Abstract
<jats:p>How is a socialist past preserved, narrated, and contested through living memory, archives, and museums? This book explores the memory of Romanian rural socialism from a longue durée perspective, bringing forth recollections at the edge of time in dialogue with recent memory cultures. Focusing on peasant revolts, deportations, land collectivization, gendered labor, Roma social worlds, agricultural cooperatives, consumption, and nostalgia, it uncovers the cultural textures of everyday socialism that often remain absent from official histories and examines them alongside archival documents. This ethnography shows how ordinary people negotiated state power, reworked traditions, and re-symbolized social roles. In doing so, it reveals the presence of the socialist period in collective memory, social consciousness, systems of action, daily practices, as well as in social and institutional structures of postsocialist life. By opening avenues for transnational comparison across Eastern Europe and beyond, the study contributes to the anthropology of memory, socialism and postsocialism. Raluca Mateoc is Senior Research Associate in Religious Studies within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.</jats:p>