Suchergebnisse

This paper investigates Romania's auto-image as described by Dan Puric in his book
Suflet Românesc
(
Romanian Soul
). By employing imagology, this article first shows how Romanian national identity is constructed in opposition to Western culture and modernity. And by drawing on imagology and Hayden White's approach to historiography, I provide a discursive analysis of the Romanian auto-image provided in the text. I show that Puric's writing of Romanian national identity is a Romantic one rendered in the anarchist mode. The author alleges that Romanians are born with a "Romanian soul," which guarantees their adherence to a Christian Orthodox worldview, one to which Western culture and modernity are inimical. The dominant metaphor used to represent Romanianness is the folktale, whose main traits—being set in
illo tempore
, a focus on a stark moral antithesis between good and evil where the former prevails, and favouring intuition over reason—are allegedly shared by "pure" Romanians. After revealing the pillars of Romanianness in Puric's view, I trace the intellectual and cultural continuities between his Romanian auto-image and Romania's far-right views on nation and nationhood, as well as the national communist view on Romanianness. As far as the former is concerned, I highlight the structural similarities between Puric's nationalism and anti-Semitic discourse. With respect to the latter, I draw attention to Puric's reliance on two of the several national communist myths identified by Romanian historian Lucian Boia: the myth of continuity and the myth of conspiracy. Puric's book dovetails with national communist discourse by postulating the alleged continuity between the peoples and cultures that have existed in Romania's current geographic location across the centuries and retains its communist fears of foreign conspiracy.

This article reports on findings from the first stage of a longer study of the realities of offending in Romania, which has the highest incarceration rate in Europe. The main goals of the research were to make an accurate estimate of the number of Rroma (Gypsy) men in Romanian prisons and to identify their socio‐cultural characteristics and criminality. The information from this study will be used to help facilitate the work of the developing probation service in Romania and the social integration of Rroma offenders. It should also inform a crime reduction strategy in Romania and hopefully, the social inclusion policies of the European Commission, Romania and its accession neighbours all having large Rroma communities.

Two groups of children are described, some adopted out of their country of origin and some adopted in their own country. Utilizing a family systems model adaptable across countries, the impact of institutionalization on later child behavior is examined. Results will assist practitioners to develop a protocol to assess the family and the child at various ages, regardless of country of origin.