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Street Life, Value and Exchange in a Poor Neighborhood of Bucharest STREET LIFE, VALUE AND EXCHANGE IN A POOR NEIGHBORHOOD OF BUCHAREST by Gergő Pulay Submitted to Central European University Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisors: Dr. Vlad Naumescu Dr. Violetta Zentai CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2017 1 Statement I hereby state that this dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions. The dissertation also does not contain any materials previously written or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgement is made in the form of bibliographical reference. Gergő Pulay, Budapest, 30 September CEU eTD Collection 2 Acknowledgements This dissertation is the outcome of a prolonged period of research both in the sense of ethnographic fieldwork as an academic inquiry and as a quest for the meaning of life. A full list of persons who made contributions to my efforts (together with the necessary comments) would be perhaps as long as one of the Chapters. Therefore I limit the list of persons here especially to those who were present and who supported me during the very difficult period of writing-up, my return to the academic scene (to CEU especially) and who helped me to maintain the belief that I have something to meaningful to say: Ana Chiritoiu, Calin Cotoi, Pinar Donmez, Razvan Dumitru, Judit Durst, Margit Feischmidt, Martin Fotta, Laszlo Foszto, Agnes Gagyi, Attila Hegedus, Jan Grill, Mariya Ivancheva, Cecilia Kovai, Vlad Naumescu, Attila Melegh, Florin Poenaru, Prem Kumar Rajaram, Michael Stewart, Catalina Tesar, Violetta Zentai, and my parents and family. I‟m also grateful to all the participants of debates on the Chapters, including those who attended the workshops held in 2016 at the Institute for Minority Studies (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Centre for Social Sciences). CEU eTD Collection 3 Table of Contents Statement ...................................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... 3 Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction: The poverty of poverty research ............................................................................ 6 Fieldwork encounters ................................................................................................................ 6 We are Ferentarists! .................................................................................................................. 9 Street, household and value .................................................................................................... 25 The main concepts of the dissertation ..................................................................................... 30 Towards an urban ethnography of marginality in Bucharest .................................................. 34 Outline of the dissertation ....................................................................................................... 40 Chapter 1. Crisis, stigma and resemblance ................................................................................. 43 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 43 In a castle under siege ............................................................................................................. 45 What Madonna said ................................................................................................................ 52 Scales, fear and intimacy ........................................................................................................ 60 Romanians and Gypsies: civilization and its discontents ....................................................... 68 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 71 Chapter 2. A history of urban marginality in Bucharest ............................................................. 73 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 73 The metonymic mahala and the urban margins in a “city of contrasts” ................................. 76 CEU eTD Collection The relegations of the dispossessed ........................................................................................ 84 “It was a field” ........................................................................................................................ 89 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 93 4 Chapter 3. The Civilized, the Vagabond, the Player and the Fool ............................................. 97 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 97 Texas, Bronx, Romania ........................................................................................................... 98 Being civilized ...................................................................................................................... 107 Being a player ....................................................................................................................... 114 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 123 Chapter 4. „I‟m good but also mad‟: The street economy in a poor Neighbourhood of Bucharest .................................................................................................................................................. 126 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 126 The neighbourhood with the greatest traffic ......................................................................... 129 Madness and silent armament ............................................................................................... 133 Collaboration and combination ............................................................................................. 143 The interstitial and the illicit ................................................................................................. 145 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 148 Chapter 5. The management of precarity ................................................................................. 150 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 150 Precarity: livelihood, suffering and autonomy ...................................................................... 151 The work of hope .................................................................................................................. 154 Street vending and scrap metal trade .................................................................................... 162 Traders and junkies ............................................................................................................... 171 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 178 Concluding remarks .................................................................................................................. 181 List of references ...................................................................................................................... 191 CEU eTD Collection 5 Introduction: The poverty of poverty research I am the global crisis/All my wealth is from abroad/Yes, yes, yes, money from America/England and Spain (...) I am the most evil disease/With the financial crisis/ (...) Don‟t pretend to me that you are great/‟Cause yours are only empty words/I give you the financial crisis/Bigger than any disease/ (...)/ I shoved all in crisis/Yes, yes, yes, as you put the plug in/I ate them on bread/So that they will remember me. Babi Minune: I am the global crisis (2009)1 Fieldwork encounters What is the peculiar power that peripheries and their marginal subjects exert onto centres to which they are subordinated or onto other respectable places from where the process of civilization is supposed to emanate? What are the practices of symbolic and material exchange or mimicry that are mutually constitutive for the agents who belong to these seemingly antagonistic locations? The present dissertation draws on these questions in order to provide an urban CEU eTD Collection ethnography of a marginal neighbourhood of Bucharest which is widely imagined as an ultimate „ghetto‟, or „Gypsyland‟ (ţiganie) not only in town, but also well beyond it, and which is 1 For the original lyrics, see: http://versmuzica.ro/versuri-muzica/manele/babi-minune-criza-mondiala/ 6 consistently depicted as a source of fear and threat for social order in Romania‟s capital city. In less heated terms, however, the neighbourhood can be described as a rural-urban buffer-zone, where the local presence
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