Sincrai: spatiality of identity Contact : Vincze K. Istvàn organizer 3526 -Sincrai nr 291, jud Cluj, Romania tel.fax 00-40-64-257580 photo credit : Vincze K. Istvàn

Vincze Istvan is the person who had in 1990 the idea of presenting six pairs of dancing children from Sincrai in a traditional dance festival in Hungary. A year later, the first tourists came in the village to learn traditional dance and several houses have been accredited with international standards in tourism. A whole network has emerged in several years, originating basically from the very individual initiative of Istvan. (Since then, the Hungarian farmer association of Romania has initiated an important ethno-touristic network with 5 districts in Transylvania). People learned that they have something to offer: their situation isolated from urban connections, their cultural tradition, their minority experience as Hungarians living in Romania, their identity and their difference with the Hungarians leaving in Hungary. (In the late 80s and early 90s, European migration reports shown evidence of a preference to emigrate in Hungary with 30% of the Hungarian living in Romania. The main reason of this emigration was the search for a better life standard and a more comfortable situation as "major" ethnic category). Since, the situation has very much improved. One of the important "transition indicators" is the respect for human rights and the integration of minorities. Minoritar identity is a very important political problem in Eastern Europe. Minorities are considered as a dynamic factor in the European integration as they have already experienced the construction of their identity within a multicultural context. Geographic diversity is in fact a consequence of the isolation and its identity formations. But in the social realm, the spatial condition of identity exceeds the fixed location.

"The spatiality of identity is not a territory but a multi-dimensional matrix of mobile, fusing axes of identity within which individuals are complexly, contingentely, multiply and contradictory positioned". (Natter in Pile,185) In the case of Sincrai, mobility and free trade transformed the representational forms of "identity" into a touristic capital . "Identity" creates "difference" within the social condition in the same way 'isolation" creates "diversity" within the geographic condition. Local dynamics emerged in Sincrai only with its resituation in a new context: the enlargement of the European Union and the transition to a market economy. The rhythms of location are in this case just modulations with the rhythms of the European transition. The enlargement of European Union implies a necessary recuperation of the European memory but also new ways to experience it. Such a post-modern psycho-aesthetic feelings like "uncanny" or "nostalgia" are quite an elegant commodity for Eastern Europeans. And very fashionable... They are all about our relationship to space... The western urban civilisation need to recuperate the "rural" experience and live it with simultaneously pre-industrial and post-industrial conditions. Today "coming back" is not opposed to "becoming" and " the linear time of progress" coexist with the more dialectical "time of regression and recuperation". Body techniques, customs, tastes, archaic traditions and crafts have been conserved in the 40 years of the Cold War isolation and can now be freshly experienced on the market, simultaneously with products of high technology. The new tourist is "nostalgic" and looking for identity but also for new connections. Events such as a "dance workshop" are not only cultural productions but also opportunities of communication. They open up the spatiality of identity into a spatiality of action and performance. The body is also playing here as an important integrational and connective element. Dance, tourism, transportation, communication, money: are differently scaled mobilities which mutually support each other. a kind of urban "mixity of mobilities" within a "rural" condition. Urban life tends to include more and more rural conditions... The urban development of Sincrai was not planned, not predicted but emerged spontaneously with the relocation of the area in the context of the contemporary European mobilities. Culture creates complex dynamics in the contemporary society. "In the post-Ford restructuring (deregulation and lean-management) new museums and theatre buildings have come with the transformation of the society, making culture an important commodity which has helped to give cities a more attractive locational factor". (Marion von Osten) This works within the rural condition too. Sincrai became in 10 years a profitable hybrid between a traditional village and a "modern" locality which handles its locational advantages, its qualities and infrastructure like saleable goods and puts them on the market accordingly. Not only art and architecture, but "tradition", "identity", "difference" could also easily become international economic and prestige factors within the context of the Europe unification. Tourism is a dynamic element which connects tradition to modernity. But its dynamics are not simple: it paradoxically valorise tradition and at the same time it menaces it, subverts it, and tends to spread modernisation. The question for Sincrai and other similar cases will be how to maintain a balance between modernity and tradition and to continue to develop the existing touristic dynamics ...