My experiences with anthropological research in Ghana and Cameroon made me aware of the differences between doing such research ‘there’ and ‘here’, between being a visitor in another country and being a researcher in my own society.Illustration by Studio Sonsuzhttps://theanthro.art/investigative-or-embedded-research-fieldwork-experiences-in-ghana-and-cameroon-as-lessons-for-anthropology-at-home-sjaak-van-der-geest-illustration-by-studio-sonsuz/ [...]

Understanding the causes of persistent inequality between different segments of a society is at the core of social science. This article explores the issue of exclusion by examining various mechanisms of durable inequality within Romanian society, with a specific focus on the Roma population. Throughout history, the Roma have experienced institutionalized exclusion, including slavery, which this text refers to as “categorical exclusion”. Even though these explicit forms of exclusion have been abolished, there is still evidence of “social exclusion” as a continuation of earlier institutionalized servitude. To understand and address the mechanisms that perpetuate inequality, it is crucial to critically [...]

It is well known that tuberculosis (TB) damages the physical body. Less known is the fact that the body is frequently damaged by one or more of the many side effects of TB drugs. What is even less recognized, including among doctors, is that this multi-layered damage often lasts long after a person is cured and may be irreversible. In this article I will discuss hearing loss and other sequelae (aftereffects of a disease or injury) caused by tuberculosis and its treatment and experienced by people in Romania. I argue that these harms change TB survivors’ sense of self, and [...]

In this reflective paper, I delve into the moral evaluation process carried out by emergency department (ED) triage workers in Romania as they grapple with the rising demand for emergency care. Adopting a symbolic interactionist approach, I scrutinize how triage staff assess patients’ entitlement to and deservingness of care, with a focus on the intricate dynamics of this assessment process. My long-term fieldwork at the EDs of two public hospitals exposed that moral evaluation arises from the pragmatic necessity of dissuading patients from seeking ED services for issues that could be addressed by primary care providers. Since current policies prevent [...]

How does intra-European transnational labor migration in agriculture change the material and status conditions of the most underprivileged groups living in the European peripheries from which this labor originates? How do the dominant groups react? While a rich literature looks at transnational labor migration from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, there is still room for research on the ethic relations that structure these flows as well as on the material effects that it has in communities of extreme marginality such as that of the rural Roma. Illustration by Andra Badeahttps://theanthro.art/roma-seasonal-migration-and-its-effects-in-romanian-rural-communities-valer-simion-cosma/ [...]

“I haven’t held you in my arms, but I feel you. I haven’t talked with you, but I hear you. I haven’t met you, but I love you. Your absence is like the sky: present everywhere.” In Romania, women who unexpectedly lose a fetus or newborn baby with whom they had imagined a life-long bond often experience deeply-felt emptiness and loneliness. Their experience is made worse by the silence and misrecognition they encounter in their social surroundings. This article describes women’s painful interactions with the medical system, the Orthodox Church and the people in their personal networks. It shows not [...]

Transparency and accountability are fundamental for modern democracies but grassroots governance depends upon social and cultural systems of knowledge which often raise serious barriers to information and political participation. Ethnographic fieldwork in a Romanian village shows how a culture of secrecy and deception permeates social interactions from everyday life to the workings of local politicians and administrators. Information about corruption and abuse of power becomes hidden and distorted when political leaders behave just like everyone else in the village: they protect shady deals and patronage using the epistemic advantage offered by technocratic knowledge and the haze of rumours and gossip.Illustration [...]

Most ethnographic research projects are conducted during the day. But how suitable is such a work schedule in global cities that operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, or where potential interlocutors work during the night? Researching at night, as I found out, is not very suitable. So for some time now, but especially while researching the labour opportunities of migrant manual workers in London, I have been developing a set of methods for doing ethnographic research during the night. I started from classic ethnographic methods, such as participatory observation and free or semi-structured conversation and then used [...]

The desire to have a lighter skin color and the efforts to achieve it are rarely just purely individual choices based on personal style and preferences. Rather the ideal(ized) tones of women’s skin (in Bali and elsewhere) hint at social hierarchies and structures created through and perpetuated by skin color, both in the colonial past and nowadays. In this piece, I present the costs that young women in Bali pay to feel like meaningful beings in a global cultural context where the skin color they’re born with is frequently judged as “dirty” or associated with “backwardness.” Next, looking at my [...]

Ami and Izabela are friends. One is an ethnic Romanian and a PhD candidate in anthropology, the other, thirteen years her junior, is an ethnic Roma and an undergraduate student. Their friendship took off when Ami was doing her field research about kinship among Roma. Izabela was fresh out of high school at the time; she taught Ami the Romani language and answered all her questions about Roma (even the silly ones). While she was explaining the world she had been raised in, with its practices and values, to the researcher that had moved in with her family, Izabela started [...]

In the last greater than thirty years, the work lives of blue-collar people in Galați, Romania has fundamentally changed. After decades of state-guaranteed employment, many starting in the 1990s were forced into early retirement or made redundant when industrial units were privatized and restructured or closed entirely. Local options for training and re-employment in the industrial sector were few, forcing many to either migrate outside Romania for work, or accept positions in the city with many disadvantages, including low wages, limited benefits, rigid work schedules and inferior working conditions. Embracing an approach applied by Rothstein during 40 years of study [...]

The segregation and poverty of the Roma have been debated for the last thirty years in Romania and some other Eastern European countries. Academic research was conducted to better understand the conditions of Roma discrimination, poverty, and segregation, while applied programs were designed and implemented to improve their standing in the society. Despite the existing debates, applied projects, and governmental programs, the overall situation of the people living in segregated Roma “ghettos” has largely remained unchanged, with people living in poor conditions, being often illiterate, discriminated against, and unemployed. Many of these people, however, got tired of waiting for the [...]

Political ecology examines the relations between communities and the environment, with a focus on the postcolonial world. Reports about human-nature interactions in geographically exotic contexts have fascinated western audiences from the very beginning. Political ecology brings an important critical dimension connected to how postcolonial politics generates social and ecological crises. Extrapolating and adapting political ecology outside the Global South is particularly challenging. The ways in which political power, economic interests, social hierarchies, as well as culture or ideologies contribute to the construction of the environment remain less discussed in Eastern Europe. The political ecology of the European periphery points to [...]

This article invites the reader to follow seemingly unrelated paths towards the same goal: making sense of what it means to be human in a world that casually blends discourses on nature, technology, and biology having at their centre the ideas of progress, optimization, and their capitalization. Within this type of current thinking, the challenges posed by climate change could be addressed technologically, the dream of ecological capitalism could continue ad infinitum, and Artificial Intelligence would be instrumental in fulfilling this promise. A closer look at the politics of optimization within and outside managerial perspectives may teach us otherwise: one [...]

At the end of a frustrating work duty, I asked Iosif, the foreman of a Romanian rail repair crew, what would have happened had his team not managed to mend the broken suspension of a cargo wagon. A routine task, replacing the part had turned into a taxing six-hour long toil: the workers had to use scavenged parts, makeshift tools and improvised fixes that one does not learn from any technical handbook. “There’s no such thing as ‘can’t’ in the Romanian Railroads!” he replied. His answer, equally fatalistic and boastful, eloquently captured the plight of state-run rails in Romania, and, [...]

From the late 1700s to 2016, when it became an urban nature park, Văcărești Pit was a mixture of wastelands and modernization projects on the southern fringes of Bucharest. While always integrated in the productive and power circuits of the city, the area was also a spatial and temporal gap: created by invoking, dismantling, and re-appropriating parts of the past, as well as imagining different futures[1]. Around Văcărești Pit, real estate developers, people displaced from their homes, ecologists, politicians, visitors, passers-by, scientists, hopes, fears, fantasies, “casino capitalism,”[2] wild animals, and plants have gathered from all over the city. All these [...]

Nowadays fossil-based plastics are ubiquitous. They are in our clothes, buildings, cars, and roads. Accumulations of very small pieces of plastics, called micro-plastics and nano-plastics, are present everywhere in nature and various organisms, including humans, with effects whose gravity we are only now beginning to understand. In addition, fossil-based plastics are almost indestructible, being considered the “new immortals,” next to other man-made materials such as cement or radioactive waste. Then, in our “plasticized” world, how do we relate to plastics and how do we learn to approach its dangerous and almost eternal presence? These are some of the questions of [...]

This text inventories some of the ecological consequences of city lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic and discusses critically their uneven distribution and ways in which social groups experienced them. The discussion includes a critical approach to extractive capitalism, which relies on continuous exploitation of natural resources and reproduction of social inequalities. Read by actor Daniel Popa , with an illustration by CO+LOR Constantin Cojocaru și Loreta Isachttps://theanthro.art/the-political-ecology-of-locked-down-cities-lucian-vesalon/ [...]

Multispecies studies is a field that was born out of the pressures generated by questioning the centrality of the human in a number of disciplines (anthropology, philosophy, history, feminist studies, ecology, art), by normalizing and extending questions and interests in ethics and power relations, and especially in the immediate, visible materiality of a world in the midst of destruction. Multispecies studies ask for a cultivation of attention as a practice of being in the world, as a purposeful and assumed immersion, a practical recognition of the multitude of relationships through which we and others—other species—semiotically and materially co-construct our worlds. [...]

There is increasing public awareness and debate surrounding the relationship between the environment and human society, specifically focusing on the human-nature dichotomy. The essay draws on various fields such as environmental anthropology, social ecology, environmental humanities, and other social sciences to explore the idea of natural and social interdependence. The text also presents arguments from the author’s doctoral research to reveal how the natural and social are interconnected and argues that a new direction in socio-ecological research is crucial in today’s context. During the industrialization period, nature was viewed as separate and disconnected from human life. However, traditional societies have [...]

Football can be more than a sport. Obviously, playing football can help improve the health of city dwellers. Accessible pitches, modernized facilities, or well-trained coaches can harness the sport’s popularity to get people to play it. But there is a further effect of football to consider. The beautiful game can strongly contribute to repairing the social health of the cities we live in. The football pitch has a unique ability to bring together people from different social backgrounds. Unfortunately, in twenty-first-century Bucharest, the chances that people from diverse backgrounds interact on the neighborhood football pitches are almost null. The rental [...]

Glovo, Uber, or Bolt are just some of the names that have become known in Romania in a very short time, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. But a less discussed phenomenon is what it means to be a delivery person or a courier when your manager is an algorithm that monitors your every move and checks you at every step. In other words, what does it mean to be a worker on a digital platform and part of the “platform economy”? Are these workers really their own bosses? And do they really work when and as much [...]

Two years, seven evictions, almost 300 people for whom the only prospect of housing after eviction was the street. The structural violence in Bucharest is as subtle in its manifestations as it is obvious when we look at the city’s evictions. For the evictees, the waiting lists for social housing provide the dramatic dimension of their lack of agency to claim their right to the city. For two years I have been among some of Bucharest’s evictees to understand the mechanisms and the powerlessness of poverty, the state’s stubborn retreat into savage neo-liberal housing policies, and the criminalisation of poverty [...]

Tens of thousands of workers are currently employed in factories in the Baia Mare area. Most factories are greenfield projects, while old industrial sites in Baia Mare have been abandoned. Most employees working in furniture, mattresses, clothing and footwear producing factories receive a minimum wage for full-time work. The young and “disciplined” employees manage to supplement their minimum wage by working overtime or doing additional shifts, depending on the employer’s needs. Some resort to seasonal work abroad in order to ensure their families’ survival. The factories in question are a precarious link within the capitalist circuit, operating as outsourced factories [...]

This piece looks at how Romania’s forests were destroyed by illegal logging after the Revolution of 1989. Based on my book Disrupted Landscapes. State, Peasants and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania (2016)*, this piece sheds light on the actors involved in illegal logging activities, the political and economic mechanisms at work, and the devastating effects on the forests.Rudari, a traditionally poor, marginal minority population that is becoming increasingly so in the postsocialist context, take on the role of scapegoats for large-scale logging done by Romanians. The majority Romanian population—the owners of the disappearing forests—fail to acknowledge that the [...]