AnthroArt

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 rel...

“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 misrecogn...

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 politi...

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 worke...

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 wom...

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...

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...

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, a...

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. Extrapola...

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 technol...

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 hand...

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 fu...

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 c...

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 Po...

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. Multisp...

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 argumen...

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 foot...

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 pl...

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...

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...

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 tr...

Sensitivity to certain smells is in fact simply a mask of privilege. The significance of a particular smell is not discovered by differentiating it from other smells (there are no independent forms/means to encode these distinctions) but by discriminating the contexts in which a particular smell has value. The social dimension of scent is learned through the hegemonic discourses of a particular sp...