A Fragment of Daily Life in the Collectivized Romanian Village between 1971-1985

Based on a personal diary, I will reconstitute certain fragments of daily reality in one collectivized village of the communist period. The research approach is based on a contextual, localist-type methodological perspective, important for minimizing the potential negative effects of the epistemological precarity of post facta analysis, so characteristic to the social and humanistic fields of study. Without doubt, it does not eliminate subjectivity, but it reduces it significantly. The analysis proposed below captures the characteristics of the rural daily life in the last period of the Romanian communist society based on the following criteria: the dissolution of the traditional, peasant village and the end of the peasantry; the emergence of new social value systems; the dismantling of peasant collectivism; the widening rural-urban gap and the effects of economic crisisies in the eighties, which affected both the rural and the urban localities.The premise I start from is that the communist period cannot be judged by applying a reductionist and nominalist label; it must be approached from inside of its own specificity, by attempting to reconstitute the mechanisms of social articulation, which generate new phenomena, having their own historicity, some of which have found an extension in the post-communist period as well.