„They took personal data and some pictures, yet they found nothing for us” – misunderstanding and suspicion in a marginal Roma neighborhood from Romania
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2012, Vol 3, Issue 2
Abstract
This paper claimed to reveal, that mistrust during fieldwork is more than an unpleasant individual experience: it is a telling ethnographic data. Repudiation of Gallilei Street ghetto residents was equally due to a wrong research question and some external factors. Postsocialist industrial restructuration and residential policies brought – likewise everywhere in Eastern Europe – insecurity to the one-time privileged working-class. To go further, unemployment entailed changes in residential patterns and echoed new forms of exclusion. The better-off workers, Roman and non-Roma, could – at least partly – maintain their previous conditions, but many were pushed to the fringes of the social structure. In lack of capital they cannot stand in the process of privatization, lost their rented apartments and become evicted. Others, coming as a second wave to an old block, were facing uncertain situation with property rights; decaying conditions – initially a cause of avoided privatization later an effect of it – turned the green building into a “Gypsy ghetto”. And ghettoization did not only entail impoverishment, but created dependency to local institution, claiming to do good to the locals. Mismatch with school and NGO, being used by many, promising to help the Roma, green block inhabitants look suspiciously to anyone resembling with such helpers.
Authors and Affiliations
Plainer Zsuzsa
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP161538
- DOI -
- Views 118
- Downloads 0
From land to sea: unsettling subjectivities
In this paper I trace an important conceptual shift which emerged during my fieldwork with fishermen in the South West of Ireland. I begin by describing how my role as a social researcher was interpreted as a valuable ‘b...
Flowerman
I am engaged in a project about reverie, using poetics and storytelling as my method. Where does one person’s reverie start and another’s end? What uses might anthropology have for reverie? Taking the form of a braided n...
Paratext and meaning-making in indie games
The essay discusses the role of paratext in framing players’ experience of videogames, focusing on the indie game scene and specifically examining three types of paratext: game title, game description, and the readme fil...
Fermeture sociale, différence et diversité: des enjeux identitaires
L’article se réfère à la notion de «fermeture sociale» en partant de la conceptualisation du Max Weber et, ensuite, en la problématisant à travers un commentaire sur les quatre articles publiés dans le numéro 1 / 2011 de...
Do those who play together stay together? The World of Warcraft community between play, practice and game design
In a time when video games are commonly blamed for anything from antisocial behavior, to the isolation and alienation of their users Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games have developed to provide one of the ulti...