NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GRANT PROPOSAL
Funded 1995
Katherine Verdery
Johns Hopkins University
Political Identities and Property Restitution
in Transylvania, Romania
Project Summary:
Statement of Problem. The changes produced by the fall of communist parties in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union offer opportunities both to investigate how such processes as privatization,
democratization, marketization, etc. are unfolding and to reflect upon the very meaning and theoretical
interconnections of these key western concepts. What are democracy and private property? Given that
many theories of liberal democracy posit them as closely interconnected, exactly how are they linked,
and what can we learn about this from watching Eastern Europeans try to create them?
Some scholars approach these questions by viewing democracy in a narrowly formal way (e.g., voting,
protest marches, party membership, and petitions), and by thinking of property rights chiefly as matters
of exclusive individual vs collective ownership. The present project, by contrast, emphasizes informal
practices that contribute to forming political identities and social persons, and it sees propertyrightsas
complex and overlapping. It focuses on the privatization of land, to examine how newly apportioned
rights to land are producing new possessing identities that lead people to defend theirrightsin court and
in other ways; these actions and identities can be seen as elements of possibly democratic practices that
are overlooked by other approaches to democratization as linked with property. Thus, the project —
submitted for funding under NSF's "democratization" initiative — is guided by the questions, Where
should we look for "the political" so as to talk about democratization? How does it intersect with local
understandings of "property"?
Research Site and Methods. The project, already begun with IREX funding, is located in a Transylvanian
community (Romania) in which rights to land are in the process of being returned; it includes regular
observation of court cases in the county capital as well. Research methods consist of formal and informal
interviews with a variety of people (villagers pursuing restitution, heads of other forms of agricultural
enterprise, local authorities, judges and lawyers, and government officials), participation in the work of
the village Land Commission, observation of events in court, discussions with parties to cases, reading
newspapers, and copying statistics from local and county archives. These methods will produce a detailed
picture of how property restitution is taking place, what kinds of rights (ownership or usufruct, exclusive
or overlapping) are being created, how villagers think of themselves in relation to land, what activities
they engage in to pursue their rights — particularly lawsuits and complaints to the commission — and
what sorts of political identities and practices accompany these. The study's guiding assumptions are
that because standard formal definitions of property and democracy are unlikely to suit the realities of
Eastern Europe, the "successful" implementation of these forms must be approached as an open question,
through field research. The result will be an ethnography of democratizing-practice-through-property.
Significance. 1) The study will clarify aspects of the process of decollectivization, on which very little
has been written to date. 2) It will offer a specifically Transylvanian answer to the question, How an
May, 1997] Page 121
democratic practice and private property linked?, thus broadening awareness of the various forms assumed
by these concepts. 3) It will propose answers to the question, Where should we locate "the political" so
as to assess the prospects for democratization in a more nuanced way than through people's ritual
participation in meaningless elections. 4) It will contribute to theoretical questions about the nature of
"the state," "democracy," and "property" as concepts, thus permitting reflective criticism of foundational
western political notions and enhancing theory-building about them.
Political Identities and Property Restitution
in Transylvania, Romania
I. Statement of the Problem
The fall of communist parties in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is producing manifold
changes in the region's polities, economic forms, and state-subject relations, usually spoken of as
"democratization," "privatization," and the development of "market economies." Aside from investigating
how the changes are unfolding, scholars now have an opportunity to reflect upon the very meaning and
theoretical interconnections of these key western concepts. What are democracy and private property?
How are they linked? What can we learn about this from watching East Europeans try to create them?
Many scholars would approach these questions by defining democracy in a narrowly formal way through
specific institutions and procedures, such as particular forms of popular participation (voting, protest
marches, petitions, party membership), and by thinking of propertyrightschiefly as matters of individual
vs collective ownership. The present project, by contrast, favors an alternative approach to
democratization and private property, one emphasizing local practices as windows onto the formation of
political identities and new kinds of social persons. It does this by investigating the privatization of land
in Transylvania, treated as a locus for examining how newly apportioned rights in land are producing
certain forms of "political participation" other than the standard ones, together with new possessing
identities. The project will result in a description of property notions and political practices associated
withowning —that is, an inquiry into the relation between property and political prospects — combined
with a critique of ethnocentric conceptions of democracy, property, and state.
II. Theoretical Discussion
A. Property, Democracy, and Person in Political Theory
Despite fundamental differences in their orientations, theorists from Hobbes and Hegel through Foucault
have all seen private property, specific solutions to the problem of sovereignty, and particular practices
ofgovernment as linked together in characteristic ways in the lineage of capitalist societies. Some of
this work explores how it is that owning something helps to constitute freedom, such as by freeing one
from dependence on the opinions or the will of others. Beyond this, some theorists have also explored
how, in the development of capitalism and liberal democracy, ownership and freedom have intersected
in what we might now call (doing some violence to earlier meanings) "persons." Locke, for example,
saw property as what gives personality its political quality and as the tangible subject of an individual's
powers and attitudes — a concrete symbol of his rights (Locke 1960: 101-102). One might say that for
Locke, property is an objectification of personality. This is possible, however, only because free men
through the exercise of reason have instituted government so as to preserve property. Similar elements
appear in Hegel, in Waldron's reading of him: private property constitutes both individual freedom and
Page 122 [PoLAR: Vol. 20, No. 1
personality. "A person is a unit of freedom aware of its sheer independence," says Hegel (1967, quoted
in Waldron 1988: 353). Without private property, individuals cannot "develop the abilities and selfconceptions
definitive of their status as persons" (Waldron, ibid.). For Hegel, the exercise of an
individual's free will is embodied in objects, which register that free will and force it to become consistent
and stable over time — something that does not happen if other people work on the same object (Waldron
1988: 360-374). Thus is property-owning fundamental to a certain kind of social person, whose stability
and consistency rest on having a property stake in the consequences of one's actions.
Comparable notions of a specific kind of social person, as an aspect of property and a requirement of
freedom, are to be found in Macpherson's critique of classic liberalism (Macpherson 1962). Introducing
his argument as "a theoretical inquiry into the basis of the liberal-democratic state" (1962:1), Macpherson
reads the basic texts of liberal theory as premised on a notion of "possessive individualism," and he
criticizes this construct in its relationship to the unbridled acquisitiveness ofearly capitalism. Heconcludes
that the ideas of freedom, rights, obligation, and justice that emerged with modern capitalism and have
been central to theorizing democracy have all been shaped by the idea of possession.
A very different set of approaches, found in contemporary social theory, emphasizes practices and
discourse (e.g., Bourdieu 1977, de Certeau 1984, Foucault 1978 and 1979), rather than looking at
institutions such as private property, the state, parliamentary democracy, etc. Foucault, for instance,
examines techniques and practices of government, understood broadly as the "right disposition ofthings"
or of the "complex composed of things and men"; property is but one aspect of this complex, and the
state but one modality of government (1991: 93-94). "Freedom" enters into his concerns because it is
the premise for the operation of modern power: power is power when it addresses itself to individuals
who are free to act; it "presupposes rather than annuls their capacity as agents" (Gordon 1991:5). What
then interests Foucault is how those individuals become positioned as subjects of specific practices and
tactics of power. As Burchell (1991: 120) puts it, "Governed individuals may be identified by their
governors as members of a flock to be led, as legal subjects with certainrights,as children to be corrected
and educated, [or] as part of a natural resource to be exploited.... In each case the subjective selfidentity
of governed individuals presupposed or required by the exercise of political power will be
different." Working from this view, one would speak not of "persons" but of "subjects" as the point of
intersection for property (or techniques implicating it) and "democracy" (or the identities suited to and
formed by popular participation).
Bourdieu, alternatively, examines practices that develop specific dispositions and competences; because
these may or may not fit with the intentions of those who dominate, we can inspect them for hidden
sources of change. Criticizing political science for taking as its object only the practices that do not
challenge control over the fundamental mechanisms of social reproduction (1977: 189), Bourdieu too
indicates loci of "the political" in venues other than standard institutional or procedural ones.
Work influenced by approaches such as these would significantly alter the views of privatization and
democratization that prevail in economics, political science, and policy circles, for it would study transition
through something other than institutions and procedural rules. Standard approaches ask if there are
free and fair elections, if people participate in them, if there is intra-party competition, if there are laws
guaranteeing contracts, if there is "civil society," if new constitutions protect certain kinds ofrights,if
agencies have been set up and suitably empowered to manage the divestment of state property, and if
there are provisions regulating access for small and medium-sized firms trying to compete in a stillmonopolistic
environment (see, e.g., di Palma 1990; Poznanski 1992; Mason et al. 1991; Keren anc
May, 1997] Page 123
Ofer 1992; O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986; Przeworski 1991; Frydman and Rapaczynski
1994; Frydman, Rapaczynski and Earle 1993). But if we see political power as more than just the
actions of voters, parliaments, and state policy-makers, we ask different questions. In resituating "the
state" from the "top" of society to loci that are multiple and nonobvious, we would look for critical
contact points between citizen and state in everyday practices, explore their subject-forming effects, and
ask whether other kinds of political action besides formal party-based activity might shape political
identities (see, e.g., Burchell 1991; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Foucault 1978,1979 and 1987; Fout 1992;
Miller and Rose 1990; Miller and O'Leary 1987; Mouffe 1992; Ringrose and Lerner 1993). We might
even extend such an inquiry to ask whom liberal democracy has traditionally "counted" as effective
subjects and political citizens, and why "states" are treated as privileged sites for political participation
and identity validation (McClure 1992: 109-110). In keeping with these emphases, the present project
investigates privatization of land as a locus at which community-forming participatory practices might
shape (or be prevented from shaping) political identities different in kind from those of the socialist
period. (For descriptions of the latter, see Verdery 1991, 1993, 1994b.)
B. Anthropological Work on Property and State
The above-mentioned work on "persons" and property connects with substantial bodies of literature in
anthropology, albeit from a different angle. Property rights have long been important to anthropologists
(e.g., Bloch 1975, Feeley-Harnik 1991, Gluckman 1943 and 1965, Goody 1962, Hallowell 1955, Leach
1959, Malinowski 1936, Peletz 1988, Strathern 1988, Weiner 1992). From the wealth of problems
treated in this literature I will briefly single out two that are particularly relevant to the present project:
How property should be defined, and how various human groups understand it in relation to notions of
self.
Along with some theorists of property rights (e.g., Comisso 1991, Demsetz 1967, Waldron 1988),
anthropologists reject a definition of property as a thing or a relation between persons and things. They
instead see it as a relationship between or among persons, sometimes with respect to things (Hallowell
1955; cf. Strathern 1988: 104), with ownership as only one possible such relation (usufruct being
another). Anthropological studies of property have pointed to a wide variety of property arrangements,
in addition to exclusive ownershiprightsby individual or collective owners. Such work as Malinowski's
onTrobriand property rights and Gluckman's in Africa, for instance, have shown that such rights can be
structured so that a thing is not allocated to one social person exclusively but is shared out or enjoyed
through overlapping use, without unique jurisdictions (see Hann 1993a for a concise summary). Or,
persons might have exclusiverightsof use, but not of ownership or possession (Cronon 1983). This sort
of work shows the complexity of property rights, far beyond the flat dichotomy between exclusive
individual or state/collective ownership rights that appears in recent writing on privatization in the
former Soviet bloc (e.g., Poznanski 1992). In several illuminating papers, Hann illustrates the utility of
such an approach for Hungary (1992, 1993a and b).
Another staple of anthropological inquiry, inspired by Mauss's The Gift, is research into how persons
are made through their relation to things (e.g., Appadurai 1986, Carrithers 1985, Davis 1992, Harris
•989, Strathern 1988, Weiner 1992). This work is easily tied to questions of property. Strathern observes
that to define property as a relation between persons and things is to presuppose that things exist in
themselves and are external to persons. So categorical a division is not, however, universal: in some
societies persons are equated with things, or things are extensions of persons rather than being set off
Page 124 [PoLAR: Vol. 20, No. 1
from them, or persons treat other persons as thing-like (Strathern 1988: 104). Similarly, Weiner broadens
"property" to speak of "possessions" and writes of the ways in which possessions constitute identities,
create authority, and establish difference (Weiner 1992). Work of this kind draws attention to the ways
in which "persons" are socially and culturally constituted, often in relation to or by means of things.
This applies equally to western notions of property, in which, according to Strathern, "The fact of
possession constructs the possessor as a unitary social entity" (Strathern 1988: 104). It does this, she
claims, through a commodity metaphor that sees persons as the proprietors of their own persons — that
is, "proprietorship instantiates an identity between owner and thing owned," which is in the extreme
case "the unitary self, the 'possessive individual'" (p. 157). This phrasing connects directly to that of
the political theorists discussed above.
A third (and much smaller) anthropological literature relevant to this project consists of a newly emerging
"ethnography of the state" (e.g., Anagnost 1988, Borneman 1992, Buchowski 1995, Feldman 1991,
Humphrey 1993, Verdery 1994c), some of it inspired by the approach to governmentality described
above. For example, Borneman examines how the practices of East and West Germans, in response to
family policy, positioned them differently as subjects in relation to their two states, with consequences
for their "nationness." Feldman looks at techniques of subjection through the manifold material practices
exerted upon the bodies of Irish political prisoners. This work assumes that power is more than its
concentrated expression in bureaucracies and policies, and it asks how practices of rule come to create
subjects' belief in "the state's" ubiquity and centrality (cf. Abrams 1988).
The present project draws upon these literatures to study decollectivization in Transylvania. I will
investigate the precise definitions of property rights and obligations, looking for the possibility of
overlapping rights of both ownership and use, along with evidence for how identity and notions of
person relate to property. I will ask whether Macpherson's early-modern "possessive individuals" are
evident in this new "transition to capitalism"1
and seek to account for them, if so. Treating
decollectivization as more than simply a question of altered property rights, I will see in it a locus for
practices of "government" and participation that shape political subjects. I will give special attention to
people's participation in new community forms (such as the "Associations" created after collective
farms were undone),2
their contributions to village meetings and local initiatives (such as the laying of
a gas main), their relationship to the local land commission that distributes rights to property, and their
recourse to the courts, in which they seek proper assignment of what they see to be their rights. Treated
as contact points between villagers and "state," the last two of these venues permit assessing what kinds
of participatory competences are emerging in Romania's transition and what relationship they have to
the persons and identities characteristic of socialism. That inquiry, in turn, feeds a reflective critique of
"state," "democracy," and "private property" as foundational western concepts.
III. Relation to Long-term Project and Work Completed to Date
No single project both feasible and worth doing can "answer" such large questions. I plan to narrow my
scope in two significant ways. First, I deal only with rights to private property in land, not with the
complicated process of privatizing state-owned industries. Second, I focus my inquiry through fieldwork
in a village in Transylvania. This modest location makes sense for several reasons. It is indeed in
parliaments, through politics in national capitals (where villagers' votes may perhaps influence the
outcome), that property rights in land are codified. But it is in specific territorially based communities
that they are contested and put into practice, as owners argue over specific clods of earth they claim as
"theirs" and, in justifying their claims, reveal local conceptions of "possessive individuals" who may or
May, 1997] Page 125
may not conform with liberal-democratic theories about democracy's proper subjects. Again, we may
think of "states" as residing not in rural communes but in urban places, whence they work their will
through the organs of rule and adjudication. But ethnographies of states as processes and techniques of
rulecan be done at any location in which rule is present, legitimacy perceived, subjection accomplished.
The conflicts that state policies inevitably produce are situated. Those concerning agriculture break out
inrural settlements, and their outcomes influence the environment in which further policy will be crafted
and further conflicts will unfold. Looking at a village community will not tell everything we want to
know about private property, democratization, and states, but it will tell us some things available in no
otherresearch site — such as how those who own and/or use land (as opposed to the laws that codify its
use) conceive of their land and themselves, how they strive to secure their possession, how they seek to
manipulate "the law," and how these actions both shape them as actors and also reflect and influence
changes in "the state" itself.
The proposed research will continue a long-term project begun in September 1993-June 1994, funded
bytheInternational Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) and administered by the Romanian Academy.
That work focused chiefly on problems in recuperating property rights; the proposed continuation would
broaden this to concentrate more fully on the question of political identities. Funding is requested for
two summers of fieldwork and library research, plus logistic support across three academic semesters,
bywhich time I hope to have completed a book manuscript describing the process of property restitution
and its implications for democratic practice up to that point.
A. Background to Property Restitution
InFebruary 1991, the Romanian parliament passed a law (known as Law 18) to restore private ownership
rights over landed property. In contrast to property restitution in Albania, Russia, and Armenia, but
similar to the situation in Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, Romania's Law 18 does not just
distribute land to villagers who live on it and have worked if. it attempts, with certain exceptions,3
to
recreate the property regime that existed before collectivization. For a number of reasons, this has
proved more complicated than its backers (including western governments and lending institutions) had
imagined. To begin with, 30% of Romania's agricultural land was in state farms, not in collective farms,
andLaw 18 disbands only the latter.4
Many prior landowners thus locked out of their state-farm properties
have resisted, both by lawsuits and by forcible occupations. Second, as I have described elsewhere
(Verdery 1994a), the property regime of socialism has made it exceedingly difficult to reconstruct the
landscape that existed in 1959, when the final collectivization drive began. This has produced widespread
litigation. Third, because Law 18 recreates the property situation as of 1959, it reconstitutes the farms
ofhouseholds that were viable units 30 years ago but whose members have now died, emigrated, married,
andotherwise substantially changed their relationship to land. As a result, conflicts have erupted among
nearly all categories of the population, as some people disagree over the division of 30-year-old
inheritances and others complain at being excluded from ownership rights. These effects of Law 18
have proved atomizing and divisive.
While I cannot explain here the politics behind Law 18,1 note that those privileged in its final form were
mostly national- and local-level apparatchiks (the political base of the governing coalition), prevailing
over anti-communist groups led by pre-1945 large proprietors. This means, inter alia, that the people
best situated to obtain land after 1991 (newly elected mayors, plus the rural agrarian elite of the communist
period — agronomists and presidents of collective farms, heads of state farms, heads of the Agricultural
Page 126 [PoLAR: Vol. 20, No. 1
Machinery Stations) have the edge in building a new social position, while the pre-communist elite is
handicapped.
The passage of Law 18 in February 1991 launched the dissolution of collective farms all across the
country and the restoration of individual private landownership. It established land commissions working
at three administrative levels: the county, its constituent communes, and their constituent villages. Of
these three, the most important were the commune commissions, charged with determining the amounts
of land each village's households are to receive and with resolving disputes wherever possible, throwing
problem cases up to the county land commission or the courts. The actual measuring and assignment of
specific parcels was the job of commissions working in each village. Administratively, there is a sharp
break between the county commissions and those of the commune and village: the former exercises
almost no control over the latter two, which are run by the commune mayor. Thus, Law 18 (together
with laws on local-government autonomy) laid the groundwork for substantial independence on the part
of local authorities.
I have been observing property restitution from the vantage point of Aurel Vlaicu, a village in the
commune of Geoagiu (Hunedoara county), in the region of Transylvania. I first conducted fieldwork in
this community twenty years ago (see Verdery 1983) and have revisited it frequently in the intervening
years, spending time there each summer since 1989. I decided to return to Vlaicu for an extended
project on decollectivization owing to my long familiarity with it and to the store of data I had amassed
on land-holding prior to collectivization.5
I describe in section IV.A. below my activities and research
procedures during my September 1993-June 1994 fieldwork.
B. Preliminary Results
My analysis of the data from my recent fieldwork has so far been very selective and does not detail
differences among different categories of villagers. I offer the following tentative findings to suggest
how a community-based ethnographic project might relate to the themes of property, state, and
democratization as outlined above.
1) Conceptions of Property-ownership and Self. Vlaiceni of both ethnic groups (Germans and
Romanians) — especially those who have received "their" land back — are modified "possessive
individuals": they define themselves in relation to possessing, and they want ownership, not use rights.
Many want ownership so as to rent out the land, being unable to work it themselves. The "individual"
in terms of which they conceptualize ownership, however, is a.family corporation (rather than a single
individual), extending back in time to incorporate ancestors from whom they inherited the land. I draw
this conclusion from a number of interviews and particularly from the strategies ofjustification I heard
them using in public quarrels over their rights.6
For nearly all Vlaiceni, the criteria that matter in
validating landownership are entitlement and desert (rather than some criterion such as efficiency). By
far the most common grounds for entitlement are kinship (or blood) and work: people believe they
deserve to own land because it belonged to their ancestors, because they or their parents worked it, or
because their parents worked in the collective even if they had no land. My material suggests, then,
notions of self that link together kinship, possession, and labor — selves that are actualized by work on
possessions transmitted by blood (cf. Lampland 1995). These notions imply a bodily link to ancestors
through land, thus spatializing and materializing social memory and personal identity.
Three aspects of this are relevant to the themes of this project. First, justification through labor posits
social persons defined by their effort, persons who gain identity as possessors because they act. This
May, 1997] Page 127
shapes identities different from the ones available under socialism, as well as social persons different
from those marked by the dependency and "inculcated apathy" so common in writings about the socialist
period. At the same time, however, this "person" is not singular as collectivization delegitimated familybased
owning and laboring units, decollectivization now illegitimates them, with kinship becoming a
significant basis for claims. Thus, property restitution entails reinforcing a kinship ideology. Both of
these points bear on the subject relations Unking villagers to the Romanian state and to democratic
processes: they indicate self-acting subjects who embed themselves in wider social networks, as against
the atomizing tendencies fostered by some aspects of restitution.
Second, the emphasis on kinship and ancestry is necessarily backward-looking. Against socialism's
relentless orientation to the future, many villagers now define themselves by where they have come
from: they are possessors because their ancestors were. To the extent that Romanian socialism had
honored the past, it was a past dominated not by kinship but by the "nation" and its march toward
communism. Those who now insist on the importance of ancestry are therefore broadening the legitimate
forms of historical consciousness to include pasts and solidarities that are other than national. The
significance of this point should not be underestimated in a country where state nationalism has gone
together with the suppression of "civil society" and of related grounds for political identities.
Third, to note that these "possessive individuals" are familistic is to point to what may be an ideological
blind spot in Macpherson's account. Given English property law, his early "possessors" were not truly
"individual": for all except certain criminal proceedings, the law presupposed households as the basic
units and recognized ownership only for men. This suggests that the very concept of possessive
individualism is the ownership equivalent of what Pateman (1988) sees in classic social-contract theory:
therationale for an originary citizen who is male. If so, then the category of free, democracy-prone selfowning
possessors potentially excludes women. This is more thanjust a question of whether women are
becoming property-owners in Transylvania (though my data indeed show that widows often have difficulty
getting back the land their families once owned): the example shows how investigating Transylvanian
property conceptions may cast unexpected light on the basic ingredients of "liberal democracy." In
addition, not only are women problematic "possessors": decollectivization hasrenderedthem unemployed,
depriving them of the wage-owning status that, for many women, had altered the balance of household
authority somewhat in their favor. The present project therefore sharpens its critique of western forms
by asking specifically about how property and "democratization" intersect in
gendered ways.
2) Law, Rights, and Forms of Political Participation. Vlaiceni have not passively accepted the property
rights assigned them by the land commission. Besides simply occupying lands by force, some have
brought suit — in some cases, collectively — and many have gone before the commission to protest.
These actions are quintessentially political, and they have significant effects on people's identities.
a) Democratization and the creation of a "rights-bearing subject." Underpinning the local struggles I
witnessed is a persistent discourse of rights. As people fight their battles, defending their claims against
one another and against local officials, they often invoke "rights" as an argument. Over and over I heard
people urge each other, "Defend your rights!" "Why are you giving up? Don't give up, don't let them
walk all over you!" Lest we too hastily find here liberalism triumphant, however, we might note that
this ideology of rights has its origins in socialism, which encouraged subjects to see themselves as
entitled to things7
— an entitlement now serving a demand for rights. Socialism too guaranteed rights,
though not to property. One might say that socialism had already created villagers as rights-bearing
Page 128 [PoLAR: Vol. 20, No. 1
subjects of a certain type, but by complaining repeatedly to the land commission, going to court, and
plowing over their neighbor's furrow, they may now be activelyproducing themselves as such. Whether
they are doing so in some relation to legal procedures and guarantees, however, is less certain. For
some, the right they seek derives from might, for others from ancestry or labor, for still others from past
deprivation. These may not have been exactly what the architects of liberalism had in mind. My data
reveal a remarkably capacious notion of rights that differs substantially from the liberal notion of them
as discretionary opportunities for action conferred by law, rather than as some "natural" thing one "has."
Many of my informants seem to see law as the problem rather than the solution — suggesting some
continuities with the citizen/subjects of socialism.
b) Legitimizing the "law-governed state." Acritical part of this project is to examine villagers' connection
with formal law. The approximately 400,000s
court cases now pending in Romania over land — a
number that will surely escalate once all property titles are awarded, as they have not yet been —
indicate significant participation in a process of seeking one's rights. What is this experience like?
First, it involves often costly and time-consuming trips to court, since cases are not prepared in advance
by legal counsel and then brought to trial but are created in situ, through repeated court appearances to
hear yet another witness, yet another piece of testimony, yet another expert evaluation. This aspect of
legal practice discourages many would-be participants at the outset.
Second, because cases do not come up in the order posted, parties coming to court on the appointed days
may sit for hours awaiting their moment. During this time, people spectate the law: they learn judicial
norms by hearing the judge speak over and over about the need for proofs and documentation, argue
over what judicial level has or does not have competence, admonish people for their posture or their
attitude, dismiss or postpone cases because the parties do not have full property title or because they
have not received preliminary title from the local commissions, throw cases back to the local authorities
or to the county commission, advise parties to go get a lawyer because they are not competent to defend
themselves, and complain frequently about the failure of local officials to comply with court orders to
produce documents. Among the things court spectators learn are that the court does not have power to
resolve many of the cases brought before it, particularly against local officials' resistance; that much of
the court's work is carried on in arcane, specialist language to which ordinary people do not have access;
that they can be tripped up by numerous procedures and rules; and that the practices of participation in
defense of one's rights eat up large portions of one's resources.
My discussions with Vlaiceni and others involved in court cases revealed considerable skepticism about
<4
the law." As one judge I knew put it, there are two Romanian views of law: those who win a case in
court say justice was done and the law is impartial, while those who lose say justice is corrupt and the
judge was bribed. My encounters amply confirmed this opinion. Most Vlaiceni do not believe that the
law is neutral and impartial, and this shapes their relation to both law and state.9
Those who lost cases
that I followed were convinced from the start that their opponents had bribed the relevant officials, or
that because the evident interest of "those in power" was to have them lose the case, thejudges would be
so instructed. At the same time, even people who have won a case often have difficulty having the
judgment enforced, owing to the resistance of local authorities. These attitudes and experiences suggest
that state legitimation through the "rule of law" is problematic, and that people view their defense of
their rights as something taking place as often against the political system as facilitated by it through
reliable procedures.
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From my attendance at court I saw in the experience of bringing suit subtle forms of domination rather
than of citizen empowerment. An example is the way people's words enter into the court record. Instead
of being taken down verbatim by a stenographer, the proceedings enter the record only when the judge
periodically dictates a summary to the secretary. This practice leaves no doubt that ordinary citizens'
words have legal effect only if translated (and thus authorized) by "the state." In other words, what one
sees in these encounters is perhaps not political "subjectivity" but subjection, not citizenship but
subordination (see Foucault 1983: 213). I read postural and behavioral signs as suggesting that many
parties to a suit do not come there confident of their rights but, rather, as supplicants. This was also
evident in the behavior of those coming to legalize inheritances at the state notary. These orientations to
law doubtless continue those of the socialist period, when the governors perceived the governed as
"children to be corrected and educated" (see p. 2 above). Yet emerging alongside this, the governed
have become legal subjects with certain rights — an identity clearly accepted and acted upon by all
those who bring suit. Decollectivization thus focuses very different possible subjectivities and political
identities.
From my research so far, I would say that legitimation through a "law-governed state" is not faring well
in rural Transylvania, nor are people's activities in defense of theirrightstreading an easy path to politically
effective "citizenship." This has strong implications for the state's subsequent capacities and the strategies
itcan pursue. It remains to be seen, however, whether people will be discouraged and give up defending
themselves or will persist, forming durable participatory relations that are mediated through legal
institutions and that might strengthen the latter's independence.
3) Local-level Perspectives on Political Recentralization and the Prospects for "Citizenship." The
events of 1989 dealt a severe blow to the centralized Romanian party-state; extensive privatization will
only enhance that effect, thus facilitating pluralist democratic participation as usually conceived. Will
those now in power succeed in reversing this trend? Will they obstruct the restoration of ownership
rights that many political theorists see as fundamental to freedom and democratic participation? Among
the places in which we can look for evidence on this question are local government and the process of
privatizing state firms.
Although the actions of commune officials may seem insignificant for the reconfiguration of state power,
local-level management of property restitution in fact has very high stakes. Law 18 gave commune
authorities and their topographers sufficient independence to foster local autonomy. If they manage to
contain and resolve localized conflicts over land, creating some form of order without intervention from
the center, this will impede recentralization of the state and will further local self-government. But if,
instead, they become embroiled in infighting and corruption, squandering their independence and enabling
orinviting the center to step back in, reconstituted central power will be the result. The implications of
local struggles over land thus ramify far beyond the villages, affecting the state's capacity to dominate
villagers in the future.
My evidence shows that local commissions rarely resolve cases but instead toss them up to the county
commission and the courts — both currently controlled by a governing coalition with state-expanding
aims. County-level organs do not even have adequate means for final resolution — first of all because
no suit can be brought until one has a property title, and the commissions have been exceedingly dilatory
in producing these. The delay caused President Iliescu to propose that the state resolve the problem (so
it could tax the land) by decreeing that preliminary titling papers automatically become permanent. In
other words, delays and disorder in local and county management of property restitution were effectively
Page 130 [PoLAR: Vol. 20, No. 1
"bringing the state back in" (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985). At the same time, however, the
political center was itself contributing to these delays, thus obstructing villagers' "possessive
individualism." It failed to train enough topographers to carry out the measuring and neither solicited
nor accepted trained topographers from elsewhere.10
Moreover, the government has postponed by nearly
two years a USAID project for satellite mapping: the relevant Ministry refused to supply the five to
seven key coordinates essential to starting the work. Clearly, those at the center have little interest in
empowering "neutral" technical knowledge and local authority, and theresultis persistent if not increased
central power.
Additional insight into the matter of state power and property rights comes from noticing that individual
households struggling for possession do so in a rural interactive field overwhelmingly dominated by
collective actors," whose advantages over "individuals" on the playing field are backed by some relation
to the state. My data suggest a tendency for social actors to "collectivize" in order to participate on this
playing field. Rather than sue in court, individual farmers having problems over land might put their
land in the Association and let it fight for resolution of the borders; moreover, as a collective actor, the
Association has more clout both with the mayor and in court than do single owners. Thus, an organization
based in use rights gains interactive purchase at the expense of individuals with ownership rights.
The possibility that the state's continued presence in village agriculture may work against the interests
of owning households and even of individual ownership is strengthened by my discussions with directors
of these state-backed organizations, many of whom as individuals are interested in privatizing. In their
experience, the bureaucratically superior bodies that supervise them squelch any attempt at individual
initiative: in other words, they see the higher levels of "the state" continuing to retard lower-level
enterprise, as well as privatization and private ownership by these directors and their shareholders.
These local views confirm the reconstituted power of what Cornea (1993) calls the "directocracy" — a
loose grouping of bureaucrats and public officials who profit by maintaining subsidized state property
and, alongside it, founding their own private firms. They feed these firms by siphoning off the resources
and subsidies of the state firms. Facilitating this arrangement, according to Cornea, is ongoing confusion
in the system of property rights, with the boundaries that separate private, collective, and state property
rights weakly defined and poorly enforced. Thus, bureaucratic parasitism on state property presses in
the direction of unclear title, uncertainty as to who may exercise propertyrights,and incomplete ownership
for villagers as well as others.
Finally, the impression of reconstituted state power — and a power of a specific kind — is enhanced if
we look at what is happening to bureaucratic practices. Decollectivization provided an opportunity to
reinstitute the sort of rule-by-records that characterized the Habsburg period in Transylvania; the post-
1989 state might have proposed a machinery for recreating records, making them a predictable basis for
resolving conflicts, and then guaranteeing ownership based on them. So far, however, this does not
seem to be the outcome. Instead, the procedures for implementing Law 18 have muddied such records
and practices as already existed. An entirely new system of topographic numbers was institut-ed, for
example, in the absence of legislation to link them to the older set. Thus, even a villager with a property
title cannot use it effectively in court, for the property numbers on it bear no resemblance to anything
else on record.
Although I cannot yet describe the politics whereby theseresultswere achieved, they suggest the following
about state power, instead of a power institutionalized and exercised through predictable procedures
(which many see as the hallmark of liberal-democratic states [Bunce and CsanAdi 1993: 266-7]), what
May, 1997] Page 131
we see are the ruling practices of the predatory "spoiler state" (Gross 1988), consolidated by preventing
other actors from acting effectively. "Government" in this context rests on maintaining an environment
of uncertainty, one in which "owners" can readily doubt legal guarantees to their possession (after all,
these people saw their supposedly law-guaranteed property confiscated after World War II). "Law" in
this context becomes not only a space for actively pursuing one's rights but an occasion to experience
inefficacy, as cases drag on for months only to be thrown elsewhere, unresolved. "Local self-government"
inthis context means struggling to assert yourself against powerful local authorities who put you off and
rarely resolve your problems.
The experience of property restitution is thus a disheartening one for many villagers, as they seek to
participate in shaping their futures but find themselves thwarted much of the time. This is a more telling
experience than any participation in "free" elections. It subjects people to a state that produces not
democratic empowerment but dependencies that may thwart "possessive individuals" from effective
action. Nonetheless, working against this are the "possessing" identities that drive them to court despite
theirdoubts about its neutrality. Moreover, as several villagers protesting to local authorities said to me,
"We want them to know they can't treat us like this." This reflects very different personal and political
identities from those of the socialist period, identities whose undermining or reinforcement will be
crucial to the future of whatever counts as democracy in Romania.
IV. Research Methods
A. Past and Anticipated Research Procedures
My research during 1993-94 consisted of the following elements, most of which I would continue over
the nexttwo summers under the proposed NSF grant. The principal method was participant observation,
supplemented by structured and unstructured interviews and use of archives.
1) I interviewed Vlaiceni about what their families had owned, what they have received, how they are
working it, how they think about land both under the collective ("whose" property was it) and after, and
what opinions they have concerning a number of village conflicts involving land — who they think is
"inthe right" I held informal conversations with over 80 families and conducted more extended interviews
with a subset of these, chosen to reflect the overall composition of the village with regard to ethnicity,
former wealth, place of birth, age, and occupation. Prior experience of surveillance and my persistent
reputation as a "spy" have led me to adopt the expedient of not selecting interviewees randomly but
preferring those who invite me in and/or those I know from the past to be good and willing informants.
Similarly, I do not tape interviews but take notes during or immediately after the conversation. Using
these methods, I believe I am able to get useful information.
Overthe next two summers, I will continue to interview villagers about their use of land and conceptions
ofit, about events that have happened in my absence, and about what those mean. Among the questions
I will pursue are: Why are so many people fighting so much over land, if they haven't the tools to work
it with? Have there been cases of theft, as there used to be under the collective? What is "theft"? How
can people be sure of their ownership? Who should guarantee it? Would you sell your land? To whom
would you sell it? Would you give preference to relatives, or not? Can you do whatever you want with
your land? Can you decide not to plant on it? Do you feel the same way about land you or your parents
bought as about land you inherited from your ancestors? Are people without land as responsible as
people with land? Who does the most for the community? These and other questions help to reveal to
what extent people see land as a commodity or as an extension ofthemselves and their families, something
Page 132 [PoLAR: Vol. 20, No. 1
over which they exercise full or only partial control, as well as touching on moral issues about entitlement
to land that will show how property-owning is legitimated.
In addition, I will speak with all villagers who have pursued claims in court, to learn what effects this
had on them. I will ask whether they thought the decision was just, what they understood about its
grounds, whether they learned anything from going to court, and what impression they took away from
the court proceedings. I will also discuss local activities such as participation in village meetings,
collective initiatives, and the village Association, so as to understand whether they see these forms of
participation as enabled by a "new" climate for political action, in comparison with what they knew
before 1989.
2) I spent some time in the commune center and (briefly) in some neighboring communes, speaking
with local authorities and others about how property restitution was proceeding in those settlements and
why it differed from what I was learning about Vlaicu. I also interviewed directors of Associations,
Agromecs, Romcereal, and state farms, asking what problems their firms are facing, what interest they
have in privatizing, how that might happen, what role the state ought to have in their functioning, and
how they treat the land (potentially "owned" by villagers) under their charge.
In returning to Vlaicu I will again interview these officials and directors to learn what has happened to
state property, as well as speaking with officials of Vlaicu's Association about villagers' participation in
it, its internal disputes, and changes in people's allotments. In these conversations I will be particularly
attentive to their present perceptions of relations with "the state" — how they talk about it and who they
think it consists of. Additional conversations with commune officials will help me understand whether
they have expanded or shrunk their room for maneuver and where they feel the presence of the state
most acutely. I will also probe for what the idea of "property" means to them, in comparison with what
villagers have to say about it.
3) I copied detailed records in the commune archive about the process of land restitution, including the
initial redistribution that was proposed. In Vlaicu I copied the registers that show who is actually
working what parcel. For comparison with this latter list, I copied from the county branch of the state
archives a parcel-by-parcel listing of fields for the village, from the 1948 census. I plan to computerize
these lists and collate them to detect discrepancies in past and present holdings, which I will follow up
in interviews so as to learn more about the inequities decollectivization is producing and to discover
what kinds of people are trying to do something about this.
4) Two or three times a month I went to the county capital and sat in the office of the state notary,
watching how property inheritance was being handled. From discussing these cases with the notary, I
learned a great deal about the complications arising from the socialist property regime. This work (as
well as that in item 5) took me far beyond the bounds of Vlaicu, giving me a sense of the wider arena of
property conflicts and sensitizing me to problems (such as unrecorded testamentary divisions or land
exchanges) that I then pursued in my village interviews. I plan to return to the notary's office to ask
about any changes in inheritance cases and their disposition, as well as to find out how the office of the
state notary is being reorganized (a process that was just beginning as I left in 1994).
5) I sat weekly or biweekly in the courtroom of ajudge in the county court, listening to cases involving
property disputes. In addition, I got to know several otherjudges and lawyers with whom I discussed
the cases I heard during my time in court, and I spent many hours as well discussing these with thejudge
in whose courtroom I sat. These contacts proved especially useful in following two lawsuits brought by
May, 1997] ^ Page 133
people from Vlaicu; for one of them, I was able to read the entire court file, as well as to discuss with the
judge the rationale for her decision. From my connections with the countyjudicial apparatus I drew the
conclusions offered above about the role of courts in producing subjection, as well as about the values,
norms, and procedures that appear in this specific judicial site. I plan to return to court to interview
judges about changed directives from the Ministry of Justice concerning land disputes and to learn of
any new trends that have emerged in their cases.
6)During the spring of 19941 accompanied the village land commission on its rounds, as commissioners
measured everyone's household gardens, and I witnessed disputes over boundaries. I also sat in the
commission office and overheard numerous complaints that villagers brought to it for resolution. From
these activities (which I will not be able to continue, since the commission does not work during the
summer) and the strategies of justification I heard villagers marshall in defense of their claims to the
commission, I learned a great deal about how they conceive of land and their relation to it. These
sessions provide much of my material for hypothesizing a "possessive individual." They were especially
valuable in that I did not elicit what I heard, and my presence probably influenced its content rather
little, since people had a strong stake not in impressing me but in persuading commission members
through arguments convincing to them.
7) I carried out a small number of interviews with officials and members of parliament in Bucharest. I
plan during the next phase of my project to do more of these kinds of interviews, speaking with heads of
the parliamentary commissions for agriculture, parliamentarians who took strong positions in the debates
over Law 18, and officials in the ministries of agriculture and finance. I aim to find out more about the
politics surrounding land issues — why the law on cadastres has been so long delayed, what has happened
with the law on land rentals that was being passed when I left, what determines the policies for granting
credit to cultivators, why it is that individual farmers are discriminated against and collective actors
favored (as seems to be the case) in granting credits and who is responsible for setting the conditions for
credit, etc. My friendships with several members of parliament and one government minister will provide
me with access to officials involved in setting agricultural policy.
I will also spend time in libraries in Bucharest and Cluj, reading newspaper reports on issues concerning
land, the parliamentary debates that occurred around Law 18, and other information on property law.
Mytiesto two magistrates in the Cluj Court of Appeals will assist me in finding and interpreting material
about property law. These investigations will aid my understanding of who "the state" is for specific
policies relating to agriculture and why "it" has acted as "it" has with respect to landed property.
As I have done with my previously collected data, I will type the results of these interviews and
observations into a computer locked with a password, and the real names of those with whom I speak
will not be retrievable. I will later index the notes and process them with key-word searches; I do not
now anticipate any more complex computer processing.
B. Schedule of Research
I request support for two months of research during each of the summers of 1995 and 1996. I will spend
six weeks of each summer in Romania and the remaining two weeks reading at the Library of Congress.12
I plan to leave in late May and go directly to Vlaicu, in order to benefit from the one relatively dead
period in the summer growing season (around June 1-July 1). This timing will enable me to interview
villagers, local officials, and court personnel (who start vacation on July 1). I will spend July 1-July 15
in the cities of Cluj and Bucharest (whose library holdings are complementary), interviewing government
Page 134 [PoLAR: Vol. 20, No. 1
officials in Bucharest, and reading newspaper reports, parliamentary debates, and law compilations.
After returning to the US, I will read in the Library of Congress until the end of July. In August I will
work on analyzing and writing up my material, and I will continue that work from Sept. 1995-May
1996, alongside my teaching duties. I will repeat this schedule in June-July of 1996, with a second trip
to Romania and write-up from August through December, at the end of which I expect to have a completed
book manuscript.
V. Dissemination of the Results
The research to date has generated one published paper (Verdery 1994a). I will write several more
papers for specialistjournals and will present work at colloquia, professional meetings (AAASS, AAA),
and, if possible, seminars at the World Bank and other policy institutions. My larger goal is to write two
books, one treating the theoretical issues I have outlined here and one on decollectivization, written in
plain language for a nonspecialist audience of students and policy-makers. Both will be offered to
Romanian publishers for translation. I note that all my prior grants have resulted in published papers or
books.
VI. Significance of the Research
In the present global transformation, all manner of fundamental forms and concepts have come up for
grabs. Such things as electronic media and genetic engineering put pressure on standard notions of
<4
property," social and political "identities" (indeed, the concept of "identity" itself) are being altered,
global capital flows are changing the nature of "states" and of the "nations" long associated with them,
and what counts as "democracy" is also in flux. Taking cognizance of these wider changes, this project
explores their particulars with respect to "property" and "democracy" in Transylvania. It contributes to
understanding both the transformations in these phenomena in Eastern Europe and their broadertheoretical
definitions and interconnections. It asks, How can we see property rights, democratization, and forms
of rule as mutually constitutive, intersecting in "persons" and political subjects? How does law-making
— not as policy but as practice — shape political identities and future "citizens"? Where should we
look for "the political" so as to talk about democratization?
In attempting to answer these questions, I reject narrowly formal definitions of participation and also
narrow understandings of property. I see the rearrangement of property rights as potentially tied to new
identities that generate political participation in defense of these rights; such participation shapes
dispositions and competences that may prove durable elements of a kind of democracy not reducible to
votes and petitions. These property-based identities have themselves become stakes, however, in larger
political processes, as other groups in Romanian society retard the allocation of ownership rights to
individuals living in villages, thus thwarting the development of competences based in defending those
rights. By taking this conceptual approach, the project will contribute new ways of thinking about
"democratization" and "property," bringing anthropological insights into questions handled largely (and
not always well) by political science.
Alongside these objectives, the study will contribute to understanding the process of decollectivization,
on which very little has been written to date. I will provide an account of rural property notions and
restitution that — unlike the bulk of studies of privatization — is not urban-based and does not start
from the assumption that it knows what "property" means or that exclusive ownership rights are the
only form to be pursued. I will examine the definitions ofrightsand obligations, looking for the possibility
May, 1997] Page 135
ofoverlapping rights of both ownership and use, along with evidence for how notions of person relate to
property, and I will also bring into critical focus the very notion of private property.
The study will also contribute to the newly emerging literature on "ethnography of the state," which I
expect will be influential in shaping the interdisciplinary work on states and their contemporary
transformation. What can one learn from investigating rural property — an issue in which the state has
significant interests — about the kind of state power that is forming in Romania? What might that
suggest about the very concept of "the state"? Do we find a state formed partly in the context of
localized struggles, in which one or another group invites "state" intervention against other local groups
—that is, do we find the state as a ragged and miscellaneous collection of resources whose invocation
in local struggles produces and reifies it? Who and what is "the state," in the Romanian case?
By offering both a description of unfolding processes and a critique of the concepts they implicate, the
project aims to fulfill abasic objective of "science" as knowing: to set up a relation between investigator
and constituted object, so as to cast light on and transform both.
Notes
1. I should state clearly that I do not share the assumption of many scholars and policy-makers
that "capitalism" is what is happening in the former Soviet bloc.
2. Their raison d'etre was that most villagers do not have the means to work their newly acquired
land and must therefore pool it in larger chunks, administered by officials who organize its cultivation.
3. To date, there is little published literature on decollectivization. Pryor (1992) is chiefly a
history, not about post-revolutionary achievements. Papers by scholars such as Kideckel (1993), Hann
(1993a, b), and Creed (1993) helpfully discuss the earliest moments of decollectivization in Romania
and Hungary but in relatively brief compass; somewhat more detailed is Ag6cs and Agocs (1994).
4. State farms (IASs) were run as state enterprises with salaried labor and an appointed director;
neither employees nor the director had any necessary relation to the land the farm worked. Collective
farms (CAPs), by contrast, were formed from "voluntary" donations of land by the villagers who thereby
became their members and their labor force. As of 1980, 61% of Romania's agricultural land was in
collective farms (including private plots), 30% in state institutions, and 9% in individual private farms.
If we look at arable land rather than all agricultural land, the figures are 74%, 21%, and 5% (Tumock
1986: 184).
One reason for not dismantling state farms was to assure a supply of food during the expected drop in
production on the former collective-farm lands. A law passed in 1994 sets the conditions for eventual
return of state-farm land to its former owners, also.
5. Vlaicu's Transylvanian location is significant, for the region's property history and structure
are very different from that of Romania's other parts, owing to Transylvania's prior inclusion in the
Habsburg Empire. During the 1860s, the Austrians introduced property registration into Transylvania.
Because the parts of present-day Romania that were not underAustrian occupation instituted land records
much later and in more provisional form, anyone there who now wishes to prove ownership has fewer,
and more unreliable, sources than do Transylvanians. The latter therefore have greater hopes both of
reestablishing ownership and of resisting usurpation by local authorities. Forthis reason what I observed
Page 136 [PoLAR: Vol. 20, No. 1
in Vlaicu is not always true of land restitution across Romania as a whole (and therefore I specify
'Transylvania" in my project title).
6. See point 6 under Research Methods.
7. For a further discussion of this sense of entitlement, see Verdery 1994b.
8. I have been unable to confirm exactly how many such cases are pending — according to my
inquiries, the Ministry of Justice seems to have no record of them. The figure of 400,000 was used by
the head of the main opposition party in a speech in May 1994.
9. In the most extended case I followed, the plaintiff boasted to other villagers that he was sure he
would win because I was "friends" with the judge (and he was "friends" with me). When he lost, he
considered an appeal because he has a relative at the court of appeals and could probably win there.
10. A USAID project was struggling to work around the obstacles to measuring, but according to
the office director in Bucharest, not making much headway.
11. In 1994 these consisted of: 1) "Agromecs," the old machinery parks of the socialist period,
which still provide the machinery for plowing and harvesting; 2) commune authorities (mayor, vicemayor,
Council) and the land commissions they oversee; 3) state farms; 4) the post-collective
"Associations"; 5) Romcereal, a state organization that offers credits and bulk purchasing and warehousing
functions; 6) banks, most of them still state-owned.
12. My previous experience working in Romanian libraries in the summer is that they are not
conducive to accomplishing anything. I plan to collect bibliography and to follow up with the reading in
a setting that enables work. The Library of Congress has extensive collections of Romanian newspapers
and government documents.
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