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Title: “Two Introductions”

Authors: Ioana Popescu, Simina Bădică

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article: Popescu, Ioana and Simina Bădică. 2013. “Two Introductions”. Martor 18: 9‐15.

Published by: Editura MARTOR (MARTOR Publishing House), Muzeul Ță ranului Român (The

Museum of the Romanian Peasant)

URL: http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista‐martor‐nr‐18‐din‐2013/

Martor (The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review) is a peer‐reviewed academic journal

established in 1996, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology, museum studies and the dialogue among these disciplines. Martor review is published by the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Its aim is to

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the article(s) is prohibited and will be considered an infringement of copyright.

Martor (Revue d’Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain) est un journal académique en système peer‐review

fondé en 1996, qui se concentre sur l’anthropologie visuelle et culturelle, l’ethnologie, la muséologie et sur le

dialogue entre ces disciplines. La revue Martor est publiée par le Musée du Paysan Roumain. Son aspiration est de

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T"o Introdctions

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Ioana Popesc

Some people can boast a memory fornames, others for dates, some aunt becomesthe embodiment of the family memory, others

have a visual memory, some others an audi-tory one or the memories of gestures. But, re-gardless of the poignancy of memories, thereis a trigger that generates the remembrance.Most times, it is a photo album, a flavour or anobject that constitutes the pretext for re-visit-ing a space, moment or event from the past.Each time, the act of remembrance itself en-genders a new story: remembering one’s child-hood - for example – transfers to the presentnot just events one has truly experienced, butalso one’s impressions about them, impres-sions that formed subsequently, in one’s ado-lescence and adulthood. Cesare Pavesesuggested that, probably, each period of one’slife seems all the more longer as it is furtheraway into the past, simply because it is multi-plied due to the reflections of the following pe-riods.

*If childhood moments are situated rather

far away in time from the present adulthood,then their remembrance might become a truly exotic journey and the objects that populatedthat world of the beginning might function asmystery-bearing relics, as triggers of culturalcuriosity and surprise. It’s enough to chooseone piece from the daily universe of childhood(a word, a gesture, an object) to remember andits entire context, along with the following im-pressions and experiences, are activated in the

present.When I was young, mother didn’t think it

fit to teach me the ways of the household. I hadto steal the knowledge - later on - from her, my aunts or even from my friends. But even then,more or less consciously, one way or the other,I would try and change gestures or recipes

until I reached my own result, which was, ac-tually, the rendition of the childhood modelpracticed by my family. As a friend has ob-served, no matter where I went, even for de-termined periods of time, in lack of an exactreplica, I would carefully suggest my family’shome, as it had imprinted itself in the mem-ory of the child I once was. I have even sur-prised myself recently as I was trying variouscombinations of flavours (lavender, worm-

wood leaves and Revlon perfume) that, to-gether with the wood furniture and the woolcarpet, would reproduce the olfactory sensa-tion I had every time I returned home fromschool.

I was saying that mother systematically re-fused to teach me anything about the house-hold by claiming that if I learned it on my own,I might reach superior performances as –truth be told – household chores were not re-ally her cup of tea. Instead, she unremittingly

and practically taught me three things that, inher opinion, were paramount and crucial tothe woman I would one day become.

1. To artistically mend cotton socks on thewooden stand (in those days, in the ’50s –’60s, one wouldn’t even think of throwingaway solid cotton socks because of a merehole);2. To knit bootees for newborns (thus,with just one reused ball yarn, I could have

the first gift for the newborns of ourfamily and our friends);3. And finally, to hem handkerchiefs.At the time, I didn’t ask myself why hem-

ming handkerchiefs was on the shortlist of sine qua non female wisdom. I only know thataround age 7-8, I learned how to transform lit-

tle squares of linon2 - which, by tear and wear,had acquired the consistency of a veil - motherhad cut out of blouses or dresses so worn andwashed-out that they couldn’t be recycled as awhole, into elegant and soft handkerchiefs,

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of things which become obsolete and disap-pear. That is why we tell stories and our child-hood is told to us, that is why memory is soimportant and that is why the memory of asimple question activates for Herta Muller the

memory of her entire childhood: DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was the questionmy mother asked me every morning, standing by the gate to our house, before I went out ontothe street. I didn't have a handkerchief. And be-cause I didn't, I would go back inside and get one. I never had a handkerchief because I would always wait for her question. The handkerchief was proof that my mother was looking after mein the morning. For the rest of the day I was on

my own. The question DO YOU HAVE AHANDKERCHIEF was an indirect display of affection. Anything more direct would havebeen embarrassing and not something the farm-ers practiced. Love disguised itself as a question.That was the only way it could be spoken: mat-ter-of-factly, in the tone of a command, or thedeft maneuvers used for work. The brusquenessof the voice even emphasized the tenderness.Every morning I went to the gate once without a handkerchief and a second time with a hand-

kerchief. Only then would I go out onto thestreet, as if having the handkerchief meant hav-ing my mother there, too. (Müller 2009).

There is, however, another solution for thesurvival of former useful things that haveturned into curiosities. For example, IrinaNicolau used her abilities as a curator and col-lector, as usual, against the current: in full hy-

gienism, she decided to collect and use only beautiful, cambric handkerchiefs. First, she re-

ceived two or three from abroad, then shelooked through the stores in Bucharest and

couldn’t find anything beautiful,7 so shestarted to sew thin hems on patches of Indiancambric which she lovingly kept in all sorts of drawers. Because she couldn’t mix handker-chiefs with other clothes in the washing ma-chine, she bought a plate bucket from a villageshop and would boil them on the stove. As shehated ironing, she would lay the wet handker-chiefs on the bathroom tiles. At the beginningof the 2000s, Irina was reconstructing in her

own home a fragment of the reality of the pre- vious century.

And, had she lived longer, she would havedefinitely succeeded in re-vamping the hand-kerchief as an indispensable accessory to any

outfit.

R")")b"-&*$ %&(!%++!Simina Bădică

No handkerchief resembles another as itis used, carried, monogrammed, lost andfound; no childhood resembles another as it is

remembered, cherished, buried deep, forgot-ten or constantly brought to mind. This vol-ume is a celebration of the transforming powerof childhood memories, of the enormous en-ergies and resources that reside in that specialtime in everyone’s lives.

Our plea for remembering childhoodshould be understood on a personal, academicand curatorial level. This volume itself oscil-lates between these dimensions. Some authors

have chosen to remember their own child-hood by building intricate auto-ethnographies(Dumitru and Precup), others have urged in-terviewees to remember their childhood(Adam and Galabova) while some remind usof the troubling and traumatic past that child-hood can turn into at times (Bezzi andMihăilescu). Some articles look at the habitsand rituals of childhood (Iuga), others at theimages they leave behind (Blos-Jáni and Pre-cup), some at the toys they use and produce

(Roșu and Iancu). The museology section isconcerned with the practice of translatingchildhood into a curatorial concept. All arti-cles share a deep concern with childhood andargue for a firmer positioning of this subjectin anthropological, ethnographic, visual andmuseological research.

Research on childhood is almost an invi-tation for auto-ethnography, yet only a frac-tion of our authors have given in to this

temptation that does come with considerabledangers. The past is a foreign country and one

Ioana Popescu


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can never underestimate the shattering powerof discovering a different story of one’s idyllicchildhood. This is probably mostly true for thearticle that opens this volume. Mihaela Pre-cup’s journey into her own childhood and her

family’s history in Socialist Romania isprompted by her ritualistic visits to the family albums. Her intention is “to explore the influ-ence that the family album has on the forma-tion of a certain (possibly idealized) view of one’s childhood and family members, who areoften interpreted by children as non-politicalindividuals.” The article dwells on the strikingpresence in the family album of official pho-tographs of her grandfather, “relatively high up

in the communist party ranks” and offers afresh perspective, very much lacking in con-temporary discourse on the communist past,on coming to terms with a family genealogy that encompasses both resistance to and sup-port for the communist state. Precup producesan intricate interpretation of these photo-graphs that would enable her “to see the work-ings of dictatorship not as separate from, butas part of her own story”.

Iuliana Dumitru builds a seductive narra-

tive of a subject that has already attracted theattention of anthropologists. The community in the seaside village of 2 Mai, a favorite resortfor bohemians, artists and intellectuals in thecommunist and post-communist era, is, how-ever, analyzed here from a distinctive, insider’sperspective. Iuliana Dumitru grew togetherwith this community as a child working withher parents in the village camping facility.Trained as an anthropologist, Dumitru now

provides a compelling narrative of how she in-teracted with the adult world in a Bildungsro-man of camping and befriending.

Anamaria Iuga writes about the role of children in the customs performed in the vil-lages she studied ethnographically (mainly from Transylvania and Maramureș). Shedraws out attention to the interesting fact that“some customs, performed until recently ex-clusively by young people and adults, or inwhich children had a secondary role, havelately been taken over also by children, and are

thus simultaneously performed by various agecategories”. She sees children as seminal to theperformance and continuity of popular cus-toms in Romania’s villages as she concludesthat “regardless of their role (passive or active

performers, spectators or beneficiaries) chil-dren fully contribute to the social cohesion of a community and to the passing down of val-ues incorporated in traditions”.

A different perspective on Romania’s ruralchildren is that of Cristina Bezzi who studiestransnational families from two Romanianrural areas (the Romanian Moldavia and thesmall town of Borşa in the Maramureş region),who work in Italy. The already defined cate-

gory of children “left behind” is contextualizedin this article via the attempt to overcome thestigmatization of parents and, particularly, of mothers by showing children as active, notpassive subjects of their families. Bezzi ad- vances a new term, the transnational / trans-migrant child instead of the derogative “childleft behind”. She argues that it is not only chil-dren, but families who “actually suffer the con-sequences of a context of structural poverty”as “migration becomes a strategy and a choice,

but from a very restricted range of possiblechoices.”

The two subsequent studies depart fromthe analysis of contemporary childhoods andenter the realm of visual childhoods or, betteryet, visual traces of childhood. Melinda Blos-Jáni explores the symbiosis of moving imageand everyday life, the changing domesticationprocess of the medium of film and the shift-ing visual construction of childhood. The ar-

ticle follows the history of the Haáz family of Târgu-Mureş and the history of the local FilmClub (and Ervin Schnedarek, its leader). Blos-Jáni tells the story of a family bound togetherby the use of this medium in a country - so-cialist Romania - where making home moviesnever became a widespread practice.

Dana Mihăilescu writes on the visualtraces of child survivors of the Holocaust. Sheargues that “the generations of child survivorsand children of survivors share a form of memory which I call erratic memory, one

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which is fragmented, limited, evanescent,fleeting, and erring at times.” She focuses ontwo recent French exhibitions dedicated toHolocaust child survivors and two visual proj-ects by children of Holocaust survivors from

Poland and the U.S and analyzes the tech-niques they use in order to foster the new gen-erations’ questions as important queries thatpermanently acknowledge and confront theincreasingly more distant Holocaust experi-ences.

Children, at least up to the age when they learn to write, are silent historical characters.They do not leave behind written sources. Asoral history was born precisely to give voice to

those traditionally silenced by history, it wasonly natural that at least two oral history stud-ies would find their way into this volume. Si-mona Adam reconstructs the experience of children growing up in multicultural Banat.She describes the “small world of the family and of the birth place, and a larger world, of the social institutions and of politics. Bothworlds are reconstructed, retrospectively,within the narration of the childhood, from aseries of images that link the individual mem-

ory with the collective memory of Banat’s in-habitants.”

Nadezhda Velinova Galabova collectedthe school-day memories of Sofia English Lan-guage School alumni from the 1970s whiletrying to answer some broader questions: how did Bulgarian state socialism instrumentalizechildhood in its aspirations to create “the new socialist person”? How did socialist Bulgaria –a society so much in love with the concept of

equality – legitimize and interpret the founda-tion of elite schools? What narrative strategiesdo the alumni resort to nowadays when they have to present the problematic past publicimage of the school? Galabova looks at thealumni’s school-day memories, using them notso much as sources of “hard facts”, but as nar-ratives through which the respondents pres-ent themselves and want to perceivethemselves as agents, as active protagonists inthe everyday life of the school. Both oral his-tory articles are especially attentive to the ways

childhood is reconstructed through memorialand narrative practices and embedded in one’scurrent life-story. More broadly, the researcharticles in this volume argue for children to beseen as active agents in their communities,

their families and the societies that sometimestend to regard them as passive actors in aworld ruled by adults.

The museology section of the volume re-flects on a two year project (2011-2013) of theRomanian National Peasant Museum entitledChildhood. Remains and Heritage. The project,supported by the Culture Program of the Eu-ropean Union, resulted in a virtualChildhood Museum

(www.childhoodmuseum360.com) exhibiting3D reconstructions of a series of real exhibi-tions organized by the museum and one trav-elling exhibition. The project wasco-organized with the Romanian Cultural In-stitute, Association pour la Promotion del’éducation des enfants (Paris, France), Lębork Museum (Poland) and with our partners, theRomanian Ministry of Culture and NationalPatrimony and Ethnokids Association (Brus-sels).

This volume presents the travelling exhi-bition of the Childhood Museum as conceivedof by Lila Passima, one of its curators. “How big can a childhood museum be?” she asks. “Itmight fit into a pocket, it might reach theclouds, cut the world in two, enter a fairytale,hang on a coat hanger, or be whispered in thepapelka tongue. One thing is certain: we allcarry our own childhood museum, whosedoors are always open, from the story of the

fates to the angels with clipped wings.”In the accompanying text, Rodica Mari-

nescu provides insights into the interactive na-ture of the whole project. At each thematicexhibition, the visitors had the chance andwere even invited to leave traces behind; they could bring objects, photographs, texts andany fragments kept over the years that mightdepict the remains of their own childhood.Furthermore, for each exhibition, a space wasprovided for the public to leave their ownmark: they could stick photos from home on

Ioana Popescu


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the boards, they could draw little crosses orwrite their names on the blackboard, add (old)sayings and memories on a string or write inthe guestbook. What are thus the traces thatthe guestbook records?

The second part of the museological sec-tion provides access into the toy collections of two Romanian museums. Georgeta Roșu de-scribes the unique clay toys (almost 2000) inthe collections of the National RomanianPeasant Museum, while Bogdan Iancu tracesthe unexpected history of a collection of chil-dren-made toys, gathered in the 1970s at theSzékely National Museum of Sfântu Gheorghe(Covasna) by architect and ethnographer

Károly Kós. Iancu focuses his narrative on therelationship between childhood and the ma-terial world populating it, a still under-re-searched subject in current anthropologicalwriting.

Not an expert on childhood myself, whileimagining and editing this volume, I discov-ered the amazingly diverse manners in whichchildhood can be written about, analyzed orremembered. When writing about children,one builds a dialogue between the childhoods

presented as case studies and one’s own child-hood. This is definitely a book written by adults. Nevertheless, I invite you to search forthe child that is hidden even behind the mostserious academic work. (S)he is there, in theimaginative, unexpected way that an article atsome point shifts focus, (s)he is there whenwords and images complete each other, (s)he isthere in the silences and question marks.Enjoy our Childhood issue!

Translated by Alina-Olimpia Miron

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Müller, Herta. 2009. “Every word knows something of a viciouscircle.” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laure-ates/2009/muller-lecture_en.html.

Benjamin, Walter. 2011. Enfance. Eloge de la poupée et autres es-sais. Paris: Payot & Rivage.

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