CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Pulay, Gergo |
|---|---|
| Title | Street-life, Value and Exchange in a Poor Neighborhood of Bucharest |
| Summary | What is the peculiar power that peripheries and their marginal subjects exert onto centers 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 ethnography of a marginal neighborhood of Bucharest which is widely imagined as an ultimate ‘ghetto’, or ‘Gypsyland’ (ţiganie) not only in town, but also well beyond it, and, which, moreover, is consistently depicted as a source of fear and threat for social order in Romania’s capital city. In less heated terms, however, the neighborhood can be described as a rural-urban buffer-zone, where the reach of the local state has been sporadic throughout its history and where Roma and non-Roma Romanian inhabitants have been living together, and thereby share not only the territorial stigma attached to the place, but also ways of persistance, livelihoods, and notions of value, in material and non-material terms, that locals and outiders alike largely associate with this neighborhood as opposed to other parts of town. |
| Supervisor | Naumescu, Vlad; Zentai Violetta |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/pulay_gergo.pdf |
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