On Bucharest Neighborhood, a Home Ethnology Perspective
On Bucharest Neighborhood, a Home Ethnology Perspective

Summary/Abstract: Rural sedentariness continues to be considered to this day the essence of Romanians’ cultural survival; by comparison, urban mobility is usually invested with ambiguous and even contradictory meanings. Manifest in diverse forms, from rhythmic or seasonal swinging between home at the parents’ and home at work, to professional migration, or even emigration, the movement the city presupposes continues to be interpreted as instability, as “loss” of roots – and thus of identity – in favor of a not necessarily beneficiary cosmopolitanism. Briefly put, most of the times, the mobility of urban residence continues to be negatively connoted, despite evidence that we owe urban mobility the necessary alterity for cultural survival and modernity. I tend to believe though that the notion of urban sedentariness must not surprise one and that it defines a large portion of urban dwellers.

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