Whose Minority? The Resistant Identity of the Moldavian Csangos

The article is based on my fieldwork in 2002 in a village in Eastern Romania with a multi-confessional population made up mostly of Roman Catholics/Csangos and Orthodox Christians. The core premise of the analysis is that the collective identity manifested here transcends ethnic and confessional divides. The field data about the village’s cross-cultural life fall into the following categories: the oral history of the village, the performing of rituals, and the local history of modernization. These topics inform a single collective identity that is grounded in an expressive culture (Fredrik Barth) and as such requires critical reflection on the cultural complexity of collective identities as the Csangos, which have been formed within multiple and overlapping social and historical contexts. The subject is the different temporalities that emerge during political modernization. In conclusion, in the Csangos’ case, the constructivist concept of ethnicity should be revisited and complemented with an acknowledgment of Csangos’ benign self-identification, which sheds light on their discrete or hidden identity.