The Library of New Europe College has recently received the second batch of a book donation which completes our “Marian Viorel Anăstăsoaie” Special Collection. The Collection now comprises around 590 volumes spanning both well-established and more innovative sub-fields of anthropology, from social and cultural to psychoanalytic and urban anthropology. It includes “classics” of the field such as E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Edmund Leach or Margaret Mead, and it features famously seminal works like Bury Me Standing, by Isabel Fonseca, or La Pensée sauvage, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Many of the volumes in the Collection are available in their original language (French, English, German), but there are also translations into Romanian.

Marian Viorel Anăstăsoaie (1976-2021) was a gifted social anthropologist who graduated from the Faculty of Sociology (University of Bucharest), obtained two Master’s degrees – in history from the Central European University (Budapest), and in anthropology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and completed his PhD at University College London. As part of his academic career, he worked as a lecturer at Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj) and the Institute of Ethnology at Martin Luther University (Halle-Wittenberg), but it was really anthropological fieldwork – in, among other places, Cuba – that he tended to prefer. A cosmopolitan and inquisitive mind, Viorel travelled extensively before settling in Bucharest, where he joined New Europe College as a Fellow and subsequently Librarian, and set up The Group for Anthropological Research and Debates (GARD), which has continued his legacy up to the present.

Treasuring the memory of our former colleague, New Europe College wishes to extend its gratitude to Viorel’s wife, Dr. Ioana Măgureanu, for kindly fulfilling his wish to bequeath his book collection to our Library.