BOOK REVIEW "Socialist Heritage. The Politics of Past and Place in Bucharest", by Emanuela Grama, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019, 247 pages

Abstract

Emanuela Grama’s book, Socialist Heritage. The Politics of Past and Place in Bucharest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2019, p. 247) represents an outstanding contribution in the field of anthropology of heritage, retracing the transformation of Lipscani street and the central district of Bucharest, the Old Town, from a socially and ethnically culturally diverse place in the early 20th century, into a benchmark of nationalist rewriting of local history during socialism, finally morphing again, beginning with the 2000s, into the historic center of an European capital. The backbone of the book is represented by a solid archival and ethnographic research into the changing meanings of the Old Town revealing the fundamentally dual nature of heritage “as a double form of marking” (Grama 2019:29) in which the illusionary search for (historical) essence morphed into a strategy of distinction that led to marginalisation and exclusion.