Street Names through Sociological Lenses. Part II: Constructionism and Utilitarianism

Abstract As toponymic means of inscribing urban space, street names have been addressed mainly by human geographers, who have articulated the field of critical place-name studies. In this paper, I continue the endeavor started in the previous issue published in Social Change Review of reading street names through sociological lenses. Whereas in the first part of this two-part contribution the analysis was made from functionalist and conflictualist perspectives, this second and final part employs social constructionism and the utilitarian theoretical tradition in making sociological sense of street nomenclatures. First, conceiving of street names as forming discursively constructed linguisti…

Celebrities' Memorial Afterlives: Obituaries, Tributes, and Posthumous Gossip in the Romanian Media Deathscape.

Cross-culturally, dead are protected from posthumous negative evaluations by the universal “nil nisi bonum” precept that governs the ethics within the community of mourners. In this study, we set out to test the observance of this injunction against posthumous gossiping in the Romanian public deathscape. Obituaries and other posthumous articles ( N = 1,148) were collected that covered the deaths of 63 celebrities who passed away between 2013 and 2016. Materials were gathered from the digital archives of three Romanian news sources (a news agency, a “quality” newspaper, and a tabloid), published one week after the moment of death. The findings show that 22% of the articles do contain negati…

Staging Death: Christofascist Necropolitics during the National Legionary State in Romania, 1940–1941

AbstractThe cult of death and the celebration of martyrdom lay at the core of interwar fascist movements across the European continent. However, it was in the Romanian Legionary Movement (also known as the Iron Guard) that these were articulated into a full-fledged ideology of thanatic ultranationalism. In this article, I examine the spectacular fascist necropolitics staged as state-sponsored funeral performances during the short-lived National Legionary State (September 14, 1940–February 14, 1941). A detailed description of the massive campaign of exhumations and reburials of the so-called “legionary martyrs” carried out during this short time span, culminating with the grandiose ceremony …

Political patterning of urban namescapes and post-socialist toponymic change: A quantitative analysis of three Romanian cities

Abstract Critical scholars of place-name studies have compellingly demonstrated that significant transformations in a society's namescape follow suit major power shifts and regime changes. However, despite the wealth of particular case studies existing in the literature, scarce efforts have been made to examine street name changes in a comparative framework using statistical modeling techniques of multivariate analysis. This paper aims to overcome these shortcomings by developing a comparative approach to analyzing post-socialist street-naming transformations in three Romanian cities from Transylvania (Brașov, Cluj-Napoca, and Sibiu). Based on comprehensive data collected from multiple sour…

The privatization of death: the emergence of private cemeteries in Romania’s postsocialist deathscape

Private cemeteries constitute a new development in the Romanian postsocialist death system that poses a challenge to the traditional burial culture. This paper charts the emergence of privately own...

Sequencing toponymic change: A quantitative longitudinal analysis of street renaming in Sibiu, Romania.

Recent scholarship in critical toponymy studies has refashioned the understanding of street names from innocent labels to nominal loci of historical memory and vectors of collective identity that are embroiled with power relations. Urban nomenclatures consist of more than mere linguistic signposts deployed onto space to facilitate navigation. Street names are also powerful signposts that indicate the political regime and its socio-cultural values. Drawing on these theoretical insights, this paper is focused on Sibiu (Romania) and explore the city’s shifting namescape in a longitudinal perspective spanning one century and a half of modern history (1875–2020). The analysis is based on a compl…

States of mourning: A quantitative analysis of national mournings across European countries

Despite their growing incidence over the last decades, national days of mourning received curiously sparse attention throughout social sciences and death studies. This study investigates the 327 national mournings observed across European countries between 1989 and 2017 in terms of their national variance, temporal dynamics, typology of events that led to their declaration, and victimology. Drawing on a Durkheimian-inspired conceptualization of national mournings as political rites of solidarity and reconciliation, this article finds empirical support for the thesis that the frequency with which European countries declare national mourning is a negative function of a society's level of soci…

Tailoring a Fashionable Self: Sartorial Practices in an Emerging Market Context

Abstract This study consists in a quantitative analysis of fashion preferences, examining various factors influencing clothing personalization. The first part of the paper sets out the theoretical framework, discussing the historical relationship between the emergence of modernity and the configuration of fashion industry. The study proceeds with detailing the regional context where the empirical research is grounded, paying particular attention to the development and current status of the region’s clothing industry. After presenting the data and the methodology, the paper discusses the empirical findings followed by their interpretation. Based on the results we argue that the level of educ…

The politics of mourning in post-communist Romania: unravelling the thanatopolitics of grievable deaths

National days of mourning are state-sponsored rituals of collective grief enacted in the public sphere by political authorities to symbolically mark and emotionally cope with a socially significant...

Street Names through Sociological Lenses. Part I: Functionalism and Conflict Theory

Abstract Street names are mundane spatial markers that besides providing a sense of orientation inscribe onto the landscape the ideological ethos and political symbols of hegemonic discourses. This review article takes stock of the existing scholarship done on the politics of street naming practices in human (political, cultural, and social) geography and rethinks these insights from sociological perspectives. Drawing on Randall Collins’ taxonomy of sociological theory, the paper interprets urban street nomenclatures along functionalist, conflictualist, constructionist, and utilitarian lines. The analysis is delivered in two installments: Part I addresses urban nomenclatures from functional…

Mapping the political toponymy of educational namescapes: A quantitative analysis of Romanian school names

Abstract This study sets out to map the political toponymy of Romanian schooling network. Starting from the theoretical premise that national memory is toponymically inscribed, inter alia, on a series of public organizations that form an institutional namescape, the paper reads the Romanian historical memory through the looking glass of school names. Exhaustive data was collected for the Romanian secondary schools bearing a nominal identity (N = 2850). Data were analyzed in terms of the ethnic and gender distribution, the social (occupational), spatial, and historical structures of the Romanian educational namescape. Our findings reveal that the political toponymy of the Romanian schooling …

The posthumous condition of gossip: Death and its reputational benediction

Gossiping is ubiquitous in social life. In every imaginable corner of society, people from all walks of life are gossiping their living acquaintances. But what happens when the “third party,” i.e., the subject of gossip, is absent par excellence, not only temporarily and spatially, but definitively? Do people continue to gossip their dead acquaintances? What is the fate of gossip after its target dies? These are the questions this paper sets out to address. In doing so, it develops a non-reductionist sequential model of death as a social process in which biological death is only the starting point of the bio-social phenomenon of dying. Building on some classic anthropological theories and c…

Theorising love in sociological thought: Classical contributions to a sociology of love

This article sets out to explore the contributions of classical social thinkers to a sociological understanding of love. It builds on the premise that despite its major relevance and consequential importance in shaping both individual lives and the social world, until recently love was a heavily undertheorised topic in the sociological tradition. Moreover, the body of disparate sociological reflections that have been made on the social nature of love has been largely forgotten in the discipline’s intellectual legacy. The article then proceeds in unearthing the classics’ contributions to a sociology of love. It starts with Max Weber’s view that love promises to be a means of sensual salvati…

Shifting urban namescapes: street name politics and toponymic change in a Romanian(ised) city

Abstract Street names express the spatial materialisation of nominative discourses articulated and deployed by the powerful in their politicisation of the urban landscape with self-legitimising ideological values, political symbols and historical narratives. Using an approach grounded upon the theoretical principles of critical toponymies, this paper sets out a longitudinal perspective on the politics of street nomenclature in Hermannstadt/Sibiu (Romania). For this purpose, a dataset comprising the complete historical record of street names in Sibiu between 1829 and 2018 was constructed. The analysis focuses on capturing the ethnopolitics played out at the level of the city's street names t…

Celebrating the royal liturgy within the national calendrical memory – The politics of festive time in the Romanian Kingdom, 1866–1947

The paper analyzes the calendrical struggles over mastering symbolic time in Romanian modern history by scrutinizing the logic of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing a temporal order made up of political holidays celebrated within a festive calendar. It looks, first, at how the constitutional monarchic political order established in 1866 with the enthronement of Carol I as Ruling Prince of Romania developed a royal festive calendar pillared on the National Day of the 10th of May. By analyzing the making of the royal temporal order organized within a national festive calendar, three techniques of calendrical construction are identified and detailed: a) calendrical shifting, b) c…

Street naming practices: A systematic review of urban toponymic scholarship

’Civilising’ the Transitional Generation: The Politics of Civic Education in Post-Communist Romania

Abstract The paper examines the introduction of civic education in post-communist Romania as an educational means of civilising in a democratic ethos the children of the transition. Particularly close analytical attention is paid to a) the political context that shaped the decision to introduce civic education, b) the radical changes in both content and end purpose of civics brought about by educational policies adopted for accelerating the country’s efforts of integrating into the Euro-Atlantic structures (NATO and the European Union), and c) the actual consequences that these educational policies betting on civics have had on the civic values expressed by Romanian teenagers. The analysis …

Transitional Politics of Memory: Political Strategies of Managing the Past in Post-communist Romania

The article develops a typology of political strategies of coming to terms with the past as a theoretical frame of reference against which it assesses the transitional politics of memory pursued in...

Nations in black: charting the national thanatopolitics of mourning across European countries

Periods of national mourning have been on the rise in the last decades in European societies as part of a wider process of democratization, whereby ordinary citizens have been increasingly granted ...

The Sacralization of Martyric Death in Romanian Legionary Movement: Self-sacrificial Patriotism, Vicarious Atonement, and Thanatic Nationalism

ABSTRACTThe paper explores the radical morphing of Romanian patriotism in the aftermath of the Great War within the Legionary movement. It shows, first, how the war martialized the rhetoric of self-sacrificial patriotism articulated discursively during the second part of the long nineteenth century that accompanied the making of the Romanian national statehood. Second, the paper focuses on unraveling the postwar cultural matrix that made possible a radical, self-sacrificial, patriotism to emerge within the Romanian Iron Guard’s fascist worldview. Within the Legion’s redemptive political theology, the wartime national patriotism aiming at redeeming the nation by making the Greater Romania wa…