Building a House in Rural Romania before and after 1989
This book offers anthropologists, historians, and sociologists a starting point for research on the diversity that characterizes the Romanian rural architectural landscape in the communist and post-communist eras.
It is the first contextual analysis of the legal framework for constructing privately owned houses during the Ceausescu dictatorship, including the changes due to the 1977 earthquake. The research is also intended to provide the social, cultural, and historical premises for the analysis of dwelling construction after the fall of the communist regime.
It is also a book about the social significance of the actions, from long-term planning to daily routines that transform a house into a home, that create hierarchies within the domestic group or the rural community.
Florica (Bohîlţea) Mihuţ is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of History at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She obtained a PhD in History in 2003 and a degree in Ethnology, Cultural Anthropology, and Folklore in 2015. The social history of Ancient Rome, gender studies, and Romanian ethnology are the main focus of her books and articles.
"The work written by Professor Florica Bohîlţea-Mihuţ is valuable from two points of view. First, it addresses the problem of living in the rural area in a period that bears the imprint of totalitarian ideology. Secondly, it brings valuable ethnographic data from settlements that have not entered so far and in this respect to the attention of researchers."
Narcisa Stiuca
"The Conclusions underline the importance of the research topic and show how the activity of building (or repairing, modernising) a house was and still is not only a material process but also a cultural mean of constructing the owner’s identity. Florica Bohîlțea Mihuț research demonstrated that under apparent similarities (the emergence of „pride houses” and more recently „rustic houses” built usually as holiday residencies by town dwellers), there is a great variety in the ways in which a new house is build and expresses the identity of the owner and of his or her community. The bibliography is impressive and witnesses the amount of historical and anthropological documentation that was involved in writing the book. The interdisciplinary methodology and the quality of the analysis make Building a House in Rural Romania before and after 1989 an important contribution to the understanding of the recent past in Romania."
Ecaterina Lung, (2019)
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