Enacting Culture in a Romanian Village
Enacting Culture in a Romanian Village

Summary/Abstract: “Local culture” has been the focus of anthropological endeavour since the discipline’s beginnings, and the concept has a long history of re-defining and re-framing on all levels (spatial, political, and so on). One particularly useful definition of “culture” put forward by Bourdieu is that which is “taken for granted”—what people do without necessarily being aware of it. Culture is, therefore, similar to ideology, and not unlike Foucault’s notion of discourse, in that its workings are not explicit and visible to those who form part of that culture. Yet, is it really possible to distinguish the notion of “local culture” as practice from discourses around that particular “culture”? Houses of culture—institutions built in eastern Europe and the USSR during the socialist period used to host, represent, and change “local culture”—can raise questions around the practice and performance of culture more generally.

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