Mobilità di ritorno e migranti forzati nello spazio sociale e culturale romeno

Examining the history of ethnographic studies in Romania, conducted by both local and foreign anthropologists, the issue of mobility has only recently gained prominence. For a long time, this topic was not the focus of anthropological reflection, primarily attracting the attention of demographers and sociologists. Since the late 1990s, anthropological studies on transnational migrations have become more established, and more recently, there has been a focus on return migrations. In the past few years, in response to the mobility turn in the social sciences, interest has grown in the interconnections between various forms of (im)mobilities that traverse Romania’s social and cultural landscape. In this article, based on ethnographic data collected during various field studies, I reflect on the complex and often subtle relationships between the experiences and representations of return migrants and forced migrants, set against the backdrop of two relevant geopolitical events: the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the war in Ukraine in 2022. In addition to highlighting these concrete interconnections, I discuss how the analytical categories used to describe these (im)mobilities need to be critically examined and redefined.