AnthroArt

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 a type of body-mediated ethnography. I used various digital applications and cyber tools to monitor, evaluate, and translate into infographics both my own sensory experiences and the participants in my research. After a year in New Spitalfields, a night market in London, I understood in my own body how precarity takes a corporeal form. In this piece, I therefore try to articulate in writing the bodily experiences of pain and exhaustion along with the isolation and social alienation from both society and their own families that these night workers feel night after night. Through this mode of night-time body-mediated ethnography, my contribution to the specialist discussions about the precariousness of manual labour conditions consists in pointing out the aspects of the highest degree of existential precariousness.

Read by actor Daniel Popa , with an illustration by Alex Săvescu

https://theanthro.art/the-nightshift-julius-cezar-macquarie/

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 experience as a “white” woman in Bali (and at the consumer habits of Westerners who save money the entire year to get tanned on the beaches of places like Bali), I intend to show how the bodies of women who think of themselves as “modern,” are also subjected to beauty standards regarding skin color. As a closing reflection, I bring up the privilege of white Romanian women to be “cosmopolitan” and able to choose to exoticize their skin through vacations at the beach, tanning products, or tanning beds. Behind this privilege lie hierarchies and social inequalities generated by skin color. Many Romanian Roma women are judged and disadvantaged, similarly (to some extent) to the Balinese women, because they were born with darker skin

Read by actress Katia Pascariu, with an illustration by Cristina Pîrvu, read by Katia Pascariu

https://theanthro.art/putih-bersih-cantik-white-clean-beautiful-tracing-beauty-and-color-among-women-in-bali-and-closer-to-home-romania/

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 to ask her own questions about the world Ami came from. A few years later, in the letters below, they talked about a recently published book written by a Spanish anthropologist, Paloma Gay y Blasco, together with her gitana friend, Liria Hernández, with whom Paloma had conducted her fieldwork many years before.[1] The book gave Ami and Izabela the opportunity to discuss about their own researcher – informant relationship and to sound out the blurry border between scientific interest and friendship, as well as to understand what it meant for a Romani woman to make her own choices and to become an individual while she belonged to such a tight-knit and rule-bound group as the one Liria belonged to. [1] Paloma Gay y Blasco and Liria Hernández, Writing Friendship. A Reciprocal Ethnography, “Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology” Series, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

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

https://theanthro.art/when-we-write-we-listen-to-ourselves-letters-from-the-imaginary-border-between-research-and-friendship/

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 in Mexico (2014), this contribution, which is based on a research interest of almost two decades in Galați, looks at the influence that the working lives of members of the working class have had on their material circumstances, social relations and political attitudes. The account explores the impact of changes in work on budgets for housing, health care, education and other basics within working-class families, with particular emphasis on the challenges fiscal austerity in the post-communist era has imposed. Transformations of social life within working-class families in Galați are also addressed. The social fragmentation generated by the need to migrate for a viable job is analyzed, as well as the influence of work in Galați on kinship and community relations at the local level. The political ramifications of job insecurity include mistrust of civil servants and a sense of abandonment by society, which can undermine the full consolidation of democracy in Romania.

Read by actor Daniel Popa , with an illustration by Andreea Moise

https://theanthro.art/material-social-and-political-implications-of-work-in-and-beyond-galati/

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 support promised by the Romanian state and looked for a better life abroad. In my ethnographic journey into the world of a poor Roma neighborhood, I look at the dimensions of this societal failure—the poverty and discrimination these people experience, but also how migration is becoming the main mechanism for the emancipation of this deprived population forgotten by the institutions of the Romanian state that should have helped them.

Read by actor Daniel Popa , with an illustration by Alex Săvescu

https://theanthro.art/migration-and-changing-expectations-in-a-roma-segregated-neighborhood-remus-gabriel-anghel/

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 multiple violations of environmental rights, as well as the environmental victimization of individuals and communities, especially marginalized ones. The political ecology of the European periphery is an alternative discourse that mobilizes the imagination of researchers and activists to find ways of organizing nature-society relations that are both more socially just and ecologically sustainable. Read by actor Daniel Popa, with an illustration by Andreea Chirică https://theanthro.art/the-political-ecology-of-the-european-periphery-lucian-vesalon/