Sateni. A Diffuse Household in a Post-peasant Society

An imagined "ideal type" village, Sateni portraits Romanian rural household changes after the fall of communism The general frame of the story is based on a particular household I visited many times starting with the year 2000, dialogues and details being picked up from many other field researches in the Romanian countryside. The narrative is focused on household structure and relations, with fusions and fissions coping with societal changes, economic breakdown and new entrepreneurial opportunities as well as with work migration in the EU The social history of the house itself, turned to a "pride house" by the elder generation and then to a "rustic house" by the younger one, depicts a general social trend of the post-socialist rural world seeking for "modernity" and of breaking up with the historical status of peasant The more theoretical frame is centred around the "diffuse household," an ambivalent locative and occupational social category of the communist "household-worker" (peasant-worker) that emerged during communism as a result of work migration of former peasants to surrounding cities, and which is still functioning as a main domestic adaptive strategy Nevertheless, individualism seems to gain terrain reshaping households and household relations into an ambiguous "post-peasant" society.