Amid the rising nationalism and racial politics that culminated in World War II, European countries wishing to "purify" their nations often forced unwanted populations to migrate. The targeted minorities had few options, but as R. Chris Davis shows, they sometimes used creative tactics to fight back, redefining their identities to serve their own interests. Davis's highly illuminating example is the case of the little-known Moldavian Csangos, a Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking community of Roman Catholics in eastern Romania. During World War II, some in the Romanian government wanted to expel them. The Hungarian government saw them as Hungarians and wanted to settle them on lands confiscated from other groups. Resisting deportation, the clergy of the Csangos enlisted Romania's leading racial anthropologist, collected blood samples, and rewrote a millennium of history to claim Romanian origins and national belonging—thus escaping the discrimination and violence that devastated so many of Europe's Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other minorities. In telling their story, Davis offers fresh insight to debates about ethnic allegiances, the roles of science and religion in shaping identity, and minority politics past and present.

Amid the rising nationalism and racial politics that culminated in World War II, European countries wishing to "purify" their nations often forced unwanted populations to migrate. The targeted minorities had few options, but as Chris Davis shows, they sometimes used creative tactics to fight back, redefining their identities to serve their own interests. Davis's highly illuminating example is the case of the little-known Csangos, an ethnic community in Moldavian Romania who practice Catholicism and speak a mix of Hungarian and Romanian. Romania wanted to expel them; Hungary wanted them for resettlement. Aided by Catholic priests, the Csangos resisted deportation with a concerted strategy involving blood samples, anthropologists, and historians, hoping to exempt themselves from the discrimination and violence that targeted Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other minorities. Davis draws on many facets of the Csangos' refashioning to add insight to debates about racial politics, national communities, and ethnic and religious minorities past and present.

Set against the backdrop of the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism in Eastern Europe, this book declares that Catholic theologians ought to be understood and studied as intellectuals: socially and historically situated creators of national cultural traditions. While the Romanian government funds thriving schools for the country’s Hungarian minority, NGOs founded by Transylvanian Hungarians continue to organize volunteers to supplement this formal pedagogy. These volunteers understand themselves to be reviving a national tradition of “serving the people” by educating the region’s rural Hungarian populace. While this book is about the challenges Catholic educators face in teaching villagers, it is just as much about their new effort to call groups of volunteers from across the border in Hungary to teach alongside them. In these encounters, Transylvanian Hungarian educators remake their intellectual tradition, especially ideas about the basis of pedagogical authority, the ethical character of the nation, and the social location of selfhood. When contemporary Catholic intellectuals urge teachers to manifest their national self-consciousness, they carry with them the assumption that selfhood emerges where humans collaborate with God. While Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals are enmeshed in constant competition, by focusing on contemporary theologians New Magyar Apostles unmasks the struggle over the nature of divine presence that animates this revival of a Christian national tradition of intellectual service.

Community Networks and Cultural Practices in Twentieth-Century Romania: Paper-Based Cultures in the Writings of a Catholic Priest presents an anthropological interpretation of 2,400 documents left behind by a Hungarianized Swabian Catholic priest living in Romania during one of the Eastern European dictatorships of the twentieth century. This book addresses what the pre-digital paper-based culture was like in Eastern Europe from the point of view of the protagonist, a Catholic priest, who lived in a predominantly Orthodox country. The author calls the twentieth century the era of the typewriter. Mária Szikszai’s questions refer to both the epoch and the micro-universe of these people. What was the world like in which the protagonist and the other people he was in contact with lived? How did they live their daily lives? How did they make important decisions? What pains, hopes, and joys did they have? What did they have to say and what were they silent about? This volume presents an anthropological incursion into the life of an Eastern European man who lived almost throughout the twentieth century, during which time he tried to document the era he was living in.

The Fascist Faith of the Legion "Archangel Michael" in Romania, 1927–1941 engages critically with recent works on fascism, totalitarianism, and religion, and advances an original theoretical and methodological approach to fascism as a political faith. On this basis, the book constructs an innovative comparative research framework for reconceptualizing the history of the Legion "Archangel Michael" in Romania, 1927–1941. It contends that the Legion put forward a palingenetic political faith of a theological type, called Legionarism. To provide a comprehensive analysis of the origins, main features, mechanisms of institutionalization, and demise of this self-proclaimed salvific political faith, the book documents the palingenetic foundations of the Legionary faith, the syncretism between fascist and Christian rites and rituals, and the intricate relationship between the Legion and the Orthodox Church and its dogma. The book documents three main sacrificial strategies employed by the Legion to "re-evangelize" the people in the new faith: (1) the appropriation of the cult of the fallen soldiers; (2) terrorist missions meant to create fascist heroes through violent sacrifice; and (3) sanctification through heroic fight for Christianity in the Spanish Civil War, in an attempt to link Legionarism with the transnational crusade against "Judeo-Bolshevism." As well as providing a detailed historical and interpretive account of the Legion, the book makes a significant contribution to debates about defining fascism and its relation to religion. It also provides novel comparative perspectives for studying other attempts at constructing fascist faiths in interwar Europe, most notably in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany but also in Central and Eastern Europe. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of fascism, Romanian studies, politics and religion, political theory, totalitarianism, youth radicalization, violence, and the emergence of terrorism.

This volume addresses the question of ‘identity’ in East-Central Europe. It engages with a specific definition of ‘sub-cultures’ over the period from c. 1900 to the present and proposes novel ways in which the term can be used with the purpose of understanding identities that do not conform to the fixed, standard categories imposed from the top down, such as ‘ethnic group’, ‘majority’ or ‘minority’. Instead, a ‘sub-culture’ is an identity that sits between these categories. It may blend languages, e.g. dialect forms, cultural practices, ethnic and social identifications, or religious affiliations as well as concepts of race and biology that, similarly, sit outside national projects.

This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.