Infrastructure, feral waters and power relations in rural Romania

Abstract

The material relics of socialism continue to affect present-day rural Romania. This article explores the nexus of socialist/post-socialist agricultural infrastructure, groundwater, soil transformations, the privatization process and the constitution of power relations along the Lower Danube rural areas. Positioning ourselves in the anthropology of infrastructure, we document both ethnographically and with Geographic Information Systems tools the social and political consequences of broken agricultural infrastructure in a village located on the banks of the Lower Danube, Romania. We show how the local political elite is able to exploit the surfacing of groundwater in their favour, resulting in economic loss only for small landholders and villagers without power. The interface of the multiple temporalities inherent in infrastructure with the various materialities of groundwater – its propensity to leak, infiltrate and surface – precipitated the emergence of a new ecological order. The new hybrid ecology is made up of pre-socialist feral groundwater, the socialist ‘hydraulic society’ that reclaimed agricultural land, and the post-socialist political economy. We engage a more-than-human perspective in order to offer a more sophisticated – and realistic – picture of post-socialist rural power relations.

Ethical Endeavours

“…Anselma Gallinat (2022b) demonstrates how ideological othering and post-socialist stigma are used in political discourses about eastern Germany. All the articles in the volume engage with the complex temporality of post-socialism, showing how 'past, present and future interweave, as beliefs about the past impact on perceptions in the present and suggest, open or close options for the future' (Gallinat 2022a: 108) -for instance in relationship to large socialist-era agrarian infrastructure that damages groundwater in Romania today (Dorondel and Posner 2022) or in the ways notions of socialism and post-socialism are deployed in Eastern Germany to make sense of current problems or envision future solutions (Ringel 2022).…”