10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5030
application/pdf
2239-625X
5030
2
it
urn:nbn:it:unica-28027
Stelu Şerban
Anuac
Sabrina Tosi Cambini, Altri confini: Storia, mobilità e migrazioni di una rete di famiglie rudari tra la Romania e l’Italia, Mimesis, Milano, 2021, pp. 274
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
10
Book reviews
2021-12-13
2021-12-13
2021-12-31
2021-12-31
289-292
1
Stelu Şerban
2021/12/13
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5030
289
ISSEE, Academia Română, București, Romania
2239-625X
2
292
urn:nbn:it:unica-28027
Sabrina Tosi Cambini, Altri confini: Storia, mobilità e migrazioni di una rete di famiglie rudari tra la Romania e l’Italia, Mimesis, Milano, 2021, pp. 274
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                                     2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 289-292




                                                                       RECENSIONI
Sabrina TOSI CAMBINI | Altri confini. Storia, mobilità e migrazioni di una rete
di famiglie rudari tra la Romania e l’Italia, Mimesis, Milano, 2021, pp. 274.


   Until recently an exotic subject, the study of Rudari populations has
become in the last two decades a field of rigorous and accurate academic
research. They originated from the current territory of Romania, but are
present in all Southeast European states, as in adjacent countries such as
Ukraine and Hungary, or Greece. Recently, after 1990, and more intensely
after 2007, the year of the entry of Bulgaria and Romania into the European
Union, the Rudari participate massively in labor migration in the countries
of Western and Southern Europe. Many of the controversies surrounding the
Rudari regard their origins. Included in the category of Roma populations,
the Rudari actually reject this categorization. And indeed, the most plausible
and best-argued hypothesis in academic works is that their area of origin is
the southwest province of Transylvania in Romania, an area where mining
dates back to Roman times.
   This long introduction outlines the theme of Sabrina Tosi Cambini’s book
for a non specialist reader. The choice of this subject was connected to the
long experience of Tosi Cambini among the Rudari. She had her first
contacts with some Rudari who emigrated to Italy in the early 2000s, but a
2008 internship at the former Luzzi hospital near Florence, abandoned in
2006, prompted her to take the decisive step. It is worth mentioning that
Tosi Cambini’s engagement was rooted not only to her academic
scholarship, but to two social organizations in the Tuscany region,
Fondazione Giovanni Michelucci and Movimento di Lotta per la Casa. At
Luzzi, she met several Rudari from the southeastern area of Romania,
Constanța and Călărași counties, who she befriended in some preliminary
interviews. The following year was the first trip to Romania to get a better
knowledge of the Rudari she had met in Luzzi. Then some long
anthropological fieldwork followed: between 2009 and 2016 Tosi Cambini

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Stelu Serban
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 289-292.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5030
290                                                   SABRINA TOSI CAMBINI | ALTRI CONFINI


lived every year from a few weeks to several months with Rudari families in
some villages in Constanța and Călărași, but also on the other side of the
Danube, in Bulgaria, near the town of Silistra, where these Rudari had
relatives (pp. 11-20). Tosi Cambini’s field experience is fascinating, even for
anthropologists and ethnographers in Romania and Bulgaria, who rarely get
involved in this kind of multi-sited fieldwork.
   The structure of the volume is provided by two consistent parts that differ
in size, but each with a meaningful place. In the first part, called “Storia e
mobilità”, Tosi Cambini addresses the stories of several families of Rudari
from the villages in the two counties in Romania mentioned above (for
reasons of research ethics, Tosi Cambini changed the names of these villages
so that they could not be identified). Although shorter (pp. 25-110), this first
part is the most interesting, in my opinion, in the context of the existing
academic bibliography on the Rudari. The second section of this part,
“Spazio genealogico, storico, geografico” (pp. 43-90), is the most significant,
in which Tosi Cambini reconstructs, through oral history data the mobility
networks of the families of Rudari for a long period starting from 1880, with
the withdrawal of the Ottoman administration from Bulgaria and Romania,
and the partition of Dobrogea, a region bordering the Black Sea to the west,
until the fall of socialist regimes in 1990. There was natural cross-border
mobility on both sides of the Danube, which began before 1880, but
intensified immediately after this date (as also a natural mobility but within
the borders of the same state) in the interwar period when both parts of
Dobrogea were included in Romania. However, there was also a forced
migration in dramatic contexts, during the Second World War, when
Dobrogea was again divided between Romania and Bulgaria, much of the
pro-Romanian population, colonized in the 1920s being forced to move back
to Romania. The “Bulgarian” Rudari, for the most part, were included in this
wave, but many of them were deported by the authoritarian pro-German
regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu, along with the Jews and the Roma
population. Tosi Cambini uses an interesting methodology for collecting oral
history data, namely the reconstruction of genealogical and matrimonial
networks as well as the criteria for establishing housing for newlyweds,
bringing to light the relations between Lingurari, a particular name given to
the Rudari in Romania and Rudari who migrated to Bulgaria.
   The second part of the volume follows the migratory trajectory after 1990
of the people from the villages studied in the two counties in Romania.
Although these are few villages, the migration area covered by this people is
impressive: from the north to the south of Europe (Norway and Great
Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Serbia, Greece and Turkey, p. 118).

2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 289-292
SABRINA TOSI CAMBINI | ALTRI CONFINI                                                  291


The migration of the Rudari has peculiarities that Tosi Cambini brings to the
fore and approaches analytically (pp. 124-5). Even if the Rudari were also
part of the large migration flows from Romania, which took between 4 and 5
million Romanian citizens abroad, they differ in specific practices. First of
all, over time, they are building their own networks between Romania and
the diaspora, based mainly on family ties. Then, a completely new practice is
represented by the migration of the whole family nucleus. The latter practice
of the migration of Rudari led to housing issues, through which for the first
time Tosi Cambini faced the subject of her research: the former Luzzi
hospital, that was the place of residence for most of the Rudari from the
Romanian villages studied by Tosi Cambini. In fact, she also calls the former
Luzzi hospital un sat rudar – a Rudar village (p. 134), even if along with the
Rudari in 2009 other people of different ethnicities and citizens lived there
(out of the 334 residents, 239 were of Romanian citizenship, Rudari, the rest
being from Morocco, Tunisia, an extended Roma family of 26 people from
Montenegro and 9 Italians, p. 144). Moreover, the former Luzzi hospital
becomes a kind of “home” for the Rudari by restoring family networks as
well as a subjectivity reflected in the attachment and responsibility of the
Rudari towards this building (pp. 135, 139-140 with quotations from Gilles
Deleuze and Michel Foucault). A lot of Luzzi’s Rudari arrived here after a
first period of painful migration and remained here calling for their wives
and children; others, chose to move away, such as the cases of those who
went to Stratford upon Avon in Britain, following a strategy, including the
financial one, that Tosi Cambini recounts in detail (pp. 130-133). However,
the Luzzi community was perceived by the authorities and presented in the
Italian media as a source of crime, so that from 2010 to 2012 all resident
families are evacuated. Tosi Cambini recounts this situation in detail,
emphasizing the residents’ attempts to reject any accusations and remain in
Luzzi. Many of the Rudari worked without documents, in the informal
economy, as masons, nurses, janitors, couriers, etc. (pp. 177 ff). Most of the
Rudari returned to Romania after the evacuation from Luzzi and started to
build a new acasă (a new home), the title of the last section of the volume
(pp. 203-236). Tosi Cambini is also accurately following this last part, based
on the fieldwork done in Romania after 2012. It is about restoring the same
subjectivity and attachment to living in a familiar territory (Arjun Appadurai
is quoted), which recovers long family histories and kinship networks
addressed in the first part of the volume.
   Sabrina Tosi Cambini’s book is a fascinating journey. The author pays
close attention to theoretical framework concepts, such as subjectivity,
housing, migration, family network, the slum, that are connected to an

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292                                                   SABRINA TOSI CAMBINI | ALTRI CONFINI


appropriate bibliography. The great value of the book, however, is the field
material brought into the foreground. In fact, Tosi Cambini seems conscious
of this and underlines this aspect by interspersing between the sections of
analysis and interpretation long ethnographic portraits, “morceaux
etnografici”, as she calls them, full of color and substance.

                                                                       Stelu ŞERBAN
                                                  Academia de Științe din România
                                                            steluserban@yahoo.com




2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 289-292
