Review of Grama, Emanuela. Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania (New Anthropologies of Europe)

Published on H-Urban ; Tracing the multiple political lives of a small district of Bucharest called the "historic center" is the prism chosen by anthropologist Emanuela Grama to look at the making of the communist and postcommunist state and city, in connection with the production of social classes and ethno-cultural identities in the Romanian capital. The author analyzes the heritage regimes that shaped the life of a ruined sixteenth-century princely palace (Old Court) and the district surrounding it (Old Town) in Bucharest. The narrative’s focus ranges from the discovery of traces of a "medieval past" for Bucharest in the early 1950s to the 2010s, when the same area was revalued as embodying the cosmopolitan European character of the capital. From the socialist period to the more or less chaotic clash of multiple temporalities of the first postsocialist decades, the book reveals how a variety of social actors—politicians, architects, urban planners, archaeologists, heritage preservation experts, real estate agents, inhabitants, and state tenants—redesigned this space according to specific ideological and professional logics.