In Between Places of Remembrance and Realms of Memory: The 15-Years Commemoration of the Romanian Revolution in Timişoara

This study is devoted to the commemorative practices and the sites of memory of the 1989 Romanian revolution. It has resulted from a multi-sited fieldwork experience through Timişoara, Bucharest, and Cluj occasioned by the fifteenth public celebration of the founding event of the Romanian post communist democracy. We hereby propose an oral history and cultural anthropology analysis which is methodologically based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with participants at the commemoration. We have closely followed the itinerary and the pace of this public celebration attempting to a thick description, in order to scrutinize the world of meanings that the commemorative gestures and the memory sites of Timişoara spread out. The historical events of December 1989 are seen through the lenses of the current stakes of the end of 2004; a year marked by the particular political context of the recent parliamentary and presidential elections held in November in Romania, by the judicial context of prescription which was going to be applied to some crimes of the revolution, and by the perennial religious context of Christmas Eve. The theoretical hypothesis we subscribe to is, that spaces of remembering – which are often traumatic in the case of the Romanian revolution – are converted into sites of memories only if there is a political will of memory to erect them, as well as recurrent cultural practices to ritually reactivate their meanings. The paper outlines the manner in which a tensional proximity of these different contexts, political, cultural, social, interfere with the commemorative practices, and with the socially (re)organizing modalities of the collective memories of the revolution. By the fact of “having been there”, in the very tradition of cultural anthropology, we aim at an inner, intimate knowledge of a social reality which would challenge the master narratives on the revolution as simplifying politically charged versions of the past. We also wish, in the very tradition of oral history, to give voice to those narratives that would yield different untold or less told histories of the revolution, or would reveal hardly visible discourses on the political scene.

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