Situated Meanings of Rurality, Ageing, and Care in Romania's Transition: Perspectives from Spermezeu

This paper explores multiple dimensions of ageing and gender inequalities in rural Romania, in the context of failed market transition and EU integration. Articulated through different policy discourses and structures of inequalities, market transtion has shaped the lived experiences of aging and livelihood, and has restricted the struggle of the elderly to defend particular meanings of rurality. The reconfiguration of practices and meanings of rurality obliterates other aspects of market-led transition- including the patterns of caring for the elderly, the caring practices of the elderly themselves, and the symbolic meanings of aging and care. Following Bourdieu's concepts of doxa, symbolic violence, and habitus, textual analysis of rural development and social policy shifts reveals that, in the absence of a strategic vision of its own rurality, Romania's social field of transition has been pe1meated by the doxa of Neolib~ralism, which enforces a middle-aged, androcentric, and urban-oriented transition process. This doxa distorts many meanings and practices of rurality, and obscures or usurps heterodox opinions calling for a more humane and culturally contextualized transition. Distilling from the narratives of the elderly in a high-migration village in Transylania, the fieldwork analysis will show how the elderly's notions of livelihood and wellbeing are embedded in a culturally specific habitus of rurality, which is based on an eco-centered worldview, centered around interrelationships (caring for and about others, the land, and the community). Juxtaposing this cultural habitus with the instrumental framing of the elderly in EU-led rural development policy illustrates how the power of representation misrecognizes some of the detrimental effects of migration and de-peasantization on the well-being of the elderly.