Kinship
and alliance relations greatly determine the social organizatrion of European
countries, including those which in 1989 were under communist rule.
Registry
officer celebrating a wedding under the communist rule in Bansko,
Bulgaria.
Alliance and
kinship relations never ceased to determine the social organization in communist
regimes, though they less served to transmit patrimonies than to circulate
educational or professional privileges or privileged access to reserved
markets. In Eastern European countries and ex-Sovietic Union they have found
in the postcommunist regimes new fields of pertinence due to privatization
of lands, restitution of whole estates in towns and liberalization of industrial
activities, even if these effects were limited in the first years of postcommunism
by legislative dispositions and effective social practice. Alliance and
kinship regained importance in such a conjuncture, insofar as culture in
Rumanian societies was still dominated by the notion of rurality, as attested
by the discussions on the notion of "Rumanian folk". Everybody in Bucarest,
Cluj or Baïa Mare is of peasant origin or has rural affines, and is
concerned with the restitution of either a collectivized estate or orchard,
or even an ancestral property in the village. Forgotten old taunts, distant
uncles, usually neglected cousins are then rediscovered, sometimes surprisingly.
The genealogical memory is trained again like in the past.
J.C. :
Le Feu Vivant, la parenté et ses rituels dans les Carpates, Paris, PUF,
1994, p. 204
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