Serial Anachronism: Re-Assembling Romanian Forest Commons

commons;anachronism;Romania;Anthropology and Archaeology;Social Sciences;Anthropology and History

Mateescu, OanaFeeley-Harnik, Gillian ;

University of Michigan

关键词: commons;    anachronism;    Romania;    Anthropology and Archaeology;    Social Sciences;    Anthropology and History;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/138738/omateesc_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

The ongoing global renaissance of the commons thrives on an implicit temporal hyphen: old and new commons are different and yet alike. Premised on untimeliness, commons oscillate between the deep past, the present and the distant, potentially utopian, future. For Romanian forest commons, brought back by legal fiat in 2000 amid debates over a troubling return to archaism, this hyphen condenses, at the same time, the reconstitution of a collaborative mode of ownership, a distributive politics and a practical understanding of the ways in which social relations aggregate into corporate entities. Re-assembling a historically layered object produces anachronism.But this is not simply the effect of historical forms surviving or being imported into present composites of commons practices. The resilience of commons is, in fact, grounded in serial anachronism. Focusing on the highland region of Vrancea, this dissertation brings together a succession of historical misalignments — 1755, 1801, 1910, 2000 and 2008 — the mathematical articulation of forest commons as a regime of proportional distribution, pragmatic redefinition as timeless ownership, contradictory legal codification, ambivalent reconstitution and, finally, recognition as historical patrimony. These are instances of creative anachronism that reveal not just the fraught coexistence of ;;archaic” with ;;contemporary” forms in the commons, but also the complex exercises in simultaneity that such coexistence requires. As a distributive politics, the commons stimulates ratios between the one and the many; as a politics of anachronism, it fosters constant movement between distribution (or dispersal) through time and assemblage. Persistent re-assemblage relies on forensic evaluation and thus, implicitly, on the accumulation and reconfiguration of multiple evidentiary artifacts (including narratives, documents, objects and sensory clues). This repertoire of proofs which commoners use, successfully or not, for bridging gaps of time, knowledge and power becomes a collaborative project of persuasion directed at state officials, forestry experts, environmental activists, academics and, indeed, the commoners themselves. The serial anachronisms intrinsic to contemporary Romanian forest commons have, thus, a double-edged potential: they are incongruities demanding practical synchronization via constant reassemblage as well as compelling materials that creatively employ the effect of untimeliness as a political and rhetorical form.