Calin Cotoi

University of Bucharest | Unibuc · Department of Sociology

Prin aducerea la viață a unor social-revoluționari, anarhiști, medici, bacteriologi, specialiști în igienă publică, sociologi și reformatori care au străbătut granițele imperiilor europene, vreau să arăt cum a fost tematizat, materializat și transformat socialul în România. Indivizii și teoriile se deplasau, iar traiectoriile lor intersectau toate...

In Central and Eastern Europe, nature protected areas came into being in a dramatically changing society, economy, and culture. Formerly industrial and infrastructural landscapes have been both materially and semantically reshaped through practices of restoration and attempts to revitalise ruins of failed modernisation projects. Around a socialist-...

In Inventing the Social in Romania, 1848–1914, Călin Cotoi brings to life several ‘obscure’ anarchists, physicians, public hygienists and reformers roaming the borderlands of Europe and Russia. The book follows individuals, texts, projects, sometimes even bacteria, traveling, meeting, colliding, writing and talking to each other in surprising plac...

Review

The debate between Romanian Narodniks (Poporanists) and orthodox Marxists proved to be inconcludent. None of the sides actually won the debate in a decisive theoretical or political-institutional way. Nevertheless, its importance resided in the imagining of a Romanian national idea from inside fin-de-siècle socialism. The powerful mixture of strong...

Romanian interwar geopolitics emerged mostly through a radicalization and instrumentalisation of sociology, seen as a militant science serving the nation-state. Geography re-defined itself as both geohistory and geopolitics and tried to articulate German Geopolitik and French géographie politique in order to create a science of national and global...

This book aims to revisit the historical canon regarding the formation of intellectual elites during successive projects of modernization during 19th and 20th centuries. While existing works on the topic focus either on the elimination of previous elites in times of radical social change or on the creation of new elites by each new political regime...

After 1990, nature conservation areas multiplied all over Central and Eastern Europe. National parks came into being as part of a dramatically changing society, economy, and culture. Scholarly efforts to understand national parks rely either on arguments about the social construction of nature or on political ecology. In this article, I attempt to...

The emergence of social modernity in the Romanian principalities can be traced to the founding of quarantinist outposts against the last waves of plague and the first waves of cholera. The crisis of this sanitary arrangement opened the way for a series of failed but productive projects of modernization. The collective political body was imagined an...

The connections between "the Humboldtian tradition" and very important cultural layers of the European anti-Enlightenment movement can provide a powerful alternative to the mainstream(s) in today's social sciences. This tradition should be seen, though, in its concrete historicity and the political and theoretical blind spots which are part of this...

The Csangos are an ethnic/religious minority from Moldavia, Eastern Romania. They are defined as legitimate subjects by two antagonistically nationalizing projects: the Hungarian and the Romanian one. I am not trying to discover some “authentic” or “hybrid” identity that would explain away the ambiguities connected with this ethno-religious group....

Social Economy is a rather new and ambiguous presence in the area of discourses and practices that target the so-called "Third Sector". It can be seen on various backgrounds that lend it some specificity and historicity: the cooperative movement, the emergence of social experts and expertise, a third way ideology, a form to represent and create new...

The contemporary investigations on power, politics, government and knowledge are profoundly influenced by Foucault’s work. Governmentality, as a specific way of seeing the connections between the formation of subjectivities and population politics, has been used extensively in anthropology as neoliberal governmentalities have been spreading after t...

Social sciences are, usually, in the uncomfortable position of having to earn their scientific credentials in order to be able to intervene in politics. In the interwar period, Romanian sociology put itself, with remarkable few afterthoughts, in the service of the nation‐state. During the communist regime in Romania, authoritarian politics of scien...

The neo-Boasians (Bunzl, 2004; Orta, 2004; Bashkow, 2004 etc.) are proposing a non-alterity anthropology. This paper tries to show that they are overly optimistic and that, in embracing a counter-Enlightment tradition of thought, they are neglecting not only ambiguities but also nested alterities.