“Heritage-Making” in the Romanian Institutional and Non-Institutional Spheres: Interferences, Tensions, and Conflicts of Representation

This study aims to examine the practices, the vocabulary and the representations of different Romanian actors in charge of “making” heritage. These actors include professional institutional experts, policy makers and curators who produce “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith, 2006: 4), and the representatives of rural individual actors who undertake indigenous “heritagization”, typical of private museums and collections. By taking into account the actors’ engagement with the field of “heritagization” and with that of “goods to be heritagized”, this study proposes an analysis of the dynamic relation between institutionalized forms of Romanian identity construction through cultural heritage and the increasing place for individual decision-making about identity issues in post-socialist Romania. Using a reflexive approach, this study investigates the realm of “heritagized goods” with regard to the status of different actors engaged in “heritagization”, the principles and criteria according to which the “patrimonial value” of a specific “good” is assessed, and the stakes surrounding patrimonial constructions in the Romanian institutional and non-institutional spheres. In sum, the purpose of this research is to examine the “multivocality” of the term “heritage” in Romanian cultural space, using it as a lens to analyse changing “regimes” (Bendix et al., 2012: 12) of identity construction in time and space.