Abstract:

In the past years rural Southern Transylvania has been the site of a revivalist movement centred on the reconstruction and heritagisation of ethnic (Saxon) foodscape. The process is mobilised by a complex and cosmopolitan network of social actors engaged in small-scale food production, gastronomy, ecotourism and environmental conservation, fueled by a sense of exonostalgia (Berliner 2014) for an ‘unspoilt’ Arcadia, irreversibly lost in Western Europe. I examine how their representations of past ecology and gastronomy are designed to connect Southern Transylvania to a global economy of sustainability, where frugality, remoteness and dispossession can be converted into added-value and symbolic prestige (see Weiss 2022, Meneley 2021, Bordi 2008). The analysis explores how value and taste are materialised into artisanal food commodities and experiences, particularly in a “cuisine of economy” framework (Weiss 2022), in which low-status foods migrate into the prestige-infused categories of fine-dining cuisine or culinary heritage. These engagements transform the local foodscape into a transnational moral and political arena, in which the heritagisation of the edible past is mobilised as an exclusivist ecological fix to Anthropocenic anxieties.

Short bio:

Monica STROE is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (Bucharest). She has published research on the impact of agricultural policies on small-scale agriculture and traditional agricultural knowledge, cultural landscapes, food heritage, ethnicity, nationalism and identity politics, middle-class food consumption. Her current research interests include econostalgia and conservation politics, neo-ruralism, food authentication, and the new dynamics of gastronationalism in the context of the rise of populism.

This event is organized within the Group for Anthropological Research and Debates (GARD) hosted by the New Europe College.