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 prices or the costs of football training for children are prohibitive for a significant number of people, with this leading to a very high level of homogeneity of the sport. As my research on Bucharest’s neighborhood stadiums shows, things have went downhill at great speed after 1989. In this regard, the city has a lot to learn from its recent past. A number of the small-sized workers’ stadiums built in Bucharest’s areas of blocks during communism used to work as informal neighborhood centers where residents would gather not only to play football but also to spend their leisure time together, relax, and socialize. Girueta is possibly the most vivid example of this. Unfortunately, the former stadium located in Bucharest’s neighborhood of Berceni, where you could once see people sunbathing in the stands or kids playing in the shade of the tall poplar trees surrounding it, is gone. On the now vacant lot, a supermarket is said to soon take its place.

Read by actor Daniel Popa, with an illustration by Ferenczy András

https://theanthro.art/children-of-girueta-and-the-wastelands-of-football-for-all/

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 as they want? In this text and podcast, I talk about the lives of night workers hired by online ordering platforms and transport and courier services in big cities like Bucharest, Brașov, Cluj, Iași, and Timișoara, the so-called “siliconised cities.” Bolt or Uber drivers are the people who work “behind the scenes” 24/7 (twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week). But those who work in a different temporal rhythm, nocturnal, are invisible to the majority of society who work during the day. That is why nightshift workers have a low sense of the value of their services compared to workers in professional jobs in Romania, and they feel a lack of respect from consumers who use their services. In other words, I will tell you about the inequalities that appear and deepen in the social fabric of the “siliconised cities.”

Read by actor Daniel Popa, with an illustration by Andrei Nicolescu

https://theanthro.art/promises-and-realities-working-on-digital-platforms-julius-cezar-macquarie/

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 to the extent that, for urban poor, the very right to a family is challenged.

Read by actress Katia Pascariu, with an illustration by Andreea Moise

https://theanthro.art/uncitizenship-through-evictions/

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 for large Western companies – the largest by production volume and number of employees being Ikea. The experience of managers and workers in these factories shows how factories and employees alike are in an extremely vulnerable and volatile position. Their bargaining power is minimal, while constant concessions are essential for survival.

Read by actress Katia Pascariu, with an illustration by Sorina Vazelina

https://theanthro.art/reindustrialization-labor-and-precariousness-in-romania/

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 true economic beneficiaries of deforestation are the local bureaucrats and politicians. The piece draws on extensive research in the village of Dragomirești, Argeș County (the names of the village and the interlocutors quoted were changed to ensure their protection), from 2014 to 2016—over twelve months of fieldwork in total—and a research methodology that combines ethnography, archival research, and satellite imagery. * Ștefan Dorondel, Disrupted Landscapes. State, Peasants and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania, Oxford and New York, Berghahn, 2016

Read by actor Daniel Popa , with an illustration by Kadna Anda

https://theanthro.art/an-ethnography-of-disappearing-forests/

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 space and historical framework—as early as childhood, we learn which smells are pleasant and which are stigmatized. Smell thus becomes an index of one’s position in the social hierarchy. Scents connect (and separate) individuals immediately, without the generalized and conventional forms of consciousness, morality, or aesthetics. It is not an entirely conscious act; an odour repulses us and instantly triggers judgments of value. What happens, however, if we try to filter through the lens of rationality the reasons why certain olfactory essences are socially regarded as pleasant or as potentially dangerous?

Article by Ruxandra Păduraru, illustrated by Simina Popescu, read by Katia Pascariu,

https://theanthro.art/the-construction-of-an-olfactory-other/