive transformations and radical changes in social and cultural structures” (Johansson and Lalander) rather than to a set of styles and practices through which working-class youth impotently rage against the machine. Resistance is qualitatively different from rebellion, which is often framed in terms of unconscious or irrational behaviour (Raby); resistance is first and foremost intentional. Subcultures articulate resistance to mainstream/dominant culture and may be measured across several continua, including passive to active, micro to macro, covert to overt, individual to collective, and local to global (see Williams, Resistance; E. Hannerz). Participants in countercultures see themselves as being more critically aware of what is happening in the world than the average person, believe that they act on that critical awareness in their thoughts, words, and/or deeds, and electively detach themselves from “involuntary or unconscious commitments” (Leary 253) to mainstream culture, refusing to uncritically follow the rules. The concept of resistance thus gives some momentum to attempts to clarify the extent to which members of alternative cultures intentionally break with the mainstream. The links between resistance and counterculture are explicitly dealt with in recent scholarship on music subcultures. Graham St John’s work on electronic dance music culture (EDMC), for example, offers a complex analysis of resistant practices that he conceptualizes as countercultural. Participation in EDMC is seen as more than simple hedonism. Rather, EDMC provides the scripts necessary for individuals to pursue freedom from various forms of perceived oppression in everyday life. At a more macro level, Madigan Fichter’s study of counterculture in Romania similarly frames resistance and political dissent as key variables in the articulation of a counterculture. Some recent attempts at invoking counterculture seem less convincing. Noting that counterculture is a relatively “unpopular term in social scientific research,” Hjelm, Kahn-Harris, and LeVine nevertheless proceed to theorize heavy metal as countercultural by drawing on the culture’s “transgressive” (14) qualities and “antagonistic […] attempts to shock and provoke [as well as] those occasions when metal, by its very presence, is shocking” (15). Other studies have similarly articulated “countercultures” in terms of behaviours that transgress mainstream sensibilities (see for example, Arthur and Sherman; Kolind). It is debatable at best, however, whether hedonism, transgression, or provocation are sufficient qualities for counterculture without concomitant cultural imperatives for both resistance and social change. This leads into a brief comment on a second trend, which is the growing interconnectedness of social theories that attend to subcultures on the one hand and “new” social movements (NSMs) on the other. “Traditional” social movements, such as the civil rights and labour movements, have been typically organised by and for people excluded in some way from full rights to participate in society, for example the rights to political participation or basic economic protection. NSMs, however, often involve people who already enjoy full rights as members of society, but who reject political and economic processes that injure them or others, such as marginalised groups, animals, or the environment. Some movements are contentious in nature, such as the Occupy-movement, and thus quite clearly antagonistic toward mainstream political-economy. NSM theories (see Pichardo), however, also theorize the roles of culture and collective identity in supporting both opposition to dominant processes and strategies for alternative practices. Other NSMs foster lifestyles that, through the minutiae of everyday practice, promote a ground-up reaction to dominant political-economic practices (see Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones). Both contentious and lifestyle movements are relatively diffuse and as such align with traditional conceptualisations of both subculture and counterculture. NSM theory and subcultural theories are thus coming together in a moment where scholars are seeking distinctly cultural understandings of collective lifestyles of resistance and social change. Conclusion Recent attempts to rephrase subcultural theory have combined ideas of the Birmingham and Chicago Schools with more contemporary approaches such as social constructivism and new social movements theory. Together, they recognise a couple of things. First, culture is not the determining structure it was once theorised to be. The shift in understanding subcultural groups as rooted in ascribed characteristics—being naturally different due to class, ethnicity, age, or to location (Park; Cohen; Clarke et al.)—to one in which subcultures are intentional articulations created by people, highlights the agency of individuals and groups to create culture. The break with realist/objectivist notions of culture offers promising opportunities for understanding resistance and opposition more generally. Second, the “counter” continues to be relevant in the study of subcultures. Subcultural participation these days is characterised as much or more by non-normativity than by marginalisation. As such, subcultures represent intentional protests against something outside themselves. Of course, we do not mean to suggest this is always and everywhere the case. Subcultural homogeneity was never really real, and concepts like “the mainstream” and “dominant culture” on the one hand, and “counterculture” and “opposition” on the other, are dialectically constructed. The “sub” in subculture refers both to a subset of meanings within a larger parent or mainstream culture (meanings which are unproblematic within the subculture) and to a set of meanings that explicitly rejects that which they oppose (E. Hannerz). In this regard, “sub” and “counter” can come together in new analyses of opposition, whether in terms of symbols (as cultural) or actions (as social). References Arnold, David O., ed. The Sociology of Subcultures. Berkeley, CA: Glendessary P, 1970. Arthur, Damien, and Claire Sherman. “Status within a Consumption-Oriented Counterculture: An Ethnographic Investigation of the Australian Hip Hop Culture.” Advances in Consumer Research 37 (2010): 386-392. 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In São Paulo/Brazil, between the years 1950 and 1980, porcelain sculptures representing courtesy scenes were fashionable in wealthy and middle-class homes. Several Brazilian factories started to produce such images and many others were imported, the most of them from Germany. These representations were inspired by the fêtes gallants, a rococo style genre from the 18th century. Factories like Meissen, Limoges and Capodimonte produced thousands of copies which circulated in Western Europe and the Russian Empire. During the 19th century, from French institutional policies, the fêtes galantes were revalued along with the recovery of the rococo. This political and cultural movement resulted not only in domestic interiors decorated with authentic pieces from the 18th century gathered together by collectors, but also in the production of new objects. Following decorative practices, studies anachronistically reclassified 18th artisans as artists, constructing their biographies, circumscribing their peculiarities, and identifying their works. Many pieces from the privates collections ended in museums. The porcelain aristocratic figures won the world and are produced until today. It was at the end of the 19th century, in the region of Thuringia, that the technique of lace porcelain emerged. Produced by women in a male-dominated environment, the technique involved the use of cotton fabric soaked with porcelain mass which was then sewed and molded over the porcelain bodies of male and female figures. After that, the piece was placed in the oven at high temperature, burning the fabric and leaving the lace porcelain. It is significant and relevant for the purposes of this research that the lace porcelain technique was never recognized as a object of interest by the academic literature on porcelain. It is likely that the presence of the female labor, the practice of sewing and the use of fabric have been interpreted by the male academic and amateur elite as discredit elements. Added to this, the lace porcelain became very popular in the 20th century. The reinterpretation of rococo in the 20th century was also understood as a lack of artistic inventiveness associated with marketing interests, which resulted in the marginalization of these sculptures. What is proposed here is to study these objects as pieces of domestic decoration practices, recognizing in them capacities to act on the production of social, age and gender distinctions. I intend, therefore, to demonstrate how these small and seemingly insignificant objects were associated with decorative practices of fixing women in the domestic space in Brazil during the 20th century. They acted not alone but in connection with other contemporary phenomena such as post-war fashion, the glamorization of personalities from the American movie and European aristocracy and the rise of Disney movies, which promoted the gallant pair as a romantic idea for children in the western world.