„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 EP40969
- DOI -
- Views 161
- Downloads 0
When stuff gets covered in fluff in order to build up a paradoxical existence
Living immaterially in an over-materialized world seems to have become one of today’s paradoxes. More and more often what can’t be touched looks like getting greater “weight” than palpable things, commonly known as stu...
Destinations without regulations: Informal practices in Romanian rural tourism
This article is an ethnographic account of the informal practices I encountered during my fieldwork in three touristic destinations in the Romanian countryside. In these places, as in other parts of rural Romania, over...
“Just because they’re lies doesn’t mean they’re not true”: Learning and transmission of lies among storytellers
In diverse rural communities located near the borders separating Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, traditional storytellers known as contadores de causos use lying as a strategy for their performances. Their legitimacy as...
Follow me on academia.edu: analysis of a distraction online and of its consequences on daily life
The narration of a story is a work half-way between the real and the virtual, the factual and the functional. The request to join a social network sent to 281 people is a pretext to reflect on what happens in the world...
Rus, Alin. (2007) The mineriads: between political manipulation and workers’ solidarity – foreword by Ruxandra Cesereanu, introduction by John Glendhill, Bucharest, Curtea Veche
Jiu Valley and the miners have represented for the Romanian society a continuous point of returning and this time the author suggests that an ingression in the recent history of Romania should be made through the instr...