Textures of Belonging: Senses, Objects and Spaces of Romanian Roma [1 ed.] 2021005192, 2021005193, 9781800731370, 9781800731387

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Textures of Belonging

ROMANI STUDIES Edited by Sam Beck, Cornell University In the course of the twenty-first century, Europe has become aware that the Roma are its largest minority, with an estimated population of eleven million people. As a result, Romani Studies has emerged as an interdisciplinary field that offers perspectives derived from the humanities and social sciences in the context of state and transnational institutions. One of its aims is to remove the stigma surrounding Roma scholarship, to engage with the controversies regarding Roma identity and, in this way, counter anti-Roma racism.

Volume 4 TEXTURES OF BELONGING: SENSES, OBJECTS AND SPACES OF ROMANIAN ROMA Andreea Racleș Volume 3 THE ROMA AND THEIR STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE Edited by Huub van Baar and Angéla Kóczé Volume 2 INWARD LOOKING: THE IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON ROMANIPE FROM THE ROMANI PERSPECTIVE Aleksandar G. Marinov Volume 1 ROMA ACTIVISM: REIMAGINING POWER AND KNOWLEDGE Edited by Sam Beck and Ana Ivasiuc

TEXTURES OF BELONGING Senses, Objects and Spaces of Romanian Roma

Andreea Racleș

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2021 Andreea Racleș

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Racleș, Andreea, author. Title: Textures of belonging : senses, objects and spaces of Romanian Roma / Andreea Racleș. Description: New York : Berghahn, 2021. | Series: Romani studies ; volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005192 (print) | LCCN 2021005193 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800731370 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800731387 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Romanies—Romania—Social conditions. | Belonging (Social psychology)—Romania. | Group identity—Romania. | Odors—Social aspects— Romania. | Dwellings—Social aspects—Romania. | Romanies—Material culture. | Material culture—Romania. | Ethnology—Romania. Classification: LCC DX224 .R33 2021 (print) | LCC DX224 (ebook) | DDC 305.8914/970498—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005192 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005193

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-137-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-138-7 ebook

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1 PART I. MATERIALITIES OF BELONGING

Chapter 1. Ethics and Attempts

25

Chapter 2. Aesthetic Presences

49

Chapter 3. Modernising Absences

69

Chapter 4. Home Textures

83

Chapter 5. Tastes of Home

107

PART II. SENSES OF (NON-)BELONGING Chapter 6. Olfactory Politics and Everyday Racism

125

Chapter 7. (De)Constructions of ‘Olfactory Alterities’

138

Chapter 8. Writing Smells

152

Chapter 9. Manufacturing Smells

168

Conclusion. Sensing (Non-)Belonging

181

References

197

Index

210

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES Figure 0.1. The ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ wall-carpet.

15

Figure 1.1. The train line.

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Figure 1.2. Room prepared for the liming session.

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Figure 2.1. Thinner fabrics.

51

Figure 2.2. Thicker fabrics.

52

Figure 2.3. Domestic setting.

53

Figure 2.4. A half carpet on the floor at the Carols’.

55

Figure 2.5. Wall-carpet on the floor.

59

Figure 3.1. ‘Modern’ renovations.

73

Figures 4.1 and 4.2. Stuff to be sent to Romania.

97

Figure 4.3. The ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ wall-carpet in Guernica.

98

TABLES Table 4.1. The rate of severe material deprivation per Romanian Development Region.

87

Table 4.2. The share of population at risk of poverty or social exclusion per Romanian Development Region.

87

Tables 4.3. Number of people who changed their locality of residence per Romanian Development Region.

88

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people without whom the idea of writing this book would not have materialised. My deep appreciation goes to my research participants whose voices, objects, senses and knowledge constitute the heart of this book. I thank all those who made time for me, who spoke to me or did not and for their trust or distrust, which were just as thought-provoking. Enormous thanks to the Roma family that hosted me in Rotoieni and to Mihaela. I will never be able to pay back the support and inspiration that I received from them. I am grateful to Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Andreas Langenohl, my two supervisors at Justus Liebig University, for their guidance through the different stages of my research. Their invaluable advice has been crucial in the development of my thinking about knowledge production. I also wish to convey my gratitude to Colin Clark who was part of my dissertation committee and whose remarks have been particularly enriching. For their continuing interest in my work, encouragement to write this book and for their friendship, I thank Andreea Cârstocea, Raul Cârstocea and Ana Ivasiuc. I extend my gratitude to Angéla Kóczé, Maarit Forde, Snezana Vuletic, Stella Basinyi, Veronika Zink and Blair Biggar who read different parts of my writing and made valuable comments. Any remaining errors are mine only. Furthermore, I am thankful to Ana Chirițoiu, Cătălina Tesăr, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka and Martin Fotta who commented on my work in its different stages and forms. Equal thanks go to the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) for the three-year scholarship (2013–2016) and for the funding that made possible my field research. I gratefully acknowledge the important source of support and continuous learning that the community of fellow doctoral students at the Institute of Sociology ( Justus Liebig University) and at the GCSC has been throughout the different research and writing phases. I also wish to thank the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (Uni-

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

versity of Bielefeld) for the Start-Up scholarship which preceded my GCSC membership (April–September 2013). I would like to pay my gratitude to Vintilă Mihăilescu who was one of the main reasons I wanted to study the master’s programme in anthropology at the National School of Political and Administrative Studies (Bucharest). Sadly, he passed away in March 2020. Professor Mihăilescu’s insightful comments on my master’s thesis have guided me ever since and inspired me in the process of writing this book. I am indebted to all my friends and family. Warm thanks go to Ana Migowski, Marah Theuerl and Maria Cristache whose camaraderie made my life in Germany and my writing process easier. Enormous thanks to my parents, Carmen and Constantin Racleș, and to my brother, Bogdan Racleș, who have always supported and trusted me. I am equally grateful to my aunt and uncle, Mariela and Vasilică Tamba, who significantly helped me throughout the months that I spent in Rotoieni. A special thanks to my life partner, Douglas Neander Sambati, who moved to a new country so that I could complete my research, read various drafts of this book and constructively criticised them. Last but not least, I wish to thank all those involved in the editorial process, as well as the reviewers who assessed the book proposal and the manuscript, whose suggestions helped me to refine the insights offered by this book.

INTRODUCTION

This book is about ways of negotiating, contesting and attaining (or not attaining) belonging. It scopes out how these engagements are materialised and sensorially experienced in the everyday. The focus falls on how inhabited and transited spaces, material objects and household practices assist Roma from north-eastern Romania in negotiating belonging, allowing commonalities to surface. While the ways in which Roma throughout Europe produce distinctiveness against the backdrop of their coexistence with non-Roma have been well documented, forms and vocabularies of ‘belonging together’ (cf. Pfaff-Czarnecka 2012: 13–14) that emerge in these encounters have not been explored thoroughly. Following approaches that call for the need to investigate what people have in common more than what makes them different (Lemon 2000; Theodosiou 2010, 2011), the book focuses on modes of nurturing attachments to places and engaging with everyday materiality that do not point at differences but rather at the commonalities and similarities with non-Roma. This requires a destabilisation of the clear-cut distinctions between Roma and non-Roma socialities which have been prevalent in Roma-focused sociocultural analyses that tended to picture Roma as committed carriers of alternative ways of living, moralities and aesthetics. Yet the book does not gloss over the dynamics that have been constituting the different Roma we-collectives ‘as racialised subordinated Europeans’ for centuries (Kóczé 2018a: 460; see also Yıldız and De Genova 2017). These dynamics have historically relied on the construction of Roma bodies, spaces and lives as being ‘behind the times’ due to individuals’ inability to cope, as it were, with a continually progressing world. In this sense, this book examines negotiations of belonging in relation to an inescapable urge to belong to ‘modern times’ as manifested by the people with whom I did research in Rotoieni,1 a town in north-eastern Romania. As such, negotiating and sensing (non-)belonging entails a constant tension between the (lack of ) recognition and investments in an ontologically unattainable status.

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Framing the Materiality of Belonging ‘They want to modernise us’, a woman told me during one of my first visits to the southern Romanian village where I carried out field research among Ursari Roma for my master’s degree in anthropology (2009–2011). ‘They’ were a non-governmental organisation that was implementing a housing project for people on the outskirts of the village, most of whom had a Roma background. In our conversation about household practices, the woman – Manuela – mentioned that, since the project had ‘come’ to the area, she and her neighbours had also (like everybody else in the village) started using water-based emulsion paint to bleach the interior walls of their houses. I was told that the whitewash, which people had formerly preferred, was no longer what people used to bleach the internal walls of their houses. ‘We also have to be like the others, don’t we?’ Manuela asked rhetorically. This conversation and similar ones that I had a few years later (2014– 2015) in Rotoieni prompted my interest in negotiations, enactments and discourses related to dynamics that I interpreted in terms of belonging. ‘I am fascinated by people’s tenacious investment in seeking common grounds’, writes sociologist Anne Marie Fortier (2000: 1) about Italians in Britain with whom she conducted research about ‘performative belongings’. Manuela’s tag question triggered in me a similar preoccupation with the Roma people’s quest for ‘terrains of commonality’ (Theodosiou 2011: 94) with the nonRoma they live with. Commonality refers to ‘the sharing of some common attribute’ and is interlinked with ‘a feeling of belonging together’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 20). Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka writes that commonality, as the perception of sharing certain attributes,2 is: individually felt and embodied while collectively negotiated and performed. Commonality is often perceived through a social boundary-horizon that helps discern between the insiders and the outsiders. It thus relies on categorisations, mental checkpoints, everyday-life distinctions and public representations that often buttress boundary maintenance. This is precisely where commonality is likely to attain the form of collective identity that requires the other/the outside for engendering a perception of internal sameness. (2011: 202)

My interest in belonging and people’s quest for commonality is not primarily related to the maintenance of in-group boundaries, much less with ways of nurturing a ‘collective identity’. Instead, I am interested in exploring relationalities and the everyday fabric of these relationalities that point at the porosity of categorisations and negotiability of boundaries. Following Elspeth Probyn, who stresses the importance of exploring ‘forms of belonging outside of the divisiveness of categorizing’ (1996: 10),

INTRODUCTION

3

this book explores negotiations of belonging across socio-politically crafted categorisations, rather than belonging within boundaries that demarcate categories. This book relies on the understanding of belonging as ‘a profoundly affective manner of being, always performed with the experience of being within and inbetween sets of social relations’ (Probyn 1996: 13). Manuela finds herself ‘within and inbetween sets of social relations’ that comprise at least the relation with the people representing the housing NGO, with her Roma neighbours living in proximity, with her non-Roma and other Roma neighbours in the village, as well as with anyone else imagined by Manuela to bleach their walls with the new water-based emulsion paint. It is from this multi-relational entangled position that Manuela bleaches her walls like the others do, thus revealing the ‘minuteness of movement that occurs in the everyday process of articulation’ (Probyn 1996: 6). ‘Movement’ does not refer here to the transit of physical distances, but to the non-fixity of belonging and its performative character (Fortier 1999, 2000; see also Bell 1999). The introduction of movement in our thinking about belonging is meant to counteract ‘the fixity of the categorical logic of identity’ and to trigger more attention to the ‘wish to belong’ (Probyn 1996: 9). This approach ‘disrupts belonging as a taken-for granted, pre-discursive, un-reflexive, and stable condition’ (Antonsich 2010: 652). But despite the emphasis on movement and unfixity, the concreteness of belonging is far from being obscured in feminist accounts. The concern with individuals’ ‘engagement with the tangible’ and their ‘devotion to trying to realize the virtual as the actual’ is central in Probyn’s theorisation of ‘outside belongings’ (1996: 6). Inspired by this work, Fortier underlines that belonging is necessarily ‘constituted through both movement and attachment’3 (2000: 2; see also 1999). These are central concerns for the chapters in the first part of this book, in which I discuss ways of making and sensing belonging through domestic practices and food. Attachment to practices, places, localities and collective values has been frequently stressed in sociological and socio-anthropological inquiries of belonging (Anthias 2006; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011, 2012; Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2005; Theodosiou 2011; YuvalDavis 2009, 2011). Pfaff-Czarnecka argues that attachment (both material and immaterial) is one of the main dimensions of belonging, along with performance/perception of commonality and a sense of mutuality (PfaffCzarnecka 2011, 2012). From this perspective, attachments ‘are intensified through material possessions (one’s own belongings) as well as through immaterial connections – for instance, to fields, pastures, houses, and ritual sites’ (Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011: xxi).

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The emphasis on attachments is one of the aspects that supported PfaffCzarnecka’s and others’ attempts to distinguish between belonging and identity as different analytical categories. It has been argued that, compared to belonging that captures relationalities, identity is conducive to polarisation (Anthias 2006: 20) and fuels ‘dichotomous characterisations of the social’ (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011: 203), thus denominating a ‘separate and self-contained set of properties and possessions’ (Theodosiou 2011: 101). What qualifies belonging to circumvent the ‘residual elements of essentialisation’ (Anthias 2006: 20) is its concern with the multiplicity of material and immaterial attachments. Thinking about belonging in terms of material and immaterial attachments brings in a concern with the emotional implications of belonging. The importance of emotional investments has been highlighted in relation to a feeling of being at home (Antonsich 2010; Christensen 2009; PfaffCzarnecka 2011; Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011; Yuval-Davis 2009, 2011). Importantly, this emphasis on the emotional dimension points at formations of belonging as embodied, thus being less cognitive than constructions of identity that require conscious and purposeful decisions regarding the content and form of representations (Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011: xvii). Despite this increased attention paid to emotional attachments and investments,4 we know little about how the human sensorium – that is, the bodily capacity to see, hear, smell, touch, taste – mediates people’s attachments and enables their quest for commonality. Based on an empirically informed inquiry, this book seeks to narrow this gap by introducing the lens of sensed belonging. Throughout the chapters, the book sheds light on Roma individuals’ capabilities, everyday efforts and embodied knowledge invested in forging grounds for commonality and making homes in concrete terms: renovating a house, demolishing and reconstructing parts of a dwelling, bleaching the walls and preparing the emulsion paint (chapters 1 and 9), drilling the walls and hanging or removing wall-carpets (chapters 2, 3 and 4) and cleaning the house and engaging in doings that preclude undesired smells from expanding (chapters 8 and 9). And these are examples of what the notion of texture denotes in this book: more or less versatile concrete surfaces and, more generally, materialities that frame the immaterial sensorial qualities of everyday spaces. Hence, sensed belonging is about ‘the minuteness of the social surface’ (Probyn 1996: 20) and the everyday sensorial deployment involved in ‘being/becoming like the others’, as Manuela put it. In developing the notion of sensed belonging (and, as I show later, nonbelonging), I follow sociological and anthropological scholarship that analysed and sought to compensate for the neglect of senses in social research. As Mason and Davies (2009: 587) put it, ‘In ordinary and everyday ways, the senses are part of human life and of the experience of what Ingold calls “in-

INTRODUCTION

5

volvement in the world” (2000: 258), and thus it would seem at the very least peculiar to filter that reality out of our social scientific ways of knowing the world’. In addition to accounts showing how the senses mediate processes of emplacement and the development of attachments to locality and the urban space (e.g. Law 2001; O’Neill and Hubbard 2010; Wise 2011), this book is also inspired by perspectives of human geography that reveal the embodied and sensuous character of these attachments (Brickell and Datta 2011; Conradson and Mckay 2007; Fenster 2005; Gorman-Murray 2009). Yet the main scale that this book focuses on is the immediate scale of the domestic space. Material attachment and ways of engaging with domestic materiality as a part of processes of negotiating belonging have been dealt with in material culture literature, often providing ethnographic accounts of the intersection of homemaking processes with class, gender and ethnicity (Clarke 2001; Garvey 2005; Miller 2001; Rosales 2010). In this book, materiality refers to ‘how people make sense of the world through physical objects’ (Attfield 2000: 1) and to the capacity of objects, buildings and places to trigger or maintain people’s sense of belonging (Fortier 1999, 2000; Leach 2003; May 2011; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2005). Household objects and infrastructure (which includes walls, fences or furniture) are not lethargic manipulable material forms. As ‘extensions of the senses’ (Howes 2006a: 166), these tangible forms have sensorial and material qualities due to which ‘we are able to unpick the more subtle connections with cultural lives and values’ (Miller 1998: 9). More than acts of individual expressivity, making home often consists of acts of making, negotiating and enacting belonging. This book contributes to these debates with a view on belonging as a set of capabilities that enable people to make homes, to negotiate and engage in relations across material, immaterial or imagined differences. In doing so, Roma people are actively participating in the reproduction and reformation of ‘normative horizons’ (cf. Povinelli 2006) as well as of common reservoirs of values, moralities and urges that delineate between ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ standards of homemaking. This binary lay at the core of the enactments related to and discourses about selves and others in Rotoieni that I discuss in detail in chapters 2 and 3. The domestic space and the material entities that constitute it not only serve as the arena in which these enactments and investments happen, but also make them palpable and visible to create the premises for recognition. Recognition plays an important part in creating the conditions for the achievement of a sense of belonging (Roberman 2011: 42). As an ‘intersubjective experience’ (May 2011: 370), belonging requires other people to acknowledge someone’s place among them (Coleman and Collins 2011: 14). As Lund puts it, ‘one does not only locate oneself in a place but is also lo-

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cated by other people’ (2011: 120). Hence, acquiring a sense of belonging is neither solely agency-driven, nor merely structurally produced, but fuelled by relationalities (Anthias 2006; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011). While thinking about recognition, Manuela’s tag question – ‘We have to be like the others, don’t we?’ – comes again to mind. This signposts that acquiring recognition and attaining belonging requires compliance with collectively endorsed norms and values. Following Judith Butler (1993), Fortier highlights that performed belonging is about citations. Citations refer to ‘the invocation of convention’ (Butler 1993: 225) and the ‘reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer’ (Butler 1993: 234, cited in Fortier 2000: 5). If the ‘have’ from Manuela’s phrase reveals the constraint involved in the negotiation of belonging, ‘like the others’ epitomises the ‘invocation of convention’ and norm, and thus a quest for ordinariness in the name of commonality (May 2011: 368; Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011: xvii–xviii). People seek ordinariness ‘in order to “opt into” a range of shared practices and activities in a situation where the multiplicity of fields may pull them into separate practices’ (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2005: 11). In chapters 2 and 3 of this book, I discuss ways in which household objects (mainly wall-carpets) play active parts in people’s quest for and claim of ordinariness and ‘normality’.

Terminology and Field Sites The research in this book revolved around Rotoieni, a small town of fewer than ten thousand inhabitants located in Moldavia. According to the official figures provided by the local authorities in 2013, between 8 and 9 per cent of the town’s inhabitants are Roma. As for the group identification, the Roma from Rotoieni identify as ‘Ursari’.5 Being Ursar (singular) is often said to mean being ‘Romanianised Roma’, thus ‘more integrated’, as both Roma and non-Roma would put it (see chapters 2 and 3). Apart from self-identifying and being identified as Ursari, the words țigan (sing.) or țigani (pl.) were not absent from both Roma and non-Roma’s vocabularies. Ada Engebrigtsen argued that ‘țigan’ designates a position constituted through an asymmetric rapport and interdependency between Roma and non-Roma. In this sense, it is ‘a significant position in the Romanian figuration’ (Engebrigtsen 2007: 193). I employ the notion of ‘gypsiness’ along similar lines. Importantly, ‘gypsiness’ does not name a set of features ascribed to or assumed by people of Roma background and it is not an unfortunate equivalent to ‘Roma identity’. Rather, I understand ‘gypsiness’ as a racialised position ascribed primarily to Roma, historically constituted through the reproduction of stereotypes, naturalisation of socio-economic divides and perpetuation of

INTRODUCTION

7

power imbalances, which subjects Roma individuals to discourses and practices of oppression, marginalisation and dehumanisation. According to the Roma linguist Ian Hancock, the word ‘tsigan’ (and its other variations such as cigano or Zigeuner) was assigned during the Byzantine period, and derives from the Greek word atsinganoi, meaning ‘not to be touched’ (Hancock 2005: 1). Meanwhile, the word ‘Gypsy’ is ‘a name created by outsiders and is based upon a mistaken assumption’ that these people came from Egypt (2005: xviii). The term ‘Gypsy’ cannot be used as an equivalent or as a translation of ‘țigani’ because the two terms are rooted in different histories of oppression that had different manifestations throughout Europe. As Hancock shows, they have separate etymologies and emerged within different historical circumstances. While acknowledging the pejorative and racialising connotations of the Romanian word ‘țigani’ (see Matache 2016; Woodcock 2015),6 I use it in circumstances similar to those described by Alaina Lemon: ‘rather than eschewing the words “tsygan” or “Gypsy” as potential slurs, or interchanging “Gypsy” and “Romani” randomly, . . . I use both to convey subtle shadings in discourse, for the shifts are not arbitrary. . . . In this way, I can more faithfully describe verbal interactions, to untangle what speakers express by preferring certain terms in certain situations’ (2000: 5). From this perspective, replacing the term ‘țigan’ with the term ‘Roma’ when I report, for example, how non-Roma refer to the Roma in racist terms would be misleading. In order to remind the reader and to signal the offensive connotations inscribed in this term, I italicise this term in all chapters. This book joins the efforts of recent studies that have advanced our understanding about formations of belonging through refreshing approaches such as that proposed by Marinov (2019), who provides an ‘inward looking’ at migration and its effects on ‘Romanipe’, Humphris’s analysis of ‘intimate state encounters’ (2019) or Solf ’s lens of ‘citizen outsiders’ (2018). But while these studies discuss belonging based on studies carried out with Roma abroad, where they are framed as migrants, my research offers a perspective on belonging mainly as negotiated and sensed by Romanian Roma in Romania. In 2014 I carried out fieldwork for six months in Rotoieni. In the first two months (March and April 2014) I lived with a non-Roma couple in a flat located in the centre of the town, a two-kilometre distance from the area sometimes called Ursărie where most Roma in Rotoieni lived. In the following months that I spent in Rotoieni (August to November 2014) I lived mostly in the so-called Ursărie, benefiting from the kindness, support and help offered to me by the family that I will call the Carols. The Carols also opened their doors to me during my subsequent two-week trips to Rotoieni (April 2015 and September 2015) and short visits between 2016 and 2018.

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After spending six months in Rotoieni, in 2015 I visited Roma from Rotoieni who had been living in western Romania, Spain and the Netherlands for several years. This enabled me to link the different contexts in which home and belonging were narrated, enacted and imagined. As both ‘material and imaginative’, home is defined from a critical geography perspective as ‘a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connect places’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 2). ‘Following things’ and ‘following people’ (Marcus 1995) were strategies employed in the attempt to explore the home-belonging nexus, its material and sensorial dimension being at the core of this book. Acknowledging Clifford’s suggestion that researchers should depart from localising cultures through the localisation of ethnographic research (1997), I opted for approaching Rotoieni as a locality contextualised by larger interconnected social orders shaped by globalisation, mobility and the capitalist world system (Marcus 1995).

Beyond Distinctiveness Throughout the centuries, a series of interconnected institutional, academic and other kinds of public narratives produced essentialising interpretations of features that supposedly precluded Roma from belonging here or with us. The Roma’s Indian roots are a paradigmatic example that shows how, by invoking a remote and ‘essentially different’ origin, such narratives reinforce Roma people’s position as not belonging here, to the national and European us. The invocation of Indian roots ‘unnecessarily exoticizes the Gypsies, and second, it ignores their own view of themselves’ (Stewart 1997: 28). While acknowledging that a common Indian origin can function as ‘a strategy for international solidarity among Gypsies’, Judith Okely was the first to warn that it risks categorising people into ‘“real” and “counterfeit” Gypsies’ such that only those who manifest signs of their ‘Indian origins’ will benefit from policies and protection based on ethnic criteria (1983: 13). Ethnographies in the last three decades or so have revealed a few ways in which Roma identify with and belong to places within different national contexts, thus deconstructing the folklorising and romanticising views of Gypsies as nomad, unrooted or unable to settle or integrate. Not only has this work expanded our ethnographic knowledge about ways in which Roma perform their social identities as linked to places and localities within the respective national contexts (Buckler 2007; Lemon 2000; Theodosiou 2003, 2007, 2011; to some extent Williams 1982), particularly in situations framed by migration (Benarrosh-Orsoni 2016, 2019), but it has also called attention to how they see themselves as intrinsic to the histories of these places. Based

INTRODUCTION

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on his analysis of Gabor Roma ways of defining their identity in relation to Transylvanian territories they claim to inhabit ‘since always’, Martin Olivera (2012a, 2012b) proposes a view on ‘indigenous Gypsies’ as an analytical category that enables a view on Gabor as a social form generating and generated by ideas of autochthony (2012b). These endeavours have also succeeded in reshuffling lorist ideas that had envisaged Roma as cultural enclaves, self-isolated (not to mention itinerant), thus socially, geographically and politically peripheric to the centres of the ‘majority’ societies they happened to be in the vicinity of. Different levels and formulas of contact with non-Roma have been conceptualised as constitutive of Roma identities or ‘cultures’ that are constantly redefined in the present,7 thus unfixed and constantly adapting in the face of socioeconomic and political changes. Differently put, the ways in which Roma navigate the social and geographical spaces (often dominated by nonRoma) or the ways in which they integrate (Olivera 2012a; Williams 1982) are now viewed as constitutive of Roma social forms, and not of the state of being in isolation. The issue is that showing that Roma share the same geographical and social spaces, that they engage in daily economic and social exchanges with non-Roma, does not seem to problematise conceptions that point at, as it were, Roma ‘internal coherence’ (Okely 2010). Okely makes an argument about Gypsies having ‘for centuries provided a pioneering example of cultural coherence’ and about their culture as being ‘created from and through difference’ (2010: 40). My point is that the conceptions that shed light on the linkages between Roma and non-Roma, as well as on Roma place-based self-identifications and their attachment to locality, are the same that propagate the viewpoint according to which Roma are bricoleurs of cultural autonomy and distinctiveness. The ways in which different Roma populations foster attachments to places and engage with and signify the materiality of their everyday life are held for indicators of their distinctiveness vis-à-vis non-Roma. The different ways in which they do so are regarded as fundamentally constitutive of Roma socialities. This book, by contrast, shows that Roma people’s engagements with and the meanings they attach to everyday objects and spaces articulate commonalities of aspirations, urges and capabilities. It is an attempt to unfold similarities as constitutive of both Roma socialities and Roma–non-Roma relationships. Like belonging, which cannot be disconnected from its implicit postulation of non-belonging, the concept of similarity is not meant to transport an ideal of harmony and to dismiss matrixes that produce and maintain unescapable differences. From a cultural studies perspective, Anil Bhatti and Dorothee Kimmich (2015) propose similarity as a concept relevant for the description of relationships that imply a relative proximity and a relative dis-

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tance. Spatial and contextual, these relationships set the measure of proximity (Nähe), distance (Distanz) and distancing (Entfernung) (2015: 13). The empirical value that Bhatti and Kimmich assign to this concept stems from its aptitude to designate continuities and thereby to rethink well-established binary oppositions such as self–other or subject–object (2015: 14). As such, the so-called ‘similarity paradigm’ attempts to reshuffle its opposition to identity (Langenohl 2015: 106) and to reflect on the pervasive tension between the recognition of similarities (empirically graspable) and assertion of differences (Bhatti and Kimmich 2015: 20). In addition, without implying sameness, the concept of similarity has an ethical dimension and is proposed as ‘a critical and subversive’ epistemological gesture (Bhatti and Kimmich 2015: 26). In Bhatti’s words: ‘It is therefore correct to demand that the right to diversity and alterity must be coupled with the “right to be similar.” Similarity (Ähnlichkeit) is different from the demand for generic sameness (Gleichartigkeit). It is the process toward equality’ (Bhatti 2014: 39). But beyond such a critical gesture which, though important, exceeds the direct scope of this book, the analysis proposed here manifests a concern with practices of similarity (Praktiken der Ähnlichkeit). My concern with practices of similarity is subsumed to the focus on household-related practices and everyday material culture by means of which belonging is negotiated and sensed, and homes are made.

Everyday Material Culture Throughout the centuries, the domain of material culture enabled different professionalised practices (those of museums, ethnologists, missionaries, activists) to shed light on others’ ‘cultural specificities’ and markers of distinctiveness. The reifying capacity inherent within material objects has made possible to point out the differences of ‘some’ relative to ‘others’ in terms of civilisation, modernisation, as well as level of appropriation or creativity in dealing with forms of oppression. The manifest interest in objects as material entities that account for ‘other’ modes of attaching significance to, celebrating and reproducing difference has not bypassed approaches to Roma-related accounts. The sociocultural inquiries that have advanced the study of material culture with regards to Roma social forms are concerned with ceremonial or prestige objects (Berta 2007, 2011, 2013, 2019; Tesăr 2012, 2014, 2018) or with items that make visible individuals’ belonging to a particular Roma we-collective such as Kalderari (e.g. Hașdeu 2014) or Gabor Roma (e.g. Olivera 2012a; Tesfay 2009). These studies that come to mind as material culture contributions have been interested in material presences and absences that, in Péter Berta’s terms, ‘materialise differences’.8

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11

Alongside dualities like community–self, us–them, pure–impure, local– global, inalienable–alienable, dialectical movements between the sacred and profane poles have profoundly configured the anthropological thought. In totemic societies, Durkheim (2001) shows that the classification of materialia and immaterialia into the two moral domains – the sacred and the profane – enables the division between ceremonial life and daily life. Along this divide, ceremonial life consists of community-reproducing and moralityforming events, while daily life comprises ordinary and self-interested activities that aim at fulfilling individuals’ immediate basic needs. It might be thus said that anthropologists’ fascination with rituals, ceremonials and the fabrics of activities pertaining to sacred time is explained by the intention to unravel mechanisms by means of which we-collectives and their moral systems are reproduced, get transformed or become interrupted. This Durkheimian fundamental separation between the world of sacred things and the world of profane things9 translates itself into the dichotomy between the respect-arousing collective-oriented realm and the ordinary self-oriented realm. As such, this separation dismisses the everyday realm as a site where consciousness of commonalities and belonging across boundaries can be furthered. At the same time, it naturalises the idea that things are not significant in themselves but are necessary as vehicles of the ideas essential for the maintenance of the collective consciousness regarding the sharing of the same moral life.10 In this Durkheimian approach, material objects are important for their capacity to give some sort of shape to ideas of collective relevance that are shared by individuals pertaining to the same wecollective, as well as to make individuals identify with and confirm each other as members of the same social unit. From this standpoint, reality is created by socially relevant and cherished ideas and not the other way around. While, ‘in order to express our own ideas to ourselves we need to anchor them in material things that symbolise them’, reading Durkheim further: ‘the role of matter is minimal. The object that supports the idea is trivial compared to the ideal superstructure that subsumes it, and, moreover, it has nothing to do with that superstructure’ (2001: 173). This conception that the material world can be read as a text, in which objects signify ideas of collective relevance, is viewed as an intrinsic approach to what material culture studies as a research field has become (see Basu 2016; Bringéus 1986; Woodward 2001, 2007). In academic accounts about Roma, items that they wear and use in the public space have been often read as symbols of their distinctiveness from those pertaining to other Roma we-collectives or from non-Roma. Clothes and the so-called ‘dress code’ in particular constituted the object of interest of anthropologists who conducted research among Roma categorised as ‘traditional’. Olivera, for instance, maintains that Gabori clothes (women’s

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long pleated and flowered skirts and men’s loosely fitting black trousers, dark waistcoat and broad-brimmed hats) are signs of distinction that only those who possess insider knowledge can decipher. We are told that Gabor clothes do not have the capacity to create the distinction from other Roma (immoral, backward, inelegant) or from non-Roma; that on the contrary, the clothes signify an already existing distinction cultivated through the enactment of social and individual qualities cherished by Gabor (Olivera 2012a: 129). Hence, clothes are just collateral ‘external signs of the identity’ that express the identity of ‘the noble Roma’ as opposed to other Roma (řumunguri) and non-Roma peasants. Olivera’s interpretation is that Gabor clothes constitute ‘a sign, an essential evidence of their high morality’ (2012a: 132, my translation) that manifests itself in a Gabor-respectable external appearance: clean, neat, elegant. Regarding social distinctions preceding the use of certain objects (clothes in this case) as opposed to objects creating socio-culturally relevant distinctions, we can also read Hașdeu’s account (2014) about Roma women’s bodies and way of dressing. In Hașdeu’s reading, female bodies are divided into the upper (thus the pure) part and lower (thus the impure) part. What delimitates between Roma and gadje (non-Roma) is the significance that Roma attach to this division and how that shapes the ways of dealing with everyday materiality (for instance, what can or cannot be touched in specific situations). We are told that ‘there is nothing “more Roma11”’, than the pleated, flowered and glittery skirts worn by married Roma women which cover ‘the most problematic body part’ (Hașdeu 2014: 88, my translation). Hence, the clothes they wear are again seen as that which encodes principles and what makes, as it were, the supreme distinction (Roma–gadje) possible. In addition to these approaches that cast light on how visible objects (e.g. clothes) represent or symbolise distinctiveness from other Roma or nonRoma, other studies uncover the ways in which objects concealed from sight, that belong to the ceremonial or sacred domain (in Durkheimian terms), play a significant role in the social reproduction of Roma we-collectives, political relationships and kin groups. Ethnographies in Transylvania, such as Cătălina Tesăr’s with Cortorari (see 2014) and Péter Berta’s with Gabori and Cărhar12 (see 2019), are insightful for understanding how particularly valued objects take part in the negotiation of family alliances and marriage arrangements, as well as in the attainment of individual prestige. The two approaches differ in that Tesăr (2014) contests the idea that the possession of chalices, taxtaja, highly valued among Cortorari, would generate the possessor’s value and prestige. In her interpretation, the extent to which individuals succeed in behaving according to moral orders cherished by their kin is what inflects value on the chalices they possess and not the other way around. Tesăr thus rethinks the general idea deriving from gift-giving theo-

INTRODUCTION

13

ries whereby persons are extensions of objects, stressing that the subjective ways in which objects acquire significance account for the argument that objects are in fact extensions of persons. For the Gabori with whom Berta carried out research, the possession of beakers and roofed tankards (taxta and kăni) institutes a hierarchic form of social organisation, thus being essential in ‘the creation and maintenance of harmony and balance between the ethics of sociability and the politics of difference’ (Berta 2019: 13). Central in Berta’s accounts is that, apart from their possession, these objects and the knowledge that Gabor and Cărhar Roma possess about prestige goods’ material qualities and social biographies constitute ‘a marker of their Roma identity’ (2019: 117) and, fundamentally ‘materialise difference’. I encountered neither outstanding clothes nor prestige objects in my interactions with or accounts of Ursari Roma in or from Rotoieni. Nobody ever mentioned anything about the existence of items like taxtaja either in relation to themselves or their past or to other Roma we-collectives. In fact, my interlocutors referred to the long pleated and flowered skirts and broad-brimmed hats as being exclusively worn by other Roma (ăialalții or altfel de romi/țigani) (see Racleș 2020). In these instances, other Roma indexed the idea of ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ or ‘the real Roma/țigani’. More than once, the identification as Romanianised Roma was accompanied by the self-reference ‘actually, we are not the real Roma’ as compared to those regarded as ‘traditional’. The case study of Ursari Roma provides empirical means to grasp material objects outside the material-world-as-a-system-of-signs paradigm. The question is: how can we depart from a view that regards objects as symbols at the service of social scientists in decrypting specific cultural orders? How can we circumvent the understanding that has long regarded the material thing, in Durkheimian terms, as a sign ‘that serves only to recall the reality it represents’ (2001: 165) and that serves to relentlessly actualise our collective set of moral considerations? This book deals with these questions in three ways: by looking at ordinary objects and everyday spaces; by examining their sensorial dimension; and by inquiring into material absences. I suggest that by ascribing analytical value to ordinary everyday objects, ways of using and signifying them, as well as to their sensorial and affective dimension, more light can be shed on people’s enactments of and discourses about belonging, similarities and the formation of linkages between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’. Distinct from ceremonial objects, prestigious objects or items that are endowed with analytical significance in an identity register, ordinary objects in the realm of the everyday have the analytical capacity to challenge the conception of unambiguous distinctions between ways in which Roma

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engage with and assign meanings to everyday materiality and the ways in which non-Roma do. The imperative of examining ordinary or banal objects as constitutive of everyday spaces, practices and social fabrics has been signalled as a reaction to the pervasive interest in rather extraordinary materialities (Attfield 2000; Tilley 2006: 70; Woodward 2007: 108, 167). In the framework of more recent studies about Roma social forms, the research of Norah BenarroshOrsoni (2016, 2019), about ‘transnational households’ cultivated by Romanian Roma who live in the Parisian suburbs, shows how everyday materiality (e.g. landlines and cell phones or food) enables them to foster ‘a shared sense of double-rootedness’ (2016: 149). Everyday objects refer in this book to items that contribute par excellence to the maintenance of a sense of familiarity and ordinariness, which I examine in Part I. Yet this does not impede them from intermeshing in practices of self-identification, resignification or ascription. The case of wall-carpets discussed in chapters 2 and 3 provides a means to analyse understandings and resignification practices whereby these objects went from being objects that ‘Romanians’13 enthusiastically hung on the interior walls of their houses to being deemed as obsolete items that supposedly indicate backwardness or ‘lack of will to modernise’ of inhabitants. Despite the fact that in previous decades ‘Romanians’ enthusiastically covered the interior walls of their houses or flats with the ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’14 style of carpets (Figure 0.1), at the time of my research this practice was referred to as a ‘typically’ Roma or țigani practice. Refraining from implying that the ways in which people engage with the material world are essentially shaped by who they are or are considered to be, I show how people are actually constructed based on how they engage with the material world at a particular point in time. In other words, people do not hang wall-carpets because they are țigani (as nonRoma and better-off Roma often imply), but they are constructed as țigani based on the use of these items which, in the light of the claimed ‘modern’ standards of homemaking, have become local insignia of backwardness. The sphere of the everyday is not solely a sphere of material presences, but equally a sphere of absences that need to be attended to as well. The absence of carpets from the walls which I discuss in chapter 3 is relevant for the understanding of how Roma negotiate, attain and sense belonging, as well as how this absence fosters similarities, in this specific case, to those who had already removed the carpets from the walls. Thinking with Patrick Williams, ‘Meaning emerges from the play of emptiness and fullness’ (2003: 24) and absences are constitutive of presences (2003: 55). Severin Fowles suggests that we ought to examine ‘the politics of attending to what is missing and why’ (2010: 26), criticising the neglect of absences brought along by ‘a notion of presence linked to physicality and tangibility, as if the only

INTRODUCTION

15

Figure 0.1. The ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ wall-carpet, Rotoieni, October 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

meaningful relations were those between entities that can be seen, smelt or felt’ (2010: 25). But Textures of Belonging shows that absences can equally be felt, seen, smelt and tasted.

Sensorial Politics and Non-Belonging Thinking about physical absences takes me to the material-sensorial nexus which is central in this book. While the study of materiality has always been concerned with processes of objectification, as classical works of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984) and, later, of Daniel Miller (e.g. 1987, 1994, 2013) show, Christopher Tilley15 points out the necessity of ‘refining our empirical understanding of the manner in which these processes work in relation to the manifold sensuous qualities of things’ (2006: 71). But if the dynamics of the materialisation of individuals’ belonging to different we-collectives have been explored, by contrast, little has been inquired about how belonging and its antipode, non-belonging, are sensed. The focus on the sensorium in social sciences constitutes one way of departing from the perspective on material culture as a text that can be read

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(Sullivan 1986), where objects are signs or symbols that can be deciphered according to the specific cultural guidelines. Based on the premise that sensorial orders are translated into social orders, David Howes (2006a) proposes an ‘intersensoriality model’ of analysis according to which the traditionally recognised sensorial modalities (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste)16 are not equal. The way they operate and are organised reflects power relations in societies. Supporting the argument that sensorial modalities do not operate socio-culturally and politically in the same ways, the cultural historian Constance Classen encourages sociocultural analysts ‘to go beyond the audiovisual and recover the senses of smell, taste and touch as subjects of serious inquiry’ (1997: 404). Considering that the olfactory is ‘the most denigrated sensory domain of modernity’ (Howes 2006a: 169), this book channels its effort precisely in this direction. In contemporary Europe, wherein ‘anti-Roma politics has political currency’ (Stewart 2012: xviii), it is not surprising that the ‘bad and dangerous smell’ as a racialising marker of Roma people’s otherness appears not only in daily encounters, but also in public and political discourses, generated by and generating racism against Roma. At the beginning of April 2015, during a conversation about the local Roma with the librarian from the municipal library of Rotoieni, the non-Roma woman asserted: ‘I guess you also realised this, as you lived with them. Wherever you’d go in this world and there’d be a țigan, you’d feel that specific smell’. Furthermore, in 2014, during the first months that I spent in Rotoieni, I was often asked by nonRoma how was I able to stand ‘that smell of țigan’. These and other equally unsettling manifestations of racialising discourses and practices that I encountered during my fieldwork in Rotoieni are dealt with in chapters 6 and 7, where I unpack the racist logic of differentiation to which the local Roma were subjected. It is a logic that dehumanises, neutralises socio-economic cleavages and makes the individual accountable for the success or failure in complying with normative standards of homemaking; a logic that pretends to justify why some are (and deserve to be) part of ‘us’ while ‘others’ are part of the marginalised ‘them’; a logic that reifies bad smells as results of Roma people’s alleged ‘natural characteristics’, such as indolence and carelessness in regard to how their house looks or smells. In this sense, the endeavour of this book joins the approaches that examine and critique the ways in which olfactory politics target people with either ethnic minority or migration backgrounds by ascribing malodours to these people’s spaces and bodies. Roma are certainly not the only ‘others’ that are targeted by discriminatory olfactory politics. Black people (e.g. Smith 2006), the Jews in Europe (in Howes and Classen 2014: 69), Pakistanis in Britain (in Largely and Watson 2006: 31), Indians in Thailand (in Beer 2000: 217–18) and migrants from

INTRODUCTION

17

other African countries in South Africa (in Howes and Classen 2014: 88) are just a few scattered examples of presences constructed as incorporations of olfactory otherness. In her monograph about Russian Romani, Lemon shows how Gypsies are racialised by being mapped onto settings like street markets, which are described by non-Gypsies as ‘Gypsies’ “natural habitat”’ (2000: 58). Gypsies’ bodies and presence are thus racialised through the naturalisation of their allegedly inherent connection to such spaces. It is in relation to the ‘pragmatic immediacy’ (cf. Lemon 2000: 57) of space that the olfactory as a marker of otherness will be unfolded in this book. In my conversations with non-Roma, smells were constructed as one of the main markers of difference between Roma and non-Roma households (chapter 7), thus pointing not only to Roma people’s bodies, but to the connections between bodies and the immediacy of their inhabited space. Unpacking the connections between bodies and the domestic and urban materiality thus enables the analysis of the ways in which racialising dynamics are materialised.

Book Outline The places lived and made by people who are identified or self-identify as Roma/țigani constitute the main socio-material fields in relation to which sensed belonging will be discussed. My fieldwork has shown that negotiations of belonging have major sensorial implications which can be grasped only in relation to everyday materialities. To expand on these considerations systematically, this book takes the shape of a two-part account: the first part is mainly concerned with materialities of belonging, while the second expands on senses of (non-)belonging. In the first chapter, I begin with a discussion about my movements between ‘sites’ that fostered a reflection on the rapport between myself as a ‘white’, ‘schooled’ and non-Roma young researcher, and the people who participated in my research. Thoughts on the ways in which the related asymmetries impacted the knowledge-making process are also considered. They are articulated in relation to the methodological approaches mobilised in a bid to tackle the material-sensorial nexus involved in negotiations of belonging and in homemaking processes. Chapters 2 and 3 show how, either through their presence or absence, wall-carpets materialise people’s engagements in processes of negotiating belonging on the level of their inhabited space in relation to ‘modern times’ and to the Roma we-collective. Both chapters point at Roma women’s relation to the materiality of space, mediated by practices related to wallcarpets, by means of which Roma women engage in negotiation of ‘modernity’ as understood locally.

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Chapter 2 fleshes out meanings and resignifications that Roma in Rotoieni attach to the wall-carpets and the related practices. It is an account about wall-carpets as objects that provide a sense of familiarity and materialises the emotional attachment to the place Roma called home in Rotoieni or abroad. It will be shown that at times, framed by the research situation, the practice of hanging wall-carpets partakes of the repertoire about ‘us, the Roma/the țigani’. Meanwhile, chapter 3 looks into how people position themselves vis-à-vis these objects that went from being ordinary to becoming discredited and associated with gypsiness. If value is a criterion that establishes which desires are legitimate and which are not (Graeber 2001: 3), then wall-carpets acquire value through their absence. This chapter shows how the absence of wallcarpets serves enactment purposes. It serves one’s affirmation of belonging to ‘modern times’ by decorating the inhabited space in a way that is legitimated as ‘modern’, and thus one’s self-identification as ‘Romanianised Roma’. Chapters 4 and 5 cast light on translocal entanglements and engagements in homemaking processes elsewhere. Roma’s expenditure of physical and emotional energy is related to the aspiration of having a ‘home where nobody can throw you out from’, as Maria, my host mother, put it. Locality will be reflected upon in its material and sensorial proportions – as something that is seen, touched, smelled and listened to – something people engage with during their everyday activities carried out within their inhabited space(s). Chapter 4 discusses particularities of Rotoieni that prompted and facilitated Roma people’s decision, urge or aspiration to move. Based on my conversations with Roma abroad and in western Romanian localities, the analysis expands further on translocal entanglements and on the affective materiality of homemaking processes elsewhere. It discusses ‘the sense of contiguous home’ (Wise 2011) of the Roma people who identify Rotoieni as their hometown but live (or lived at the time of my research) abroad or elsewhere in Romania. Chapter 5 revolves around the ‘affective materiality of food’ (Alexeyeff 2004) through which meanings of home are made and tasted. It shows that, by eating and making ‘home food’ abroad, the feeling of estrangement is negotiable, but not completely surmountable. The absence of certain ingredients leads people to nostalgically evoke their longing for home. Their position as migrants and the feeling of estrangement lift food from home (such as, for instance, sarmale) out from the banality they might have been relegated to when cooked back in Rotoieni. While abroad, eating and talking about food are acts through which not only ‘home’ is translocally consumed (and often idealised), but also through which narratives of belonging in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are enacted.

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19

In the second part of the book, I begin from the observation that Roma in Rotoieni are people subjected to a logic of differentiation that naturalises ‘bad smells’ as part of Roma people’s households and bodies. I will analyse the ways in which the olfactory acts within and outside the parameters of this racialising logic by exploring everyday domestic practices that Roma engage in, create and resignify. I must warn the reader that the accounts reproduced in chapters 6 and 7 are particularly disturbing and injurious vis-à-vis the Roma. I chose to include them in this book with the intention to unpack and critique flagrant manifestations of local racialising representations, as well as to (self-)critically reflect on what determined my non-Roma research participants to articulate offensive discourses in conversations with me, also a non-Roma. There are two registers of analysis that form the second part of this book. One register encompasses dynamics of constituting gypsiness as racialised otherness, while the other uncovers the individual expressions and interpretations of olfactory experiences framed by the immediacy of the inhabited space. To trace connections between these two methodologically asymmetric registers of analysis, I will draw on individual and group conversations with non-Roma (first register) and conversations with and olfactory diaries written by Roma research participants (second register). After discussing notions related to olfactory politics in chapter 6, chapter 7 relies on conversations with and among non-Roma to uncover what is so particular about the olfactory – as compared to sight, hearing, taste and touch – that enables people to draw hierarchical lines between ‘us’ and the different ‘them’, thus between who belongs and who does not. I show how, based on lived or projected olfactory experiences, non-Roma employed racialising tropes as part of a repertoire of representations that naturalises and reifies socially vilified features that are said to be innate to the Roma: indolence, carelessness and thus immorality. In this vein, chapter 7 reveals how non-Roma affirm themselves as righteous citizens by naturalising ‘filthy smells’ as markers of otherness and, thus, by projecting inferiority on Roma people’s bodies and spaces. Chapters 8 and 9 address the question of how the olfactory operates outside (though not completely disconnected from) racist ascriptions. I show how Roma in my research endorse a series of normative aspects that derive from the local olfactory politics. Besides analysing ethnographic interviews with Roma, I reflect on the content of the olfactory diaries17 written by six Roma research participants. They shed light on the corporeality and materiality of the olfactory experiences and, by that means, on the individual acknowledgement, contestation or enforcement of the local meanings and implications of the olfactory. I conclude that the local meanings of the olfac-

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tory (that operate within a racist logic) inform claims and contestations of belonging. In the concluding chapter I summarise the contributions that the notion of ‘sensed belonging’ and the view on belonging as a set of capabilities make to the various debates with which this book has engaged. Proposing the notion of ‘unattainability of belonging’, the concluding chapter is also a reflection on the underside of belonging. It suggests that all discussion and conceptualisation of belonging is in fact about non-belonging. The negotiations of belonging are made on the grounds of the unachievable, which are framed by a configuration of power relations, surreptitiously preventing the societal recognition of Roma people’s belonging.

Notes 1. To preserve anonymity, the town’s, streets’ and research participants’ names have been fictionalised. 2. The attributes that Pfaff-Czarnecka names are a ‘common lot as well as cultural forms (language, religion, and life-style), values, experience, and memory constructions’ (2011: 202). 3. As expressed by Fortier, her concept of ‘migrant belongings’ seeks to capture both ‘the constitutive potency of movement, in the formation of physical and symbolic locations of belonging’ and ‘new formations that emerge from deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and that are rooted, even momentarily, in place’ (2000: 2). 4. For considerations about these issues in relation to Roma people, see Theodosiou and Brazzabeni 2010 and Theodosiou 2011. 5. I discuss the ethnonym ‘Ursari’ in more detail in chapter 1. 6. I refer to this point further in chapter 1. 7. For a recent reconsideration of this argument that regards Roma lives as happening ‘in the present’ and disconnected from notions of past or future, see Tesăr 2018. 8. The title of Péter Berta’s recent book is Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma (2019). 9. ‘Things’ is meant here in the broad sense as a category comprising not only material objects, but also animals, plants, atmospheric phenomena and all entities that can become totems. 10. This does not mean that ordinary objects cannot become sacred, but quite the opposite. Collective representations have the force to sacralise objects and assign significance that does not derive from the material properties of certain objects conventionally established as valuable. 11. Here the word ‘Roma’ is used as an adjective. 12. Cortorari (see Berta 2019: 179). 13. These quotation marks are intended to distinguish between those instances where the word ‘Romanians’ refers to non-ethnic-minority citizens of Romania (as used by

INTRODUCTION

14. 15. 16.

17.

21

my Roma and non-Roma interlocutors) and those cases where the same word refers to Romanian citizens in general (I refer to this distinction further in Chapter 1). I started thinking about the wall-carpets in an early analysis of these items’ potential to ‘tell’ stories about the lives of Roma individuals (Racleș 2014). Christopher Tilley is well known for his endeavours to bring a phenomenological perspective to material culture studies. Anthropological research that addresses the human sensorium (e.g. Geurts 2002) has shown that the model of the five senses is not universal. This model reflects only Euro-American conceptions about bodily sensations that are based on the Aristotelian classification of senses. According to this classification, sight and hearing are essentially linked to reason and knowledge, thus being considered superior to the other sensorial modalities – smell, touch and taste – regarded as ‘lower senses’ (Smith 2007: 28; see also Classen 1997). Chapter 8 discusses at length the methodological implications of this approach.

PART I



MATERIALITIES OF BELONGING

CHAPTER 1



ETHICS AND ATTEMPTS

Introduction During the first weeks of my fieldwork in Rotoieni (March 2014), I often wore a pair of overused purple Converse sneakers. Although I had another pair of white sneakers, I did not wear them as I had assumed they were inadequate for the purposes of my long back-and-forth walks through the town. I was aware, though, that in my interactions with representatives of local authorities (the school, the town hall and the social work office), my sneakers with holes on the sides might have called into question my credibility as a researcher from abroad, considering that in a local context like Rotoieni, clothes and other items of appearance tend to be seen as indicating one’s socio-profession or educational status. As a non-Roma researcher, trying to be humble seemed to me to be fundamental in the process of crafting relationships with the people who self-identified or were referred to as Roma and/or țigani. As suggested by non-Roma feminist anthropologist Iulia Hașdeu (2016: 187) as well as Native Hawaiian scholar Julie Kaomea (2001: 77), humbleness is a precondition for being respectful and ethical, as well as reflexive and critical. Considering that the ethnographer’s own corporeality is in itself an instrument of research (Katz and Csordas 2003: 280), I continued to wear the visibly old purple sneakers, which constituted (or so I thought) one of the elements that allowed me to enact a humble and unpretentious attitude. At a later point, in April 2014, I started to wear the new white sneakers more often, as the old ones would cause my feet to get wet whenever it rained. Despite the fact that I was aware of the aforementioned implications of wearing the old shoes, I did not expect that this change would be noticed or easily remarked on by my interlocutors. My assumption was soon refuted.

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The first time I dropped by the house of the Carols – the family that would host me a few months later – both the children and Maria, their mother, jokingly made remarks related to my ‘new’ shoes: ‘Oh. . . Andreea, you [finally] bought yourself new shoes’. The first-born daughter, who was fourteen years old at the time, asked me further details about where I had bought the sneakers and how much I had paid for them. The day before, Narcis had made similar remarks. He was a non-Roma librarian who, at the time of my research, worked at the school known as the ‘țigani’s school’ due to the high number of Roma pupils. He noticed instantly that the shoes I was wearing were not the overused purple sneakers and lauded my initiative of buying new ones. I mentioned that I already had them before starting my field research and this answer triggered the following reaction with what he intended to be an amused tone: ‘Oh. . . I see Andreea. . . so you did not wear them until now because you were afraid that they [the țigani1] were going to steal them from you’. Considering that, in a way, by wearing the overused shoes I was attempting to foster commonalities between myself and the Roma people who participated in my research, Narcis’s reaction made me ask myself: with whom was I actually fostering commonalities? With the Roma that I was in touch with, who did not seem to relate to my practice of wearing overused shoes anyway, or with Narcis, who ascribed to me the fear (that he found legitimate in the context of dealing with Roma) of having the new shoes stolen? This was one episode that made me reconsider a series of thoughts with which I had started my field research. In this chapter, I attempt to unpack those thoughts as they emerged during the writing process and to critically reflect on the implications of doing ethnographic research with and among Roma and non-Roma people from Rotoieni. Let me first introduce some considerations about the history of the presence of Ursari Roma in Moldavia and about the socio-economic situation of the Roma in Rotoieni.

Ursari in Rotoieni Most anthropological research that addresses Roma social forms in Romania has been carried out within or in relation to localities in the region of Transylvania, while ethnographic research with Roma in Moldavia or Wallachia (Țara Românească) is rather scarce. I am emphasising this as the question of how regionalism operates on an everyday level in Romania is essential for understanding Roma social forms (Olivera 2012b). Olivera writes that ‘Many Transylvanians (Hungarian, Romanian and Roma) regard their fellow citizens in Moldavia and Wallachia (in particular Oltenia) with a condescending eye: they are largely seen as “primitive” (înapoiați) inhabitants of the

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“disadvantaged” eastern and southern regions, while Transylvania, richer and historically oriented to the West, is viewed as “modern” and “civilised”’ (2012b: 22–23). The presence in Moldavia of those who were subsequently referred to as țigani was mentioned in official documents for the first time in 1428, later than in both Wallachia and Transylvania (Achim 2004: 10). Historians agree that they reached this part of Europe during the Tatar migration and that they were already slaves of Tatars2 (2004: 15, 27). Until 1918, Transylvania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, having previously maintained close ties to the Hungarian crown and empire. In the meantime, the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were ruled by the Ottomans from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and became a single country in 1859. These regions are, to this day, still commonly viewed as the most underdeveloped and thus the most backward parts of Romania, not least due to their high rates of poverty and unemployment. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Mihail Kogălniceanu (1837) deemed Ursari to be one of the four categories of ‘princely slaves’, namely those who ‘wandered the countryside, leading a bear, whom they would encourage to dance the tanana’ (in Achim 2004: 33). Etymologically, this word originates from the word urs, which in Romanian means ‘bear’. Described as one of the most mobile groups in Europe, in the early nineteenth century, Ursari travelled from town to town with bears captured in the Carpathian Mountains and paid taxes to the crown annually (Tünaydın 2013: 54). Yet it seems that bear-taming was only an additional occupation for the nomad Ursari from Moldavia and Wallachia (Marushiakova and Popov 2013: 74). Apparently, the production and repair of metalwork were the activities in which Ursari mostly engaged (Marushiakova and Popov 2009: 124). In any case, nomadism did not mean wandering for the whole year, but only in the summer (Achim 2004: 53). Achim notes that ‘the transition to a sedentary life’ went hand in hand with ‘[Gypsies] becoming tied to agricultural occupations’, which ‘brought them closer to the peasantry’, a process that started towards the end of the eighteenth century (2004: 56). In Moldavia, Ursari, like others who practised semi-nomadism, were officially granted a certain level of autonomy in solving the internal problems that might have emerged among their members (Marushiakova and Popov 2007: 76). The ethnonym ‘Ursari’ persisted despite the fact that ‘the conditions that led to the application of the name have disappeared’ (Urech and van den Heuvel 2011: 152). This is also the case in Rotoieni, where none of those who identify as Ursari recall memories related to bear-rearing, taming or dancing. Instead, the making and selling of combs is what people recall as the ‘traditional activity’ of the Roma from Rotoieni. During my field re-

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search, many Roma remembered having participated in making or selling combs, which, however, ceased to be profitable after 1989. In 2014, only a few men were still manufacturing combs, using new tools and technologies that eased the production process, which they described as very meticulous and time-consuming. A shoe factory was the largest employer in the Rotoieni area until the fall of communism. The people of Roma background who used to work at the factory expressed pride in having held regular jobs there before 1989. In 2013, however, the factory only had a small number of employees, and among those, no Roma at all. Apart from public institutions, other employers included a textile firm, a slaughterhouse and small shops, bakeries and restaurants. In a report based on a qualitative study about the socioterritorial marginalisation of Roma communities in Romania,3 it is mentioned that, in 2013, the only firm that had a few Roma employees was a local sanitation company contracted to clean by the Rotoieni city hall. At the time of my research, many Roma in Rotoieni engaged in formal or informal commercial activities. From big cities, they bought merchandise to sell at the central market or other local markets. Others relied on welfare benefits for which various activities required by the city hall were carried out in the town (such as gardening or garbage collection in public areas). Selling cigarettes in disguise at the market was also a relatively common practice; officials described it as ‘a țigani thing’. While some Roma saw this as a fair and honest way of providing income for their families, others rejected any association with these practices as illegal and liable to cause problems with the police. Apart from those who sold cigarettes, most of the Roma had official documents and authorisation to conduct small-scale commerce.

Vocabulary Apart from my use of ‘țigani’ or ‘Gypsies’ as part of direct quotes from interviews, conversations or citations, I prefer to employ the term ‘Roma’. The Romanian Roma sociologist Nicolae Gheorghe (1991: 829) writes: ‘The endonym, the name accepted by the people themselves, is Rom (pl. Roma), which in their Sanskrit-based language, Romani, means “man,” “married male,” “husband,” and, in a more general sense, “person belonging to our group,” to “us,” as opposed to Gadzo, Gadze, “they,” non-Roma’. Elsewhere, Gheorghe and the French sociologist Jean-Pierre Liégeois (1995: 8) write that, ‘while it does not cover all of the groups concerned, it [the name “Roma”] is increasingly being used in the political sphere, and it does have the advantage of clear demarcation from terms imposed from outside’. In 1971, at the First World Romani Congress in London, delegates from four-

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teen Eastern and Western European countries adopted the term ‘Rom’ ‘in order to establish unity among Gypsies everywhere’ (Mayall 2004: 205). Although I have not often been called a gadje, I was one. I was a gadje walking through Rotoieni in a pair of overused purple sneakers. In Romani language, the word ‘gadje’ means non-Roma. Romani linguist Ian Hancock (2005) writes the following about gadje (which he spells ‘gadže’): ‘The commonest word in our language for all non-Romani people is gadže, singular gadžo, though there are several others. It is not a proper noun, nor is it an offensive word; it simply means “non-Romani people”’ (2005: xxii). Regarding the etymology of this term, Hancock mentions that it, as well as other terms that refer to someone who is not Romani (e.g. das or goro or gomi), ‘meant such things as “civilian”, or “prisoner of war”, or “captive” in their original Indian forms’ (2005: 10). In a similar vein, Romanian Roma scholar and activist Margareta Matache4 (2016) writes that ‘gadje’ is ‘the generic term used by Romani people to refer to non-Roma’. Matache also critically engages with the term ‘Gadjo-ness’, which underlines ‘a Euro-specific form of whiteness that grants social, economic, cultural, and institutional privileges and entitlements to non-Roma, or more precisely, to dominant majority groups’. Before I discuss how moving and writing ethnography shape one another during and after field research, let me briefly refer to Matache’s critique regarding the use of ‘țigani’ for it has important implications for the politics of writing. Matache (2017) criticised gadje scholars’ use of ‘țigani’ in their writings. She places her criticism within a broader discussion about how so-called ‘Romani Studies’ contributed throughout the decades to the construction of Roma as inferior. In the article ‘Dear Gadje (non-Romani) Scholars. . .’, her main argument is that Romani scholarship has been colonised in relation to at least three main aspects: terminology, content and representation. Considering that gadje scholarship has greatly influenced the construction of identity markers, the use of certain ethnonyms is said to have a crucial role in this process of constituting Roma as the other. Paraphrasing Matache, in Romania, the word ‘Țigan’ is a ‘fixed, racialised and harmful signifier’. In her words, ‘Yet, the T-word holds heavy historical weight, along with its illegal and offensive nature. The Tsigan category connoted “slave” for 500 years. There has been evidence that Romani leaders have demanded to replace the name Tsigani with Roma since 1919, and there have been political efforts to officially recognise Roma as the umbrella term for Romani groups across the world since 1971 or even prior to that’. While these sensitive terminology-related matters should be acknowledged and unpacked in both scholarship and political activism, I follow Paloma Gay y Blasco (2011) who suggests that they could be circumvented only by unfolding ‘the moral and ethical rights and wrongs of using either “Gypsy” or “Roma”’ (2011: 459).

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Related to terminologies, it is important to mention that in Rotoieni, and by extension in the Romanian context, the denomination ‘Romanians’ is often used to refer to those who do not have any ethnic minority background, who self-identify and are referred to as constituting ‘the majority population’. To distinguish between the use of ‘Romanians’ nominating non-ethnic-minority citizens and the use of Romanians referring to citizens of Romania, I will use quotation marks whenever I mean to point at the former use of this denomination. Țigănie is also a word that appears frequently in this book. It is the term used by Roma and non-Roma to refer to the area inhabited by most of the Roma in town and derives from the word țigan. It is not a particularity of Rotoieni that the neighbourhood located on the outskirts, which is populated mostly by Roma living in deprived conditions, is denominated țigănie.5 Thus, țigănia6 could be understood as a socio-spatial racialised and ethnicised category which locals operate with, marking who is (almost irrecoverably) at the margins.7 Moreover, the fact that people employ this category nearly everywhere in Romania reveals that țigănia is a localised and spatialised manifestation of broader dynamics of exclusion, racialisation and marginalisation. In Rotoieni, a town of less than 2,500 hectares, țigănia is situated on a hill on the south-western margins of the town. Here, most of the houses are located along a train line (Figure 1.1), which shapes the material, olfactory and acoustic texture of the neighbourhood. From the central market where

Figure 1.1. The train line, Rotoieni, March 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

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many residents of Rotoieni work, one has to walk approximately 1.2 kilometres up the hill to țigănie. From the school that most of the Roma pupils attend, the distance to țigănie is approximately two kilometres. What connects țigănia to the rest of the town is what I will call Covesnei Street. Children of all ages, adults and the elderly walk daily along the margins of this trafficked road, which connects southern localities to bigger cities of north-eastern Romania. Thus, walking from the central market up the hill towards țigănie does not only mean walking up the hill, but also constantly inhaling exhaust fumes released by the trucks, buses and cars of all sizes that traverse the town. My fieldwork in Rotoieni, my everyday movement, as well as the movement of many of my research participants, were configured by the route between these two distinguishable yet mutually definable parts of Rotoieni connected by Covesnei Street: țigănia and the rest of the town. Leaving behind the market area, Covesnei Street reveals itself as an area where the better-off inhabitants live. Along both sides of the street, spanning a distance of approximatively five hundred metres, most households are solid and imposing, made up of buildings with at least one upper floor. What caught my attention was that most of them seemed to be unfinished, as if the building process had stopped at some point (for similar observations, see Tesăr 2016). It is only where the row of these big houses ends that țigănia starts. Two almost indistinguishable entrances that appear on the right and left side of Covesnei Street are in fact entrances towards the parts of the town referred to as țigănie. For some of the local authorities’ representatives (none of them of Roma background), țigănia is the place where ‘țigani choose to self-marginalise’, where most of the welfare recipients live and where order, discipline and notions of cleanliness are missing. For the better-off Roma who live on Covesnei Street, people who live in țigănie (five hundred metres or less away from them) are not only poor and pitiable, but are also ‘backward’ in the sense of being ‘non-modern’ or ‘non-modernised’, or are less committed to doings that could improve their livelihood. For some of the Roma who have a house elsewhere in town, living among ‘Romanians’ is often a source of pride that provides them with a means to differentiate themselves from ‘the poor’ and ‘uncivilised’ Roma/țigani (see chapter 3).

Moving between Fields Thinking about the importance of terminology in the process of coproducing and communicating knowledge brings me to a discussion about how field research and writing merge. The effect of engaging with the two fields

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together – the observation (the fieldwork) and the analysis (the writing) – generates what Marilyn Strathern (1999) called ‘the ethnographic moment’. This is defined as the relation between ‘the understood’ (what is analysed at the moment of observation) and ‘the need to understand’ (what is observed at the moment of analysis) (1999: 6). Strathern discusses in detail the implications of what moving between these two fields means, warning that the idea of movement in the sense of ‘travelling to and returning from’ has ‘politically troubling connotations of intrusion and of freedoms taken at other people’s expense’ (1999: 2–3). While entering the field of writing (in the sense that Strathern proposes) where the ethnographic moment is (supposed to be) happening, I realised that my fieldwork experiences (the observation) had been shaped by my movement between the two socio-spatial and material registers: țigănia and the rest of the town. In what follows, I draw on the implications that this movement had relative to my positionality as a non-Roma, ‘white’ doctoral student living in Germany. How did this positionality impact the process of collaboratively generating knowledge and the writing phase? Along these lines, there are equally many ethical implications. Covesnei Street becomes of particular importance here as it was part of the route that I had to cover in order to reach țigănia and, there, the Carols’ house. This distance organised my movement between the sites that constituted my fieldwork and shaped my socio-spatial access to people, just like it organised this present written account. By simply walking on that street, wearing a satchel and overused purple sneakers, my presence was noticed from the beginning. I was initially associated with the Baptist church from a neighbouring village to which the Carols – my host family – were affiliated. At another point, being seen with the vice-mayor, I was also deemed to be a social worker or school mediator. As such, I was imagined as someone who had to be shown or convinced of the precarious conditions in which people from țigănie lived. Meanwhile, due to my affiliation to a foreign institution (university), employees from the aforementioned school would see me as a potential fundraiser, or at least someone linked to funding institutions. Covesnei Street came to signify a series of distances that I had to ‘transit’ daily, other than the spatial one. During the first two months, when I lived with a non-Roma couple who told me from the beginning that they were ‘racists’, traversing Covesnei Street meant traversing distances from the discursive realm of very disturbing Roma-related representations to the materiality of the precarious circumstances in which the Roma that I was visiting were living. It meant traversing the distance between those who ironically suggested to me that there was nothing to research about those ‘lazy’, ‘indolent’ and ‘backward’ țigani, and the Roma who would – often sceptically at the beginning – agree to talk with me and invite me into their houses.

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Walking on Covesnei Street was challenging not only because of its noisy, polluted, traffic-fumed and hilly features, but because it always required the mental activity of surmounting a series of uncertainties, expectations and ethical dilemmas. How do I approach people without implying the promise of giving something in return that they materially need? What would be an ‘adequate’ way of giving something in return without either hurting feelings or making anyone feel ‘used’? How do I talk to people about my research on domestic spaces and material culture without implying that their contribution to my research would bring the concrete result of a housing project for Roma in Rotoieni? How do I talk about my research interests in the local meanings of the olfactory without being perceived as someone reaffirming the racist repertoire about the ‘smelly and dirty țigani’? How do I deal with concerns such as the fact that I could (and sometimes would) have a meal in the restaurant in the town centre, before or after my walks to țigănie, where people would have to provide lunch for their families based on budgets that were perhaps lower than the amount I would spend on a daily lunch? And later, how do I decide which family to live with after having received several offers from families with whom I had made close contact, without offending the others? These are only a few of the questions that accompanied my thoughts while walking on Covesnei Street, which, with time, evolved into new questions and generated new concerns. It was on my way to țigănie that I had multiple dialogues with myself and imagined conversations with those I was about to visit; that I stopped several times to jot notes on my mobile phone; that I would take my first-hand notes related to what I had learnt during the time spent with the families in țigănie, notes that would then become extended reflections written in my field diary. My walk between țigănie and the flat in the town centre where I initially lived mediated between the site where I would ‘collect data’ and the site where I would retire in the evening with the ‘collected data’. It was thus about two kilometres away from țigănie that I would systematise my notes and first-hand observations, usually sitting on a fairly comfortable sofa, in a warm flat with running water, central heating, an indoor toilet and an equipped kitchen, including a microwave and a stove, where I could easily improvise dinner. Being able to enjoy this comfort often made me think about the asymmetries that shaped my rapport with the people whom I wanted to be my research participants, with their right to and sense of ownership over the knowledge that they shared (or not) with me. After I moved in with the Carols (August–November 2014), I could no longer ‘refuge myself ’ daily in that flat in the town centre. My walks on Covesnei Street now had different connotations than those revealing me as an ‘extractor’ of information and pictures, who left behind what I self-critically

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and somehow cynically call ‘the field of extraction’ every evening. I use this metaphor to refer to the ground that I was in the position to explore and, from there, to ‘collect data’. I call it the ‘field of extraction’ in a self-critiquing attempt that sympathises with Strathern’s warning that ‘collecting data’ is suspect. If ‘collecting’ has political connotations, implying the question of ‘appropriating other people’s possessions’, ‘data’ has the epistemological implications of ‘mystifying social effect as fact’ (Strathern 1999: 4). During my stay with the Carols, my walks on Covesnei Street were thus instantiations of my process of becoming part of the ‘field of extraction’ in at least two ways. On the one hand, I myself became ‘investigated’ by the neighbours from țigănie and by others who knew that ‘that student from Germany’ had moved in with the Carols. On the other hand, my presence in the household affected the family dynamic, the organisation and use of the household space much more than when I was only a visitor. As walking to țigănie was now walking home, it meant going to the place where I was sleeping, where I was taking groceries to, where I was eating, where Maria – the mother of the family’s four children – set up the fire in the stove when I felt cold and from where she would call me to ask when I would be home to eat. It meant walking to the place that I and my clothes smelled of – an effect of various household practices that the family members and I engaged in. At the same time, it was the place where my laptop, notes, jottings and field diary were. In all these senses, moving to țigănie made myself and my body part of my own ‘field of extraction’. Moving in with the Carols triggered different reactions from the people with whom I had contact in town. These reactions would also constitute part of my field data (for instance, Narcis’s reaction to my white sneakers at the beginning of this chapter). For example, Iulian, Maria’s husband, told me slightly ironically just before I moved into their house: ‘I’m so sorry for you that you have to live with us, but if that’s better for your research. . . then you have to do it’. In the same fashion, others, Roma and non-Roma alike, would pity me for living in țigănie. Those who did not live in țigănie in particular would develop a series of imaginaries about the chaos and dirtiness that I was supposedly enduring, or about the ‘kitschy’ and obnoxious aesthetic that was deemed to characterise Roma people’s households. Furthermore, having moved into țigănie is also what brought up the question: ‘How can you stand that smell of țigan?’ This was to become the trigger for my decision to look further into racialising repertoires about the Roma in relation to the local meanings of the olfactory discussed in the second part of the book. Others, including Roma, would deem me ‘courageous’ for having embarked on such a research project, which would often be assessed as dangerous or challenging due to the material circumstances involved.

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Wanting to Belong to Study Belonging I wished and imagined (perhaps naively) that moving to țigănie would partly narrow perceived distances, such as those between țigan–non-țigan, racialised–racialising, belonging–non-belonging and researcher–researched. In fact, however, moving in with the Carols made these distances more visible and more articulable for all involved. The material and sensorial dimensions of these distances became important for the conceptualisation of what I self-critically called ‘the field of extraction’. While acknowledging the complications that operating with such a term might entail, I suggest that its use enables me to highlight two important aspects. Firstly, ‘the field of extraction’ metaphor highlights the research participants’ ‘proprietorship’ and ‘authorship’ (in Strathern’s terms). As such, it acknowledges the relational, though asymmetrical, character of the knowledge generated, both during my stay in Rotoieni and in the process of producing this written account. Secondly, it sheds light on the fact that my access to most of what I learnt, sensed and experienced within their households was to a great extent in the control of the people that I visited and lived with. As Strathern puts it, ‘people are more than respondents answering questions; they are informants in the fullest sense, in control of the information they offer. I meant this in the sense that the ethnographer is often led to receive it as information, that is, as data which has become meaningful, by putting it into context of general knowledge about these people’s lives and situations and thus the context of its production’ (1999: 7; my emphasis). This intent to pay respect to the authority that my research participants had in regulating my access to their stories and domestic material culture sometimes developed into an augmentation of anxieties and dilemmas. I did not want to make any ‘wrong’ steps that might have resulted in people’s rejection or scepticism towards me. I hoped to somehow belong in order to be trusted, to be someone with whom they could share their thoughts, so that later I would be able to reflect on and write about belonging. I wished to be liked and (perhaps pretentiously) regarded by my research participants more as a part of us (Roma) than as a part of them (non-Roma). I wanted to be accepted in țigănie, to be perceived more in the light of our similarities than in the light of the differences that maintained the distances between us. But, as Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2008), inspired by Adorno and Horkheimer, observes, ‘in an attempt to create commonalities we keep hitting upon irresolvable differences’. This warning takes me to the question of power asymmetries in the process of knowledge production. From the early stages of my research, I was convinced that the ethnography I wanted to engage in, both as method and theory, required a critical

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approach. Such an approach, as Soyini Madison (2012) following Foucault puts it, aims to ‘deconstruct and reinvent those epistemological certainties that foreclose alternative possibilities for ordering and reordering authoritative regimes of truth and to discern and unveil relationships between mechanisms of coercion and what constitutes knowledge’ (2012: 15–16). This approach compels us to ask questions like: ‘What are we going to do with our research, and who ultimately will benefit? Who gives us the authority to make claims about where we have been? How will our work make a difference in people’s lives?’ (Madison 2012: 8). With these questions in mind, I carried out ethnographic interviews (Heyl 2001) and took part in ethnographic episodes on which I draw in this book. I tried to prioritise themes, practices, objects and categories that seemed relevant for my Roma and non-Roma research participants and to marginalise those that I had considered looking at prior to my fieldwork. While my methodological approach was attentive to the conundrum regarding the asymmetries between ‘the researcher’ and ‘the researched’, the question still remains: was it really possible to circumvent the distances between myself and my research participants? Based on the work of Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2010), it could be said that conjointly generating knowledge is possible, but that ultimately the social divisions that structure academia and social relations will always hinder participation on equal terms (2010: 33). This reminds me of a question Iulian asked me during a visit to Rotoieni in August 2017: ‘So Andreea. . . what else did you discover about us (the Roma)?’ Despite the attempt to encourage Roma people’s conscious participation in the process of generating knowledge, Iulian still referred to me as the one with the capacity and means to discover and get to know more about them. This very meaningful question posed by Iulian recalls ‘the schism’ that emerges when, although ‘knowledge is generated through the dialogue between researcher and research participants’, ‘on the level of academic representation it is the researcher who is acclaimed as the sole author’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010: 35).

On Highlighting Commonalities As I have already pointed out, in consolidating my relationships with the people from țigănie, I was hoping to bring to the fore what made us similar rather than what made us different. I related to the circumstances of the Carol family, as well as to those of other Roma families with whom I interacted in Rotoieni and abroad, in many ways. In order to reduce the distances that defined people’s attitudes towards me, I delivered information about myself that articulated those commonalities. When Maria and Iulian offered

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me the chance to live with their family and humbly ‘warned’ me that the material conditions of their house might not be those (that they assumed) I was used to, I talked about my childhood years that I spent in my grandparents’ village where running water and indoor toilets were (and still are) nonexistent. When people invoked experiences of discrimination, I would share partially analogous experiences that I went through as a Romanian migrant in Germany. When the people that I met abroad recounted experiences of hardship that derived from their status as ‘Romanian migrants’, I would bring up the experiences of my parents, who lived as Eastern European migrant workers in Spain for almost two decades. Yet were these experiences indeed comparable? Was I really revealing commonalities or was it simply an illusion gently maintained by my interlocutors’ abstention from reacting and contradicting me by saying ‘it is not the same’? Are the personal events and stories that I was invoking (in order to highlight commonalities) translatable into Maria’s life stories, or the other way around? Although I could identify several commonalities linked to our migrant background, to our gender, to our Romanian citizenship or to our identity as Moldavians, it cannot be dismissed that we had structurally different positionalities. As Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2008) puts it: ‘In the micro spaces of every day we are embedded on this historical, political, social and cultural complexity. In this regard, communication happens or fails. Thus, assuming that a commonality exists between the participants enables communication on the one hand. On the other, however, this assumption ignores the differences influencing this communication, which can result in its failure’. Indeed, communication was one of the main goals that I pursued when attempting to highlight the commonalities with the Roma who participated in this research. I use ‘highlighting’ instead of ‘creating’ (despite the temptation to use the latter) for I believe the commonalities already existed and it was not I who had to create them. Highlighting commonalities becomes a political statement here. In a context like the Romanian society, where the negation or concealment of commonalities between Roma and non-Roma shapes the understanding of oneself and others, confrontation with and acknowledgement of commonalities is imperative. This confrontation has the potential to interrupt the script, that is to say, on the one hand, to shake those (Roma or nonRoma) self-understandings as being superior to the ‘less civilised’, ‘less hardworking’ or ‘less developed’; and, on the other hand, to reconsider those self-understandings about oneself as ‘less’ than others, as was the case with several Roma interlocutors. Situations like those in which Maria told me, ‘you know. . . we are seen as a lower ethnic group’ or ‘you, Andreea, lowered yourself to live among us, in țigănie’ were moments of encounter that revealed how selves are penetrated by the societal and structural negation or

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concealment of commonalities between Roma and non-Roma. Again, the commitment of this work to notions of belonging is linked to the task of shedding light on the commonalities, on what makes us similar, without losing sight of the inequalities that nurture differences. Nonetheless, committing myself to this task does not contradict, but rather confirms the idea that ‘a commonality in identity’ is impossible (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2008) – an impossibility that frequently became obvious in the ethnographic episodes of which I was a part. The same impossibility reveals these episodes as ‘encounters of radical difference’ structured by ‘deep division lines, articulating social inequalities’ (ibid.). One episode that shook my naive illusion of lessening asymmetries happened one afternoon in August 2014. On that day, Maria recounted an experience that she had at the Baptist church, which the Carols frequented at least every Sunday. She recalled that a (non-Roma) believer had complained in derogatory and racist terms about the Roma from the surrounding areas, referring to them as lazy, thieves and more generally as a damaging presence in the community. Maria’s reaction was to confront the man by letting him know that those words hurt her as it was her people that he talked about: Perhaps the person didn’t realise that I was myself a țigancă [feminine form of ‘țigan’] and that all those words and examples hurt me. I asked him to stop making those comments when I am around, because it is painful for me. I pray for my people, I pray for them to change, but it will never stop hurting me hearing these statements made by ‘Romanians’ . . . It also comes from the family; when parents tell their children: ‘behave yourself, otherwise I’ll give you to the țigani’ or ‘the țigani will come and take you’, obviously they will grow up with the fear. . . A fear and a repulsion for us . . . A ‘Romanian’ will never cease to be a ‘Romanian’. (Maria’s words as recorded in my extended jottings, August 2014)

At the end of her recollection of what happened, Maria stated: ‘You see Andreea. . . there is this gap between us and “the Romanians” that will never ever disappear, no matter what’. This encounter made me once more aware that being ‘a Romanian’, that radical difference, was an aspect of my positionality as a researcher from which I could never escape. However, the attempts to reveal those aspects that made us alike did not always fail. There were indeed aspects that facilitated the communication process and, thus, the process of conjointly generating knowledge. One of them was a linguistic aspect, namely my Moldavian accent. As I was raised in a town in north-eastern Romania, located around eighty kilometres from Rotoieni, I speak Romanian with an accent easily recognisable elsewhere in the country. Unlike people from western Romania, who take pride in keeping the accent that marks them as originating from Transylvania (when, say, they move to Bucharest), those who speak with this ‘Moldavian accent’

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tend to suppress it, as it is considered a ‘countryside accent’. Based on how it sounds, it is referred to as a way of speaking employed by unsophisticated people who have a low level of education and who are anything but cosmopolitan. The fact that I spoke Romanian with a ‘Moldavian accent’ was perceived by my interlocutors as a sign of a lack of a superior attitude (which would have been assumed if I talked neutrally, ‘without an accent’). Therefore, it could be said that my Moldavian accent became a point of commonality and created a feeling of me being an insider, belonging with them to the region. At the same time, I could not speak any of the Romani dialects that the different Roma populations in Romania speak. I acknowledge that there must have been aspects that I missed due to my lack of Romani skills. Yet it did not hinder the dialogue and interaction as all the Roma in Rotoieni are fluent Romanian speakers, with many of the youngsters not speaking Romani at all. What is more, my lack of Romani skills entailed a series of implications relative to the lessening of asymmetries between ‘the researcher’ and ‘the research participants’. First, my explicit attempt to study Romani revealed my research partners’ language skills as valuable resources and knowledge that they owned while I did not. Sporadically, my tutors in this process were: Maria’s youngest children, who taught me basic vocabulary and would often make fun of my awkward pronunciation of words and phrases; the pupils and the Roma teacher who was offering Romani classes weekly to Roma children in seventh and eighth grade; and Manuel, a young man whom I used to meet weekly and who taught me basic grammar. My interactions with these language tutors were contexts in which the literacy rapport was completely inverted; the Romani language was a field in which I was completely illiterate, while they were the knowledge authorities. Second, the fact that I did not speak the language allowed me to observe how people used the language as a way to keep ‘their space safe’. Maria once told me that Roma often speak Romani when they do not want to be understood by non-Roma. As it is not considered a useful resource, but rather a marker of stigmatisation, in many cases parents do not want to teach their children Romani. At the time of my field research, the members of the Carol family did use Romani. Maria mentioned once that by speaking this language she feels connected to her children and vice versa. Although it rarely happened, one of Maria’s daughters once told me jokingly that they only spoke Romani to each other when they did not want me to understand them. Apart from language and accents, the discussion about communication and dialogue can be taken to further epistemological levels. In the chapter ‘Time and Writing about the Other’, Johannes Fabian (2014) defines ethnography as communicative praxis. This proposal is accompanied by the critique

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that, while the interactions that happen during fieldwork imply sharing time with the people, ethnographers tend to operate in their teaching and writing practices with ‘a discourse that consistently places those who are talked about in a time other than that of the one who talks’ (Fabian 2006: 143). The core of Fabian’s critique of the discipline of anthropology is precisely the denial of coevalness (2006, 2014). This critique signals that the ‘temporal distance is objectivity in the mind of many practitioners’ (2014: 30). Fabian suggests that communicative and dialogic ethnographic approaches shall replace a ‘positivist and empiricist ethnography’ (2014: 73) which prioritises the question of ‘what the facts were’ with little (or no) acknowledgement of how the presence of the researcher shaped ‘how the fact came to be’. In her book Critical Ethnography, Soyini Madison (2012) also touches on the question of ‘the ethnographic present’ (see Fabian 2014: 33), which is said to be resisted through dialogic forms of relationship. According to Madison, ‘Dialogue moves from ethnographic present to ethnographic presence by opening the passageways for readers and audiences to experience and grasp the partial presence of a temporal conversation constituted by others’ voices, bodies, histories, and yearnings’ (2012: 11). This book relies greatly on pieces of dialogue in order to explore categories, experiences and the meanings with which they are imbued. In reproducing, analysing and translating pieces of conversation from Romanian into English, I hope to have succeeded in providing a ‘politically sensitive representation of the spoken words’ (Buckler 2007: 36).

The Material-Sensorial Nexus in the Field In this book, another way of dealing with questions related to ethics and representation in ethnographic research is by unpacking the specificities of the sensory-oriented methodology that guided the endeavours of my research in Rotoieni. Maggie O’Neill (2012) argues that reflecting on the ‘sensuousness of ethnography’ – a term coined by Paul Stoller (2004) – requires more than immersing ourselves in people’s everyday contexts. It demands the acknowledgement of people’s role as experts and knowledge-holders regarding the ways in which they sense their world. Thereby, understanding the world requires the researcher to consider ‘intra-subjectivity and the more sensory ways that people engage in, describe and explore their social worlds’ (O’Neill 2012: 155). It also requires that we ask ourselves, ‘how do we write meaningfully about those everyday embodied experiences of touching and feeling, conjunctions of sensation and emotion that cannot arise without the physicality of the body?’ (Paterson 2009: 766). Interested in what he calls ‘haptic knowledge’, Paterson notes that the engagement with sensuous eth-

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nography demands reflection on both the researchers’ and the research participants’ ‘sensuous dispositions’ (ibid.). The concern in this book with the ‘sensuousness of ethnography’ revolves around the olfactory. On the one hand, I deal with the materiality of field sites and inhabited spaces that shapes the olfactory texture of these socio-material contexts. On the other, I scrutinise the racialising repertoire about gypsiness as ‘olfactory otherness’. When thinking about these aspects, I am confronted with several methodological and epistemological anxieties. Being invisible and mostly unmeasurable, it is hardly possible to categorise and organise smells as empirical evidence. However, this was never my intention. The task in the field was to grasp the olfactory dimension of the domestic space and the way in which it reveals the material conditions of people’s everyday lives. Thinking about inhabited spaces and places as dynamic and processual instead of as static entities has been particularly productive for the analytical endeavours concerned with the material-sensorial nexus. Inspired by the philosopher Edward Casey and his theory of place (1996), Sarah Pink (2008) develops an experiential understanding of place, endorsing the idea that place is not fixed, but is rather ‘a form of constantly changing “event”’ (Pink 2008: 178). Ethnography is thus a place-making process that ‘happens’ in collaboration with the research participants. Pink shows that ‘the sensory sociality of walking, eating, imagining, drinking, photographing, and audio- and video-recording, alongside and in collaboration with research participants, can be productive of place-as-ethnographic knowledge’ (2008: 175–76). This perspective informs my ethnographic engagement, which has also included community and house tours, as well as walks through the places relevant to the everyday life of my research participants. Apart from walking, eating and drinking are sensorial and bodily activities experienced both by the research participants and myself. It is thus by allowing all the senses to operate during field research (not only sight and hearing) that the ethnographer becomes more reflective of her own role and position in the field. These are considerations that informed the phase of my research with the Roma who had moved abroad from Rotoieni. The people I visited in Spain, as well as Cecilia, whom I visited in Amsterdam, guided me through the locality where they were residing in the summer of 2015. These walks constituted moments of encounter in which past and present experiences merged and biographies were (re-)created. As O’Neill suggests, walking and talking entail a ‘relational, sensuous, kinaesthetic, democratic and participatory process of collaborative coproduction’ (2012: 164). Walking research practices have also been discussed in conjunction to visuality production based on the engagement with digital means (see Favero 2014; Pink 2004, 2006). Paolo Favero (2014), a visual anthropologist who

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combines elements from visual culture studies, digital and material culture, argues that digital tools have become ‘progressively more attentive to context, relations and materiality, and hence to the world surrounding the frame’ (2014: 167). My use of digital means consisted mostly of taking photographs with a digital camera (during my research trips in 2014) and then with my mobile phone (during the research trips in 2015). These digital means enabled me to subsequently deal with my ‘head and body full of memories’ (Pink 2008: 192) and with my own sensorial experiences as field data. The digital photographs that I took were essential in my writing process. They enabled me to transpose aspects of the material, visual and sensorial texture of my fieldwork into a written form. This digital visual material also enabled me to reflect on the relation between the circumstances (social and material) in which it was coproduced and its visual content, thus facilitating the examination of materiality of movement, emplacement, relationality and belonging. Yet neither the photographs I took nor the conversations that I recorded could possibly capture sensorial experiences in the field that contributed considerably to the process of generating data, becoming data themselves. Experiences like the touch of the wall-carpets hung in the houses of my research participants, the taste of the food made by Maria, the smells with which my clothes would be impregnated whenever the people I visited fried potatoes or when the Carols made a fire in the stove, were all ways of knowing and knowledge inscribed in my body and sensorial memory (cf. Seremetakis 1994; see also Degen and Rose 2012). As such, they also contributed to the understanding of my field research and to the crafting of the written accounts readable in this book. An attempt to capture sensorial experiences of my research participants and to explore the material-sensorial nexus in the field has been the olfactory diaries approach. The ‘olfactory diaries’ technique consisted of six of my research participants recording smells from their households over a period of two weeks. This technique (with consideration of the epistemological and ethical implications that I discuss in chapter 8) enabled the people to reflect on the olfactory experiences from their inhabited space(s), as well as to make interpretations and assessments of those experiences. In this sense, the olfactory diaries aimed to provide space for my research participants’ contestations and formulations of local understandings of the olfactory, revealing the (im)materiality of olfactory experiences and facts.

Access to ‘Relevant’ Knowledge The ethnographer deals with ways of learning that are always shaped by the context in which the learning ‘happens’ and in which ‘people themselves are

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managing what is to be known, and to whom when’ (Strathern 1999: 12). In this section, I reflect on such ways of learning that underlie this book by discussing how Maria and Iulian related to me and to themselves, as well as how they managed how and what was to be known by me. Both Maria and Iulian, the Roma couple who hosted me, enacted from the beginning the role of mediators between myself and ‘the community’. ‘Mediator’ was exactly the word that they used in order to define who they were in relation to me. Most of the time, this activity of mediating meant introducing me to people they assessed as trustworthy, as well as recommending me to neighbours and relatives as an equally trustworthy student from Germany. ‘Don’t enter anyone’s house, Andreea!’ or ‘Wait for my husband and he’ll go with you wherever you want’ were warnings that Maria would often give me, particularly in the first two months that I spent in Rotoieni. At the same time, this role of mediation was also enacted in the sense of ‘channelling my steps’ towards people who, in their view, had something to tell me regarding ‘Roma traditions’. This is connected with the assumptions that they had about the content of my research. In the first weeks, whenever I walked with Iulian in țigănie, he introduced me as a student who wrote about ‘typical’ Roma or Ursari traditions, customs and, at times, housingrelated practices. The mediation of my access to ‘the community’ and thereby to the knowledge that they assessed as being valuable for my final written account was also enacted and talked about in terms of their relationship with God. Maria, Iulian and their four children were the only Roma Baptist family from Rotoieni who frequented the Baptist church in a neighbouring village. They were well known as pocăiții, a pejoratively infused term which, in its literal sense, means ‘remorseful’. It is usually employed to name those who assume other religious affiliations than the traditional ones in the region (mainly Orthodox and Catholic). Although many neighbours expressed scepticism regarding Maria and Iulian’s religious reorientation, they talked about Iulian in bright tones. It was often emphasised that the change from who he was before and after his conversion was impressive. From an ‘immoral, violent and alcoholic man’, he was said to have become a loving, caring husband, father and householder, as well as someone who could serve as a source of inspiration for all the Roma men in țigănie. This story of Iulian’s conversion was told to me by many Roma and nonRoma neighbours and officials, including Iulian himself. Moreover, Maria always talked about their family life in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’ the baptism, referring to the period of ‘before the baptism’ as a phase marked by domestic violence, poverty and crying. More than ten years after the baptism, Maria and Iulian hosted me in their house in the name of ‘God’s will’, without accepting the rent payment that I offered. They would often emphasise

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that, unlike other people from țigănie who could have hosted me, they did not expect anything in return; that by providing me with a roof and helping me with my research, they nurtured their own relationship with God and thanked him for their peaceful family life. What is also interesting from the perspective of their assumed role as mediators between the researcher and their knowledge are Maria’s remarks about the fact that us meeting each other was a sign of God’s love towards both them and myself. Their self-identification as people who, based on their connection with God, were willing to help me accomplish my research was an important aspect that shaped what and how I was to learn about their lives and experiences. Their Baptist affiliation shaped the enactments and narrations about them as Roma in particular ways and was supposed to shape (as far as Maria and Iulian were concerned) my understandings, and then writings, about them and other Roma in Rotoieni. In the first weeks of my stay in Rotoieni, Iulian told me: ‘We are different from all that you’ll see here, in the mahala [țigănie]’ and ‘We are not the typical țigani, you’ll see that we have other principles and morals’. Maria emphasised often that people from țigănie trust Iulian and they often seek advice from them, as they know that the Carol family is special due to their connection with God. It is true that many neighbours would drop by with small requests such as help with filling in forms for different public offices; reading and helping them to understand different official documents; helping them figure out if purchased goods were authentic or counterfeit; and borrowing household items or small quantities of flour, sugar or potatoes. When anything like this happened, Maria would usually draw my attention to such occurrences as confirmation of their special status within țigănie that she had previously talked about. The discursive markers of difference between them and the other Roma from țigănie have always gone hand in hand with the self-affirmation of their Roma background. Knowing that my research project had primarily to do with Roma (and not with the Baptists in the area), I was often provided with insights into what they do and what they believe as Roma or Ursari. I remember once when Alex, the youngest Carol child who was seven years old at the time, was playing with a broom and called out to me, exclaiming: ‘Look Andreea! This is how we [i.e. Roma] sweep out the dust’. In the first weeks of my field research, I asked myself what, from the way I had presented myself and talked about my research, made Iulian think that he should introduce me to people with whom I could conduct some sort of ‘expert interviews’, meaning people who had knowledge about what is institutionalised as Roma history and culture. When we had our first long conversation, he stated: ‘I know few things about our culture. My brother, who is a teacher of the Romani language, knows more, but I also know some

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things because I always liked to be informed. I know [that]. . . we are nomad people, we come from India, we are organised in different castes. . .’ (March 2014). It was not long afterwards that Iulian suggested I visit the man known as the last comb manufacturer in Rotoieni. Comb-making is known as the (formerly) traditional occupation of the Roma in Rotoieni. Iulian seemed to assume that creating a context in which I could observe how combs were made was something beneficial and relevant for my research. We went to the house of this man who was not only busy, but also visibly uninterested in Iulian’s request to show me how he worked. ‘Show us how you make combs, but by hand, the way you used to make them, not as you do it today, with the new technology!’ said Iulian with an encouraging tone. Meanwhile, in a lower voice, Iulian told me that the old man had stopped making combs manually as the process was extremely laborious and time-consuming and that instead he preferred to use ‘modern technology’.

An Ethnographic Episode Later, when Iulian and Maria noticed that it was rather the everyday and the domestic realm that I was keen to explore, the enactments of and discourses about their affirmed ‘Roma identity’ became much more concrete. It is during the analysis and writing phase that I became aware of the fusion between my specific interests in household matters and the tones in which Maria and Iulian narrated their Roma selves. To illustrate this point, I will elaborate on what I call ‘an ethnographic episode’, namely a bleaching walls session that took place in early April 2014 when the house was being prepared for Easter. As I had previously asked about this practice, the couple invited me to join in and see how they (as Roma) bleached the walls. They told me that in their family Iulian contributed greatly to this activity, despite the fact that in the ‘Roma culture’ it was mostly women who took care of the household and, therefore, who were responsible for bleaching the walls.8 The couple emphasised further that Iulian did so not only because in the past he had worked as a house painter, but also because, as they put it, in their family things were slightly different than in other ‘regular Roma families’. They also explained to me the procedure that he had to follow when he worked as a house painter, recalling with a nostalgic tone ‘the beauty of the illustrations’ that were designed on the margins and in the corners of the interior walls. ‘Now it’s something else in fashion, it’s something simple, only colour, without any drawing or glitter’, Maria told me, referring to the outmoded versus modern dichotomy (that will be discussed in depth in chapters 2 and 3).

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The day before the bleaching session Maria planned the colours. She decided to paint the walls yellow based on the fact that the room had previously been painted blue, green and pink, but never yellow: ‘I like this colour, it lights up the room. Blue, green. . . these are colours for cold weather, but this [yellow] is great for spring’. It was also the moment when she told me that she considered asking Brândușa, their first-born daughter, to help her draw illustrations on the walls in the vein of what Iulian had explained was fashionable in the past: ‘Here we’d like to bleach the walls with yellow emulsion and draw purple illustrations [on the upper margins], and there [in the other room] we’d like to have the walls purple with yellow illustrations’ (excerpt from my field notes, April 2014). On the following day, a Wednesday, shortly before noon, when I arrived at the Carols’ house everybody was at home, prepared for the liming session (except the first-born, who was attending high school in the nearest big city). All the furniture from the room where we were going to bleach the walls was outside. Only smaller pieces of furniture remained inside (Figure 1.2). Everyone was busy with something, either related to the walls that were to be bleached, or taking pictures with the digital camera that I had brought with me. As I showed interest, Iulian encouraged me to use the paint roller and apply the emulsion paint to the walls. I call this an ethnographic episode not (only) because it provided me with a context in which I could engage in so-called participant observation where people did something and talked about what they were doing, and not only because it was a context in which I could ‘collect “relevant” data’ for my analysis, but rather because it constituted an event in which knowledge about selves and practices was conjointly elaborated through our concomitant bodily and rhetorical engagement in the act of bleaching the walls. I call it an ethnographic episode because it illustrated how the family approached the activity of renovating their house, and what they wanted me to see from this approach. Moreover, it was a setting that revealed how their understanding of what I was researching shaped and constituted the knowledge that they shared with me, as well as the way in which my access to it was mediated. What I propose through the use of a notion like ethnographic episode is a reflection on how the ethnographer’s presence and people’s own representation of what is being researched might shape activities or chores into events or rituals. Consider once more the aforementioned mindful preparation and planning of the bleaching session. Furthermore, the fusion between what Strathern (1999) calls anthropologists’ ‘expository practices’ and people’s ‘display practices’ is prone to shape the way in which an activity is carried out concretely, as well as the terms in which it is thought of and talked about. It is in this sense, for instance, that I see Maria’s remarks about considering

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Figure 1.2. Room prepared for the liming session, Rotoieni, April 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

drawing illustrations on the walls (as used to be done in the past) connected with the interest that I manifested in this household activity. Eventually, the walls were painted one colour. What is even more interesting is realising how the things that I was interested in gradually came to have an impact on the ways in which people talked about themselves. This is actually the main idea enforced by material culture approaches: it is not only that people shape material objects’ existence, but

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that material objects equally shape people’s existence and discourses about it. What do I mean by ‘gradually came to have an impact’? This is related to what changed in Maria and Iulian’s choices regarding what and when to share with me (or with other outsider audiences) about them as Roma. For example, at the beginning of my stay in Rotoieni, Iulian would usually invoke broad narratives, such as ‘we-Roma, a nomad people’. Later on, however, I observed him referring to the wall-carpets, in which I was explicitly interested, as something particular to the Roma or to the Ursari Roma. In fact, when I took Stella – a colleague of mine from Botswana – to the Carols’, the fact that they hung wall-carpets was among the first things that they told her about themselves as Ursari Roma. The reflection on these ethnographic episodes is an attempt to be epistemologically self-conscious about ways of knowing; about the exchange of knowledge through which knowledge itself is being created and revealed; about the contribution and participation in the conjoint process of generating knowledge in which people in my research engaged. It is with these considerations in mind that the ethnographic episodes explored in the following chapter about the presence of the wall-carpets should be imagined.

Notes 1. Throughout our conversation, Narcis mostly used the term țigani. 2. It is unclear whether they were enslaved within the territory of the principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia), or before arriving on the north bank of the Danube, via the Byzantine Empire and the Balkan Peninsula (Achim 2004: 21). 3. This study was carried out in communities from five different counties, including Iași, between December 2012 and June 2013. 4. At the time of writing (August 2017), Margareta Matache was an instructor and postdoctoral fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. 5. Another term that is used at times in a similar way is mahala. This word is widely used in the Balkans, marking the Ottoman influence in the region. In other regions/ localities, the area inhabited by Roma is referred to as ‘colonie’ (for a reference to this, see Olivera 2010). 6. Țigănia is the grammatically articulated noun form of the unarticulated form ‘țigănie’. 7. I use the same definition of țigănie elsewhere (Racleș 2018: 88; Ivasiuc and Racleș 2019: 26). 8. However, Iulian was not the only husband I met in Rotoieni who bleached the walls or helped his wife with this activity.

CHAPTER 2



AESTHETIC PRESENCES

Introduction It was in August 2014 that I got in touch with one of the Orthodox priests in Rotoieni. One of Iulian’s sisters had told me that this non-Roma man could introduce me to ‘reliable’ Roma families due to his good relationship with Roma in Rotoieni. Before the priest and I met, we had a short phone call, after which he sent me the following text message: ‘I can put you in contact with about two Roma families. But the only common aspect of their households is the kitsch :) Probably you are looking for a community of authentic țigani with typical clothing and home decoration elements typical to them. In Rotoieni most of them are an unsuccessful imitation of “Romanian” families’.1 I learnt afterwards that it was my mention of wall-carpets that prompted the man to associate my research with a ‘scholarly quest for authenticity’ (Malkki 1992: 36), based only on our very short phone conversation. Despite the fact that in previous decades Romanians enthusiastically covered the interior walls of their houses or flats with the ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ style of carpets (see Figure 0.1), at the time of my research this practice was referred to as a ‘typically’ Roma and/or țigani practice. Regardless of their ethnic background, people in Rotoieni often talked about wall-carpets as interruptions of the ‘ideal home’ pattern dominated by simplicity and practicality and as signifiers of backwardness. In this chapter I focus on the uses and qualities of wall-carpets, as well as on the domestic practices these objects are part of, particularly in the households of those who had them on the interior walls of their house or flat at the time of my research. The chapter unfolds various implications, from aesthetic and practical ones to those related to ‘ethnic identity’. In addition to

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the consideration of statements like ‘I cannot stand the bare walls’ or ‘They [wall-carpets] protect our houses on the inside from cold’, this chapter also looks at affirmations like ‘It [wall-carpets] is a țigani thing, our thing’, which I will discuss in relation to ‘the sensitivity to the aesthetics of community life’ (MacDougall 1999: 4). In MacDougall’s words, ‘aesthetics’ is not about ‘the valuation of sensory experience (as in European aesthetics), except as this bears upon the ability of people to determine what is familiar or unfamiliar’ (1999: 5; emphasis in original). Aesthetic sensibilities refer to mundane activities, everyday objects, bodily experiences and emotions, all of which ‘define a familiar social space and the individual’s sense of belonging’ (1999: 6). This lens enables me to reflect on the discourses and enactments of the Roma individuals for whom wall-carpets are ‘our Roma/țigani thing’ and contribute to the realisation of a familiar social environment. The term ‘aesthetic sensibilities’ supports a discussion about self-identification with the wall-carpets, while being nonetheless critical of and alert to the essentialising view that depicts the practice of hanging wall-carpets as something typical of ‘the Roma’. Through domestic consumption practices, people project ‘an idealized notion of quality of life and an idealized form of sociality’ (Clarke 2001: 28). Examining household practices and the domestic space is thus methodologically useful for analysing people’s movements between ‘ideas of selfpresentation and ideas of appropriate display’ (Garvey 2001: 61). But rather than on ‘ideas of self-presentation’, the light in this chapter will be cast on local notions of ‘appropriateness’ and the normative standards of homemaking that shape the ‘everyday aesthetics’ (Miyahara 2014; Saito 2010). At the same time, I elaborate on the ways in which women negotiate, accommodate and contest these homemaking standards at the level of domestic arrangements. ‘Hidden in plain sight’ (Saito 2010: 2), everyday aesthetics is about ‘what at first may appear to be trivial, negligible, and inconsequential aesthetic responses that we make on [a] daily basis’ while resulting in ‘serious moral, social, political and environmental consequences’ (Saito 2010: 6).

No Empty Walls In October 2014 I met Georgian, a non-Roma man who, for more than twenty years, had performed commercial activities in the field of household textile items. He told me that the kind of wall-carpets I discuss here started to be imported from China in the 1970s. In the 1980s, like almost everything else, these wall-carpets were purchasable only via the informal market due to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s2 austerity policy, which hindered Romanians’ access to many goods.

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The wall-carpets measure 2 by 1.5 metres and, according to Georgian, used to be imported from Syria. In the aftermath of the war that started in the Middle East, ‘the thick wall-carpets’ stopped being produced. Instead, similar wall-carpets started to be imported from China and Turkey. Georgian mentioned that these ‘new’ types of wall-carpets that ‘invaded the market’ are made of a lower-quality fabric and have different dimensions, colours and templates. I saw three versions of wall-carpets in houses inhabited by Roma people in Rotoieni in 2014 and 2015. The version that I saw most often is 2 metres long by 1.5 metres wide and according to Georgian was produced in Syria. The second version I saw only once in the house of a family living in extreme poverty. It was the same size, but was made from a much thinner fabric. Georgian mentioned that this type imitates the Syrian carpets but is cheaper and of a lower quality (Figure 2.1). The wall-carpets from the third category are smaller than the other two and, similar to those from the first category, are made of a high-quality fabric. According to Georgian, they are produced in and imported from Turkey, and are more expensive. One of the few of those that I saw (Figure 2.2) was bought by Melania, a young woman who was living in Spain, but who renovated one of the three rooms of her seven-member family’s house in Rotoieni in accordance with her ‘new taste’, as one of her sisters put it.

Figure 2.1. Thinner fabrics, Rotoieni, March 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

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Figure 2.2. Thicker fabrics, Rotoieni, September 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

The Roma who had wall-carpets talked about hanging them as a practice of ‘putting clothes on the house’ (in Romanian, ‘îmbracă casa’) and as a way of keeping the house pleasant and cosy. ‘We don’t like bare walls; the house needs to be dressed somehow’ was a statement uttered several times. Once, a woman in her late thirties, who lived on the outskirts of Rotoieni in the same basic conditions in which people in țigănie lived, told me jokingly: ‘How could I stay like that, without them [the wall-carpets]? [ Just like that] with empty walls? Am I in jail to stay with those bare walls or what?’ (October 2014). All my visits, and particularly my stay with the Carols, revealed that covering the walls constituted an important aspect of the cycle of the household and was described in relation to both practical and aesthetic implications. The wall-carpets were taken down when the walls had to be bleached or when the inhabited space was to be adjusted to the seasonal conditions. In the Carols’ house, in the warm months, the wall-carpets were hung in a centred fashion. Meanwhile, in winter, along with these carpets, the walls were almost entirely covered with other kinds of rugs. As a general rule, the carpets’ location on the walls depended on the location of the beds. The walls against which beds were positioned were those

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where carpets would be hung most of the time (Figure 2.3). Colourful but in dark tones, these carpets ‘filled in the emptiness of the walls’ (as my interlocutors put it) that were usually bleached in bright and concentrated colours like pink, neon or light green, light blue, yellow or mustard. But these carpets were not the only items on the walls. Apart from the rugs that covered the surfaces of the walls in the winter months, colourful plastic or paper was pasted on the walls against which the gas cooker was positioned. Pictures of family members, Orthodox icons or diplomas illustrating the children’s school performance were also attached either directly onto the wall-carpets or on the remaining empty wall surfaces. Objects like plush toys or garlands left over from Christmas were other common wall accessories. Regarding their visual content, the wall-carpets display various motifs, such as: religious characters ( Jesus Christ with his sheep and the Last Supper) (see, e.g., Figure 2.2); non-humans (elephants, peacocks, lions, tigers, deer) which are usually pictured next to lakes or other marine landscapes; and oriental scenarios, the most common being ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ (Figure 0.1). There were a few carpets that did not fit into any of these categories, including one illustrating six dogs playing billiards, one displaying tigers attacking an antelope and one that pictured the Bosphorus Strait and the Turkish flag. It seemed to me that both the human and non-human

Figure 2.3. Domestic setting, Rotoieni, March 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

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characters, through their bodily positions and gazes, were staring at or simply witnessing what happened in the domestic space on an everyday basis. The visual content was not meaningful in any way for the people who were hanging the wall-carpets at the time of my research. Most of the women reported that they had simply bought the wall-carpets that they liked at first sight from the few options that were available in the bazaar. Any attempt to trace connections between the visual content of the wall-carpets and the inhabitants’ values or aspirations would be rather inaccurate. One anecdotal example is the display of the carpet illustrating dogs smoking and playing billiards in the Carols’ house, right next to a wall-carpet displaying Jesus as a shepherd. Smoking and playing games of chance were repeatedly condemned by the Baptist Maria and Iulian, who described these acts as immoral, un-Christian and displeasing to God. However, the display of ‘the dogs playing billiards’ wall-carpet was never questioned. As long as this carpet played its role of filling the emptiness of the room and the bareness of the specific wall, nobody minded its visual content.

The Peacock Wall-Carpet The last time I saw the peacock wall-carpet (Figure 2.4) in the Carols’ house was in September 2015. Maria recalled that she had purchased it in 1997, when her first-born son was three years old. It was bought with the money that she earned from selling sunflower seeds in local markets and bazaars. My archive contains pictures of the peacock wall-carpet from five different time periods, illustrating the ways in which this item has been used, reused and differently accommodated within the domestic realm. An image that dates back to 2008 (which I found in the family’s collection of printed photographs) illustrates only the right half of the peacock wall-carpet that, at that time, was hung in the first room. My next record is from March 2014, when I entered the second room for the first time. The same right half was in a similar position as it was hung six years prior. Six months later, in September, the same right half was lying on the floor, at the entrance to the second room. After a few weeks, both halves were lying on the floor in the second room. This reminded me of Maria’s strategy of using light and easily removable floor carpets in the warm months, which allowed her to put them in the washing machine more frequently than in the cold months. In April 2015, I visited the Carol family when the household was being rearranged and refurbished for Easter. At one point, on one of the days that I spent with them during that spring, Maria came into the house with several recently washed carpets in her arms, including the two pieces of the pea-

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Figure 2.4. A half carpet on the floor at the Carols’, Rotoieni, October 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

cock carpet. As the walls were already covered with other carpets, she put those pieces on the floor again. Later, in September of the same year, the two halves were in completely different locations in the house. While the left half was hung inside the house, next to the window of the second room, the right half was outside, on a metallic frame whose role was rather unclear to me. The life-cycle of the peacock wall-carpet that I was able to trace shows that, through its material and sensorial qualities, the wall-carpet plays an important role in the process of refurbishing the house, whereby filling a space perceived as empty seems to be crucial. The ways in which Maria used the two pieces of the peacock wall-carpet are linked to her understanding of what the house should look like. Neither the aesthetic nor the practical dimensions (if we are to separate them) seem to be favoured over the other. Interestingly, Maria’s varied ways of using the two halves of the peacock wall-carpet indicate that this object is not intended to obey any kind of symbolic order regulated by dichotomies such as sacred–profane or polluted–unpolluted. The fact that the two pieces of the wall-carpet were once placed down on the floor does not preclude them from again being displayed up on the walls after being washed. In addition, although this carpet enabled Maria to retell a story about her past as a sunflower seed vendor or about her son’s birth, it was not imbued with any emblematic meaning that would inspire her to keep it wrapped and cherish it for the memories it may evoke.

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The different ways in which Maria made use of the two pieces of the peacock wall-carpet suggest that these objects were not employed strictly within the parameters established by their producers or contingent on the standard uses allocated to these items. Maria engaged with the domestic materiality in ways that enabled her to accommodate the different needs of her household at different points in time. In this sense, one could say that the wall-carpets go through a process of ‘de-commoditisation’. Roberta Sassatelli, inspired by the work of Michel de Certeau (1984) and Daniel Miller (1987), defines ‘de-commoditisation’ as ‘the re-translation of the meanings and uses of commodities through daily life, on the basis of needs that are not directly reducible to those of production, retail or promotion’ (2007: 115). Pointing to a tablecloth which she had previously used as a wall-carpet, a woman in her early fifties listed a few ways in which she uses even the over-worn wall-carpets: ‘It [a wall-carpet] can be very old, but if you wash it, you take it and put it here or there, in front of a door. . . [it can still have use]’. Such customisations indicate that wall-carpets are items that acquire different roles within the household, without their functionality surpassing their aesthetic dimension. As Pauline Garvey suggests, notions of utility and of aesthetics inform each other in a way that allows domestic objects to be ‘usable’ rather than simply ‘used’ (2003: 244). As such, it appears that the attachment to the practice of hanging wall-carpets has nothing to do with a fetishization of these objects. Given the adaptability of these objects’ useability, wall-carpets acquire momentary importance only through the practices of which they are a part, and due to the effects and immediate comfort that their presence produces within the domestic order. To illustrate this point, I will discuss the practice of hanging wall-carpets in relation to its role in making and reproducing homely atmospheres.3

Home Atmospheres That home was a place from which nobody could be thrown out was intimated more than once by the Roma I met in Rotoieni. In one of our late afternoon talks, Maria asserted: I’ve been thrown out so many times when living at my parents’ place, which always made me dream about having a house that would be mine and where no one could throw me out from, with a garden, with a kitchen. . . And see? Now I have it! . . .Dreaming of a house is a necessity, not something of pride. Dreaming of I don’t know what [kind of ] car is a sort of pride already. But having a house. . . a place nobody can throw you out from. . . [is not a source of pride]. (Excerpt from my field notes, September 2014)

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Similar accounts contextualised the biographies of carpets that I saw hung on interior walls of houses. The beginning of a wall-carpet’s life-cycle was often connected with the beginning of a new phase in the individual’s or family’s life and with the desire to transform a shelter into a home of their own. Take the example of Aurica, a woman in her early forties, mother of two young men, who has always lived in țigănie. Pointing at the wall-carpet hanging in the room where we were talking, Aurica recalled: ‘I have had it since I was living in that small room at my mother’s place, I was [married but] still without children. First time, when I moved there, I bought for myself this carpet, it was about 1,000 lei.4 . . . Yes, it’s not fashionable anymore, but I still hang them because I like them, at least in one room. . . It’s okay. Only like that, with bare walls. . . I don’t like, there must be something on, you know?’ (recorded conversation, August 2014; my emphasis). In Aurica’s account, in spite of what ‘fashion’ (moda) dictates, buying and hanging wall-carpets is part of the process through which a liveable atmosphere inside the house is achieved and maintained. The following episode expands further on this aspect. It was a rainy day at the end of September (2014), when Maria’s cousin Bogdan, who lived close by in țigănie, entered the Carols’ house. The children, Iulian and I were waiting for Maria to finish the preparation of the zacuscă,5 which prompted Bogdan to ask rhetorically, ‘People, what’s this onion smell here?’ After a chat about the work that he had accomplished on that day and the complaint about the poor and disrespectful lunch that his day-employer had provided, Iulian assumed the role of researcher and initiated a conversation about wall-carpets. Bogdan stated: [I hang them] because I like. . . It seems nice [with them on the walls] and the look is. . . something homely-like. . . It doesn’t matter what they [the wallcarpets] display, but it’s how I like. . . Not with bare walls. . . I don’t like [it without them], in a way it looks ugly. . . I don’t know, but without a wall-carpet I don’t like it [the room]. For instance, when you clean the house and then you put those carpets on walls, and they’re clean, beautiful, they have those bright colours on the walls, and you hang them like this. . . You cheer up the house. But without carpets. . . The house looks empty. . . I don’t know. . . It looks ugly, it’s graceless. (Recorded conversation, September 2014)

Later on, playing the role of interviewer, Iulian asked Bogdan whether he preferred hanging a wall-carpet displaying ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ or a carpet with religious motifs. Bogdan answered: ‘There’s no difference to me, because I don’t believe in these carpets. . . You may say that there’s Jesus, but there’s no Jesus there. They’re all eye-catching and so I really like these things’. What is salient in Bogdan’s account is the aesthetic appreciation of a house with ‘dressed’ (îmbrăcați) walls. It is the carpet on the wall that contributes

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to the creation of a familiar atmosphere inside, and not its visual content. As such, the wall-carpets seem to play an important role in the refurbishment of the household’s fabric – for which not only the visual dimension matters, but also the tactile and olfactory dimensions. Once washed, wall-carpets acquire qualities (a pleasing smell, vivid colours, soft texture) that act to embellish the house and to create a pleasant atmosphere for its inhabitants. Later in the discussion, Bogdan’s aesthetic judgement, which coincided with a positive valuation of the practice of hanging wall-carpets, was complemented by a negative valuation of places like hospitals, asylums and funeral halls. A house with empty and colourless walls is comparable to an institutional place, similar to how walls without carpets were like prison walls for the woman quoted earlier in this chapter. All in all, Bogdan’s description of the wall-carpets as something homely (de casă), and other interlocutors’ view that the room would feel strange without covered walls, speak of a feeling of familiarity that the display of wall-carpets provides. It is this sensory experience that makes the shelter familiar and enables these people to relate to the specific spaces as places of belonging. That wall-carpets acquire the ability to provide a sense of home is particularly noticeable in the case of people who live abroad. Roma families that I visited in Spain had wall-carpets in their flats too. By hanging them, people seem to have adjusted their inhabited space according to their habitual homemaking parameters (‘how could I stay with the empty walls?’), thus transforming an empty and unfamiliar space into a homely environment. Whether brought from Rotoieni or found somewhere in the new localities, the importance of wall-carpets resides in their existence on the walls and their ability to shape the space. In this sense, carpets on the walls materialise a certain aesthetic sensibility that regulates the socio-domestic realm translocally. As such, rather than an attachment to the objects themselves, the presence of wall-carpets indicates an attachment to the practice of covering the walls. Expressions like ‘I don’t like empty walls’ or ‘It’s too depressing without anything on the walls’ suggest that this attachment was nurtured during people’s socialisation in an environment where wall-carpets were a ‘must’, a point that I return to later in this chapter. In August 2015, I visited Paul and Carmen,6 who lived in a four-room flat in Guernica with their three sons (all younger than five years old) and Paul’s mother. They had wall-carpets in all four rooms, including one displaying the ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ scene. However, the fact of having carpets on the walls did not preclude them (and others) from questioning the viability of this practice. Both in Rotoieni and in the Spanish towns, the notion of what is modern and what is not prompted people to practically and/or discursively reconsider the aesthetic sensibility that enables the perception of the walls covered by carpets as pleasant, familiar and ‘normal’. Contemplate

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the following statement made by Paul’s mother (aged sixty-six) during my visit to their place in Guernica: I have eight carpets at home [in Rotoieni] and now all of them are on the floor. The house is full of them now, instead of floor carpets I put the wall-carpets, like in the church. They’re outmoded now. If you have some big paintings, now you’d put those paintings on the walls instead. . . . I die if I lie to you. . .7 but in the past, I was drilling the walls to hang them [the wall-carpets] everywhere . . . I have those with. . . God, with the Last Supper, with deer, with these kinds of things. . . . (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

We see that the reconsideration of that aesthetic sensibility – that enables appreciative judgements of wall-carpets – influences the intensity of the attachment to practices associated with the wall-carpets. Despite the fact that she lived in a flat where wall-carpets were hung in all the rooms, Paul’s mother stated that such items were not in fashion anymore and emphasised that in her house in Romania the wall-carpets are laid on the floor instead.8 It is thus again noticeable that the visual content of the wall-carpets is not relevant, hence it did not preclude wall-carpets with religious motifs from being laid on the floor. No sacred meaning was allocated to a wall-carpet displaying the image of Jesus Christ and no profanation seems to be related to the fact that this figure would be stepped on once the wall-carpet was placed on the floor.

Figure 2.5. Wall-carpet on the floor, Rotoieni, March 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

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‘It’s Our Thing’ While most Roma I met during my research referred primarily to the capacity of wall-carpets to set a familiar environment and to institute a homely atmosphere within their inhabited space, Maria and Iulian conflated this depiction of wall-carpets with a narrative about a Roma collective identity. More than once, they implied that hanging wall-carpets constituted ‘a Roma thing’ or, furthermore, that hanging them was a ‘Roma tradition’. I regard statements of this kind as affirmations of the sharing of the same aesthetic sensibility with other Roma in town. Through their sensorial qualities, wall-carpets enable people to ‘find in the sharing of a strong aesthetic experience a unifying principle’ (MacDougall 1999: 6). Consider Bogdan’s words again: ‘I told you, I like them, and they cheer up the house. It’s a totally different thing when you hang them on the walls. Without them, the wall would be empty. . . one wouldn’t feel comfortable. I mean for us, the țigani . . . [when] I enter a house with bare walls, I find it. . . ugly, so to say. . .’ (recorded conversation, September 2014). Maria made an interesting remark: ‘We, the țigani. . . we were those who hung carpets on the walls. Or rugs. And “the Romanians” took it from us. They’ve seen it’s pretty and then they started to hang them as well. Well. . . the poorer ones, of our kind. Others, like I told you, come from abroad and want something different, like they’ve seen there’ (recorded conversation, September 2014). At this point, Maria described the practice of covering the walls as an essentially țigani practice. In her view, due to the wall-carpets’ aesthetic and positively evaluated qualities, ‘Romanians’ adopted the practice, despite it being, as it were, a ‘typically țigani practice’. Following up these thoughts, it could be said that, for Maria, the adoption of this practice by ‘Romanians’ is equivalent to the acknowledgement of țigani’s aesthetic knowledge as locally valid. A few months prior to this conversation, during one of my first visits to the Carols, Maria, Dumitra (a neighbour, in her seventies) and Iulian described the ways in which walls used to be decorated less than a decade ago. Maria, well aware that my research interests revolved around homemaking practices, emphasised: ‘Our țigani were very creative regarding this kind of thing. . . For colours in general. They used to like all kinds of colours. They were sprinkling [the walls] with a yellow, a pink. . . with light blue, so that when you entered the house it looked. . . really pretty’. The past tense that she used here is important as it suggests a certain historicity and longevity of the aesthetic proclivities alleged as specific to the Roma. Moreover, both Iulian and Maria affirmed that the preference for strong colours and for items like wall-carpets was an indicator of essential Roma features such as vividness and quick-temperedness.

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It is important to add here that Iulian and Maria often emphasised their desire to help me in my research endeavours, which, in their understanding, were related to Roma traditions and customs. Consequently, their remarks should be read in this light, as shaped by what they thought were my expectations of them as ‘carriers of Roma traditions’. Yet it is still relevant to underscore the aesthetic considerations provided in Maria and Iulian’s description of what the socio-psychological profile of the Roma we-collective allegedly was. Some of my interlocutors without a Roma background used similar aesthetic considerations to talk about who the Roma/țigani were or what they did. For example, when Narcis, the librarian, talked about the ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ wall-carpet, he underscored: ‘They are very passionate in what they do: loving, hating. . .’. In the same conversation, he recalled that under communism, Roma used to go to the cinema to watch Indian movies: Maybe they didn’t have anything to eat, but they would spend their last money to go to the cinema. They were crying so much due to what was happening there. . . Why? They could find themselves in those stories; they would identify their feelings with theirs. Because those movies fit perfectly with their way of being, with their feelings . . . many of their children have Indian names, such as Raj . . . Moreover, they come from India. (Excerpt from my field notes, September 2014)

Here, rather than being associated with a predisposition towards garish decorating practices (as was usually implied by non-Roma), ‘hanging wallcarpets’ is ascribed to Roma in a stereotypical fashion as something that confirms ‘their Indian roots’ and supposedly their ‘emotional predispositions’.

Routines and Rhythms I asked a few times whether hanging carpets on the ceiling was an option. ‘No way, the ceiling has to remain definitively plain’, Bogdan told me once, articulating the aesthetic inadequacy of a wall-carpet covering the ceiling. It seems that the same aesthetic sensibility that appreciates the covered walls as pleasant determines what the ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ location of the wallcarpets is, thus regulating how wall-carpets fill the space ‘properly’. If it ‘feels weird’ with empty walls, as Bogdan and others put it, it also ‘feels weird’ if carpets, when used as wall-carpets, are not placed ‘properly’. At the beginning of my stay with the Carol family, I naively asked Maria and the children where ‘the right place’ to put one object or another was. Once, I bought four rolls of toilet paper and insistently asked Maria where exactly I should put them so that everyone could have access to them. After a few vague answers, the third time I asked, Maria replied that there was no

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special place for them and that I could leave them wherever I wanted. The toilet paper was far from being the only object that, to me, seemed to be ‘placeless’ within the household’s order. The following excerpt from my field diary is indicative of my initial perception of these objects as being placeless: In the courtyard, all sorts of things spread around without any sort of order: piles of clothes, plastic bottles, household appliances, tools for agriculture work, unpaired shoes, a garbage bag with rotten apples. . . All sorts of objects big and small, pieces of furniture, a sewing machine, some cleaning products among the flowerpots that sit on the ground, a broom, an upturned bucket, a dog moving around. . . In fact, it all looked upside down. I struggle with describing this as I could not put those objects in categories; I couldn’t even understand what some of those items were or were for. (Excerpt from my field diary, August 2014)

This description illustrates a certain quality of the different household items that enable them to be in flux and to exist within the domestic realm without having a fixed place of their own. But the wall-carpets seemed to have a different status. Except when they had to be washed, when the walls had to be bleached or when they were allocated other uses, wall-carpets did have a place of their own: on the interior walls, not on the exterior ones and not on the ceiling. They were usually hung with the help of small nails, depending on the material that the walls were made of. I met Mihaela on a cloudy and rainy October day, in 2014. Loredana, an English teacher from Rotoieni who knew about my interest in wall-carpets, introduced me to Mihaela because she engaged in small-scale commercial activities. At the time of my research, Mihaela was selling second-hand shoes in local bazaars in the area. After a phone call, I dropped by her house located on Covesnei Street, near her parents’ house, wanting to both converse with her about wall-carpets and buy a pair of boots. While deciding which pair of boots I wanted to buy, I asked her about the current availability of wall-carpets in the bazaars. Mihaela explained that they were not being sold lately as they were no longer in fashion, but that she could still obtain one for me from a business acquaintance who had a few remaining in stock. As our chat continued, Mihaela recalled the following from her childhood: There [in her parents’ house] were four rooms, but some of them were under renovation, they were not finished. In the vestibule, they [wall-carpets] couldn’t be hung because we were having [walls made out of ] calcium.9 So, she [Mihaela’s mother] was having them [wall-carpets] in the room where she was sleeping and in the kitchen, only there. [They were] hung up with nails. She used to use a straight edge. . . so that they’d be hung aligned, understand? And then she would drill small holes in the wall perforating the wall-carpet symmetrically, in line. It looked really nice. Preferably, with the very small nails so that they’d be unob-

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servable, yes. . . At my mother’s place the walls were made of concrete, she had a new house. That’s why it was more difficult for the nails to penetrate the walls. It was really laborious to drill them [the walls]. For instance, here, my house is made of a different material, it’s less laborious to drill, but I didn’t. . . [hang them]. I only hang drawings and other things. . . But they [her parents], they cannot resist hanging them. (Recorded conversation, October 2014)

Stressing that her parents were among the first to build a house using concrete blocks (a long time before others in and around țigănie), Mihaela’s words reveal the material implications of the act of placing the carpets on the walls, as well as her mother’s knowledge about it and the corporeal involvement in this act. She talked about the texture of carpets and the materiality of the walls which, like in a symphony, create the sought-after domestic synchronicity. Achieving this synchronicity seems to be possible only through bodily interaction with materiality and through the laborious task of aligning the carpets ‘properly’ on the walls or of drilling the walls made of concrete. Another reference to the materiality of walls was made by a woman who lives ‘among “Romanians”’ (as opposed to ‘living in țigănie’). She noted that a house made out of loam blocks was outmoded and referred to the interaction with the material space before the advent of concrete blocks as follows: This was the habit [hanging wall-carpets]. . . The old people were hanging them, as this was the style in the early times. The tradition. . . ‘The Romanians’ too, not only the țigani. . . Walls used to be glued, coated with slaked lime. For instance, the stove used to be bronzed, and then some papers like drawings [used to be put on the walls]. How to say? Some rugs which you’d attach by drilling the walls with tacks. . .10 And they’d penetrate the walls easily as the walls were made of loam. But try to put a tack here [in the walls of her newly renovated house with concrete blocks]! It wouldn’t work at all. (Recorded conversation, March 2014)

While it was possible to hang carpets on walls made of loam block, in houses made of concrete blocks hanging wall-carpets was said to be more challenging. From this perspective, concrete blocks being preferred and evaluated as ‘modern’ construction materials seems to threaten the existence of wallcarpets inside the houses. These examples show that by being placed on the walls, carpets mediate women’s interactions with the space that they and their families inhabit. The act of filling the walls’ emptiness implies physical doings like perforating the walls with a drill or hammer that makes possible the perforation of the carpet and its attachment to the walls. This bodily interaction with the material space, and thus the bodily effort, hints at what Lefebvre calls ‘expenditure of energy’. And wherever there is space-time expenditure of energy, Lefebvre (2004) argues, there is rhythm.

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In his work about rhythmanalysis (2004), Lefebvre claims that it is through repetition that everyday life establishes itself. The French philosopher, who looked at space from a Marxist/materialist perspective, reduced things to the condition of ‘metaphors’ which have the ability to disclose ‘representations that conceal the production of repetitive time and space’ (2004: 7). Emphasising the inextricable role of the body, Lefebvre notes that there are no things as such, but only ‘things and people’. The rhythmanalytical approach is relevant here, as it allows for an inquiry of the multiplicity of rhythms in which wall-carpets play a role beyond their metaphorical dimension: ‘Everywhere where there is interaction between place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (2004: 15). Apart from connecting space, time and energy, what is important for my discussion about wallcarpets is that the notion of rhythms enables the exploration of repetition of movements, gestures, actions, situations and differences (ibid.). The following description provided by Sorana, a married mother of three daughters with whom she lived (at the time of my research) relatively far from țigănie, reveals aspects of the rhythms of her everyday life and of the measures of any rhythm: speed, frequency and consistency (Lefebvre 2004: 10). Inviting me to touch the carpets on her walls, she stated: Well. . . Yes, I always liked to have this kind of carpet on the wall, because the room is quite big, so there’s space, empty space, how to say? I liked this [pointing at one of carpets] and that [pointing at the other] and I said to myself that I should buy them. I’ve had them for a long time, almost ten years, or maybe more. Actually. . . After I got married. . . My mother-in-law had some here, but I replaced them, I bought ones to my liking. Those were smaller, more or less the same material. Similar to these but smaller, yes. . . I think it was the Last Supper, you know. . . Everyone with their own taste. And of course, [I chose from] those that I found . . . You see? They’re made in a way like [floor] carpets, underneath they’re more rigid. Look. . . you can touch it to see. . . It’s harder on its backside so that it can last longer. So, I brush it with vinegar and it stays like new. I didn’t wash them very often, or, washing them in the washing machine? No way! Because then they shrink, and the hot water makes them shrink, and then they don’t look so good anymore. Just like a new coat, when you put it in the washing machine. Afterwards, it doesn’t have the same look anymore. (Recorded conversation, October 2014)

It seems that the wall-carpets are part of the different rhythms of Sorana’s household. The material consistency of the wall-carpets shapes the fabric of the domestic space by filling the walls’ emptiness. While the material from which they are made enables the wall-carpets to last (both in time and space), the particular way of treating them is what guarantees their ‘proper look’. As Sorana put it, this is a controlled and meticulous treatment that

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requires a certain expenditure of energy and bodily effort and necessitates specific practical knowledge. Her description of how she cared for the carpets hints not only at the frequency of an act that is necessary for the maintenance of a certain atmosphere within the house, but also at the importance of repetition. Without repetition in time and space, thinking with Lefebvre, there is no rhythm. By hanging the wall-carpets in her new house, and thus reproducing a practice she was used to at her parents’ place, Sorana creates continuities between the rhythms of the two homes. Thus, what matters is not only ‘repeating’, that is, creating, a homely atmosphere in her new house, but also performing the wall-carpet-related activities the way her mother did. I interviewed Sorana’s mother as well, and recognised the same pattern of looking after the wall-carpets.

Contestations The examples in the previous section serve as a reflection of the women’s relation to the materiality of space, mediated by practices related to wall-carpets. While women are the ones who hang carpets, perforate the walls symmetrically and make sure that the emptiness of the walls is ‘filled’ ‘properly’, they are also the ones who deal with discourses that discredit the presence of carpets on the walls and deem them outmoded and backward. As already alluded to throughout this chapter, in dealing with discourses that socially stigmatise the presence of carpets on the walls, it has often been invoked that a sense of ‘normality’ (understood as familiarity) is acquired during the process of socialisation. As a young man (who had been to Spain a few times before we met) put it: ‘We got used to them. . . and it’s something normal for us; if we take them down, something would feel weird. Of course, we know they’re outmoded, but even so. . . Can I ask my mother to take them down?’ (my emphasis). A similar reference to the sense of normality provided by the house with covered walls was made by Maria. More than a justification of the contested object’s existence within the household, the following account reflects one way of disputing the wall-carpets’ social discreditation through an idiom of tradition: [You know] When you clean, and the walls are just like that. . . simple? I also like simple walls [read ‘without carpets’], I do like simple walls. I am someone who is simpler. But. . . seeing my grandmother [hanging wall-carpets], also Dumitra, who is older. . . We come with a tradition. . . I, for example, hung them as you see here. . . Because the walls are cold in winter. In summer, I take down some of them. . . As I told you, the house is not plastered outside. . . I put there, and there [indicating some of the rugs hung on the walls]. . . In that corner it’s very cold.

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So, when you put a carpet on the wall, we can rest against the wall. . . And thus the wall is not that cold anymore. Anyway. . . It’s also something traditional for us. (Recorded conversation, April 2014)

While identifying herself with ‘modern’ patterns of engaging with the inhabited space – simplicity and functionality (‘carpets keep the walls warm’) – Maria legitimated her engagement with the practice of hanging wall-carpets through an affirmation of ‘tradition’. The sense of familiarity with ‘the dressed walls’ is conceived as a commitment to a practice lifted to the status of ‘our (i.e. Roma) tradition’ (grandmother’s or neighbour’s). Without dismissing the fact that this was a narrative articulated for the researcher, I interpret the association of the wall-carpets with tradition not as a way of justifying her engagement with a practice deemed obsolete, but rather as a strategy that enables Maria to dispute the wall-carpets’ social and ideological undesirability. Another example of disputation is provided by Sorana’s mother’s standpoint. She contested the so-called ‘modern trends’ of decorating the inhabited space as that which delegitimises wall-carpets and triggers others’ decisions to take them down. Contemplate the following excerpt from the conversation we had in October 2014: So, if they’re not in fashion anymore, but I still like them, what? What happens? Will anyone beat me if I hang them? Yes, the youngsters do not hang them anymore. My daughter-in-law there [in a separate house, but in the same courtyard] has only one. . . Or two. . . I think on that wall and on the other one [showing directions], but in the first room she has none. She said it’s simpler like that. Well. . . young people are like that. . . (Recorded conversation, October 2014)

Here, the contestation of the new order, regarded as adhering to contemporary notions of modernity, seems to be a matter of individual appreciation. While acknowledging the normalising power of these ideas and the relevance that they seemed to have for younger generations, Sorana’s mother did not uncritically adopt these ‘modern’ standards of homemaking that influence local notions of how a house should ‘properly’ look. Hence, it appears that there are two registers of normality that frame the ways in which people assess the presence of wall-carpets within the domestic space: a sense of normality (‘how can we stay with empty walls?’) and politics of normality (‘wall-carpets are outmoded’). The first register is concerned with questions like where it is ‘normal’ to place wall-carpets. How should they look in order to create that homely and familiar atmosphere that people are socialised with? While this register has to do with the positive valuation of the practice of hanging wall-carpets, the second register – politics of normality – presupposes a rather negative valuation of wall-carpets. This

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level uncovers the social stigmatisation of wall-carpets and their resignification as obsolete and backward, and thus undesirable items, which do not fit into a house that wants to adapt itself to ‘modern’ homemaking standards. From the perspective on home as a space of contestations where politics of normality are negotiated, it could be argued that people who hang wall-carpets tend to prioritise their notions of how a liveable house should look, thus resisting the trend that eliminates carpets from the walls. But one challenge that emerges here is understanding the dynamics that enable some people more than others to incorporate the ‘modern’, thus socially validated, patterns of decorating and furnishing the inhabited space. Conversely, under what circumstances are some people, more than others, prone to contest such tendencies? In Rotoieni, some people travelled abroad and translocally within Romania more than others, which allowed the former to acquire new aesthetic knowledge about house decoration and household management. Acquiring this knowledge, and thus becoming familiar with ‘contemporary standards of being a homemaker’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 118), is related to the internalisation of the ‘modern Western European other’. The distance (not only geographical) between this figure and the lives of people from Rotoieni is further decreased by the power of market dynamics and the globalised advertising industry, which succeed in ‘transporting’ the ‘modern’ standards of homemaking even to those who do not have the resources or prospects to be physically mobile. While incorporating (or trying to incorporate) these standards into their everyday lives and spaces provides people with a sense of having ‘caught up’ with ‘modern times’, attachment to practices like hanging carpets on the walls seems to be an incentive for the contestation and negotiation of standards hegemonically established as modern. The wall-carpets are visible and imposing presences within the domestic realm. Neither their presence nor their absence can be concealed. But it is having them on the walls that requires a commitment to endorse or justify their existence in the house. Subsequently, their presence on the walls requires a response to or contestation of the local discourses that socially discredit the wall-carpets, regarding them as backward and indecorous. This chapter has reflected on wall-carpets’ materiality and ability to fill the emptiness of the space, thus contributing to processes of homemaking that enable the transformation of shelters into liveable spaces. The chapter has also discussed how the presence of wall-carpets contributes to the maintenance of a certain aesthetic sensibility that underpins a narrative about ‘belonging together with Roma of our kind’. Either through their presence or absence, wall-carpets materialise people’s engagements in processes of negotiating belonging on the level of their inhabited space in relation to ‘modern times’. If this chapter has focused on presences, the next chapter will contemplate

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the absence of wall-carpets and the role that this absence plays in the performance of social distance from backwardness and ‘gypsiness’.

Notes 1. Translated from the text message written in Romanian: ‘Vă pot pune in contact cu vreo două familii de rromi. Dar singurul punct comun al gospodăriilor lor este doar kitchul :) Probabil dvs. căutați comunităti de țigani autentici cu port specific și elemente decorative ale caselor caracteristice lor. In Rotoieni majoritatea sunt imitație nereușită a familiilor românești’ (25 August 2014). 2. Nicolae Ceaușescu ruled Romania between 1965 and 1989. 3. I have alluded elsewhere to the contribution of the wall-carpets to the creation of a homely atmosphere (Racleș 2014: 127). 4. Romanian currency during the period under discussion. 5. Triturated vegetables cooked and preserved for winter. 6. More details about this couple’s life in Guernica is provided in chapter 4. 7. Translated from the Romanian expression ‘să mor dacă te mint’. 8. See Figures 2.4 and 2.5 for examples of wall-carpets on the floor. 9. Calcium does not allow drilling of the walls. 10. A small, sharp, broad-headed nail.

CHAPTER 3



MODERNISING ABSENCES

Introduction Patrick Williams shows that the removal from the everyday sphere of foods and objects (mulle objects) previously fancied by the dead is crucial for the integrity of Manuš (a French Romani we-collective) as a ‘silent presence’ (2003: 47). Keeping their status quo as a ‘silent presence’ is how Manuš defy Gadzos’1 affirmed dominance of the world that both inhabit (2003: 52). Cultivating respect towards the dead through silence (which implies destroying, excluding or treating the mulle objects differently) enables Manuš to nurture their sense of living as ‘a unique group’ (2003: 24), almost viscerally different to the uncivilised and disrespectful Gadzos. The silence that surrounds the memory and the materiality associated with the dead is thus what guarantees ‘the incorruptibility of identity, of the immutability of the group’ (2003: 55). But contrary to the view that the ways of operating and classifying objects enable the solidification of group boundaries, in-group belonging and inherent moralities, my research with Ursari Roma reveals that the ways of operating with and classifying objects allow for boundaries to be crossed, belonging to be negotiated, and similarities to surface. In chapter 2 I noted that the practice of hanging wall-carpets is locally conceived as old-fashioned. Even those who could not and were not willing to imagine their house with empty walls confirmed that this practice did not comply with contemporary standards of homemaking. Furthermore, while some described it as characteristic of those living in rural areas, others explained the fact of hanging wall-carpets by pointing at poverty and a lack of

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financial means necessary for the ‘modernisation’ of living conditions. These associations often culminated in a direct correlation between wall-carpets and backwardness. People who did not have carpets on the interior walls of their houses put a particular emphasis on this absence, stressing that these items belonged to the past and were tokens of backwardness. Severin Fowles writes that, ‘like present things, absences also have their distinctive affordances and material consequences that are not only prior to meaning but can, of their own accord, direct the process of signification itself ’ (2010: 28). This chapter focuses on the absence of wall-carpets and the material and social consequences effected by this absence, in relation to how Roma people distance themselves from forms of backwardness, where backwardness is ‘a counterpart to the idea of the modern’ (Bancroft 2005: 24). People’s investments in the cultivation of social distance from anything construed as backward coincide with investments in the process of crafting similarities with non-Roma and of negotiating belonging to ‘modern times’. ‘Modern times’ is here an emic category that was pervasive in my research participants’ narratives and aspirations expressed with respect to their everyday domestic sphere. Furthermore, the chapter reveals the ways in which Roma (like non-Roma) envisage the absence of wall-carpets as a marker of one’s belonging to ‘modern times’, underpinning the self-identification as Romanianised Roma.2

Modernisation and Otherness In his theory of modernity, Peter Wagner (2001) argues that the ‘identity of modernity’ is based on the emphasis on difference, on the exclusion of otherness from the sphere of modernity and on the distancing of oneself from any category or entity defined (and construed) as other. In Wagner’s words, ‘“Modern man” aimed at distancing himself from a variety of forms of alterity – nature, wilderness and tradition outside his own social world, and the lower, dangerous classes, women and the mad inside of it’ (2001: 73). In the same vein, in this book, modernisation-related aspirations are regarded as intrinsically interlinked with the role that modernity plays in constituting figures of alterity and otherness. From the perspective of the non-Roma in Rotoieni, the practice of hanging wall-carpets belonged to a time ‘in the past’ when Romanians used to hang the same kind of carpets on the interior walls of their inhabited houses or flats. When in my conversations with non-Roma they curled their lips emphasising that Roma people still arrange their inhabited space with objects that they, ‘Romanians’, used in the past, non-Roma affirm their elevation (and thus belonging) to ‘modern times’. Conversely, they operated with a

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logic that deemed Roma essentially and immovably ‘behind the times’, and, as it were, incapable of aligning themselves with ‘modern times’. ‘The țigan other’ is thus constructed as the non-modern other based on the allegedly ‘innate’ inability to align her-/himself with the contemporary standards of being a homemaker. More than one non-Roma told me that Roma were still hanging wall-carpets due to Roma’s preference for ‘garish house decoration’, which supposedly explained their ‘typical’ resistance to modernisation and integration. In the words of Narcis (one of the two librarians whom I interviewed): ‘They simply don’t want to be aligned to these times, they like to stick with their old traditions and to bedazzle themselves’ (April 2014). From this perspective, the practice of hanging wall-carpets is construed as material proof of the Roma’s alleged inability to adjust themselves to the norm of what Garvey calls ‘the practical aesthetic’ associated with ‘simplicity and wholesome consumption’ (2003: 250). It is essential to note for this chapter that some of these ascriptions, which construct and reproduce locally the figure of ‘the țigan other’, have also been employed by Roma in the process of narrating and enacting their position as ‘modernised’ or ‘Romanianised Roma’. By means of such discourses and enactments, Roma in Rotoieni seek to distance themselves from this figure, historically constructed as embodying otherness in terms of backwardness, uncivilisedness or an ‘incapacity to keep up with modern times’. In his book about space, modernity and racialisation of Roma in the Czech Republic and Gypsy-Travellers in Britain, Angus Bancroft connects the process of modernity to the ‘civilizing process’ as theorised by Norbert Elias (1995). Bancroft stresses the character of modernity as a ‘project of institutionalised regulation and of the internalisation of self-regulation’ (2005: 21), emphasising the crucial role played by modernity in reproducing Europe ‘as a restricted ideological space and geographic entity, from which Roma and Gypsy-Travellers are excluded’ (2005: 6). In this chapter, I address in particular the question of how ‘the internalisation of self-regulation’ is related to the construction of ‘forms of alterity’ (in Wagner’s words) and to the process of furthering social distance from those forms of alterity. I explore how the absence of wall-carpets is linked to the ‘internalisation of self-regulation’ and how this absence enables Roma to enact the self-identification as ‘modernised Roma’ and ‘Romanianised Roma’. The discussion about forms of self-identification that surface in opposition or in relation to other Roma is linked to prior anthropological considerations of distances and porosity of boundaries between different ‘we’ and ‘they’. For example, Martin Olivera (2011) conveys a typology of otherness (typologie de l’altérité) that categorises the figures of the different others playing a role in Gabor articulations about themselves. This typology3 shows how Gabor Roma measure the social distances (interlinked with geopolitical

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distances) between themselves, on the one hand, and other ‘Tsiganes’ and other ‘non-Tsiganes’, on the other hand. In Rotoieni, Roma stress that they are different from ‘other Roma groups’ whom they regard as carriers of ‘outdated traditions’ and supposedly backward practices. As Ursari, they see themselves as Roma who have integrated and have succeeded in adjusting their lives and inhabited spaces according to modern standards of living and homemaking. Similar observations have been made by other researchers in regard to Roma from other national and societal contexts. In her monograph about Roma in Russia, Alaina Lemon (2000) reflects on the discourses of Lovara Roma, who assert themselves as the most ‘civilised’ and ‘cultured’ among the Russian Roma, invoking the European and modern clothing and furniture that they possessed (2000: 107), as well as ‘the Euro-Soviet etiquettes and technologies of hygiene’ that they mastered (2000: 119). Péter Berta (2013, 2019) also compares such discourses employed by Cărhar and Gabor Roma from Transylvania, showing how the latter describe the former as being ‘less civilized’ due to their allegedly low interest in modern patterns of consumption (2013: 355). David Lagunas Arias (2002) writes about Catalan Calós, to whom the category of ‘modernity’ is important in that it enables them to differentiate themselves from other Spanish Gitanos. This is just another example of how patterns of consumption considered to be modern,4 as well as certain urban ways of life, lead some Roma to self-identify as modern Roma.

The ‘Romanian’ Gaze That hanging wall-carpets is ‘a țigăneală’ – an expression that means roughly ‘a țigani thing’ – was a comment made by non-Roma as well as by better-off Roma who related this practice to backwardness and poverty. This Romanian expression has highly normative connotations and refers to activities that are carried out supposedly in an unsystematic, negligent and inaccurate manner. At the same time, it is also used to describe the results of a certain way of doing things, which are assessed as either dishevelled, unashamedly ostentatious or dissonant within a broader social and material context. Transformations of the use of domestic objects have always gone hand in hand with broader local, national and translocal dynamics that hegemonically delineate understandings of what an ‘ideal’ or ‘normal’ home is. These dynamics shape the politics and practices of display, decoration and consumption in the private sphere. For instance, simplicity and practicality are principles highly embedded in contemporary ideas of what an ‘ideal’ or ‘normal’ home is, as Pauline Garvey (2003) shows in her study about Norwegian ‘good homes’. These principles were equally emphasised by Roma and non-

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Roma that I met in Rotoieni when they talked about what it meant to have a ‘proper’ house. Within these discourses, wall-carpets emerged as icons of disruption, as they were deemed neither simple nor practical. Manuel’s5 mother is among the Roma who insisted most strongly on simplicity and practicality and invoked them as principles that guided her in the process of renovating her house. I visited her on the recommendation of Narcis, the librarian I already referred to. According to him, Manuel’s mother was one of the few trustworthy and hardworking Roma in Rotoieni. While visiting her, she asked me to take pictures of her recently renovated house and show them to Narcis so he could see how beautiful and modern her house is (for one of those pictures, see Figure 3.1). It is not counterintuitive that, as objects that have been locally constituted into disruptions of the ideal of a ‘modern home’, wall-carpets became insignia of ‘țigani’s ways of being’ in the discourses of non-Roma and better-off Roma. One of the elements that the wall-carpets were said to denote was ‘the țigani’s exuberant character’. In an essentialising manner, non-Roma told me about the Roma’s preference for bright colours and exaggeration in decoration. This way of (re)producing the figure of ‘the țigan’ was complemented by the ascription of a tendency towards the emulation and display of fake wealth that illustrated, as it were, ‘the țigani’s bad taste’.

Figure 3.1. ‘Modern’ renovations, Rotoieni, March 2014. © Andreea Racleș.

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Another element that wall-carpets supposedly denoted was ‘the țigani’s lack of work ethic’. In this regard, hanging wall-carpets was described as a strategy to gloss over the existing ‘irregularities’ in their houses, such as uneven and dirty walls. At times, these irregularities were associated with poverty, or deemed forgivable considering the precarious living conditions of Roma from țigănie. Valentina, the wife of the self-proclaimed political representative of the Roma in Rotoieni, once noted: ‘They [poor Roma] have nothing else to hang on the walls, like paintings or other current fashionable stuff; so, they still hang those carpets’. Despite such sporadic disclaimers, the use of wall-carpets was often described, particularly by non-Roma, as a strategy to cover up the visible product of ‘their laziness’ and alleged carelessness regarding their inhabited space. These ways of referring to wall-carpets as ‘a țigani thing’ allowed nonRoma to make sense of their generalisations about those called țigani. Their attitudes converged towards morally stigmatising ideas, according to which ‘bad taste’ in arranging the domestic sphere and an inherent proclivity towards ‘kitsch’ or chaos are characteristics of the Roma. In the same naturalising fashion, wall-carpets were also described as tokens of Roma people’s alleged intrinsic happiness manifested, as it were, despite their precarious living conditions. Among the Roma research participants, it was particularly youngsters, better-off inhabitants of Rotoieni and those who travelled abroad or moved away from Rotoieni who spoke of wall-carpets as indicating a lack of simplicity and a tendency to exaggeratedly adorn the house. According to Aurica’s son, who was in his early twenties at the time, wall-carpets unnecessarily loaded the atmosphere inside the house and did no more than ‘collect dust’. It is in this light that I will analyse wall-carpets as items that contribute to the institutionalisation of ‘modern patterns of normality’ through their absence. My research participants reported that it was having seen the bare walls in others’ houses that persuaded them to renounce their own wallcarpets. Iulian, for instance, recalled that when his older brother moved to one of the communist blocks of flats in Rotoieni (thus living among nonRoma), his family purposefully renounced (or attempted to renounce) the wall-carpets: There are some of them [Roma] who borrowed a ‘Romanian’ lifestyle . . . Others stuck to what they had from before. My brother for instance, gave up [hanging the wall-carpet]: ‘I’ll make do with stone, with [carbonate] calcium, with baguette, and I’ll leave it like that. . . That’s how I’ve seen it in others’ [houses], like in “Romanians’” [houses]’. So that no potential visitor could say, ‘I’ve been at that țigan’s place, and look at them, they live as they used to live in the house, although they moved to a flat’. (Recorded conversation, March 2014)

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In this example, it seems that the introjected gaze of a potential ‘Romanian’ visitor prompted the reassessment of what walls inside the flat were supposed to look like. The figure of ‘the Romanian’ seems to have played an important role in such reflections on the ‘normal’ and socially acceptable/desirable ways of arranging the house. From this standpoint, Roma operated with the hegemonically established idea that ‘the Romanians’ have already adjusted their lifestyle in compliance with ‘modern’ standards; among other adjustments, they stopped hanging wall-carpets. Meanwhile, those who spoke to me as non-Roma consistently reproduced this idea that, in reference to the Roma, they occupied the position of ‘the modern(ised) ones’, thus of those who lived according to, as it were, the modern pattern of normality.

The Absence of Wall-Carpets With the question in mind of how wall-carpets participate in negotiations of belonging, I will now focus on the emic notion of ‘modern times’. The vocabularies and imaginaries that surround the notion of ‘modern times’ have an important role in the enactments and discourses related to the position of ‘we, modern Roma/țigani’ which imply the self-affirmation of modernity. I discuss these kinds of discourses and enactments keeping in mind the othering practices and discourses that construe the ‘țigan figure’ in terms of backwardness discussed in the previous section. Wall-carpets are here items which, through their absence within the domestic realm, enabled Roma in my research to assert their belonging to ‘modern times’ and to invoke their feature as ‘modern Roma/țigani’ in comparison to other Roma from Rotoieni and from the surrounding areas. As the self-affirmation of modernity requires a figure of a ‘non-modern other’, the discourse about ‘we, modern Roma/țigani’ allocates attributes like ‘backward’, ‘traditional’ or ‘not integrated’ to other Roma, thus enabling Roma in my research to clarify what one was not. Furthermore, the categories that underpinned the affirmation of modernity, and more specifically of ‘having been modernised’, are ‘civilisedness’ and ‘Romanianness’. Being ‘modern Roma’ was often explained as referring to the ‘Romanianised Roma’ (romi/ țigani românizați) and/or ‘civilised Roma’. Alaina Lemon writes about a ‘gradient of “civilizedness”’ on which members of the different Russian Gypsy we-collectives position themselves by claiming ‘we are becoming Russian’ (2000: 75). Often, their asserted level of civilisedness is measured by the extent to which they engage with modern commodities. In the same vein, one of the ways in which Ursari Roma from Rotoieni mark the difference between them and other Roma is by rejecting

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the use of wall-carpets, thus positioning themselves above the latter on a presumed local ‘gradient of civilisedness’. The self-identification with the Ursari we-collective is important for understanding how the positions on this gradient are claimed and contested. In response to my question about what made a Roma an Ursar Roma, people of Roma background in Rotoieni argued that it was the fact of ‘living more like “Romanians” than like țigani’. Roma emphasised that, unlike ‘more traditional țigani’, the Ursari had adopted a Romanian lifestyle since communism, when many of them were working in factories. The renunciation of wall-carpets in the name of modernisation manifested and talked about by Ursari Roma in Rotoieni resembles the transition of Cortorari Roma6 from a life in tents to a life in imposing mansions made of durable bricks that Tesăr (2016) writes about. Highly visible, these mansions are meant to communicate the economic and social betterment of Cortorari and thus to be read as ‘a sign of civility that brings Cortorari closer to their Romanian neighbours’ (2016: 197). Through their unmistakable presence, these buildings do not fail in making visible their ‘social development’ (2016: 191) in terms recognised by non-Roma. But in contrast to the mansions, the absence of wall-carpets has a considerably lower potential to bring about the acknowledgement of Ursari Roma’s compliance with ‘modern’ standards of making a life. Furthermore, if the presence of mansions makes visible and concrete the Cortorari’s process of having gone ‘from “savagery” straight to “civilisation”’ (2016: 191) in the eyes of non-Roma neighbours, the absence of wall-carpets seems to materialise a change (from outmoded to ‘modern’ ways of decorating the inhabited space) primarily in one’s own and one’s family’s eyes. While the projection of the non-Roma’s gaze has a selfregulatory effect, the wall-carpets’ absence is considerably less likely to be noticed by non-Roma.

In the Absence of a House in Ţigănie On my way to țigănie, I would pass in front of a house, bleached green, that was located next to the central market, thus in the centre of town. Although I never had the chance to talk with anyone who lived there, from outside I caught several glimpses of the wall-carpets that hung inside. During one of my walks with Maria, in the afternoon of a late September day (2014), I asked her who the inhabitants of that house were. Maria replied: ‘They are Roma. It is a woman living with her daughters. . . But they don’t really say it openly [that they are Roma]7 because they are a bit more. . . Romanianised. They’re more civilised, not like those in mahala [i.e. ţigănie]’ (excerpt from my field notes, April 2015). To my question about what she meant by ‘more

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civilised’ and ‘more Romanianised’ Roma, Maria stated: ‘I think money, money allows you to do whatever for your living. . . And thus, to raise the standard of living, to have a bathroom for instance. . . Having money means that one can have a clean lifestyle. . .’. Maria’s words, which reveal an understanding of civilisation ‘as a complex of manners and hygienic practices’ (Elias 1978, in Lemon 2000: 34), speak of the socially constituted distances that shape the local gradient of civilisedness. On the one hand, Maria alludes to the socio-economic distance between the Roma from țigănie (as those who are pitiable, who lack the resources to make a better living) and the better-off Roma who can afford modern everyday commodities, which make possible a ‘modern’ and ‘clean lifestyle’. On the other hand, she pointed to the distance between what she called ‘more civilised/more Romanianised’ Roma and those, as it were, ‘less civilised’ living in țigănie, by pointing at the concealment of their ‘ethnic identity’ performed by those who lived in the green house. What seems to be important here is one’s geographical location. Maria’s words suggest that, while for those who lived in less stigmatised areas than țigănia it seemed possible to ‘hide’ their ethnic background (either ascribed or contextually self-affirmed), for those whose residence was in țigănie, downplaying their ascribed gypsiness was nearly impossible. From this standpoint, what enabled one to enact the self-identification of a Romanianised Roma was living in an area that was not signified as an essentially ‘țigani area’ and, furthermore, living among ‘Romanians’. Lăcrămioara, who lived in a two-room house with her partner and five of her daughters (four of them younger than twelve at the time), correlated the fact of living in țigănie with being ‘more țigan’ than the țigani/Roma who lived elsewhere in Rotoieni. During one of my visits to Lăcrămioara’s place in țigănie, in August 2014, her brother-in-law happened to be there. When Lăcrămioara told him why I was in Rotoieni, the man stated at once: ‘I have nothing to do with those [with țigani], I don’t want to associate myself with them. . .’. He talked a lot about his religious beliefs and made clear his position as an Orthodox believer who preached against those who tried to convert him to Baptism (alluding to the Carols, the family I was living with). He talked about how, in his words, ‘obsessed’ he was with cleaning, suggesting that his house would offer better accommodation for me. While emphasising that his mother was Lipovancă 8 (thus, a non-Roma woman), he insisted that he had a different position than the people from țigănie, since he had always lived among non-Roma. Once the man left, Lăcrămioara told me with a warning tone: Andreea. . . don’t take into consideration what he says! If you knew what kind of person he is, how much I suffered [because of him]. See? That’s why I look how I

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look now, that’s why I lost so much weight, because of him and their mother . . . Yes, I can’t say anything, he has better living conditions than I do, but of course he does! Because he has always lived there, among ‘Romanians’, surrounded by people like teachers and other well-off people. . . Obviously, he has no children, he wakes up, he arranges everything and then there’s no one to mess up everything, while here. . . How can I do that? Let’s say I do [arrange] it in the very morning when I wake up, but as soon as the kids wake up everything becomes a mess! . . . That’s why for me it’s impossible to keep the house as clean as he does. . . (Excerpt from my field notes, August 2014)

This episode reveals a few aspects on which Lăcrămioara agrees with her brother-in-law. It seems that for both of them, living outside the țigănie and being surrounded by non-Roma were premises for one’s affirmation of difference from those who lived in țigănie. This affirmation of difference often coincides with a self-identification with a higher position on the imagined local gradient of civilisedness than the one ascribed to those who lived in țigănie. For people like Lăcrămioara or her brother-in-law, who have never travelled abroad and never lived outside environments like Rotoieni, hanging wall-carpets was not something that hindered them from dissociating themselves from the ‘figure of țigan’ as constructed in relation to the Roma who lived in țigănie. In fact, Lăcrămioara justified the use of wall-carpets in a rather pragmatic way. For her, hanging wall-carpets was about protecting the walls from being dirtied by the youngest children and about adding a necessary extra layer to the thin walls in winter in order to keep the house warm.

Far from Moldavia People from Rotoieni who worked abroad, travelled or moved away with their families often referred to the practice of hanging wall-carpets as specific to the ‘not-yet-modernised’ Roma. In this section, I discuss how people who left Rotoieni reflect on the practice of hanging or taking down wallcarpets in discourses that enabled them to position themselves in relation to other Roma. What is important to highlight is that, in these accounts, the significant others are not merely those who lived or didn’t live in țigănie, but inhabitants of the specific localities in which they lived at the time of my research. In June 2015, when I travelled to Zalău, the people I talked with recalled stories of their parents or relatives who moved to Ardeal. References to Ardeal as being closer to the ‘civilised’ Western Europe, and thus more civilised than Moldavia, abounded. Dorin9 and his wife, Cristiana, who had been living in Zalău since the 1980s, said the following about wall-carpets:

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Cristiana: [Wall-carpets have] really bright colours. . . I don’t like such things. Dorin: As we lived here [in Zalău, Ardeal] we don’t wear these colours. This is a small clue. . . [that we are different]. Cristiana: I don’t like that, what I’ve seen in the houses of the țigani there [in Rotoieni], I really don’t like those things . . . Dorin: You won’t see that here, because we’re in Ardeal. That thing [having those particular carpets on the wall] is a popular practice in Rotoieni. Cristiana: I guess we. . . Even if we were there, we wouldn’t [hang carpets on the walls] either. We grew up differently in Ardeal, you know? (Recorded conversation, June 2015)

The absence of carpets on the walls of their flat provided Cristiana and Dorin with the means to position themselves higher on the gradient of civilisedness in relation to the Roma from Rotoieni. At the same time, it allowed them to implicitly underline the commonalities between them and the nonRoma inhabitants of Ardeal.10 Being (and wanting to be acknowledged as) ‘civilised’ or modern Roma seems to be a matter of practice. Engaging in social and domestic practices in ways that non-Roma (are imagined to) engage seems to provide people with the feeling of doing ‘better’ than other Roma and as good as the more ‘Western’ non-Roma. The practice of hanging wall-carpets, and thus decorating their flat in bright colours, is something that Dorin and Cristiana described as being uncharacteristic of households in Ardeal, where they were socialised. Thus, they mark the distance between them and the Roma from Rotoieni by emphasising their affinity towards and internalisation of the social aesthetic principles presumably specific to Ardeal. In doing so, they enact a narrative of identification with the people from Ardeal, the ‘civilised’ ones, while downplaying their attachment to Rotoieni.11 The discussion that I had with Ovidiu, a man in his early thirties who lived in a village about fifty kilometres from Zalău, was also insightful for understanding the self-dissociation from Roma who still lived in Rotoieni. While his parents stated clearly that their hometown was Rotoieni and that they aimed to return there soon, Ovidiu stated that this town was home for him only for Easter and Christmas. After asserting that Moldavia was no longer a region where he and his brothers could make a decent living, the man said: [Hanging the wall-carpets] is not practised anymore. They were, but they have been on the way out for the last fifteen years. Normally, nowadays in Nederlac12 they put up wallboard and this kind of stuff. Paintings. . . So [wall-carpets] are not to be hung anymore, people have [become] modernised,13 right? We are in the twenty-first century, it’s something normal. Now there are tablets, mobile phones. . . take that! And the cars. . . are [technologically] advanced now, today

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it is not like it used to be, everything is automatic and stuff. . . We advance ourselves14 . . . Yes, it looked good [with the carpets on the walls] but. . . How to say? So: I cannot hang wall-carpets if the neighbour does not hang. Or? But we go according to the possibilities. . . With mobile phones. . . iPhone 4 is already outmoded; we now have iPhone 5 and stuff. . . (Recorded conversation, June 2015; my emphasis)

Unlike Dorin and Cristiana, who associated the practice of hanging wallcarpets with the lifestyle of Roma from Rotoieni/Moldavia, Ovidiu suggested that it was a practice that belonged to the past. Without denying the aesthetic qualities of the wall-carpets, Ovidiu implies that belonging to ‘modern times’ requires the renunciation of practices that are considered ‘behind the times’ and, instead, the adoption of modern forms of consumption. Yet, just as Cristiana and Dorin’s attitudes indicate, belonging to ‘modern times’ seems to be highly related to Ovidiu’s self-identification with Ardeal (Nederlac) rather than with Moldavia (Rotoieni). Living in Ardeal enabled people to affirm their belonging to ‘the modernised ones’, by emphasising their engagement with practices and commodities that could materially confirm these claims of belonging. It was the fact that he lived in Ardeal that, according to Ovidiu, prompted and framed the adoption of ‘more civilised’ living standards aligned to the technical progress regarded as a feature of ‘modern times’. It seems that, as they are not items that incorporated ideas of technical progress, wall-carpets are easily discarded, both discursively and practically. These examples show that being Romanianised does not mean essentially doing what the ‘Romanians’ (i.e. non-Roma) do. We have seen that, more than from the ‘“Romanian” lifestyle’, Ovidiu, Dorin and Cristiana claim that they have adopted elements from the ‘Hungarian lifestyle’ (Ardeal being the area where most ethnic Hungarians in Romania live). From this perspective, it could be said that being Romanianised Roma supposes an explicit and firm rejection of practices socially deemed to be ‘behind the times’. For those I talked with in Zalău, the Roma in Rotoieni who still hang wall-carpets are in the category of the not-yet-Romanianised Roma. All in all, the rejection of practices seen as ‘behind the times’, and thus the absence of carpets on the walls, are elements that enabled the Roma that I met in Ardeal to claim and enact their belonging to ‘modern times’. Individuals who identify as Ursari in Rotoieni define themselves in contrast to other Roma social forms mainly by emphasising their attributes as Romanianised and modern(ised). Engagement with social and domestic practices in allegedly ‘non-Roma ways’ appears to provide Ursari in Rotoieni with the feeling of doing ‘better’ than other Roma and, as it were, ‘as good as’ the non-Roma. Also, being Romanianised Roma seems to imply the cultiva-

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tion of amiable relations with non-Roma and the willingness ‘to modernise’. This will to (be) modernise(d) is hegemonically understood as the keenness to give up any practice or objects associated with whatever gypsiness might signify. Furthermore, being ‘modern’ is affirmed as the attribute that makes the Ursari Roma ‘more like “Romanians”’ and less like other Roma and/or țigani whom the script frames either as backward, untrustworthy and lazy, or as exaggeratedly attached to traditions. Yet I suggest that what is taken as a point of reference in the discourses about ‘us, modern Roma’ is not the figure of the non-Roma. Being Romanianised Roma does not necessarily mean doing things like ‘Romanians’. Instead, the attribute ‘Romanianised’ conveys a complex of features and knowledge that enables one to self-dissociate from the position of gypsiness and from any stigmatising meanings attached to this position. In this sense, being ‘more modern’ than other Roma supposes being ready to detach from anything that is deemed ‘typically’ țigan. It supposes engaging with global commodities, adopting presumed ‘modern’ standards of living and making all necessary efforts to obtain societal recognition as belonging to ‘modern times’. In these processes, as this chapter has shown, the absence of wall-carpets is conceived as an immaterial indicator of ‘Romanianised Roma’s’ distinctiveness from other Roma, as well as a marker of their similarity to non-Roma and, more broadly, to those regarded as belonging to ‘modern times’ by default.

Notes 1. The term ‘Gadzos’ is used by Manuš to refer to non-Roma/‘non-Tziganes’ (see Williams 2003: 87). 2. Elsewhere (Racleș 2020) I discuss the repertoire of self-identification as Romanianised Roma that Roma from Rotoieni employ in order to point at marriagemaking related similarities between themselves and non-Roma. The focus of that article (Racleș 2020) is on the disapproval of arranged marriages, which Roma in my research consider ‘backward’ and characteristic of the ‘traditional’ Roma ways of making marriage. 3. This typology contains the following categories: the most frequent others (‘les plus nombreux: les Gajé ’), designating the ‘non-Tsiganes’ (who can be of different kinds based on the regions they live in or come from); the radical others (‘les Autres très autres’), referring to people from other continents (e.g. ‘Africans’); the worst of all others (‘les pires Autres’ – ‘failed Tsiganes’), such as Řumunguri, a denomination that refers to those Tsiganes regarded as having no morality, culture or language; the exotic others in proximity (‘les Autres locaux mais exotiques’), referring to the Tsiganes who are nomads and live in tents (e.g. cortorari); the very similar others (‘les Autres

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4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

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très proches’), such as Ciurari; and the identical others (‘les Autres identiques’ – Gabori that belong to other viți) (Olivera 2011: 7–8; my translation). In regard to being or becoming modern through consumption, Katherine Brickell writes about Cambodians who move from rural to urban regions and their endeavours to achieve modernity by adopting lifestyles and purchasing goods considered fashionable. Material culture operates here as ‘a mechanism for conveying social and cultural capital of a global nature’ (Brickell 2011: 36). I mentioned Manuel briefly in chapter 1 and I refer to him further in chapter 8. ‘Cortorari’ is the term that denominates the same Roma population that Berta writes about in terms of ‘Cărhar’. Translated from Romanian: ‘Nu prea se dau că-s țigani’. ‘Lipovans’ are people identified as belonging to ‘the other ethnic minority’ in Rotoieni (also known as ‘Old Orthodox Believers’). Details about Lipovans and their relation to the local Roma are discussed in chapter 7. More details about Dorin and his wife are given in chapter 4. ‘Ardeal’ is often used as a synonym for Transylvania. Unlike the latter, which is a term of Latin origin, ‘Ardeal’ originates from the Hungarian word ‘Erdély’ which means ‘beyond forest’ (Farkas and Fodor 2016: 425). However, at other points in our conversation about their past and family in Moldavia, they elaborated on their emotional connection to Rotoieni. A town in north-western Romania where Ovidiu and his extended family lived at the time of my research. For reasons of anonymity, the name has been fictionalised. Nederlac is located approximatively 140 kilometres from Zalău. Translated from Romanian: ‘Lumea s-a modernizat’. Translated from Romanian: ‘Ne avansăm’.

CHAPTER 4



HOME TEXTURES

Introduction In this chapter, I discuss belonging and material attachment(s) as negotiated by people of Roma background who identify Rotoieni as their ‘place of origin’ or as their ‘hometown’, but who, at the time of my research, lived abroad or elsewhere in Romania. The debates with which this chapter engages stem from undertakings around notions of locality and translocality. On the one hand, these debates emerged as a critique of transnational approaches that tended to prioritise the national scale, thus disregarding the locality scale and its contribution to the constitution of the global and the national (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2011; Glick Schiller, Çaglar and Guldbrandsen 2006). The translocality perspective (Brickell and Datta 2011) proposes that the focus should fall on migrants’ agency and calls attention to the materiality and corporeality of both movement and emplacement. This chapter is concerned with Roma people’s experiences of moving translocally from Rotoieni to different localities both within Romania and abroad. In doing so, it discusses how particularities of these localities shaped the experiences of the Roma individuals and their ‘pathways of incorporation’ (cf. Glick Schiller, Çaglar and Guldbrandsen 2006). On the other hand, the translocality frame is based on a critique of ideas of fluidity and deterritorialisation that have pervaded social sciences in the last few decades. For Michael Peter Smith, one of the critics, these ideas tended to disregard the fact that, although mobile, people ‘remain situated within various power-knowledge venues and occupy classed, gendered and racialised bodies in space’ (Smith 2011: 187). As such, this tendency underestimates the importance of migrants’ situatedness and of the situatedness of the localities they migrate to, thereby disregarding material attachments

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and engagements with material culture as a complex of ‘markers of translocal connectivity’ (2011: 190). The main inquiry in this chapter is related to the material attachments nurtured by Roma through practices of making home(s) and of fostering translocal connections between ‘here’ and ‘there’. According to Brickell and Datta (2011), translocal connections ‘become meaningful only in their corporeality, texture and materiality – as the physical and social conditions of particular constructions of the local, become significant sites of negotiations in migrants’ everyday lives’ (2011: 6). This standpoint is essential for this chapter as it underpins the discussion about how the materiality of everyday life – mostly related to the domestic space – enables people to negotiate belonging while residing in other localities than the one in which they were born or raised. In thinking about materialisation of translocal connections, and thus concomitantly about movement and homemaking, I subscribe to the approaches that ‘reject the representation of translocalities as purely imagined communities or as globalised spaces of hyper-mobile flows’ (Smith 2011: 188). Caroline Knowles (2010, 2014) critiques notions like ‘flows’ and ‘fluidity’ which have been overused in discussions about the interconnected ways in which people, objects and money circulate. Endorsing the role of the texture and materiality of transited spaces, Knowles highlights that ‘people, objects and so on do not flow: they bump awkwardly along creating pathways as they go; they grate against each other; they dodge, stop and go, negotiate obstacles, back-track and move off in new directions propelled by different intersecting logics’ (2010: 374). Inspired by the notion of navigation developed by Tim Ingold (2000), Knowles suggests that an understanding of mobility in terms of navigation is more productive because it acknowledges that ‘people are in the fabric of the material, environmental and social world, finding their ways through it’ (2010: 377; emphasis in original). Considering that navigation supposes both skills and knowledge (Knowles 2010: 376), the translocality perspective enables me to shed light on my research participants’ capacities in both navigating new social and geographical spaces, and in homemaking processes. I will look closely into how materiality of the domestic spaces enables these processes, while reflecting on the implications of the socio-material and structural limitations that condition these translocal engagements.

Intangibility? In his famous monograph based on research with Vlach Rom in Hungary, Michael Stewart writes that for them, ‘essential aspects of one’s identity did

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not derive from the past but were learnt for oneself in conjunction with one’s contemporaries’ (1997: 58). In the same book, which is well known for the argument that Roma identities are constantly reconstituted in the present, we read: No particular emphasis was put by the Rom on the bare fact of where they lived. I remember being amazed when I talked to the people in the Third Class about the possibility that their almost idyllic settlement might be flattened to make room for a new factory. I had thought that they might complain to the ministry of Budapest, but their attitude was much more relaxed: if they lost their homes, they would move elsewhere. These Gypsies were in no sense ‘nomads’, but a ‘place of their own’ was not in the end a place at all; rather, it was always [a] fragile realisation of an intangible quality of life together. (Stewart 1997: 72; my emphasis)

What is salient in this quotation is the emphasis on Rom as people for whom a ‘life together’ mattered most and could have been (re)made wherever. Without contesting the idea that the capacity of dwelling wherever is an inherent human characteristic, in this chapter I discuss how Roma with whom I did research actually put emphasis on where they live. In particular, I look into how the materiality of the spaces Roma come to inhabit complicates the assumption of intangibility of a ‘life together’. Based on her research with Gypsies from Parakalamos (a north-western Greek village), Aspasia Theodosiou problematises approaches that define Roma social forms as fluid and constantly constituted ‘in the “here and now,” regardless of “where” they are’ (2010: 329). Referring to the now classical work of Paloma Gay y Blasco (1999) and Stewart (1997), Theodosiou’s critique is eloquently summed up in this paragraph: ‘For the Gypsies, we are told, space, place and particular localities are a matter of convention after all: they are not used to ground experiences and do not contribute anything to their understanding of themselves’ (2011: 100–101). In a similar vein, Alaina Lemon (2000), who carried out research with Roma in Russia, shows that a ‘life together’ cannot be disconnected from the attachments to places and localities within which a ‘life together’ plays out. Contemplate the following insightful argument: Indeed, place matters to most Roma a great deal, especially a place near kin. The Vlax phrase for ‘together’, and’ jekh than, glosses literally as ‘in one place’, just as does the Russian adverb vmesto. This semantic possibility may not encapsulate a ‘Romani worldview’, but it would undermine any claim that a ‘Gypsy worldview’ is altogether indifferent to place. Many Roma in Russia historically anchor kinship networks to localities, and in the late twentieth century understand those kin loyalties to be continued by national borders. (Lemon 2000: 227; emphasis in original)

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The works of Lemon and Theodosiou inspired the endeavours of the field research from which this book emerges, as they speak out about Roma people’s ties to places and localities they inhabit. In comparison to the few other studies that do the same (e.g. Olivera 2012a), Lemon and Theodosiou do not imply that the ways in which the Roma in their research identify with place and nurture material attachments constitute discourses and enactments that make them fundamentally distinct from non-Roma. For instance, the study about Gypsies from Parakalamos (a north-western Greek village) shows that it is through their connection to place and locality that Gypsies create ‘terrains of commonality’ with their non-Gypsy neighbours (Theodosiou 2011: 94). Elsewhere, Theodosiou (2010) emphasises that what provides both Gypsies and (non-Gypsy) peasants from Parakalamos with ‘a shared identity’ is their common occupancy (2010: 330). What this book adds is a focus on the materiality and corporeality of the engagements in processes of making homes and fostering translocal linkages between the localities the Roma in my research inhabited. It does so by casting light on the sensorial dimension and emotions that these processes are infused by, while refraining from implying that these homemaking engagements are constitutive of some sort of singular Roma morality and sociality.

Rotoieni – A Place to Leave From The decision to leave Rotoieni was often explained by my research participants with a reference to the location of this town being in the region of Moldavia, which generally records the lowest levels of quality of life. Statistics provided by the Romanian National Institute of Statistics reveal that in 2015, Moldavia (the North-East Development Region) registered one of the highest rates of severe material deprivation along with the South-Muntenia Region and the South-East Region (see Table 4.1). Figures for 2015 also show that Moldavia is the region with the highest share of population at risk of poverty or social exclusion (see Table 4.2).1 Moreover, Moldavia is the region that registered the highest rates of population that changed their locality of residence within the national borders (see Table 4.3). Dorin is one of the Roma in my research who changed his locality of residence in search of a better life. In his words, Dorin left Rotoieni in search of a better chance to ‘make money’. I met him in Zalău (north-western Romania), where he lived at the time of my research with his wife and their two children. In June 2015, together with Iulian, the father from the Roma family that hosted me in Rotoieni, I visited Dorin’s family in Zalău for a week-

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Table 4.1. The rate of severe material deprivation per Romanian Development Region. Years

Macroregions/ Development Regions

2007 %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

North-West

30.4

25.0

24.3

21.8

24.2

22.7

21.9

18.0

16.5

Centre

29.7

27.3

21.2

19.7

18.9

23.5

27.2

25.0

21.9

North-East (Moldavia)

43.5

40.5

41.9

40.3

38.6

37.5

34.5

30.4

26.7

South-East

43.9

34.3

31.1

38.4

35.2

36.8

38.7

34.4

32.0

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

South-Muntenia

43.6

36.5

36.9

32.2

33.2

35.9

30.0

28.4

26.8

București-Ilfov

34.6

30.8

36.7

30.2

27.4

28.6

27.3

19.8

13.7

South-West Oltenia

46.7

39.2

38.1

32.7

31.7

32.6

27.1

25.3

20.8

West

25.2

22.8

20.6

22.8

20.4

26.4

28.8

22.7

16.4

Source: Table 4.1. is generated based on data available online on the website of the The Romanian National Institute of Statistics (A5–1–SAR112C): http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-online/#/ pages/tables/insse-table.

Table 4.2. The share of population at risk of poverty or social exclusion per Romanian Development Region. Years

Macroregions/ Development Regions

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

North-West

39.2

34.9

36.2

32.1

35.2

33.5

32.3

32.1

28.0

Centre

39.5

39.0

33.3

31.3

30.6

34.3

36.0

35.7

31.6

North-East (Moldavia)

56.7

55.5

52.9

52.4

51.7

52.1

51.5

49.4

46.3

South-East

52.9

46.7

42.6

51.7

49.6

54.1

53.9

53.2

46.2

South-Muntenia

52.0

46.0

47.6

42.8

43.5

45.5

42.0

41.7

43.5

București-Ilfov

37.3

34.0

40.3

32.7

29.7

31.4

30.7

25.1

20.5

South-West Oltenia

57.0

56.6

53.2

47.5

45.8

48.4

44.6

40.9

41.9

West

33.0

34.3

31.8

36.2

34.6

41.7

40.4

40.1

31.0

Source: Table 4.2. is generated based on data available online on the website of the The Romanian National Institute of Statistics (A5–1–SAR111C):  http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-online/#/ pages/tables/insse-table.

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Table 4.3. Number of people who changed their locality of residence per Romanian Development Region. Years 1990

2015

No. people

No. people

North-West

71,789

39,205

Centre

66,643

35,353

North-East (Moldavia)

163,840

62,507

South-East

138,476

46,272

South-Muntenia

149,382

51,436

București-Ilfov

31,613

54,794

South-West Oltenia

96,022

38,050

West

68,706

33,466

Macroregions/Development Regions

Source: Table 4.3. is generated based on data available online on the website of the The Romanian National Institute of Statistics (A3–1–POP302B):  http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-online/#/ pages/tables/insse-table.

end. Dorin recalled that it was as early as the 1960s that his father started to peddle in Dej,2 a small city located about one hundred kilometres from Zalău. As the distance between Rotoieni and Dej totalled more than three hundred kilometres and commuting had become inconvenient, the father decided to move with his family to Dej on a more permanent basis. Dej had been chosen because of the big factory that was operating there (Combinatul de Celuloză și Hârtie – The Cellulose and Paper Factory). In Dorin’s words: There was a big factory, industrial. So [the father] said: ‘This place is good to live in! The factory is so big, so I can give something to these people, [I can] sell them stuff ’. It was very hard in those times. And he started to sell the combs made by the țigani from Rotoieni. He started to sell those. Then he started to make some scarves out of blankets. There were some checkered blankets. So. . . he was cutting them with scissors to make purls, and so he was selling scarves. Then he started to sell plastic trumpets . . . He stayed there until the 1990s, after the revolution.3 (Recorded conversation, June 2015)

Iulian, who was also taking part in our discussion, recalled that, during his childhood, he used to travel with his father to Oradea4 (also a north-western Romanian locality) to sell things on specific dates:

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During Ceaușescu’s time they [the Roma] were earning a lot. But they were not declaring how much. My father made a bag of money on the 1st of May or on the 23rd of August,5 the national celebration of the Romanian people. We were going to Oradea to the park ‘23 August’ or ‘1 May’ – I don’t know now which park that was. There was a parade organised there, and we were also going with Mr Condeanu; there were a lot [of people]. With my father, we made a bag of money – I know this for sure! . . . We went to a hotel and I know that we counted money for about two hours. Believe me! Mr Valeriu Condeanu was selling chewing gum, and in those times [chewing gum] was completely inexistent on the Romanian market, you could only find it in special shops with foreign products. And he [Mr Condeanu] was bringing one of those red cases, full of chewing gum, and he’d sell them for a lot of money. (Recorded conversation, June 2015)

Both Iulian and Dorin explained that the choice of different localities from western and north-western Romania – part of Ardeal6 – as targets for their peddling activities was related to the fact that in this area people used to have a ‘higher purchasing power’ and were ‘richer’ than in Moldavia. It is the same rationale employed by the three related families that I talked with in a village around Zalău. One of these families was a couple in their sixties, while the other two were the families of two of this couple’s sons. They were all spending a Sunday in the village where we met, selling toys, cotton candies and other minutiae from three different stalls. At the end of this working Sunday at the local fair, they went back to Nederlac, the town where they were living when I met them. The trajectory of this extended family is similar to that of Dorin’s family. The elderly couple moved to Ardeal when they were young, without intending to permanently leave Rotoieni. In time, they settled in Nederlac, as did their children. Unlike the elderly couple, the sons did not invest in a place of their own in Rotoieni. For one of them, Rotoieni was not only a place where ‘it is hard to make money’ due to people’s low purchasing power, but it was also a ‘less civilised’ area where people were ‘less industrious’ in comparison to localities of Ardeal. Meanwhile, the parents nostalgically referred to their house in Rotoieni and planned to return there soon: ‘Of course, I’ll go back there, to my people . . . I’m already old and getting sick’, emphasised the man who was in his late sixties. But for his sons, although it was the place where they enthusiastically went to spend Christmas and Easter with old relatives and friends, Rotoieni lacked the social and economic conditions to make a ‘decent living’ that was up to ‘Western standards’. The practical implications of what it means to be closer to ‘the West’ were conflated with the symbolical dimension of the geographical proximity to Europe, contrasted to Moldavia’s proximity to the Moldova Republic. For instance, in conversation with Iulian, Dorin ironically said:

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Dorin: Look Iulian, I’ll give you an example, do you think that people live better here just because they have salaries a little bit higher than in Moldavia? No. It [the Ardeal] is closer to the border, it is Hungary! It [the border] is not Bălți.7 It [Hungary] is closer to the West. I go there, I buy a car, and I put it on sale. But you, in Rotoieni, what can you bring to put on sale? Iulian: Me? Two sheep and a ram [laughing]. Dorin: For you to eat them [laughing]. (Recorded conversation, June 2015)

In a conversation that I previously had with Iulian in Rotoieni, he emphasised that no matter where they are, ‘the Roma’ have always looked for gaps they can fill, in terms of consumption needs on the local level. Reminiscent of Ada Engebrigtsen’s observation regarding the importance of Roma’s ability ‘to cultivate customers’ in their asymmetrical relation with the peasants (2007: 49), Iulian stated: Here, in Rotoieni, many remained on the level of small businesses. They go to deposits, buy retail merchandise, and go to sell it at markets . . . They buy socks, bags, pegs, glasses, stuff that is needed on a daily basis; or tint for eggs [for Easter] . . . The tradition! How to say? [Roma] people hunt the tradition – for Easter we sell tint for painting the eggs. For Christmas we look for those wallpapers to coat the walls; for Saint Mary we go to churches to sell I don’t know what crosses. . . These are situations in which they [Roma] speculate. (Recorded conversation, April 2014)

In this passage, Iulian refers to Rotoieni as a locality that does not allow for more than small-scale commercial activities in accordance with locally constructed needs. For example, the reference to the ‘tint for Easter eggs’ has to be seen in relation to a context in which the majority population is Orthodox. Orthodox believers afford great significance to the act of painting the eggs red, which are then offered to family members and friends on the Easter days. The other example is Saint Mary’s celebration, on 15 August, which is another important event in the lives of the local community members. It is a day when many of those who live elsewhere (Roma and non-Roma alike) return home to Rotoieni and, together with their families, go to the cemetery to commemorate their dead family members. According to Iulian, this is another tradition on which local Roma capitalise by selling items that fit the occasion.8 Valentina also recalled experiences of leaving Rotoieni for short periods of time to engage in small-scale commercial activities. In 2014, when I talked with her, she was in her mid-fifties and had never made a home elsewhere than Rotoieni. Contemplate the following excerpt about the different things that she and her husband sold throughout their life:

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We were going around the whole country, selling stuff; we were selling earrings, rings, necklaces, all this kind of jewellery for young women, for. . . We were selling this, that, and the other, T-shirts. . . Then we dropped out of that and we set up a workshop to produce socks, sweaters, T-shirts, and for a while this worked well too. Then, after the revolution [end of 1989], we started going to Turkey, we brought jeans and sold them very well. But then that stopped working too. . . Then we set up a fish shop here, in the market, now that we’re old. . . (Recorded conversation, March 2014)

While the occupational map of Valentina and her spouse encompasses trajectories from Rotoieni towards different localities and back, one of their sons was living in Zalău with his wife and two children. Ioana (Valentina’s daughter-in-law) grew up in Zalău, where her parents, originally from Rotoieni, had moved when she was a child. But this attraction towards the localities of Ardeal lasted approximatively until the late 1990s. Afterwards, Roma from Rotoieni, like many other Romanians, took routes to what they saw as ‘more developed’ Western European countries, which were more promising in terms of better-paid jobs.

Going în Străinătate Going ‘în străinătate’ is translatable as ‘going abroad’. The noun ‘străinătate’ has the same etymologic root as the adjective ‘străin’, which refers to a feeling of foreignness, lack of familiarity and estrangement. My research participants’ experiences abroad were certainly not disconnected from feelings that this adjective is apt to express. In the 2000s, Italy and Spain received many Romanians for work, mostly in construction, agriculture and domestic work. Apart from these countries, at the time of my research, many of the Roma in Rotoieni were departing – or hoping or planning to do so – for England, Germany and the Netherlands. Almost always by bus or van, the Roma I talked with or heard about travelled to the localities in these countries where they already knew someone linked to their social network in Rotoieni. Often planned as temporary, the stays abroad were said to be triggered by the desire to save money and return to Rotoieni to renovate or build a home, and by those means, to improve their living conditions. My research participants who lived abroad at the time of my research9 reported that, initially, they had not intended to move there or to make a life outside Rotoieni. In fact, their migratory trajectory abroad started with temporary stays that were often occasioned by seasonal work opportunities in the respective localities. For example, Callosa d’en Sarrià is a small town in the Alicante province of Spain where several Roma from Rotoieni trav-

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elled for seasonal work related to the production and commercialisation of loquats (nísperos). It is there that I met Viorel, his partner Ilinca and two of their three children. Initially, they had not planned to move to Spain on a permanent basis. Before doing so, Viorel worked in Callosa d’en Sarrià a few months per year for several years. Irrespective of the migration destination, the desire to have a place of their own in Rotoieni was often at the core of the discussions about the urge to look for better opportunities abroad. The hope that they could work abroad and save money to build a new house, to renovate an existing one or to detach from the parents’ household was one of the main triggers of my research participants’ decisions to leave Rotoieni. However, most people did not talk about this expectation as having been accomplished. The following individual examples illustrate the variety of aspirations of my research participants and the circumstances in which they migrated abroad, as well as the variety of ways in which their expectations were more or less achieved. Lina and Marin. Lina10 was thirty-two years old when she arrived in Zamora for the first time, in 2009, together with her partner, Marin. Zamora is a city located in the Castile and León region of north-western Spain, which in 2016 had a population of 63,217 inhabitants, of which 3.5 per cent were ‘foreign population’ (translated from Spanish: ‘población extranjera’).11 In 2009, with the promise of a one-month contract for work in vineyard fields, Lina and Marin left their five children with Lina’s mother, planning to return once the contract terminated. But the job promise they had had from an acquaintance from Rotoieni turned out to be false. Thus, the hope to return with enough savings to build an extra room next to Lina’s mother’s house soon vanished. Although they wanted to return to Rotoieni immediately, this was quickly discouraged. Lina’s mother had already given a different use to the room that had housed Lina’s family, part of the three-room house which legally belonged to the mother. Hence, not having a place of their own back in Rotoieni led Lina and Marin to seek alternative ways of generating income to be sent to their children and, potentially, to be invested in the construction of a house. In the first year, they engaged in different informal activities and temporary jobs through which they succeeded in saving a little money. Eventually, they used this money to organise their children’s travel to Zamora and in 2010 they all started their family life in Spain. In Zamora they changed flats several times, but in 2015 Lina and Marin still did not have the house in Rotoieni that they had been longing for since their first trip to Spain. In August 2015, the couple were living in a four-room flat together with five of their seven children,12 Marin’s sister, Lina’s nineteen-year-old son as well as his partner and their one-year-old child. Despite the nostalgia for Rotoieni (which they referred to as their hometown) and a feeling of discontent with their financial situation in Zamora, Lina and Marin

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agreed that in Romania they still could not offer as much to their children in terms of alimentation and consumption goods as in Spain. In Rotoieni, Lina and Marin had mostly engaged in small-scale commercial activities at local markets and fairs organised in different localities in Moldavia and Ardeal. Paul and Carmen. This couple arrived in Guernica for the first time in 2007. Located in Basque Country, in 2016 the town of Guernica (GernikaLumo) had a population of 16,595 inhabitants, of which 1,895 were born abroad.13 The couple were persuaded to move by Paul’s youngest brother, who at the time was playing accordion in several Basque towns nearby. At the beginning, Paul made a living in a similar way, mainly by playing violin in restaurants or at local markets and fairs. Together with other relatives and acquaintances, Paul and Carmen lived for several months in abandoned houses and improvised dwellings until they got support from the local government to find and pay for adequate housing. Previously, Paul and Carmen had engaged largely in commercial activities in Blaj (Ardeal). Paul’s father, who was from Rotoieni, met Paul’s ardeleancă14 mother in the 1960s in Blaj, where he was selling his merchandise at a fair. Paul and his seven siblings were born in Rotoieni, but Paul lived with his relatives in Blaj for about twenty years. He stressed that it was there where he developed skills for commercial activities. When they noticed that this occupation was no longer productive, Paul and Carmen decided ‘to try their luck’ (as Paul put it) in Spain. After a period of uncertainty and struggle due to not having a regular income or adequate housing, in August 2015, at the time of my visit, Paul and Carmen were content with their life in Guernica. They were living in a fourroom flat together with Paul’s mother and their three children, who were all born in Spain and were younger than five years old. As well as being satisfied with their life there, during their years spent in Guernica, Carmen and Paul (in comparison to Lina and Marin) managed to invest further in a house in Rotoieni. Like many Romanians (Roma and non-Roma alike) who migrated abroad with their families, Paul and Carmen built a house in Rotoieni as a place of their own to which they could turn ‘when the time to return to Romania would come’, as Paul put it. Even in cases like these, when people are content with their life abroad, the idea of a place of their own back in Rotoieni is prominent. Even those who feel that they have succeeded and ‘integrated’ in the society abroad foresee an end to their stay there and a return ‘to their roots’, as some of my research participants put it. Laura and Ionuț. In Guernica, a similar narrative of success was developed by Paul’s sister Laura, who followed a path similar to her brother’s. Laura’s journey towards a life in Guernica started in 2006, when she travelled to Basque Country alone, without her children and Ionuț (her non-Roma

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husband). Back then, she earned money mostly by begging. Soon, she was able to gather enough money to bring her whole family to Spain. In August 2015, she was living in a three-room flat with Ionuț and their two young children, while her other two daughters and their families lived in separate flats. Laura, who at the time of my research was going through chemotherapy treatment, proudly talked about the house that she bought in Rotoieni, where she imagined living ‘when the time to return home would come’. Viorel and Ilinca. In contrast to the families that I met in Guernica, Viorel and Ilinca expressed a high level of discontent with their life in Callosa d’en Sarrià. This town of 7,146 inhabitants (as of 2016) is located in the Alicante province, in the Valencia community.15 Although in 2015 they were living with two of their children in Callosa d’en Sarrià, Viorel recounted that the first time he came to Spain was about ten years earlier (our conversation dates back to August 2015). Mentioning that he worked mostly without a contract in agriculture or construction, he said: ‘Throughout these years, I have been working only a few months per year; the rest, I spent at home and, whenever the money ran out, I came back [to Spain] again’. His spouse, Ilinca, joined him for work in agriculture whenever there was a promise of work for her. Eventually, at the beginning of 2015, they decided to move together with their children (who were ten and fourteen years old) to Callosa d’en Sarrià. The decision was difficult as they did not want to interrupt their children’s schooling or separate them from their social environment. In this regard, Ilinca complained: ‘We made the decision too late, we brought them only this year, and it is not easy for them with the language at their age’. What they denounced the most was the lack of certainty regarding their opportunities and access to the job market. ‘A lot has changed, we live a little better here, but we have no certainty. . .’, Viorel noted, referring to the fact that he worked only sporadically, a few days a week. In these circumstances, they could earn only enough to pay the accommodation costs for the four family members. Yet not having a house of their own in Rotoieni was an important factor in their decision to make a family life in Callosa d’en Sarrià. The place where Viorel and his family used to live in Rotoieni was a room in a two-room house belonging to Ilinca’s parents, located in țigănie. Cecilia. Cecilia’s decision to move to Amsterdam (where we met) was triggered by her daughter’s health. As a single mother in Rotoieni and with an acquaintance in the Dutch capital, she left her job as a social worker at the city hall and looked for alternatives abroad. In June 2015, when I visited her, she had been in Amsterdam for about three years. Two years prior to our meeting, Cecilia had managed to organise her daughter’s arrival in the Netherlands and the commencement of medical treatment. Cecilia’s brothers and mother were also living and working abroad. They all proceeded with the

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plan of buying a flat or building a house in Rotoieni, despite being content with their life abroad. At the time of our meeting, Cecilia had a stable job which provided her with a feeling of stability and deservingness of the good life that she said she had in Amsterdam. But it also provided her with the means to travel to Rotoieni every year, in comparison to Lina, who complained that she had not been able to visit Rotoieni since 2010. Cecilia nostalgically recalled the time when she was working as a social worker and depicted this occupation as very rewarding, as it made her feel that she was ‘doing something [beneficial] for her [Roma] community’. However, despite the status that this job conferred on her, she emphasised that the payment she received as a state employee in Rotoieni was not nearly enough for ‘a decent living’.

Making a Home în Străinătate to Make a House at Home It appears that, for the Roma people I met abroad, life in another country always started with an experience of living in very small or overcrowded flats, abandoned houses and/or improvised shelters, usually shared with relatives from Rotoieni. These experiences were often recalled as experiences of homelessness and uneasiness, of constant fear of being thrown out and of anxiety caused by uncertainty. Yet, at the time of my research, these experiences were recounted as memories from the past, specific to a phase that these people had already overcome. The networks they had become part of and the knowledge they had acquired during the years spent abroad enabled them to make a place of their own and to become somehow part of the local environment. I will focus now on some of my research participants’ engagements in ‘the production of well-being, livability, amiability and comfort’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010: 4), with a focus on the material texture of these engagements. Laura recalled having lived in several abandoned houses in Basque Country, around Guernica, before receiving support from the local government to find and pay for proper housing for her and her family. As already mentioned, in 2015 she was living only with her family in a three-room flat. She proudly guided me through the flat which, as she pointed out, used to be sparsely furnished and completely unequipped. Our conversations took place mostly in the kitchen, which was organised like a living room. The items that were there, the arrangement and the type of furniture, as well as the uses of this room suggested that this was where the family spent most of their time. On the side that was equipped with kitchen infrastructure, on and around the microwave, there were two insect sprays, a statuette of Jesus Christ approximatively twenty centimetres tall, a plush lion toy, a small ‘boy and girl’

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trinket, another small candelabrum trinket, boxes containing medicines, an empty olive jar and a newly bought broom. On the other side, on a big table placed against the wall, was a big decorative bow with many colourful artificial flowers, dominating that corner of the room. At one point during my visit, the children were served mămăligă (porridge made of yellow maize flour) with warmed milk16 at the same table. On the wall where the table stood, a 68 x 50-centimetre Romanian Orthodox calendar, which was brought from Romania, was displayed.17 To the right of the table stood a wooden cabinet with several cases and drawers. Through its transparent glass doors, one could see plenty of glasses of different dimensions and shapes, and several teacups. A red plush toy in the shape of a smiley devil was hung on one of the knobs, while a green plush frog of the same size was dangling on another. At least ten other plush toys were sitting on top of the cabinet, touching the ceiling. A television, a DVD player, framed pictures of family members, cleaning products (such as a spray for polishing the furniture), cosmetics (such as shampoo and hand cream), an air freshener and several trinkets of different dimensions were situated on the cabinet’s shelves. Many of them were placed on crocheted cloths. Three of the walls of that room hosted two painted landscapes and a piece of fabric illustrating the Last Supper. Similar items with a similar distribution characterised the other three rooms of Laura’s flat, reminding me of many houses that I had been in in Rotoieni. The wall-carpets and the plush toys, similarly placed in the room, were among the most noticeable common elements that materialised links between Laura’s flat in Guernica and the houses that I visited in Rotoieni. During our conversations, Laura emphasised that, except for two wallcarpets,18 almost nothing she had there was brought from Rotoieni. Instead, she stated that her intention was to collect things she could take back to the house she had bought in Rotoieni. To illustrate what she meant, Laura opened several drawers packed with sheets, blankets, tablecloths and towels that would be sent in packages to Romania (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Among these items, she found an artisanal towel19 which prompted her to recall family memories of her son’s wedding and her grandson’s baptism, which had taken place in Guernica that year. Like Laura, Lina also mentioned that she intended to take all the things from her flat in Zamora to Rotoieni ‘when the time to return would come’. Lina highlighted that the flat where her family and she lived when I met them was completely empty, thus pointing at the efforts she had made to find beds and furniture, to carry and install everything until the space was made liveable. Apart from a wall-carpet, she brought nothing from her place in Rotoieni: ‘The first time we came here was to make money, it was September. We decided that we were both going to work for a month, on the vineyards,

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Figures 4.1 and 4.2. Stuff to be sent to Romania, Guernica, August 2015. © Andreea Racleș.

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so that we could gather 1000 euro with which, once back home, we could buy a chimney and wood for winter’ (recorded conversation, August 2015). Lina remembered that one of the first flats where she and Marin lived at the beginning of their stay in Zamora was much smaller than the one where they were living in 2015. However, that small place seemed to her to be ‘a palace’: ‘It [the flat] had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. It was small, but to me, at that point, it seemed to be a palace. I was having the feeling that it was mine, that I could bring my children. So. . . we stayed there for a while, but when I brought my children and the landlord saw me with so many children, he got crazy. [She laughs]’ (recorded conversation, August 2015). Staying longer in Zamora was supposed to enable Lina and Marin to save enough money to build a house of their own in Rotoieni. But this required them to make a home in Zamora first. For Lina, as for Laura, making a home abroad entailed arranging the flat(s) in ways that would make them not only comfortable and equipped, but liveable on their own terms. Through arranging the inhabited space abroad in accordance with how her place in Rotoieni looked, Lina appropriated the new space and made it liveable for her and her family. When writing about belonging as identification with space, Neil Leach (2002, 2003) notes that the repetition of spatial practices (see also

Figure 4.3. The ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ wall-carpet in Guernica, August 2015. © Andreea Racleș.

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Fortier 1999) constitutes ‘a means of inscribing the self in the environment’ which makes habituation possible and a way of projecting belonging onto material forms of space (Leach 2003: 80). Thus, hanging wall-carpets and decorating the flat with plastic flowers, as Lina used to do in her house in Rotoieni, are repetitions of home practices through which a sense of belonging is made and thus materialised. Objects collected and used abroad play a role not only in the process of making a home abroad, but also in fostering the imaginary of their ‘returning’. Due to their removable character, objects that my research participants planned to take to Rotoieni materialise the temporariness that they ascribe to their stay abroad. As already alluded to, while women arrange their domestic spaces in a way that makes them feel comfortable and safe in the specific locality abroad, they do so with the idea that at one point they will return to permanently live in Rotoieni. Hence, the objects that are collected for their use abroad are often thought of as items whose ‘biography’ (cf. Kopytoff 1986) will continue at home in Rotoieni. But this projection of the temporariness of their stay abroad becomes even more concrete when it comes to the non-removable investments that they are willing (or not) to make in the homemaking process. One illustrative example is the practice of bleaching the interior walls, which constitutes an important act in making a house liveable in accordance with the normative standards of hygiene and cleanliness in Rotoieni. Both Lina and Ilinca told me they have not been willing to invest as many resources as they would have done in Rotoieni in the practice of bleaching the walls. They felt discouraged to do so because, on the one hand, they did not own the flat where they lived and, on the other hand, the length of their stay there depended on the owner. Consider Ilinca’s statement about her (un)willingness to bleach the walls in their rented flat in Callosa d’en Sarrià: ‘[Here] you’re not with your relatives together, with your home. . . Whatever you do here is only to avoid living in messiness, or to. . . But you don’t do it heartfully. We’ve bleached the walls here, but only for us to stay. . . But does anyone do it as if it was one’s own place, as one would be doing it at home? Does anyone do it heartfully?’ (recorded conversation, August 2015). Emphasising that they did not bleach the walls of the flat ‘heartfully’, Ilinca seems to suggest that the investments in the process of homemaking are triggered by a feeling of belonging that prompts one to exercise changes on the level of everyday materiality. From this perspective, it is not only the will to belong that prompts women’s engagement in homemaking processes, but it is also the feeling that belonging can be attained that triggers (or not) commitments to home materiality. The reference to the fact that abroad one is not ‘with the relatives together’ hints at the intersubjective dimension of the normative standards

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that dictate what one’s inhabited space is supposed to look like. The relatives’ or neighbours’ gaze – those they used to live near, back in Rotoieni – appears as a trigger for engagements of a certain kind with the materiality of the domestic space. As Ilinca puts it, in addition to the feeling of living in a flat owned by someone else, the lack of this gaze constitutes another element that discourages homemaking commitments abroad. Lina expressed similar concerns: Saving money to make a house in Romania: that’s my dream. Then we’d stay mas tranquilo20 here; knowing that we have a house [in Rotoieni]. Good or bad, you want to go back there, to your home, at one point. Because here, you don’t have your home. You can be thrown out at any point. You’re on the streets, no matter how much you struggle. Sometimes I do some things. . . I bought emulsion paint, I bleached, but it cost me a lot of money. And look now what my children have done to the walls! It cost me a fortune. . . But you don’t really bleach [heartfully]. . . because you know it’s not your house. (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

The statement ‘Then we’d stay mas tranquilo here’ is not only about the intention to stay longer in Zamora, but, concomitantly, about Lina’s anxiety that emerges from not having a place to return to in Rotoieni ‘when the time to do so will come’ (see also Racleș 2018). In a way, Lina’s concerns emerge from a feeling of non-belonging experienced by her and her family due to their position as ‘foreigners’. Her remark, ‘Because here, you don’t have your home. You can be thrown out at any point’, is not (only) about not possessing a flat/house in Zamora. Nor is it merely about the fear that the landlord(s) could ask them to leave at any point (as they had already experienced). It is related to a feeling of non-belonging based on their ‘non-Spanishness’. Being ‘on the streets, no matter how much you struggle’ seems to be understood as the condition of the ‘outsider’ in national terms.

‘Home Is Where Nobody Can Throw You Out From’ In my conversations with Lina and with others I met abroad, the feeling of non-belonging they expressed seems to be based on the idea of ‘citizenship and roots elsewhere’, which maintained their desire to make a home in Rotoieni too. Both those who expressed contentment and discontentment with their life abroad, and those who foresee staying abroad for a longer or shorter period, imagine that ‘the time to go back to Romania’ would be the moment when ‘a [national] law’ would force them to do so. The prospect of such a national measure against migrants is among the elements that nurture

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my research participants’ constant concern to secure a house or flat of their own back in Rotoieni. This was also true for those who preferred living abroad ‘as much as possible’ due to better access to institutional support, ‘better education’ for their children, and what they called ‘higher living standards’ than in Romania. Paul, for instance, emphasised that they planned to stay in Guernica for a long time, as their young children would have ‘a better future’ there. Yet, when I asked about the house they were having built in Rotoieni, he said: Here [in Guernica] you are, so to say, for. . . work. Or for whatever. . . One gets settled here for a certain time, but just in case, if absolutely nothing is going to work at one point, or if the state will not be able to have you here any longer, or perhaps if something changes, someone comes [into power]. . . Or if they pass a law that all the migrants should be expelled: where do you go then? You have to return home. So. . . you need to have your nest prepared just in case, to have a roof and to have a place where you belong, because no matter how late, you’ll still go home, you’ll still return to Romania. Maybe our children won’t, maybe they are going to adapt here, or perhaps they won’t need something like this [a roof in Romania]. Maybe they won’t even think about Romania. But we. . . our mind, our mentality, our soul. . . no matter how late, we are going to return home. (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

In this statement, the idea of home is defined as a place from which nobody can be thrown out, in comparison to ‘abroad’, where as a migrant one always runs the risk of being subject to (state) expulsion policies. On the one hand, a house in Rotoieni is needed as a back-up solution to the potential scenario in which the host state, in Paul’s words, would ‘not be able to have us [migrants] here [in Spain] any longer’. On the other hand, a house in Rotoieni materialises the possibility of returning to where ‘one’s roots are’ and to live again among people whom they relate to emotionally and in terms of ‘mentality’. The ‘nest’ metaphor contains an understanding of home as something that is self-made and which, as such, guarantees the irremovable right to return at any time. Having somewhere to return to – the nest – provides a feeling of safety, certainty and ease. Differently put, Paul asserts that if he were expelled as a migrant from Spain, as a Romanian citizen he has the unquestionable right to return to his nest there [in Rotoieni]. This nest thus constitutes the ultimate place to go when/if ‘nothing else would work here [in Guernica] anymore’. Related to the ‘nest’ metaphor, Paul talks about a migrant’s imperative of having ‘a place unde să te tragi’, which I translated from Romanian as ‘a place where you belong’. One of the primary meanings of the verb a trage is ‘to pull’ or ‘to drag’. With the prefix ‘a’, this verb becomes a atrage which means

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‘to attract’. It could be said that the Romanian expression ‘a place unde să te tragi’ implies a feeling of attraction towards a familiar environment, where one feels secure and acknowledged by other members as a part of it. As such, this attraction is based on previous pleasant (or recalled as pleasant) experiences of being in a familiar setting. Linked to Paul’s reference to the Spanish state, which might not be willing to host migrants forever, is Lina’s following point: So. . . maybe God will help us to save [money] and to go home. When things will be bad here. . . Because here, you always stay with fear. You never know what law will be issued. You never know what’s here. A while ago there was assistance for the extranjeros [foreigners] and so on, but now. . . since Zapatero is not governing anymore, it is very bad. It is very bad with Rajoy. Rajoy stopped all the benefits, Rajoy has also issued this law according to which you need to be here [in order to receive unemployment payment], because, if you go to Romania while being in paro21 [unemployment benefit], they are not going to give you the paro anymore. (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

Like in Paul’s account, these points made by Lina show her awareness of the vulnerable position in which she and her family members find themselves as potential subjects of state policies and of the measures that address those who are framed as non-belonging. It seems that this awareness of the politics of belonging (cf. Yuval-Davis 2006) at play – delimiting who has rights and who does not, who is from here and who is not – is what makes the need to have a house in Rotoieni so imperative. Cecilia, whom I met in Amsterdam, expressed similar concerns regarding politics of belonging which determine who stays in and who stays out. She expressed contentment with her life in Amsterdam and did not plan to return to Rotoieni in the near future. Yet Cecilia said that she always recalls her mother’s insistence on having a house/flat in Rotoieni as ‘the ultimate recourse, the ace up one’s sleeve’.22 Cecilia’s mother lived and worked for many years in Italy (and was still working there during my research), with the goal of building a house for one of her three children and helping the other two purchase their own flats in Rotoieni. In Cecilia’s words, this is what her mother has always told her and her two brothers (all working abroad): If, God forbid, something is going to happen here [abroad], you need to have a place to return to. You [need to] have a piece [of place], no matter how good – bad, big – small but [something] which is yours. You need to have it so that no one could throw you out, because it’s your house, [so that] you don’t depend on anyone. It’s you who locks, it’s you who unlocks. Even if it’s poor, even if it doesn’t have everything you wanted inside, but it’s a house. [A place where] you return and knock on the door saying bună ziua [good day] in your language, instead of buon

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giorno, guten morgen or whatever other language. (Recorded conversation, Cecilia paraphrasing her mother, June 2015)

After paraphrasing her mother, Cecilia added: ‘This is what was “home” for my mother too, the place where you are safe’. This urge to have a material place to which you are able to return is interrelated with a feeling of longing for security and with the claim of having a right to have a place in the world. The feeling of security seems to derive from the idea that, unlike abroad, nothing could happen in Rotoieni that would compel them to leave. Thinking about her teenage daughter, Cecilia had already proceeded with the purchase of a flat in Rotoieni through a programme run by the Romanian National Housing Agency:23 This is what I also consider for my child as a safety measure. God help her to never need this solution, but one needs to consider it: home gives you the feeling of [a place] where you can take refuge, where you are perfectly safe and where you can always start all over again. Harder or easier, but you can always restart all over again. Because you already know the language, you know the mentality, you know the people, that’s what home is. . . . God forbid anything should happen, but just in case. She [the daughter] should have something somewhere, at home in Romania, which is her country. . . I mean it would be easier for her there than in a foreign country. At home is different, you open other doors, despite our defective system, people help you differently24 at home. Despite all our mean people [in Romania], you solve a problem differently. Despite all our civil servants. . . Even the bread has the taste of bread. This bread here. . . It’s what I told you today in the morning about my mother. . . She wanted to buy bread. But this is not good [tasty]. . . ‘I just want a piece of bread’ said my mother. I told her that this is how the bread is here. . . The shelves are full of bread, but she just wanted a piece of bread. But it was not like the bread that. . . [we know from home]. (Recorded conversation, June 2015)

For Cecilia, as well as for her mother (who was visiting Cecilia in Amsterdam at the time) and for the people that I interviewed in Spain, having a flat or house in Rotoieni materialises their right and possibility to return when they have no alternative elsewhere. But it also materialises the connections that they nurture to those who remained in Rotoieni and to the ways of living recalled as being specific to their hometown. Thinking of home as multiscalar (Blunt and Dowling 2006) means reflecting on homemaking and related socio-material aspirations as entangled in broader place-making processes. To what extent are migrants, in this case Romanian Roma in Spain (or the Netherlands), allowed and enabled to engage in place-making beyond the domestic sphere? While places do play an important role in the constitution and enactment of selves, both in Rotoieni

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and abroad, Roma people are subject to home/place-making politics that regulate the extent to which they can appropriate spaces and shape places through their presence and ways of life. Though little elaborated on, the notion of ‘politics of translocal place-making’ proposed by Smith (2011: 194– 97) is relevant for this chapter as it epitomises the limitations with which my research participants were confronted in their process of making a home both ‘at home’ and abroad. Politics of translocal place-making are linked to their concern that, at any point, a ‘law’ might order the expulsion of all ‘outsiders’, as Paul and Lina put it. In my view, politics of translocal place-making refers to the formal and informal institutional circumstances that enable (or not) non-nationals to settle, create liveable lives and homes, and maintain translocal linkages with places and people elsewhere. It is also related to what Brickell and Datta call ‘everyday politics of agency during movement’, which ‘engages with locally specific configurations of identity, (non)belonging and spatial practice’ (2011: 7). My research participants’ engagement in homemaking processes abroad is inhibited by both their position as Roma from Romania (e.g. often with low levels of education and professionalisation) and by their position as Romanian (and Roma) migrants in Spain, which often subjects them to racialisation and exclusion from access to resources. This chapter has discussed ‘the sense of contiguous home’ (Wise 2011) of the Roma people who participated in my research, who identify Rotoieni as their hometown but live (or lived at the time of my research) abroad or elsewhere in Romania. This sense of contiguous home is attained through place-making practices that connect two or more localities, ‘both grounding transnationals and their practices within actually existing places, yet linking them across distance through material and symbolic ties’ (Wise 2011: 95). We have seen that in nurturing translocal connections while being abroad, as well as in navigating the limitations that hinder homemaking engagements, the sensorial dimension of home-related materiality plays an important role. Regarding the translocal links fostered by Chinese migrants between Ashfield (Sydney) and Shanghai, Amanda Wise writes: ‘Being able to hear one’s own dialect “spoken in the street” and able to see, hear, smell and consume familiar hometown delicacies actually created a deeply embodied, sensuous feeling of belonging and familiarity’ (2011: 99). Cecilia’s reference to bread in the Netherlands compared to bread from Rotoieni is indicative of the translocal connections’ corporeality and of the embodied character of my research participants’ ideas of home. These are precisely the aspects on which the following chapter concentrates.

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Notes 1. The AROPE (At Risk of Poverty or Social Exclusion) rates were calculated by the Romanian National Institute of Statistics and refer to those who are at risk of poverty, severely materially deprived or living in a household with a very low work intensity. ‘The AROPE rate, the share of the total population, which is at risk of poverty or social exclusion, is the headline indicator to monitor the EU 2020 Strategy poverty target’, as explained on the Eurostat homepage. Retrieved 21 January 2021 from https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/ Glossary:At_risk_of_poverty_or_social_exclusion_(AROPE). 2. Dej is located fifty-six kilometres north-east of Cluj. Cluj is the biggest city in Transylvania and the second biggest Romanian city. 3. Many Romanians refer to the fall of Ceaușescu’s regime in 1989 as ‘the Revolution’. 4. Oradea is located more than five hundred kilometres west of Rotoieni. 5. Both 1 May and 23 August were strongly ideologised National Days in the so-called communist Romania. 6. ‘Ardeal’ is often used as a synonym for Transylvania. Unlike the latter, which is a term of Latin origin, ‘Ardeal’ originates from the Hungarian word ‘Erdély’ which means ‘beyond forest’ (Farkas and Fodor 2016: 425). 7. After Chișinău, Bălți is the second largest city of the Moldova Republic in terms of area and economic importance, and the third largest in terms of population. 8. What is notable in this specific account is Iulian’s tendency to distance himself from profit-oriented practices. Due to their Baptist religious affiliation, Iulian and his wife Maria have publicly stopped engaging in commercial activities. However, as he generalises such activities as being specific to the Roma from the area, Iulian uses the plural pronoun ‘we’, alluding to the past years when they both engaged in similar activities. 9. As far as I know, the people I interviewed abroad are still living there. 10. Elsewhere (Racleș 2018), I discuss Lina’s material and affective translocal connections, based on a walking tour that we took in Zamora in August 2015. 11. The information is available on the city hall website. Retrieved 23 June 2017 from http://portalestadistico.com/municipioencifras/?pn=zamora&pc=NGT70. 12. At the time of my research, Lina had seven children, two of whom were born in Zamora. But only five of the seven children lived with the family in Spain, as two of the first-born children were living in Rotoieni with Lina’s mother. 13. These figures correspond to the year 2016 and are available online. Retrieved 28 August 2017 from http://www.eustat.eus/municipal/datos_estadisticos/Guernica_lu mo_c.html. 14. Feminine of ‘ardelean’: a person who comes from Ardeal. 15. Information available online. Retrieved 21 January 2021 from http://documenta cion.diputacionalicante.es/3demogr.asp?codigo=03048. 16. There is a common view that associates this dish with Romanian rural areas. Interestingly, Paul referred to mămăligă in his talk about differences between Moldavia and Ardeal. He ironically used mămăligă as an indicator of Moldavia’s low levels of prosperity and development, comparing the ‘backward Moldavia’ (where he was born) to ‘the more developed Ardeal’ (where he lived for about twenty years).

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17. In Romania, many people (mostly in rural areas, but not exclusively) use this calendar, wherein all the Orthodox celebrations are listed. The Romanian Orthodox churches in Spain bring such calendars from Romanian Orthodox episcopacies and sell them to Romanian believers abroad. 18. Paul and Carmen had also brought wall-carpets to their apartment in Guernica (see, e.g., Figure 4.3). 19. This kind of artisanal towel, embroidered with red, black and white thread, is often part of celebrations that people still observe in Moldavia, not only weddings but also funerals, baptisms, repasts and others. In some regions of Romania, they were also used as decorative items, mostly placed next to religious icons exhibited on the walls. 20. We talked in Romanian but, at several points during our conversations, Lina used Spanish words. In this case ‘mas tranquilo[s]’ can be translated as ‘more peacefully’ or ‘without worries’. 21. In Spanish, ‘in paro’ means being entitled to receive unemployment benefit. 22. Translated from Romanian: ‘E refugiul tău, în ultimă instanță, asul tău din mânecă’. 23. The National Housing Agency was established under Law no.152/1998 and, at the time of writing (September 2016), carried out its activity under the authority of the Ministry of Regional Development, Public Administration and European Funds. Among other projects, it carries out housing construction programmes: Mortgage-Financed Dwellings and Rental Housing Units for Young People. The information is available online. Retrieved 3 September 2016 from https://www.anl.ro/en/ despre/. 24. ‘Differently’ is used here in the sense of ‘more engaged than in the Netherlands’, where Cecilia experienced what she described as people’s ‘coldness’ or ‘detachment’ from one another.

CHAPTER 5



TASTES OF HOME

Viorel: I miss [mi-e dor de] everything from Romania. Ilinca: [I miss] even the dogs. I even wonder if anyone fed the dogs. So, if one misses the dogs, imagine the people. . . —Recorded conversation, August 2015

Introduction In chapter 4, I examined the ways in which translocal materiality enables the articulation of emotions that emerge ‘as a consequence of dwelling within and movement through places’ (Conradson and Mckay 2007: 169). While some objects travelled abroad from Rotoieni (like wall-carpets), others were collected in Spain in order to be sent or taken back to Rotoieni (such as sheets, towels and other household items). In addition to these, food appeared often in my research participants’ accounts as consumables by means of which translocal connections between homes are fostered. In this chapter I focus on ‘the affective materiality of food’ (Alexeyeff 2004) involved in Roma individuals’ enactments and discourses about them primarily as Romanians abroad. Kalissa Alexeyeff uses this term in order to connect the material and affective characteristics of food gifts that travel between the Cook Islands and New Zealand, and which ‘display familial love and connection to home in ways words cannot’ (2004: 69). In a similar vein, Norah Benarrosh-Orsoni shows that, by sending packages of food to their kin in Romania (in addition to remittances), Roma who made homes in Montreuil concretise the support that they are expected to offer to those who remained ‘behind’ in the village (2016: 155). What this chapter looks into is the question of how food enables people to ‘consume’ home

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while being în străinătate and to articulate discourses about ‘our ethics’ in relation to theirs (Spaniards’).

Ethics of Providing Food Through how and especially what they eat, people create and maintain continuities between their life abroad and their life in Rotoieni, thus embodying and enacting a sense of commitment to home. At the same time, eating what is deemed to be ‘Romanian food’ is related to the process of negotiating belonging. Following a Foucauldian approach, Elspeth Probyn (1999) writes about the role that food plays in articulating identities, with a focus on ‘ethics of living’ as ‘a mode of relating to oneself and to others’ (1999: 217). Thinking of food in these terms enables reflections on how not only eating, but also providing food mediates between ‘here’ and ‘there’ and between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The endeavours to provide food for her family were central to Aurica’s account of the beginnings of her married life, when she had to prove to her husband’s family her worthiness as a wife. When I visited her for the first time, on a Sunday in April 2014, Aurica shared with me the story of her house in Rotoieni. She lived there with her partner Panait and their two sons. At that time, the sons were in their early twenties. In the past years, Panait had worked on construction sites in Greece for a few months each year. Aurica recalled the early times of their married life when they shared a two-room house with Panait’s family. This situation was described as one that caused intrafamilial discord and animosity, but also as one that motivated Aurica and Panait to invest their efforts and income generated through commercial activities in building a house only for themselves. This eventually happened when their first son was born. To describe the current state of her relationship with Panait’s family, Aurica stated: You know what? When they come to my place, his kin, they leave their shoes outside at the entrance, and they did not want me. . . at all! Not these aunts of his, not those, nobody! Not his brothers. But when they’ve seen what I was capable of, that I don’t like to sleep until noon, that I wake up and I go to earn my money. . . And they’d see me on the way [home] coming with a bag full [of food], and that I’d bring [home] food to make and stuff to wash. . . [rhetorically] ‘So what else do you [read: they] want from me? Give me a break!’ (Recorded conversation, April 2014)

With a slightly annoyed tone, but proudly, Aurica spoke about the factors that enabled her to gain acknowledgement as a hardworking and respectful woman in the eyes of Panait’s brothers and aunts. For Aurica, the criterion according to which Panait’s relatives evaluated her as a worthy wife (apart

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from the standards of cleanliness reflected by the domestic space – ‘they leave their shoes outside at the entrance’) was her ability to provide food for the family. A view on the implications that acts of providing food have for processes of becoming, as seen in Aurica’s case, is provided in Janet Carsten’s work (1995) about Malays on an island in Langkawi (in north-western Malaysia). Carsten argues that feeding, understood both as giving and receiving nourishment, is a process of becoming a person and a participant in social relations (1995: 223). The ability to provide food for the family as an important aspect of being (or becoming) respectable and devoted parents was also referred to by my interlocutors in Spain. It was often emphasised that, despite the difficulties that living abroad can bring, it did make it easier to provide food for the family. According to Lina, the amount spent on filling the fridge for a week would be enough to prepare only a meal or two in Rotoieni. Connecting this often-invoked ‘ease’ in providing food for the family with the lack of eating-related restrictions, my research participants highlighted being able to afford anything their children wished for as a positive aspect of their life abroad. Although she preferred her life in Rotoieni, Paul’s mother, whom I interviewed in Guernica, was happy to live in Spain as long as her son could offer her grandchildren whatever they liked to eat from what was available in the supermarkets. She told me she felt relieved that her son was not confronted with the risk of being unable to purchase what the children wanted, as he may have been in Rotoieni. In a similar vein, Marin, who at the time of my visit to Zamora was very explicit about his plan to return to his life in Romania soon, confessed his fear that in Rotoieni he would not be able to provide his children with whatever they liked to eat. In his words: [In Romania] it’s more difficult to afford getting a [bottle of ] juice, to get. . . for instance. . . To get a kilo of oranges, or. . . For instance, a chocolate, what children in general [ask for]. . . You know how it goes with this Occident. . . [My children] are used to. . . Sweets, this and that, you can imagine. . . If I go with them to Romania, of course, as they are used to here, they will ask: ‘get me that, get me this’ and I don’t think I will have [the possibility to buy what they wish]. But I don’t have a choice, what should I do? Sooner or later I’ll have to go home, right? (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

In this context, ‘the Occident’ seems to signify access to a great variety of consumption goods. This variety appears here as a measure of well-being. What is interesting is that Marin locates Spain within the Occident, that is to say, in a position of superiority in relation to Romania and in one of equality in relation to other Western countries. Locating Spain on the Occident’s map implies a self-positioning within the Occident’s borders. This selfpositioning becomes material and immediate through the food (in general)

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and the sweets (in particular) that Marin is able to provide for his children. In this light, Marin’s desire to return to Rotoieni seems to be undermined by the worry that the limited access to whatever they would like to consume might be too difficult for his children. Marin’s concerns are mirrored by Lina’s references to the very beginnings of their life as a family in Zamora. She recalled that, once they reunited in Zamora after a year of living abroad without their children, her main concern was to offer them all the food and sweets that she knew they never had access to, but always yearned for: I packed the fridge knowing that my children were to arrive, with everything! I won’t tell you how much food: Danone, chocolate, all kinds of sweets . . . When they arrived, I did not know what else to give them. I filled them with chocolate – you’ll see when my nine-year-old son wakes up, you’ll be terrified. He weighs sixty-five kilos, he is fat, he’s big. From the chocolate that I gave them to eat. . . Because I was so happy that they were here, I did not care anymore [to warn them]: ‘Enough; that’s too much; you had enough; don’t eat anymore; leave it for later!’ or ‘You’ll eat after lunch’. No! I told them: ‘Eat as much as you want!’ I was bringing fifteen or twenty chocolates, I was not giving them one [chocolate] each, I was giving them all, and they were eating some and leaving behind the rest. . . But they’d eat most, that’s why both the one who’s five and the one who’s nine are fat. (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

If the first phase of her experience abroad meant being separated from her children, her stay in Zamora was what later enabled Lina to forge relationships with them through feeding. Lina’s willingness to offer her children all they could have wished for in Zamora is related to the precarious life they experienced in Rotoieni. For Lina, her children travelled to Zamora carrying a desire for what they had no access to in Rotoieni. Thus, food has an affective function that implies fulfilling her children’s (perhaps projected) needs and desires. In this sense, providing food for the family without imposing restrictions of where, when, in what ways or how much food could be consumed seems to be an important dimension of the everyday ethics of living. The following vignette that is set in Lina’s flat in Zamora illustrates quite eloquently the flexibility of what, when and where family members ate, as well as the question of how much and in what order food could be consumed (for instance sweets before the actual meal). In the afternoon of the second day that I spent with Lina and her family, she fried potatoes, eggs and meat in a big frying pan. She cooked mămăligă (porridge made of yellow maize flour) and placed cheese next to all the goods on the table. Shortly before, I had bought chocolate pastries, which I imagined we would eat together after having a late lunch. I gave them to

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Lina, who soon made them available to the children. One of the youngest enthusiastically opened the packages, ate a few pieces and then abandoned them on the table where Lina had started to place the fried meat. Lina’s sister-in-law insisted that I should sit and eat at the table, while the others took as much food as they wanted and went to the room where the TV set was located. Likewise, Lina’s daughter-in-law took a plate of food to her room, where she fed her two-year-old child. This episode is reminiscent of similar observations made by Michael Stewart with regard to Rom in 1980s Hungary. He notes that while Rom would often eat from the same bowl located in the middle of the room, easily accessible for anyone around, he and other non-Roma guests would be served food at a table (Stewart 1997: 48). In fact, eating from the same bowl while sitting on the ground means eating in the romanes way (‘the Gypsy way’) which, as Stewart’s argument goes, is fundamentally opposed to the Hungarian way. More generally, apart from ‘trivial things, such as the way we warmed our hands around the fire in the cold winter mornings’, romanes ‘stood for the crucial marker of identity, the Romany language, and, most important, romanes stood for the whole moral code elaborated around the idea of respecting those who lived in the Rom’s state of siege’ (Stewart 1997: 44). The situated food-related accounts of the Roma that I met abroad tend to diverge from this view and Stewart’s take on commensality as ‘an emotive sign of sharing, of being Gypsies together’ (Stewart 1997: 48). Except for one reference that Lina made in respect to Romanian țigani and Spanish Gitanos’ common preference for meat (see below), my interlocutors abroad did not view their eating habits as signs of ‘being Roma/țigani together’, but rather of ‘being Romanian together’. Meanwhile, to nuance the picture, during my stay with the Carol family in Rotoieni I captured remarks that reveal the fact of eating without restrictions spoken about as ‘a Roma thing’. Maria once told me how hard it was for her to keep the house in order, considering the following: I cannot keep [the house always ready] to receive guests. . . There are clothes all around, whoever returns from school takes off the clothes, throws them on the floor – schoolbags, books, notebooks – and eats. . . Our kids are not so educated. . . They eat mostly in bed, wherever they sit, in front of the television, I give them the plate and if I see that that’s where they enjoy eating, I leave them there. I don’t say. . . There’s no rule like ‘come to sit at the table’, the rule here is to spread breadcrumbs all over. [She smiles]. I am satisfied with the fact that I give them food to eat while lying on the bed, rather than telling them: ‘come to sit at the table’, with the risk that they refrain from eating at all. I usually do my children’s will, especially the youngest, and the oldest. . . When he [the oldest] returns from school he crashes on his bed, and tells me ‘mom, do you know how hungry I am?’

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And I say: ‘where do you want to eat?’ and he says: ‘here, mom’. So, I put food there, in his bed, he spreads breadcrumbs all around. . . My duty is to clean up after them. Many times, I say ‘thank God that I have someone to clean up after’. (Recorded conversation, April 2014)

I wish to point out two interesting aspects revealed by Maria’s statement. Firstly, reminiscent of the strong connection between personhood, relatedness and feeding (Carsten 1995), Maria emphasises the importance of a lack of food-related restrictions in nurturing her relationships with her children. Not imposing restrictions on where to eat is something that enables her self-affirmation as a dedicated mother, in accordance with what a good mother means in the communities with which she is affiliated (for instance, the Baptist church). Secondly, Maria’s words seem to suggest that a lack of food restrictions constitutes an aspect of Roma’s (as opposed to nonRoma’s) everyday ethics of living. In my reading, the expression ‘our children are not so educated’ – ‘educated’ meaning ‘well-mannered’ here – implies a comparison between Roma and non-Roma children. Maria seems to suggest that children behave along the lines of specific ethics of living, inculcated by parents – Roma versus non-Roma – who have different views regarding which principles should regulate the mother–child relationship. Turning to my conversations with Roma that I met in Spain, the lack of restrictions regarding when to eat has been pointed out as a marker of distinction between Spaniards and Romanians. Take the example of Ilinca’s disapproval of the level of discipline which, in her view, is too regulative of the Spaniards’ everyday life: ‘Spanish people have a timetable for everything! For eating, for sleeping, for siesta. . . When there’s a fiesta1 you can’t even buy bread, everything is closed here!’ Eating or not eating in accordance with a predetermined schedule seems to organise Ilinca’s social world in Callosa d’en Sarrià into us-Romanians and them-Spaniards. Ilinca’s discontent derives from the feeling that the flexibility to buy food and to eat whenever one wants is precluded in Spain. There, in contrast to what she alleged as being the norm in Romania, no shops or supermarkets are open on Sundays or holidays. Lina’s observations were similar to Ilinca’s, but more nuanced in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, referring to her encounters with Spanish Gitanos. Her contact with Spanish Gitanos was mostly mediated by her daughter-in-law, who identifies as one. It is in terms of food that Lina traced similarities between the Spanish Gitanos that she met and ‘us’ (Romanian țigani): They are similar to us, they like meat a lot, they eat whenever they want, they don’t have a fixed timetable, like the Spaniards. As with us [Romanian citizens]: The ‘Romanians’ [non-Roma] have a timetable, but the țigani do not. We [the țigani] eat when we have [food]. When we don’t. . . [laughing] When we don’t

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have [food], we don’t eat. That’s how it goes with the timetable. . . And they [Gitanos] like meat, but in particular the jamon,2 as they are used to eating here. . . (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

Reminiscent of Probyn’s conception of eating as ‘the paradox of absolute individuality and complete universality’ (1999: 216), the insights from my interlocutors in Spain indicate that eating (in terms of when, how and what) is concomitantly an instantiation of difference and similarity that crystallises relationalities across national, ethnic and local categories.

Being ‘Fed Up’: The Untastefulness of Home în Străinătate We have seen that according to my research partners in Spain, providing food for their family abroad was a more achievable task than it used to be in Rotoieni. Yet statements like ‘at least here we have food to eat’, ‘we eat better here’ or ‘here we can offer our children all they want’ were often followed by a ‘but’. The hesitation to assess their life abroad as fully bearable suggested that the allegedly easy access to food did not always compensate for the feeling of being away from home. This section unpacks articulations of the sense of belonging to Rotoieni in relation to the affective materiality of food. Gill Valentine (1999) discusses eating practices in relation to notions of home, consumption and identity. Valentine (1999: 514) subscribes to Doreen Massey’s argument according to which places called home have ‘always in one way or another been open; constructed out of movement, communication, social relations which always stretched beyond it’ (Massey 1994: 171). Throughout my ethnographic interviews in Spain, food revealed itself as one element that enabled material and immaterial relations to be stretched between Rotoieni and the locality abroad. Through food, translocal links are materialised, recreated and consumed. These links between ‘heres’ and ‘theres’ reveal people’s ability ‘not just to experience the social relations that are located in the place in which he or she is corporeally standing, but . . . also to experience social relations that are located in places elsewhere’ (Gielis 2009: 275, in Brickell and Datta 2011: 19). By engaging with food-related activities and meanings that are significant ‘back there’, my research participants in Spain fostered their social relations with their community from Rotoieni. For instance, Lina’s constant concern with providing everything her children wished to eat mirrors the significance that the ability to provide food for the family has in Rotoieni. As already demonstrated by Aurica’s example, more than just nurturing the children, women’s ability to provide food has the potential to trigger acknowledgement from the local community that they are good mothers. In some

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instances, the stay abroad itself is prompted by the migrants’ urge to comply with all sorts of expectations that their relatives in Rotoieni have of them. See Marin’s rhetorical question: ‘How can I go back now, without having money to build a house big enough for all my children? What would they [relatives and acquaintances from Rotoieni] say after I stayed here for so many years?’ Food and nourishment-related practices appear in people’s affective representations of home through which their longing for home is expressed. Marin made it clear to me that he was very unhappy and ‘fed up’ with his life in Zamora: ‘It’s different when you’re in your town, on your land, you know that saying, “no matter if you eat or not, at least you sleep on your pillow and you’re on the land where you were born”’. Wanting to ‘sleep on his pillow’ signifies the longing for the safety and comfort that are projected onto Rotoieni and appear here as more important than even the physical need for food. This particular conversation was highly emotionally charged, as it emerged during a discussion about his difficult experiences as an agricultural worker in Zamora. In this context, not having food (which was seen as a consequence of returning to Rotoieni) was depicted as being less problematic than being treated as an outsider and exploited ‘as a slave’, as Marin reported having experienced. Food–homeland is a nexus that appeared often in my research participants’ affective and, I would argue, idealised representations of home. Lina once jokingly remarked: ‘No matter how bad the bread is, it is still better in your homeland’.3 This reference to homeland is not about national space, but rather about the local scale and about her connections with people and places in Rotoieni. The word that Lina used is țară, which can be translated both as country (its first basic meaning) and homeland. The notion of homeland, as I chose to translate Lina’s use of țară, is criticised by Katherine Brickell for it is ‘a notion normatively mapped onto national space’ which ‘privileges ideas of national sovereignty in transnationalism studies’ (Brickell 2011: 27). In my view, in the way Lina uses it, ‘homeland’ is a metaphor for a place to which people nurture affective-material attachments while abroad, and which acquires this significance only in the context of migration experiences. Apart from appearing in such affective representations and metaphors, food plays an important role as a material good that is consumable and is thus a stimulus for sensorial experiences of home. The extent to which one can feel (or not feel) at home abroad appeared to be connected to the tastefulness or untastefulness of food. The example of Aurica’s short experience in Greece is quite illustrative of what I call the untastefulness of home abroad. In April 2014, Aurica and I had a conversation about the efforts that she and her partner had to make in order to set up a house of their own. One such effort involved the family living apart for a while, as Panait (Aurica’s

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husband) worked for several years in Greece. While he was in Greece, on his insistence, Aurica considered moving there and eventually tried to do so. Her first reaction to my generic question ‘How was the experience?’ was the following: Oh. . . I did not like it at all, what shall I tell you. . . nothing! The water there, you know how it was? It had no taste at all! . . . The salt was not salty; the sugar was not sweet and so on. He [Panait] said: ‘Hey, on New Year’s Eve I was here [in Greece]. . . [so] we’ll go to Lidl tomorrow and I’ll buy cabbage for you, I’ll buy everything you need, and you’ll make sarmale for me’. So, I put everything needed [in the sarmale], but I did not like [it]. It’s different. . . The food is different there, it has a different taste. I simply did not like it. . . And. . . You see. . . I stayed, I stayed, but then I told [him]: ‘Man. . . I’m not staying here anymore, I’m leaving, you stay here, I’m taking my bag and [leaving]. . .’. (Recorded conversation, April 2014)

Inherited from the Ottoman Empire, the Romanian version of sarmale (pl.) constitute a dish made of ground meat, rice, vegetables and various condiments rolled in grape or cabbage leaves. In general, Romanians consume it as part of major celebratory meals, such as Christmas, Easter, weddings or funerals. It is also branded and promoted as ‘the traditional Romanian dish’. Regardless of this label, Panait asked Aurica to make sarmale triggered by his desire to partially recover sensorial experiences associated with important moments from home (such as New Year’s Eve or Christmas) that he had missed while living in Greece. However, according to Aurica, this attempt failed greatly because the ingredients she purchased in Greece were tasteless. The eating experience in Greece that enabled Aurica to deem the food there as being without taste seems to be one of estrangement and unfamiliarity. These sensorially experienced moments of estrangement and unfamiliarity can be understood through the lens of the notion of nostalgia. Cultural anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis (1994) (who happens to be from Greece originally) analyses nostalgia by relating it to senses and history: In English the word nostalgia (in Greek nostalghía) implies trivializing romantic sentimentality. In Greek the verb nostalghó is a composite of nostó and alghó. Nostó means I return, I travel (back to homeland); the noun nostos means the return, the journey, while á-nostos means without taste . . . The opposite of ánostos is nóstimos and characterises someone or something that has journeyed and arrived, has matured, ripened and is thus tasty (and useful). Alghó means I feel pain, I ache for, and the noun alghós characterises one’s pain in soul and body, burning pain (kaimós). Thus nostalghía is the desire or longing with burning pain to journey. It also evokes the sensory dimension of memory in exile and estrangement; it mixes bodily and emotional pain and ties painful experiences of spiritual and somatic exile to the notion of maturation and ripening. (Seremetakis 1994: 4)

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Sarmale could be interpreted as mediating Panait’s sensorial experience of returning to Rotoieni and of travelling both in time and space. It is not only about travelling to Rotoieni, but also about travelling to a past in which events and local celebrations were enacted in a particular way. It is supposed to ameliorate the pain caused by being, as Seremetakis puts it, ‘in exile’. Paradoxically, Panait’s journey to the time and space of Rotoieni seems to be hindered by the tasteless products through which Aurica was supposed to facilitate this ‘travel’. There are two different levels of experiencing estrangement understood as processual foreignness: Panait’s and Aurica’s. On the one hand, Panait had already lived abroad for several years. This longer-term experience implied lengthier negotiations of his estrangement, which enabled him to achieve a certain level of habituation. These previous negotiations also enabled Panait’s habituation to the food deemed tasteless by Aurica. On the other hand, being abroad for the first time, Aurica’s account is about her early stage of estrangement in terms of tastelessness and ánostos, in contrast to nóstimos, which ‘characterises someone or something that has journeyed and arrived’, and thus matured (Seremetakis 1994: 4). Lina’s comparable experience shows that the feeling of estrangement is negotiable, but not completely surmountable. Despite having lived in Zamora for more than six years, she expressed a similar discontent to Aurica’s regarding the making of sarmale. Lina missed herbs such as dill and lovage (spices widely used in Romanian cuisine), which were not easily obtained in Zamora. She also complained of being unable to find sour cabbage with the proper texture that would enable her to properly roll the filling for the sarmale. However, she seemed to have found alternatives to circumvent the limits she encountered in ‘making’ the taste of home. For example, regarding the cabbage leaves, she emphasised: ‘I try to make it softer by leaving it in water for a while, but definitively it is not the same [as it was back home]’. These processes of ‘making’ the taste of home frame what Seremetakis calls ‘moments of stillness’ which occur when past sensory landscapes are translated into present acts (1994: 16). The sensory landscape is defined as ‘a repository and horizon of historical experiences, emotions, embedded sensibilities and hence social identities’ (1994: 8). It could be said that all the ingredients and flavours that used to be the basis of sarmale-making in Rotoieni are part of a ‘past sensory landscape’. When they make sarmale abroad, Lina and Aurica transpose the past sensory landscape into the present by adjusting the ingredients and the procedure of preparing sarmale. Yet, as Seremetakis puts it, such ‘moments of stillness’ ‘can occur through forced experiences of crisis, separation and cross cultural contact. For these moments release hidden substances of the past. It is the very absence of referents, surfaces and textures that lifts them out of the banality of struc-

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tural silence imposed by a culture or social order and allows a previously by-passed content to be released as history’ (Seremetakis 1994: 17). The absence of sour cabbage and of other ingredients abroad that Lina and Aurica deem tasteful makes them nostalgically evoke their longing for home. Moreover, their position as migrants and their feelings of estrangement lift sarmale out from the banality they might have been relegated to when cooked back in Rotoieni. Hence, food becomes a materialisation not only of the spatiality of home, but also of its temporality, as the work of Seremetakis on senses, memory and history shows. Tastes and memories of home are aspects that Lina also reflected on in relation to her children’s tastes and feelings of home. When talking about her adjustments in the process of making sarmale, she stated: ‘We miss these things, but not the children. When we eat salami from home, it feels like we ate I don’t know what exquisite thing. . . But they don’t have this taste. . . Maybe because they do not know about slănină4 here [laughing]’ (excerpt from my field diary, August 2015). Lina suggests that her children (two of them born in Zamora and the others brought to Spain at a young age) do not have the memory of the tastes that function as connectors to home for her and her partner. It seems that children lack the memory of the home that is home for their parents. As Seremetakis argues, ‘Memory cannot be confined to a purely mentalist or subjective sphere. It is a culturally mediated material practice that is activated by embodied acts and semantically dense objects. This material approach to memory places the senses in time and speaks to memory as both meta-sensory capacity and as a sense organ in itself ’ (1994: 9).

Dor While living abroad, eating and talking about food are acts not only through which home is translocally consumed (and often idealised), but also through which narratives of belonging in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are enacted. It was often in relation to food that my Roma research participants abroad referred to us-Romanians and them-Spaniards with hardly any reference to us-Roma.5 To exemplify how food ‘nurtures’ narratives of belonging in terms of material and emotional attachment to Rotoieni, I return to Ilinca and Viorel whom I met in Callosa d’en Sarrià. The conversations that I had with Ilinca and Viorel reflected their discontent with their condition as ‘foreigners’ and revealed their longing to live among relatives and places from Rotoieni. Contemplate Ilinca’s comment: ‘Let’s say we eat better here [in Callosa d’en Sarrià] but look. . . What I eat at home [in Rotoieni]. . . I crave more for that. Here, I can eat the most expensive food, but. . . Didn’t you realise? Look, the pies are not like at our

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home, we have our cheese . . . La noi you eat a chicken and it has another [better] taste’ (recorded conversation, August 2015). Ilinca repeatedly used the Romanian expression la noi, which is what I would call, syntactically, a locative-pronominal complement. Its literal translation would be ‘at us’ (la meaning ‘at’ and noi meaning ‘us’) and epitomises the idea of belonging based on togetherness, common origins and locative sameness. It could be translated into ‘at home’, but this would not reflect the affirmation of togetherness with all Romanians that the complement la noi does.6 Ilinca reports that, despite having more means for varied food consumption in Callosa d’en Sarrià, food is neither as enjoyable nor as tasteful as she says food is la noi. Our cheese or chicken is tastier in relation to theirs. It is only there, la noi, thus at home (in Romania/Rotoieni), that food acquires taste, in comparison to here (Spain/Callosa d’en Sarrià), where the sensorial experience of eating is arbitrated by the condition of foreignness. It is this condition that mediates a tasteless experience of eating. Seremetakis argues that something deemed ‘tasteless’ (ánosto) is related to the ‘cultural incapacity to codify past, present, and anticipatory experiences at the level of sensorial experiences’ (1994: 8). I suggest that the ‘cultural incapacity’ to codify the present (Ilinca’s stay in Callosa d’en Sarrià) in terms of tasteful experiences of eating derives from the ‘other’ position that is ascribed to them (her and her family) as Romanian migrants. Thus, more than an understanding of home as being where food tastes better, Ilinca’s account suggests that home is allegedly (and ideally) where one is able to codify one’s present and past in terms of tasteful experiences. The assessment of eating experiences as tasteful (or not) also has to do with commensality. To quote Seremetakis again: Commensality here is not just the social organization of food and drink consumption and the rules that enforce social institutions at the level of consumption, nor can it be reduced to the food-related senses of taste and odor. Commensality can be defined as the exchange of sensory memories and emotion, and of substances and objects incarnating remembrance and feeling. Historical consciousness and other forms of social knowledge are created and then replicated in time and space through commensal ethics and exchange. (1994: 37; emphasis in original)

Notions of sensory memories, remembrance and feelings are perfectly comprised by the Romanian noun ‘dor’. Dor can be roughly translated into English as the verb ‘to long for’ or ‘to miss someone/something’, or into Spanish, also as a verb, as ‘hechar de menos’. Writing about the semantic configurations of the Romanian noun ‘dor’ and the Portuguese noun ‘saudade’, Teletin and Manole (2015) note: ‘Equivalent phrases to convey dor and saudade can be found in other languages, although a perfect symmetry would be difficult to find . . . Carolina Vasconcelos found other similar concepts: the German sehnsucht, the Castilian soledad, the Asturian senhardade or the

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Catalan anyoransa (Vasconcelos 1914: 34), but culturally specific nuances render any absolute identity impossible’ (2015: 156–57). My research participants abroad often employed the notion of dor to express their longing for relatives, places and tastes. One interesting association repeatedly made during my conversations with Ilinca and Viorel was between not being able to enjoy food and dor. They both mentioned that, during the months that Viorel spent in Spain every year without his family, their craving was hindered by dor and care for the other(s) and by the anxiety that the other(s) might not have enough food to eat. These concerns expressed by both Viorel and Ilinca reveal what Seremetakis calls ‘commensal ethics’, referring to expressions of care for loved ones who are physically located elsewhere. In particular contexts, commensal ethics are also affirmed as indicative of who and how we (Romanians) are, in relation to who and how they (Spaniards) are. To illustrate what I mean by commensal ethics, reiterated as an attribute of us in contrast to them, I discuss an encounter that Viorel and Ilinca talked about: Viorel: I told once to a Spanish man. . . I was in a bar, eating, at ten [in the morning] when a guy came in. I was with a Romanian friend of mine and with another Spanish guy. And the Spanish guy said: ‘So now you [Romanians] come to eat at the bar, but when you come from Romania you come with the bag full of food from home!’ I said, ‘Yes man, you’re right! But. . . La noi, after the war, during famine. . . – You know, you [Spaniards] also experienced this – . . . So: not even after the war, during the famine times, would we eat just like that, only a piece of bread with oil’. I had a bocadillo7 from home and he [the Spanish man] had a dog with him. He took a big plate with food, but he gave the dog nothing, not even an olive pit. As I was in a bar to eat, I gave that bocadillo to the dog. . . . So, I told him: ‘I don’t come with the bocadillo from home to eat in the bar while drinking a coffee. You see this bocadillo? I gave it to the dog; you did not give it a single olive pit!’ . . . Andreea, I cannot stand them anymore. I tell them straight forward [what bothers me]. Ilinca: Viorel got really red. Viorel: Not even during famine times were people in Romania eating bread with oil, no way! Ilinca: . . . And they [Spaniards] have thousands of euros. . . Viorel: Another guy told me, ‘Why do you drink beer from the bar? It costs 1.50 euro. Go to Planesia [a supermarket in town] and you’ll see that with 1.50 euro you get two litres, because one bottle is 75 cents. I think I haven’t had beer in a bar for maybe five years. I buy and drink at home’. I was working with him. Ilinca: But you know. . . It’s different the enjoyment of drinking it in a bar, on a terrace. It’s a different feeling. Or what? Do you think I could not have made a coffee earlier at home instead of going out to have one?8 Of course I could have. . . (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

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To understand this encounter between Viorel (as a Romanian Roma migrant) and the Spanish man, it is important to disentangle a series of food and commensality-related understandings that Viorel and Ilinca operate with. One of these meanings is related to the morality of being able to provide enough food for oneself and one’s family without having to restrict oneself from eating ‘properly’. Definitively, eating bread with oil does not mean ‘eating properly’ in Ilinca and Viorel’s account. Together with how and what one eats, eating and providing food for oneself and for one’s family are revealed as everyday activities that confer dignity and through which one’s capacity to circumvent precarious conditions is affirmed. Another meaning suggested by this snippet of conversation is related to the act of ‘eating out’. Eating out – in this case, eating in a bar – is considered by Ilinca and Viorel to be a question of self-respect and respect for the one providing the related services. Consuming food brought from outside the bar is considered disrespectful to the waiter/bar-owner and degrading for oneself, as it indicates miserliness. Bringing food from outside the bar is equalled here to the intention to minimise the costs of the food consumed by avoiding payment for the service offered by the bar staff. Furthermore, sharing food is implied here as a matter of expression of care for others. In this particular example, the care for the dog reaffirms the aforementioned point about the importance of not acting according to material restrictions when it comes to eating. Being able to share food is not only a question of kindness, but also of self-affirmation of one’s non-avarice and ability to provide enough food for oneself (and one’s family), as well as for others (in this case, for the dog). The interpretations that lie at the basis of the couple’s understanding of what happened in the bar hint at their ethics of commensality. The comment made by Viorel’s Spanish interlocutor about ‘Romanians coming with bags of food from home’ was interpreted by Viorel as heavily ironical and contentious. In response, Viorel confronted the man, explaining to me that this reaction was triggered by the fact that he ‘cannot stand them anymore’. In a way, what we hear is that, if at the beginning of his stay in Spain he would not have argued with the Spanish man, at the time of our conversation – years after his first interactions with the Spanish people – he felt entitled to counter the subtle attacks addressed to him as a Romanian migrant. The way he reported having confronted the man in this particular encounter was through an appeal to history. By emphasising that ‘they’ – Spaniards – have also gone through famine after times of war, Viorel brings his interlocutor to the same level, implying that there is no hierarchy according to which some (i.e. Romanians) are more subjected to cataclysms like war and famine than others (i.e. Spanish citizens). But this equal-terms sit-

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uation that Viorel created by underlining this marker of sameness (we are all weak in the face of famine and war) was capsized by the suggestion that what differentiates people who face similar hardships is the way in which they circumvent them. By arguing that Romanians, in contrast to Spaniards, managed to avoid being in the situation of eating ‘bread with oil’ during times of famine, Viorel challenged the power rapport which (in his view) the Spanish man sought to establish through the joke about the ‘pitiable Romanians’ who come to Spain with their bags full of food from home. The context in which Viorel recalled this episode was one wherein he was expressing discontent with his life abroad and fatigue in dealing with ‘the Spanish way’ of living and relating to ‘others’. As reported by both Ilinca and Viorel, this discontent often has to do with encounters with Spaniards. Viorel’s account of the episode from the bar is one example of contestation of power positions (in this case, indirectly claimed by the Spanish man) on the level of everyday encounters. Recalling this food-related episode enabled Viorel and Ilinca to capsize the power relations to which they felt subjected, by highlighting that Spaniards fail to comply with an ethics of commensality which the couple lifts to a degree of universality. Ilinca suggests in her last remark that despite having (in her view) great sources of income (‘thousands of euros’), Spaniards still eat ‘bread and oil’ and act parsimoniously enough to eat food brought from outside in bars. These are aspects which, to her mind, make them (i.e. Spaniards) people of lower moral quality. All in all, this example illustrates how Ilinca and Viorel enact and construe their Romanianness in opposition to Spanishness, which, in their experience, is defined as characterised by parsimony, a lack of ethics of commensality and disrespect for oneself by eating poorly. Echoing the role that Probyn allocates to food as ‘a mode of relating to oneself and to others’ (1999: 217), in this chapter light has been cast on food as one way for my research participants to relate to their home in Rotoieni, both materially and emotionally, and thus to nurture translocal connections. The discussion about ethics of providing food has offered insights into the social meanings that revolve around the act of providing food for the family in the context of Rotoieni. While abroad, these social meanings continue to shape people’s ways of expressing care for their children, which is key to adults’ self-actualisation as capable and commonsensical parents. The second part of the chapter addressed the expectation that food could feed the sense of home, as well as its failure to do so. Making sarmale, for instance, is an attempt to reproduce intimate tastes that could dilute the experience of foreignness. But the attempt ends up as a reminder that ‘it is not the same’, as ingredients purchased în străinătate to make food from home are reported as being tasteless – á-nostos. I have suggested that this kind of sensorial experience of (or mere projections onto) ingredients as being tasteless has to

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do with an idealisation of home (common among migrants) that seems to be both nourished and consumed.

Notes 1. The Spanish word for local and/or public celebrations. 2. Dry-cured ham considered a Spanish specialty. 3. Translated from the Romanian dictum: ‘Fie pâinea cât de rea, tot mai bună-i-n ţara ta’. 4. Cured slabs of fatback, with or without skin, which are typically eaten in mostly rural areas of Romania and are prepared at home, after the pigs are slaughtered. 5. Except for Lina’s comment about ‘our țigani’ and the Spanish Gitanos, mentioned earlier in this chapter. 6. I have briefly referred to this dichotomy elsewhere (Racleș 2018 and Racleș 2020). 7. Viorel used the Spanish word that generally denotes a Spanish version of a sandwich, made with unsliced bread and commonly eaten in the workplace. 8. In the afternoon of that day, Viorel and Ilinca invited me for a coffee at a bar close to their flat. There, we met a Romanian-Spanish couple with whom we spent about two hours on the terrace.

PART II



SENSES OF (NON-)BELONGING

CHAPTER 6



OLFACTORY POLITICS AND EVERYDAY RACISM

Introduction Cultural historian Constance Classen criticises the late-twentieth-century anthropologists’ hesitancy to inquire into smell, touch and taste and implies that this was a result of ‘the relative marginalization of these senses in the modern West’ (1997: 404). With regard to smell, this hesitancy is connected to the dubious distinction allocated to the olfactory as ‘the most denigrated sensory domain of modernity’ (Howes 2006a: 169). Given this modern aversion towards odours (Lefebvre 1991: 197), in the Romanian context, as anywhere in Western and Westernised societies, olfactory attributes tend to encode and transport particularly offensive discourses. There are probably few offences more abhorrent and viscerally injurious than being called ‘împuțit’ or ‘împuțită’ (the feminine form) – an adjective that, in its literary sense, captures the meaning of something organic that has gone bad and, as a consequence, emits foul odours. In May 2007, Traian Băsescu, the Romanian president at the time, called a journalist ‘țigancă împuțită’, as she was allegedly making him angry with her request to interview him on his way out of a supermarket. The kind of juxtaposition employed by Băsescu – the noun with derogatory connotations ‘țigan/că’ and the adjective ‘împuțit/ă’ – as a form of extreme offence is far from being singular to the Romanian and European context.1 But despite the alarming incidence of the use of smell as part of racialising repertoires of representation targeting bodies and spaces inhabited by Roma, attempts to examine and critique the degrading and dehumanising effects entailed by these repertoires have been rare (but see Bakó 2014). The chapters in the

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second part of this book seek to examine and deconstruct such repertoires, based on the inquiry into the role of the olfactory and its local meanings in the constitution of gypsiness as racialised otherness.2 As already mentioned in the introduction to this volume, the way in which I understand ‘gypsiness’ is not as a notion that names a set of features ascribed to or assumed by people of Roma background, and much less as an unfortunate equivalent to ‘Roma identity’. My use of gypsiness is similar to yet different from that proposed by Ada Engebrigtsen (2007) to define what she sees as ‘the Rom-Gypsy mode of existence that implies their relationship to non-Gypsies and the mutual ideas that govern this relationship’ (2007: 1). In this book gypsiness is used to refer to the racialised position ascribed primarily to Roma (but not exclusively), historically constituted through the naturalisation of socio-economic divides, reproduction of stereotypes and perpetuation of power imbalances underpinned by practices of oppression, marginalisation and dehumanisation. Gypsiness is thus a position that fixes and constantly reproduces ‘the figurative țigan’ while being used in the reproduction of ‘non-țigan’ selves. As Markus End (2012: 10) puts it, ‘To enforce values and norms in the majority society, the “Gypsies” serve as projective counter-images of the “good citizen” who behaves well and thinks and feels according to such norms and values. Since forms of behaviour and feelings that violate these norms continue to exist in society, the members of the majority project those violations of social norms and values onto the figurative “Gypsy”’. In this chapter, as well as in chapter 7, I show how smells as markers of gypsiness – a racialised and racialising position – operate within a logic of asymmetric classification that naturalises filthy smells and, by that means, implies Roma individuals’ supposedly questionable morality. We will see that the racialised view of țigani as inherently unable and unwilling to do anything in order to achieve the state of ‘not-smelly’ is constitutive of non-țigan selves.

Olfactory Politics against Roma In contemporary Europe, wherein ‘anti-Roma politics has political currency’ (Stewart 2012: xviii; see also Kóczé 2018a), it is not surprising that the ‘bad and dangerous smell’ is used in public and political discourses, generated by and generating racism against Roma. According to Michael Stewart, it is not only politics at the national level, but local politics that nurture rationales for pushing Roma to the edge of non-belonging (2012: xxi). To illustrate his point, Stewart provides the account of a Hungarian mayor from a poor village: I just don’t understand this question about who is a Gypsy. It is quite clear, isn’t it? Everyone who is a Gypsy is a Gypsy. You can smell them from a kilometre.

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There is no definition for this – I can’t find one. You have to accept that a person who was born a Gypsy has a different temperament; they live differently and behave differently. I grew up among Gypsy children. Everyone who is a Gypsy has remained a Gypsy. It makes no difference if they have a bath every night, the smell remains, just like with horses. There is a specific Gypsy smell. (Stewart 2011: xviii; my emphasis)

This quotation speaks about how the olfactory sets the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and about how racist discourses create racialised bodies. It speaks about the olfactory as the sensory modality through which gypsiness is supposedly detected, implying a naturalisation of repugnant smells and, thus, of inferiority. Differently put, the mayor’s statement is about olfactory politics. What does the notion of ‘olfactory politics’ stand for in this book? In his foreword to the volume The Gypsy ‘Menace’, Stewart underlines that the anthropological notion of ‘the political’ presents an interest ‘less in the formal politics of the evictions and threats that Roma faced, than in the underlying assumptions and fears inspired in part by the gestures of everyday life (dress, style, manners and customs) that inspired and motivated attacks’ (2012: xxvii). Inspired by the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s work, Stewart refers to the political ‘as rooted in the habits and practices of everyday life, and in the collective identifications embedded in our daily “culture”’ (2012: xxxii). In Mouffe’s words, ‘By “political” I refer to the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by “politics” I refer to the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflicts provided by the political’ (2005: 153). Important for this chapter is Mouffe’s criticism of rationalist approaches to politics (the contemporary liberal thought), which neglect the role of the affective dimension of politics. To Mouffe, the affective dimension of politics is essential for the constitution of collective forms of identification and, thus, for an understanding of how political identities are constructed (2005: 154). Furthermore, politics have to do with a processual demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ for which the affirmation of difference is crucial and without which there are no collective forms of identification. From a cultural anthropology perspective, Seremetakis proposes that we focus on how the political is experienced on the level of senses, and suggests an understanding of politics of everyday life in relation to ‘a politics of sensory creation and reception’ (1994: 14). With these considerations in mind, I define olfactory politics as a set of smell-related practices, norms and discourses, historically and locally contingent, which contribute to the constitution of otherness through the attribution of malodours and socially denigrated smells to those constructed as ‘others’. Olfactory politics is about the role of smell in the formation of

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the social imagination (Corbin 2004: 136); about registers of sensory/olfactory misconduct in which ideas of olfactory disciplining reside (Low 2013); about ‘olfactory prejudices’ (Diaconu 2010); and about the ascription of olfactory identities that mark distinctions between socially creditable and discreditable odours, thus between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between ‘dominant’ and ‘subordinate’, between ‘belonging’ and ‘non-belonging’. Reflecting olfaction as a political and cultural process (Manalansan IV 2006: 50), the notion of olfactory politics allows for the analysis of the ‘profound influence of odours upon major social, political and cultural events’ (Drobnik 2006: 3) like modernisation, as Alain Corbin’s work (1986) on the French history of smells shows, or migration, as discussions about migrants and food demonstrate (Law 2001; Low 2013; Manalansan IV 2006). Despite the remarkable prevalence of malodours as markers of gypsiness in public discourses that circulate in media all over Europe, only sporadic references to the olfactory as racist insignia have been made in scholarly accounts about Roma. For example, on the second page of her monograph about Romani people in Russia, Alaina Lemon writes that in and around Moscow, ‘in speaking about Gypsies, outside the realm of poetry or theatre, they [Russians] would curl their lips and speak of smells, bare feet, lies, and fingers reaching for money’ (2000: 2). In a chapter entitled ‘The Imaginary Gypsy – Manipulated Images’ (1994), Liégeois mentions that the ‘Gypsy smell’ is a metaphor that, in Greece, is used to designate bad smells. Liégeois writes: As for metaphors, there are a great many of these, and a full list would be lengthy indeed. Staying in Greece, we have (based on the word Yiftos) “a Gypsy house” (a dirty, disorderly house), “Gypsy work” (a botched job), “a Gypsy smell” (a bad smell), and a “Gypsy wedding” (something beautiful but superficial); a Katsivelos (Gypsy man) is a dirty, smelly person, and to make the accusation “You’re a Gypsy!” is to call someone selfish, ruthlessly greedy, etc. . . (1994: 189)

Similarly, the Armenian cultural anthropologist Hamlet Petrosian, who writes about self- and outsider-designation regarding the Bosha (i.e. ‘Armenian Gypsies’), identifies expressions imbued with different pejorative connotations, among which is one related to smell: Our field material allows us to identify the following phrases, expressions, and opinions: boshaiutiun anel (literally, to behave like a Bosha) – to beg; boshi beran, boshi hot (literally, the smell of a Bosha) – an unpleasant odor; boshi guin (literally, the color of a Bosha) – an excessively bright, loud color; boshin akhte hanel (to clean like a Bosha) – to clean, to sweep in a perfunctory and slipshod manner; boshi egh (literally, the butter of a Bosha) – to expend food products and so forth uneconomically; boshi küfta (a Bosha’s meatballs) – excessively copious food. (Petrosian 2003: 23)

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It has also been pointed out how smells are referred to by members of certain groups of Roma background who seek to distance themselves from ‘lower class Gypsies’. For instance, Tesfay mentions that Gábors from Tîrgu Mureș (Romania) depict the Gergovanis as those who are dirty, whose houses ‘smell because they cook such food’ and whose language is deemed different (2009: 5). In a similar vein, in her article ‘The Bathing of the “Dirty”: A Forgotten Forced Bathing in Hungary’ (2014), Boglárka Bakó refers to a woman from a village located in Pest county who identifies as Carpathian Roma, and who talks about another Roma group (Csotris) as being the dirty ones: ‘So, haven’t you seen what’s in their courtyard? They are very dirty, the boys smell badly, too. Because they don’t take care of themselves. One can dress up in clean clothes, but it is still obvious what they are. . . muddy in all seasons . . .’ (2014: 199). As seen in these examples, smell is often alleged as a marker of gypsiness among other racist and stereotypical insignia attached to ways of handling bodies and spaces. However, it has not been closely analysed in what daily circumstances this marker emerges as such, and how it is related to local meanings of the olfactory. I proceed in this chapter to first discuss the ways in which the local meanings of the olfactory are related to representations that construe and reproduce gypsiness as racialised otherness.

Repertoires of Representation The aforementioned examples illustrate how the olfactory can be part of local ‘regimes of representation’ (Hall 1990, 1997) through which people of Roma background are racialised and relegated to the realm of non-belonging. ‘Regimes of representation’, as Stuart Hall states, refer to ‘the whole repertoire of imagery and visual effects through which “difference” is represented at any one historical moment’ (1997: 232). Representation ‘is a complex business and, especially when dealing with “difference”, engages feelings, attitudes and emotions and it mobilises fears and anxieties in the viewer’ (1997: 226). But rather than difference as something than can be seen, I focus on representations of difference as something that can be ‘smelled’. The conversations that I had with non-Roma in Rotoieni reveal and construct the socially objectionable smells as markers of both Roma people’s bodies and the materiality of their households. Taking a cue from Hall, who asserts that the process of subjectification to discursive practices has to do with politics of exclusion (1996: 2), subjecting Roma people to such discursive practices means representing them not only as ‘the smelly ones’ but, by that means, as the ‘non-belonging’ ones.

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Essential in Hall’s theorisation of regimes or repertoires of representation is the way in which they are linked to questions of power. I understand the process of constructing gypsiness as a set of acts of power through which subject positions are created and represented. Although I refrain from discussing gypsiness in terms of identity, Hall’s definition of identity is relevant here, as it reflects the power-subjectification entanglements: ‘I use “identity” to refer to the meeting point of suture, between, on the one hand, the discourses and practices which attempt to “interpellate”, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be “spoken”’ (1996: 5–6; emphasis in original). It is not enough to discuss power only in relation to how Roma individuals are construed as ‘the other’ in the dominant discourse. It is equally important to inquire into the link between subjectification, representation and ‘the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm’ (Hall 1990: 226). Hall resorts to Judith Butler, according to whom ‘power is not only imposed externally but works as the regulatory and normative means by which subjects are formed’ (Butler 1993: 23). Hall calls attention to the importance of theorising the mechanisms through which individuals as subjects identify (or do not identify) with the ‘positions’ to which they are summoned; as well as how they fashion, stylise, produce and ‘perform’ these positions, and why they never do so completely, for once and all time, and some never do, or are in a constant, agonistic process of struggling with, resisting, negotiating and accommodating the normative or regulative rules with which they confront and regulate themselves. (Hall 1996: 15)

If my conversations with non-Roma illustrate the repertoire of representation through which gypsiness is reproduced as racialised otherness and through which Roma are subjected to this position, conversations with and the olfactory diaries written by Roma research participants (chapters 8 and 9) will show how they negotiate, internalise and contest this ascribed racialised position of otherness. At the same time, the analyses in chapters 8 and 9 shed light on the modes of operation of the local olfactory politics as ‘regulatory and normative means’ that have that ‘power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm’ (Hall 1990: 226).

Materialisations of Everyday Racism In this book, the olfactory is understood as being inextricably linked to the materialisation of racialising discourses and practices on the everyday level. The work of the feminist scholar Anne McClintock (1995) about imperial

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advertising, the development of the soap industry and commodity racism is quite interesting in this respect. McClintock discusses how soap in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century was invested with the capacity to bring ‘moral and economic salvation to Britain’s “great unwashed”’ (1995: 211). As such, ‘soap took shape as a technology of social purification, inextricably intertwined with semiotics of imperial racism and class denigration’ (1995: 212). Advocating for an inquiry into how race is materialised in practice, Amade M’charek (2013) states: ‘The challenge in studying race is to denaturalize without dematerializing it, and to simultaneously attend to materiality without fixing race’ (2013: 424). M’charek argues that race is not materialised in the body, but in the relations between different bodies and different material forms that race can take (2013: 434), such as physical characteristics, narratives about criminal behaviour or national identity. Accounts about race in relational terms are to be found in Lemon’s work (2002) as well. Lemon argues that race is not only about bodies, but about ‘a particular connection among bodies, bodies whose substance is bound over time, unmixed with other bodies’ substance’ (2002: 58). In the last decades, European institutional vocabularies have tended to omit from their discourses the use of ‘race’-related concepts, despite the fact that, as Lemon puts it, ‘racialising criteria of difference’ never stopped organising social relations (2002: 56). Lemon encountered scepticism from post-Soviet scholars regarding her engagement with race as an analytical prism for understanding the position of Romani people within post-Soviet societies (1995: 34; 2000: 63; 2002: 57). For these scholars, Lemon’s ‘use of the term race imposed a foreign category’ that did not correspond to the socio-political realities of post-Soviet contexts (Lemon 2002: 57; emphasis in original).3 Acknowledging the genealogies and historical particularities of the term ‘race’, Lemon argues for the importance of inquiring how racialised criteria inform local discourses about relations between ‘us’ and ‘others’. Considering the racism that Roma suffered for more than five centuries, there is no need to transpose histories of repression from American continents to talk about the repression, violence and exclusion that people of Roma backgrounds were subjected to in Eurasia. In the same vein, although the terms ‘race’ and ‘racism’ were barely employed by my research participants in our talks, this does not mean that the subtleties of racism in its everyday manifestations should not or cannot be tackled. The everyday manifestations of racism discussed in the chapters that form the second part of this book revolve around the racist slur ‘that smell of țigan’. During my field research, this slur appeared often in relation to the spaces inhabited or transited by Roma. In relation to Roma households, non-Roma would often utter that the smell was what marked the differ-

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ence between a household inhabited by Roma people and one inhabited by non-Roma. Referring to the olfactory dimension of the inhabited spaces enabled non-Roma to materialise – and thus make available to the visual imagination – the features that they assumed to be ‘țigani’s predispositions’: carelessness in regard to their inhabited space, inertia and incapacity to overcome the low socio-economic condition allegedly derived from their inertia. These characteristics are deemed to be specific to an engagement with the material world that is said to produce ‘the smell of țigan’. Thus, the underlying racist logic operates here through the naturalisation of both the imputed capacities and the ‘bad smells’ projected onto spaces inhabited by Roma. As the racialising repertoire comprising these representations often has to do with elements that are ‘visible’, the discussions about the houses inhabited by Roma people allow the non-Roma to operate with ‘the smell of țigan’ as something material that can be seen, and thus proved. Interlinked with this racist logic, which not only (re)produces but also seeks the materialisation of racist slurs, are the local meanings of the olfactory. These meanings are mobilised both by the repertoire or representation of gypsiness as otherness (chapter 7) and in everyday practices that contest this position (see chapters 8 and 9). Hall highlights that the meaning is relational, in that ‘it depends on the difference between opposites’ (1997: 235) and allows opposite poles to shape each other. The relationality of meaning is also implied by Philomena Essed (1991, 2002), for whom meaning making is important in relation to the notion of ‘everyday’. The everyday consists of a set of ‘socialised meaning making practices immediately definable and uncontested so that, in principle, these practices can be managed according to (sub)cultural norms and expectations’ (2002: 187). In Essed’s view, these meanings constitute the knowledge that people need to have in order to be able to navigate the everyday world: Without a minimum knowledge of how to cope in everyday life, one cannot handle living in society. This at least includes knowledge of language, norms, customs and rules, and knowledge to use the means and resources that make living possible (or successful) in a given environment, determined by factors of class, gender, profession, and so on (Heller, 1984). This knowledge includes expectations and ‘script’ (Schank and Abelson, 1977) of everyday situations. (Essed 2002: 187)

The local meanings of the olfactory can be understood as deriving from what Essed calls the ‘socialised meaning making practices’ in which both Roma and non-Roma engage. But the ways in which they engage in practices of meaning making are not symmetric, for these engagements are inextricably interlinked with their ascribed and/or self-affirmed positions. As

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Roma are often ascribed racialised positions of otherness articulated within everyday encounters, Essed’s notion of ‘everyday racism’ (1991) is relevant here. This term offers an understanding of structural dimensions of racism as intermingled with routine situations of everyday life and attempts to overcome the theoretical distinction between institutional and individual racism (2002: 178). Everyday racism is ‘a process in which (a) socialised racist notions are integrated into meanings that make practices immediately definable and manageable, (b) practices with racist implications become in themselves familiar and repetitive, and (c) underlying racial and ethnic relations are actualised and reinforced through these routine or familiar practices in everyday situations’ (Essed 2002: 190; emphasis in original). The notion of ‘everyday racism’ casts light not only on how racialised otherness positions are constituted on the everyday level, but also on how these positions are negotiated, contested or internalised by those to whom these positions are relentlessly ascribed. For instance, analysing representational and production practices of hair culture in beauty shops from New York, Ginetta Candelario discusses Dominican women’s engagement in beauty practices that reflect hegemonic patriarchal imperatives of blanqueamiento (2000). Hair becomes ‘an emblem of the everyday engagement of blanqueamiento, or whitening’ (2000: 137). Yet, as Candelario demonstrates, beauty regimes are highly dominated by a white and heteronormative patriarchal logic, and therefore they do not empower Dominican women: ‘For beauty regimes require ugliness to reside somewhere, and that somewhere is in other women, usually women defined as black’ (2000: 153). Shirley Tate also discusses the ‘racialised and racialising notion of beauty’ using everyday life conversations of ‘mixed race’ black women to argue that ‘black beauty is about repeating hegemonic norms in order to be a viable subject’ (2007: 317). Everyday racism and the materialisation of racialising dynamics on the everyday level are concerned in this book with domestic materiality and household practices, with people’s engagements with the inhabited space and with their individual evaluations of such engagements. In the following section and continuing in chapter 7, I reflect on how non-Roma individuals affirm themselves as the ‘non-smelly ones’ by locating the Roma in a racialised position through the naturalisation of undesirable smells, said to signify a dubious morality. I must warn the reader that the accounts that I draw on in what remains of this chapter, as well as in chapter 7, are particularly unsettling. By including them in this book, I aim to denounce and deconstruct explicit manifestations of racialising discourses that manipulate the olfactory in a bid to denigrate the Roma people and, by that means, to reproduce in one of the most abject ways possible the often disguised ‘racialized hierarchical domination in European societies’ (Kóczé 2018b: 116).

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Racialised Sensorial Knowledge As already stated, smell was often mentioned by non-Roma in my research as one of the main elements that enable them to distinguish a house inhabited by Roma from one inhabited by non-Roma. The smell is deemed to be the result of Roma people’s lack of engagement with practices that should produce the ‘appropriate’ olfactory texture of the household. In a discussion that I had at the beginning of April 2015 with Isabela, a librarian from the public library, she made the following comments: Yes, yes, I’ve been [in a house inhabited by Roma]. What could I say. . . Probably is in their blood, they can wash with any kind of detergent, they can say that they clean. . . But I don’t know. . . it’s something specific to them, something specific. . . I don’t know, probably it’s like others perceive us. But there are. . . I told you, there are lots of [Roma] kids who borrow books from us, and they bring the books back tidy. But there are also those who do not bring them back at all, or they bring them back destroyed, stained and. . . I don’t know. My opinion is that. . . Even if you’d make them educated4 they would still [be/behave] in the same way, even if you’d try to integrate them, to tell them. . . there’s still something there. . . (Recorded conversation, April 2015)

In this first part of our conversation, the non-Roma woman hints at ‘something specific’ which, in her view, makes a house easily identifiable as being inhabited by Roma people. While at first this ‘something specific’ is undefinable, the example of ‘some’ Roma children’s attitude towards the borrowed books is meant to be suggestive. Not bringing the books back, or bringing them back ‘stained’ or ‘destroyed’ are examples of attitudes that Isabela deems specific to the Roma: carelessness towards how objects look, a lack of responsibility for goods that do not belong to them, disrespect for goods that are supposed to be shared. As the conversation was about houses inhabited by Roma, Isabela provides the example of the treatment of books to illustrate her understanding of that ‘something specific’ that, to her mind, characterises the ways in which Roma relate to the domestic materiality. Isabela’s judgement is intensified by the assumption that the Roma are defined by ‘something specific’ that ‘is in their blood’ and cannot be circumvented, regardless of any potential attempt to do so. The logic of naturalisation produces representations of difference as being fixed and permanent (Hall 1997: 245), implying that the sociocultural features of people’s lives are hereditary (1997: 244). This is what Isabela does by claiming that nothing can be done to alter the ‘țigani’s’ supposed ‘way of being’. Nothing could be accomplished in this regard, either by Roma themselves (‘washing them with any kind of detergent’) or by non-Roma (‘making them educated’, that is, ‘providing them with access to education’, assuming that all Roma would

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be unschooled and the non-Roma would be ‘the providers’ of education). This impossibility is said to reside in that ‘something specific’, which is not only in ‘the blood’, but emerges from the way in which ‘they’ are socialised; ‘what they saw [in their environment]’, and what they subsequently internalised, is supposedly unalterable. Hygiene and education are virtues that are particularly appreciated in local scaled contexts like Rotoieni, and operate as standards along which people frame judgements and evaluate each other’s morality and achievements in life. In contexts of this kind, the Romanian meaning of ‘education’ refers to socially creditable behaviours and good manners that individuals are supposed to achieve during their socialisation in the family. ‘Without education’ here means lacking morals and lacking engagement with practices that prevent undesired smells, as non-smell in this case is equivalent to ‘properly smelling’. Differently put, lacking hygiene (as a result of a lack of education) is what causes ‘that something’, allowing it to reside in houses and bodies. In this way, smells are deemed to be provoked by what is physically and morally inside (in ‘the blood’), reaffirming that the malodour is ‘not thought of simply as the result of external conditions, such as filthy conditions, but as an intrinsic characteristic’ (Howes and Classen 2014: 69). When it comes to smell as that ‘something specific’, Isabela recounts: Andreea: When you’ve been in this house inhabited by the Roma family. . . Could you have guessed that it was Roma who were living there without knowing this detail? Isabela: Yeeeees, one senses it [îți dai seama]. I don’t know. . . Firstly from the smell, there’s a specific smell. I don’t know if you realised that. . . Andreea: What do you mean? How would you describe that smell? Isabela: I don’t know, there’s a certain smell in comparison to. . . One senses [simți]! I have a neighbour who lives in the flat under my flat. So. . . She even looks like a țigancă, although she is well-dressed, fancy. . . But she has ‘that something’ by which one senses [îți dai seama], by the way she speaks. . . Luxury in the house, but right away when she opens the door, there’s that smell. I only entered once there, but. . . I don’t know, there’s something. . . No matter who enters, one senses [își dă seama]. . . (Recorded conversation, April 2015)

The ‘specific smell’5 is designated as what derives from ‘that something specific’ that, for Isabela, marks her neighbour’s gypsiness. In this specific example, difference is not represented through references to the materiality of the neighbour’s flat or to her body,6 but to ‘her specific smell’. So here, it is not necessarily the visuality and materiality of one’s existence in the world that would make non-Roma ‘know’ who is a țigan and who is not, but rather the olfactory dimension. The librarian suggests that while the visual and ma-

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terial elements might be misleading – ‘fancy and elegant clothes’ and ‘modern and luxurious furniture in the house’ – the smell reveals, allegedly always and indubitably, one’s gypsiness. The ability to sense smells seems to be a medium through which gypsiness is ‘sensed’ (i.e. ‘perceived’ or ‘detected’). The verb ‘[one] senses’ that Isabela uses repeatedly is expressed in Romanian through verbs like simți (‘one feels’) and îți dai seama (‘one becomes aware of ’). This repeated use of such expressions coincides with the non-Roma’s affirmation of an internal capacity to detect who is a țigan or țigancă. Furthermore, the fact of living in proximity to the Roma is deemed to be one of the elements that provide the non-Roma with this capacity to detect gypsiness. Isabela’s affirmation of such an aptitude reveals the sense of smell as ‘the basis for recognition and misrecognition [and] that [it] provides an opportunity to affiliate, to belong as well as to disidentify and to ostracise’ (Manalansan IV 2006: 44). After several attempts to find an adjective to describe that ‘specific smell’, the librarian states: ‘Yes, I think it is a pungent smell, specific to them. As we live in the community with them, one is able to sense it [îți dai seama]. If you are waiting in the line in a room and then suddenly that smell [spreads]. . . “Man, there’s a țigan somewhere here!” I told you. . . I don’t know, maybe those who did not have any contact with them, who come from outside, do not sense [nu sesizează] this aspect but we [do]. . .’ (recorded conversation, April 2015). What we hear is that, by cohabitating with them and, thus, by possessing prior knowledge about ‘who the țigani are’, about what they do or do not do, one, as a non-Roma, acquires the capacity to detect gypsiness and ‘that specific smell’. These examples show how the olfactory is involved in acquiring and reproducing ‘racialised knowledge’ (Hall 1997: 244) about Roma people. Beyond the visual discourses that rely on the body as providing ‘“the incontrovertible evidence” for a naturalisation of racial difference’ (ibid.), the olfactory is employed as the racialising criterion which sets smells as the main markers of difference between ‘us’ and the racialised ‘them’ (the țigani). The question that arises here is what do non-Roma (claim to) know about the Roma that enables the former to perceive and project different ‘specific smells’ onto the latter? ‘So, you’ve probably sensed too’, uttered Isabela while emphasising: ‘I’m telling you, if you lived among them. . . Wherever you’d go in this world, if there’s a țigan you’d sense that smell’. This remark encompasses two main ideas. First, that ‘we’ (the non-Roma) supposedly have the ability to detect ‘that specific smell’ and have prior knowledge about Roma, which enables ‘us’ to detect gypsiness. Second, that this ability and knowledge are acquired through living with and among them. Differently put, the non-Roma belong together by sharing the ability to identify gypsiness and due to the capacity to, ostensibly, detect ‘that specific smell’. I have often

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encountered in Rotoieni such ways of construing the ‘us’ – the non-Roma we-collective – and one’s ‘non-smelly’ position within this collective, that rely on racialising representations of Roma. These ways of construing an ‘us’ in opposition to țigani or to other ‘olfactory others’ – such as the Lipovans – constitute the focus of the next chapter.

Notes 1. Another example that reflects the use of the olfactory as a racist insignia by highlevel politicians is a statement by Jean-Marie Le Pen (extreme right French politician who led the National Front Party from its inception until 2011), who referred to Roma people as being ‘stinging and stinking’. Retrieved 9 June 2016 from https:// www.ibtimes.co.uk/roma-travellers-group-sue-far-right-leader-491937. 2. In an article Ivasiuc and I wrote (2019), we discuss the ways in which the embodiment and materialisation of Europeanness relies heavily on the reproduction of gypsiness as racialised otherness. The article seeks to deconstruct the olfactory-related slurs mobilised against Roma in the European context. 3. Lemon writes: ‘In the 1990s, various post-Soviet scholars argued with me that “race” was not a relevant category in either Soviet or post-Soviet social life because the relevant terms in official and academic use were not race but natsional’nost’ or narodnost’ ’ (2002: 57). Elsewhere, Lemon translates natsional’nost’ as nationality/ ethnicity and narodnost’ as ethnicity/peoplehood (2000: 63). 4. Translated from the Romanian sentence: ‘Chiar dacă le-ai face educație’. 5. Ivasiuc and I have argued that the ways in which olfactory tropes like ‘that specific smell of țigan’ operate locally ‘cannot be understood as disconnected from how sensory/olfactory politics operate more broadly all over Europe’ (2019: 25). 6. Hall writes: ‘The representation of “difference” through the body became the discursive site through which much of this “racialised knowledge” was produced and circulated’, as the body is ‘visible for all to see’ (1997: 244).

CHAPTER 7



(DE)CONSTRUCTIONS OF ‘OLFACTORY ALTERITIES’

Introduction According to official figures from 2013, similar to the percentage of Roma inhabitants, just over 8 per cent of the population of Rotoieni identified as Lipovans. Roma and ‘Romanians’ referred to Lipovans as members of ‘the other ethnic minority’, while ‘Romanians’ (i.e. people without an ethnic minority background) tended to compare Lipovans to the local Roma, usually by pointing at the industriousness of the former. This comparison appeared to play an important role in the articulation of who the local Roma or țigani were. ‘Lipovans’ refers to descendants of old-rite Christians who, in the second half of the seventeenth century, objected to the religious reforms imposed by the Russian Orthodox Church and went into exile (Dobrinescu 2015). Excommunicated by the Russian Church, they migrated to south-eastern Europe. It is argued that religion is still at the core of the Lipovans’ (also known as Old Believers’) identity in Romania and Bulgaria (Constantin 2014: 276). In 2011, there were officially 23,487 Lipovans in Romania (Constantin 2014: 284). After Tulcea and Constanţa, Iaşi (a county located in Moldavia) is the county with the highest number of Lipovans registered (3,586) (Constantin 2014: 274). While in Tulcea county Lipovans have intergenerationally transmitted fishing practices, in Rotoieni and its surroundings, Lipovans are known as vegetable growers and vendors. In the north-western part of Rotoieni, there is an area referred to as the ‘Lipovans’ neighbourhood’. When I asked for directions to that area, I was told that I could not miss it considering the Lipovans’ large and multi-storied houses, as well as their large gardens.

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‘You Can Ask Anyone You Want’ At the beginning of April 2015, I spent two days in two mini-markets located in the ‘Lipovans’ neighbourhood’. Inhabitants of Rotoieni, both Roma and non-Roma, describe this area mainly by referring to the big houses built with high-quality construction materials, as well as to the big gardens taken care of by the Lipovans, known in the area as hardworking agriculturists and greengrocers. On a Thursday morning, I was introduced to Cornelia, a seller, who agreed to let me spend the day in the mini-market. This space of no more than about twenty square metres was a meeting point not only where people dropped by to buy bread, drinks or basic products for cooking or cleaning, but also where people from the neighbourhood stopped for a break: to gossip, have a smoke or a drink, no matter the time of day. That morning, Liviu, a Lipovan, and other non-Roma – Zamfir and Daniel – entered the mini-market and joined the ongoing discussion that I was having with Cornelia, herself a ‘Romanian’ (i.e. without an ethnic minority background). In these conversations, smell again appeared as that which enabled one to differentiate a household inhabited by Roma from one inhabited by non-Roma. Contemplate the following excerpt: Andreea: Is it [a house inhabited by Roma] in any way different [from one inhabited by non-Roma]? Liviu: Yes, here it is. The difference is a must. Zamfir: You can ask anyone you want. . . Liviu: There’s definitively a difference [between houses inhabited by Roma and non-Roma]. One [as țigan] can have anything [inside the house] but if you enter. . . Zamfir: You fall down. . . [due to the smell]. ... Andreea: Have you ever been in a house inhabited by Roma? Daniel: I have. Andreea: Is it in any way different? Daniel: Hmm. . . not necessarily, these guys I’ve been to are like us. . . the only thing that differs is the smell. [Cornelia and Zamfir laugh loudly] Cornelia: See? Everyone complains about their smell. . . This is exactly what we’ve told her by now [towards Daniel]. Andreea [towards Daniel]: What do you mean? Zamfir: One [as țigan] has his own smell. . . . . . Of stuffiness. . . of sweat. . . Daniel: No way. . . of țigan! [They all laugh loudly] (Recorded conversation, April 2015)

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Unlike Isabela (see chapter 6), who suggested that there was no way that I, as a non-Roma who lived with a Roma family, could not identify ‘that specific smell’, the discussants in the mini-market did not imply that ‘I knew’ what they meant. I was treated as an outsider who did not know what they knew, and who had to be shown that their point about what Zamfir called ‘the smell of țigan’ was valid. The use of the phrases ‘everyone knows’ or ‘everyone complains’ highlights a character of ‘truth’, unanimously shared, with which they imbue their remarks about an allegedly commonly shared understanding of ‘that smell of țigan’. This kind of knowledge the non-Roma claim to have about Roma is highly racialised, without referring directly to something that is visible on the level of the latter’s bodies or houses. As Lemon argues, ‘skin colour was never the sum of race’, but instead, ‘anything isolated as a difference can be made to signal some ostensibly essential nature connecting generations’ (2002: 58). Daniel made his point by stating: ‘these guys [Roma] I’ve been to are like us’. But he continued by ‘isolating’ the house’s smell, which becomes a marker of gypsiness, thus enforcing that the sense of smell is the medium through which ‘we’, non-Roma, detect gypsiness. By saying ‘one [as țigan] has his own smell’, Daniel does not refer to specific Roma individuals he had visited or had contact with, but he alludes to ‘an eternal țigan’. Thus, he naturalises the association between gypsiness and ‘the stuff y smell’, setting it beyond history as what, as it were, would connect generations of Roma. Furthermore, Daniel’s statement, ‘these guys I’ve been to are like us. . . the only thing that differs is the smell’, accentuates the role of smell as a marker of difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The question that emerged during that conversation was what did ‘that specific smell’ consist of? This question put my interlocutors in the situation of having to explain through material depictions something that they, at first, talked about as being ‘sensed’ and intuitively identified. In this conversation and others like it (such as the one with Isabela), my non-Roma interlocutors answered this question with ‘material’ arguments that were intended to support the affirmation of their ability to detect gypsiness by olfactory means. These arguments were often articulated with reference to what the non-Roma affirm to know about Roma’s ‘doings’ and ‘not-doings’ (cf. Mullaney 2006) that allegedly justify the existence of ‘that specific smell’. The following examples show how non-Roma connect what they say they have smelled with what they affirm they have seen. If an olfactory experience can hardly be reproduced or ‘shown’ to an audience, the materiality of Roma’s inhabited spaces is referred to in an attempt to verbally make sense of ‘that smell of the țigan’. Based on examples of what can be seen and touched (and what, allegedly, has the character of being ‘real’), my interlocutors attempted to persuade me that there is something like ‘the smell of țigan’.

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Invoking doings and not-doings was one of the main ways in which the nonRoma spoke about ‘that specific smell’ that was said to characterise Roma people’s households.

Smells That Can Be Seen Virgiliu is a pilot who, at the time of my research, no longer lived in Rotoieni but returned there frequently to visit his family. In a conversation that we had in April 2015, he talked about the way in which he would recognise a household inhabited by Roma people: The first sign would be the lack of a fence. So, if it [the house] does not have a fence, I would think from the beginning that whoever is living there is someone with more skin pigment than us1. . . But apart from that. . . With the chromatics and so. . . But because I have seen them elsewhere, these are not necessarily things I automatically associate with them. Look, I do associate the lack of a fence with them. The pigs which walk around the houses. . . As well! Also, I associate with them the. . . Yes, maybe a too blatant chromatic. These would be the only things I associate with them. And yes. . . The loud music from parties. . . Those dogs that hang around with kids. . . And yes, one more thing! In winter one perceives2 [which one is a Roma house] from the smoke smell released by the chimney. Usually they don’t heat up with wood. They heat up [the house] with rags, this kind of stuff that they find in the garbage, with plastics and so on. . . So. . . You can imagine. . . With nylon at the windows, and again. . . The nylon at the windows can also be in others’ houses [not necessarily Roma]. But that smell of plastic I haven’t seen around others’ [houses]. I mean. . . It is something that yes. . . I associate with them. (Recorded conversation, April 2015)

In comparison to Zamfir, who implied that the Roma he visited were ‘just like us’ and that nothing from the way their house looked would be specific to the Roma, Virgiliu did refer from the outset to the visuality and materiality of Roma households. Dwellings without fences, brightly coloured houses and a glittery aesthetic, the use of nylon at the windows instead of curtains and the unrestrained sharing of the domestic space with non-humans are all, mainly visual, elements that Virgiliu underlines as markers of ‘Roma ways of living’. Moreover, he goes as far as to use the metaphor ‘skin pigment’, implying that it is not only the domestic materiality that signals gypsiness, but also skin colour. Virgiliu’s description enforces smell as something that does not leave room for interpretation. According to him, if others, who are not necessarily Roma, might hang nylon at their windows or might live in dwellings without fences, it is only the Roma houses that spread the smell of burned plastic through the chimney: ‘but that smell of plastic, I haven’t seen [experienced]

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around others’ [non-Roma] houses’.3 But his reference to doings that cause smoke-smells is not singular. In a discussion that I had with the municipal architect, he stated: Obviously, the fact that they make fire in the stoves inside the house. . . there’s a certain smell that stays there and gets embedded . . . The smell. . . Yes, in their houses it smells like an unused or old furnace. I really tried to identify what I should associate their smell with, and then I realised it was that [the smoke released by the furnace]. It makes me remember the old times when I was a child, at my grandmother’s place. (Excerpt from field notes, August 2014)

By invoking the memory of the smell from his grandparents’ house, the architect hints at the existence of a link between the smell from his grandparents’ house and the one he deemed to be specific to the Roma. On the one hand, he seems to acknowledge that similar living conditions to those often encountered in Romanian rural areas (e.g. the lack of central heating, of systematic garbage collection and of a basic sewage system) influence the olfactory texture of rural households. Furthermore, by implying that people living in rural areas engage in similar doings, the architect seems to allude to a ‘terrain of commonality’ (cf. Theodosiou 2011: 94) between the Roma he had visited in Rotoieni and his non-Roma grandparents. On the other hand, by suggesting that the smell from Roma houses reminds him of his grandparents’ household, the architect fixes the Roma in an eternal past, in a state of backwardness. From this perspective, the Roma are perceived and constructed as unable to overcome and adjust their living to contemporary housing standards. This ambivalence is not unique in the architect’s talk. The self-challenge of generalising statements about the local Roma is constant in the architect’s discourse and relies on a ‘but’ rhetoric: ‘their problem is the laziness and the desire to make money by easy means . . ., but there are also some who do their best to make a living by working hard in others’ households’; ‘they go abroad to beg and to rob . . ., but there are also [Roma] who work hard there’; ‘they don’t care about school . . ., but some of them managed to overcome their condition, for instance someone from Rotoieni is head of the management accounts institution’; ‘they don’t care where they live; they’re dirty and they disregard hygiene . . ., but there are also Roma who make many efforts to keep up with the standards of cleanliness’. This ‘but’ rhetoric seems to mediate between the architect’s claimed pieces of racialised knowledge about Roma people’s doings and not-doings. These pieces of racialised knowledge appear as markers of difference between the Roma regarded as doing well in society and those seen as not doing so well. As doings and not-doings are two sides of the same coin, what Roma are imagined to do or fail to do blends in the repertoire of representations that

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non-Roma operate with in their attempt to explain what the ‘smell of țigan’ consists of. The example of the practice of bleaching the interior walls of the houses is illustrative in this sense. Bleaching the walls is a practice with implications for the local understanding of what is a clean and ‘properly smelling’ house. Despite the fact that, for the Roma women I talked with, the practice of bleaching the walls of their houses is highly important in the customisation of their domestic space, my non-Roma interlocutors vilify Roma’s engagement with the activity. While some maintain that Roma’s presumed indolence and carelessness preclude them from engaging in such cleaning activities, others emphasise that their assumed ‘exaggerated’ inclination towards bleaching the walls too often is merely the result of their habitual negligence towards their inhabited space. Contemplate the following conversation between my interlocutors from the mini-market described earlier: Andreea: But what is ‘that smell’ like? Liviu: Cigarettes. . . Yes, stuff y. . . . Andreea: How about the houses of those [better off ] Roma that you mentioned before? Liviu: Yes, there too. That’s how it is in their houses. Although there is a bit tidier. . . But I don’t know. . . I can’t explain this. Cornelia: Yes, they do have their smell! ... Andreea: The Roma I know bleach the walls quite often. . . Cornelia: Hmm. . . no! Daniel: As they smoke in the rooms. . . Of course they need to bleach [more often]. Zamfir: It smells. . . Of course. But they don’t bleach with water-based emulsion paint, because with that one, one can even wash [the walls] with detergent, one can just clean it. They [the țigani] bleach with that kind of whitewash in bags, five RON4 per bag. Daniel: That is actually better than the water-based emulsion paint. That allows the walls to breathe. . . Zamfir: So why at my place the walls do not sweat? Daniel: But try to smoke there and then see the air inside. Zamfir: But I don’t smoke. I spent a lot of money until I quit. I quit smoking and I started drinking, another silliness. . . Cornelia: That the țigani bleach the walls twice or three times per year? Well. . . they bleach in order to cover. . . As they touch the walls randomly and stain them. . . Of course. . . that’s the only reason, right? Otherwise. . . The normal thing is to bleach once in three years, right? [addressing Zamfir]. (Recorded conversation, April 2015)

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Cornelia (the ‘Romanian’ seller) keeps diminishing Roma’s aptitude to manage the olfactory realm by means of such doings as bleaching the walls, known at the local level as doings that ‘change’ the smell in the house. She suggests that the Roma need to frequently bleach the interior walls of their houses allegedly because of their lack of discipline in relation to the space they inhabit. In her view, this ascribed lack of discipline results in a need to ‘cover’ the dirtiness produced on a daily basis. The fact that they smoke inside the house is one of the main doings that non-Roma interlocutors project onto Roma in a bid to explain what they mean by the existence of ‘that specific smell’. Here, by projecting smells, I understand the tendency to associate certain smells with Roma people’s everyday life without having had bodily contact with the private sphere of the Roma. Non-Roma make olfactory projections about Roma people’s everyday life and substantiate them by mobilising racialising and racialised knowledge about the Roma, which they assume to own and share with ‘everyone’ who is a non-Roma. For instance, Cornelia, who was the most insistent in claiming the existence of a ‘țigani-specific smell’, has never been in a house inhabited by Roma. Yet she assertively supports her Lipovan discussion partner, Liviu, who claims that even in the ‘tidier houses’ that he had been to, it is still ‘that specific smell’ that reigns. Entrenched in a racist logic, the attitudes of my interlocutors from the mini-market seem to communicate that no matter what doings Roma engage in – be they socially compromising (e.g. smoking inside the house) or socially appreciated (e.g. bleaching the walls) – these doings will never be evaluated as something other than doings that produce and maintain that/ those socially incriminated ‘specific smell/s’ (whatever that means). From this standpoint, the particularity of ‘that specific smell’ seems to be the fact that it can be neither changed nor removed, no matter what the Roma do or don’t do. In this vein, the naturalisation of racial difference ‘happens’ throughout the reproduction of such representations, according to which, whatever Roma people do, the permanency of bad smells is an unchangeable fact. Furthermore, what we hear is that none of the doings that Roma would engage in are capable of enabling the dissipation of the allegedly ‘natural’ olfactory difference between țigani and non-țigani.

‘Like a Stuffy Coat’ – A Racist Slur In the following, the focus lies on what were framed as ‘țigani’s’ not-doings. Acknowledging the methodological difficulty in observing what people do not do, Jamie Mullaney (2001: 8) discusses ‘not-doings’ as ‘unperformed behaviours’5 that impact identity formations and that, nevertheless, have

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been highly neglected by scholars interested in notions of identity. I discuss not-doings as referred to by non-Roma in their attempt to explain where ‘that specific smell’ comes from and, by that means, ‘how țigani are’. Returning to the meeting in which I participated at the mini-market in the Lipovans’ neighbourhood, I recall Liviu mentioning that even in the houses of the ‘tidier’ Roma the smell is ‘stuff y’. To his mind, this had to do with the fact that these Roma do not open the windows to allow fresh air to circulate in the house. In the same conversation, Cornelia added: ‘So, they have a stuff y [stătut] smell. The țigan has a smell of the unaired. You know that smell that a coat has after it’s been kept in the wardrobe for a year? Then, when you wear it, it has a certain smell. I imagine it happened to you at some time or another. . . One [as țigan]. . . has this smell all the time, even if one is clean’ (recorded conversation, April 2015). The ‘stuff y coat’ metaphor, through which non-Roma sought to stimulate my olfactory imagination about ‘that specific smell’, indexes an association of the temporary smell of an unused and neglected coat with the implied constancy of the ‘țigani’s specific smell’. It is an association that derives from the local understanding of gypsiness as defined by carelessness, inertia and incapacity to escape a certain low condition. The remark that the stuff y smell would always persist ‘even if one [as țigan] is clean’ is reminiscent of Howes’ observation that ‘perception of malodour had less to do with practices of cleanliness than it had to do with social status: according to the sensory classification of society a low social status is translated into a bad smell’ (2004: 10). Likewise, the word ‘stuff y’ [stătut] operates here in a similar way to ‘filth’ and ‘stench’, as written by Lisa Law, in relation to the cooking practices that Filipino women in Hong Kong engage with. Such words are ‘usually associated with civil (un)cleanliness, but the perceived olfactory differences between social classes or ethnic communities produce, and are themselves produced by, classification systems that relate more to cultural ideologies than to odours or aromas themselves’ (Law 2001: 273). Despite the fact that the questions I addressed were referring to the houses inhabited by Roma, non-Roma have often implied a continuity between space and body. This continuity is articulated by the presumption that Roma people’s corporeal doings or not-doings influence the olfactory realm of their households and that people’s bodies are integral parts of the space that they produce and inhabit. The following excerpt from the discussion in the mini-market sheds light on the body–space continuity that non-Roma imply when they articulate their thoughts about ‘that specific smell’, produced and maintained through not-doings or ‘not-properly-performed’ doings: Zamfir: Even if the woman [as a Roma housewife] is more attentive to hygiene6 [than other Roma women]. . . It [the smell] is the same.

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Liviu: There’s that air. . . Of. . . It [the house] is not properly aired out. In the morning, when I wake up, I always open the windows. . . I mean these are things that. . . Cornelia: Well. . . I believe they also open the windows, let’s be fair now. But that smell stays, it stays in their skin and it gets inherited. . . Zamfir: The skin emanates. . . Andreea: Does it have to do with the dimensions of the house? Cornelia: Eh. . . It depends on how the house is built, because also among us [non-Roma], one has a smaller house, another has a bigger one. . . Zamfir: But even if I lived in a room of seven by three metres, only one person, for instance like me. . . If I don’t open the window, and I smoke there, or if I drink. . . What? Do you think it won’t smell? Liviu: Yes, it gets impregnated everywhere, in the walls too. . . (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

This excerpt illustrates once more how non-Roma constitute themselves through the denigration of the Roma. It is by pointing at Roma’s not-doings that non-Roma affirm their engagement in doings that enable them to control the olfactory texture of their household. It is by naturalising ‘that specific smell’ as a marker of their gypsiness, and thus of the țigani’s inferiority, that non-Roma affirm themselves as not-smelly, thus superior. This racist logic, by means of which the non-Roma construct themselves as olfactorily neutral, predicates that regardless of the Roma’s doings or not-doings, the smell of Roma houses would be equally stuff y; that the țigani cannot escape their ‘stuff y condition’, which is supposedly implanted in their skin and the walls of their home. According to Isabela (the librarian), the way in which it becomes ‘implanted’ is related to the carelessness and inertia that, as this chapter shows, non-Roma assign to the Roma: They [the țigani] are from birth. . . lazy. So, they’re always expecting something. I don’t know, due to our job we’ve always had contact with schooled [Roma] people, but they are the same, they expect to be given something, to serve them as if they have no duty. One is supposed to owe them something. . . For instance, the țigancă who lives next to me does not take her trash to the garbage container. She puts it out, or she leaves it downstairs and the dogs eat it. I mean downstairs, in front of the building and she leaves it right there. . . So, there is always something that makes them not be in the same line with others [the non-Roma]. (Recorded conversation, April 2015)

More than talking about her neighbour of Roma background, the woman talks about who she, as a non-Roma, is. More than describing what her neighbour does not do, she affirms what she does and that what she does is

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indirectly alleged to be ‘in line with others’. ‘The others’, in this case, refers to ‘us’, the non-Roma. ‘Not being in the same line with others’ is, thus, a way of saying that ‘they [the țigani] are not able to be like us, “the Romanians”’, implying the latter’s superiority over the former. Here is another abhorrent illustration of how this superiority is enforced by assigning racialised difference to the Roma. When one of the people from the market tried to explain what he meant by ‘that stuff y smell’, another one cut in by saying: ‘No way. . . [The smell is] simply of țigan! Of course, they have that smell that [won’t change] even if you washed them in sweet milk’. The racialised difference that they ascribed to the Roma was established as something that could not be removed or glossed over, no matter how ‘white’ or ‘sweet’ the milk would be. Everyone who was in the mini-market responded with extremely strident and disturbing noisy laughter. All the aspects discussed in this section have important implications for the discussion about belonging and non-belonging. The Roma are regarded as carriers and producers of ‘that specific smell’, which non-Roma explained through an emphasis on not-doings. Recalling Anthias, for whom belonging is about the sharing of practices, values and relations (2006: 21), the discussion about not-doings and ‘the țigani’s smell’ is about Roma’s non-belonging that resides in the fact that they allegedly do not do things properly and do nothing for themselves and for the community as a whole. In a conversation that I had with another Lipovan man, in a different mini-market, he asserted: ‘I have a grudge against them [Roma] because they don’t produce anything for this society. Look. . . I produce vegetables’. Furthermore, this discussion is about how gypsiness – the position of the racialised other – is constituted and how Roma are subjected to it on the everyday level. This position is constantly kept outside the realm of belonging by the persistence, force and hideousness with which racist practices and discourses affect, denigrate and injure Roma lives.

Lipovans – The Other Others The time I spent in Rotoieni and the conversations I had with non-Roma revealed that the figure of otherness is not only embodied by ‘the țigan’ but also by ‘the Lipovan’. In Rotoieni, the Lipovans self-identify and are often portrayed in opposition to the Roma. The Lipovans benefit from a privileged socio-economic position and a reputation as honest, hardworking and respectable cohabitants due to their agricultural and greengrocery work. The following conversation from the mini-market encompasses references to the olfactory otherness ascribed both to Roma and Lipovans:

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Andreea: Are there any differences between houses inhabited by Roma people and those inhabited by other people here in town? Cornelia: Yes, of course there are, they are messier so to say. . . More. . . They don’t put the things in their place, you know what I mean? Messier. . . just like the Lipovans, so they’re also messier. . . We [the ‘Romanians’] are a bit swankier. . . ... Cornelia: No matter how clean you’d see him. . . The Lipovan too. . . One [as Lipovan] also has his own smell, no matter how clean he looks, he has his particular smell. Andreea: Of. . .? Cornelia: The Lipovan smells like. . . [She lowers the voice] Wait. . . there’s a Lipovan coming right now. Yes. . . So the Lipovan smells of vegetables. The țigan smells of mustiness, of stuffiness, of. . . Zamfir: Of laziness. . . let me tell you! Cornelia: You know. . . you can imagine. . . ... Cornelia: Look... For instance this Lipovancă7. . . Well she was smelling exactly the same way, no matter how much she’d wash, she has that smell. . . That sweat. . . (Recorded conversation, August 2015)

Two methodological clarifications need to be made before reflecting on this conversation. Firstly, I understand its content as a series of enactments of ‘non-smelly identities’, the mini-market being the stage on which the actors contribute to the dialogues contingently on who enters and who leaves the stage. Secondly, I read the statements about the ‘Lipovans’ smell’ or the ‘țigani’s smell’ not specifically as verbal articulations of bodily olfactory experiences. Instead, these articulations are reminiscent of Howes’ contention that foul odours are ‘a question of social ordering’ (2004: 10). The statements I have reproduced here mark, and thus reify, the distance between who ‘they’ as ‘Romanians’ are and who ‘the others’ are. And who ‘the others’ are is said to be communicated by certain naturalised (and presumably ‘natural’) smells. While enacting their position as ‘Romanians’, people without any ascribed or self-affirmed ethnic background allocate the position of otherness not only to the țigani, but also, contextually, to the Lipovans. Ada Engebrigtsen (2007), who carried out ethnographic work among Rom Gypsies and non-Rom peasants from a Transylvanian village, emphasises the significant role of the țigani in the Romanian collective identity. In doing so, the anthropologist engages with Elias’s theory of the civilising process and notion of social figuration (2007: 26). The argument that Engebrigtsen makes is that ‘the different social groups of Romania constitute a

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specific ethnic figuration that is crucial for the understanding of power relations and ethnic identity in the region’ (2007: 193). In the same vein, in Rotoieni both țigani and Lipovans hold, in Engebrigtsen’s terms, different positions in the ‘Romanian figuration’ on the level of Rotoieni. The excerpt quoted above captures the ‘Romanians’’ assumption that it is only they who share and comply with values and socially creditable practices. By affirming their indisputably intrinsic adherence to local values and socially creditable practices, my ‘Romanian’ interlocutors project and construe Roma’s and Lipovans’ alleged ‘ways of smelling’ as counter-manifestations of those values and practices. For example, one of these values is ‘the orderliness’ that ‘should’ characterise the inhabited space. Cornelia’s affirmation that ‘we’re orderly’ (i.e. disciplined) or ‘we’re swankier’ becomes ‘concrete’ through her depiction of both the Roma and the Lipovans as ‘messier’ and disorderly (‘they don’t put the things in their place’). The use of the comparative adjectives ‘messier’ (mai împrăștiați) and ‘swankier’ (mai dichisiți) points to the existence of a hierarchy of morality in relation to which the ‘Romanians’ understand their allegedly higher position within the Rotoieni figuration. The positions that are ascribed to the different others in this hierarchy are analogous with their ascribed olfactory identities: the smell of vegetables to the Lipovans and the ‘stuff y smell’ to the Roma. Gale Largey and Rod Watson note the linkage between one’s olfactory identity and one’s moral state, observing that if the individual is said to ‘stink’ physically, s/he will be considered to ‘stink’ morally as well (2006: 31). Interestingly, the smell of vegetables associated with the Lipovans is construed as a signifier of their morality and industriousness, thus locating the Lipovans in a higher position in the aforementioned hierarchy than the one presumably occupied by the local Roma. Meanwhile, the olfactory identity of ‘the stuff y ones’ ascribed to Roma is used as an insignia of the Roma’s alleged moral laxity and laziness. In this light, the smells are symptomatically ascribed to the different others in a way that reveals what people (supposedly) do or do not do. Regardless of their doings or not-doings, those constituted as others are always talked about in terms of malodours, not symmetrically, but in accordance with the position they are ascribed in the aforementioned local hierarchy. The example of ‘the smell of sweat’ is quite illustrative of how the same malodour is imbued with different significations depending on the otherness in question. Contemplate the following excerpt from a conversation that I had with Narcis, the librarian from the school known as ‘the țigani’s school’: I’m intrigued by that smell of the țigani. Whatever you do, it will always smell like țigan in their house. I entered just once, with the Census, but I had to leave that place immediately, otherwise I would have puked. . . The Lipovans also smell, but they smell because they work so hard and have no time for other stuff . . . I appre-

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ciate others [țigani] who are. . . who have more dignity. . . But not those who beg for anything, complaining all the time about their situation, those who act with no dignity. There are also those who work and have more dignified behaviour. . . (Excerpt from my field notes, October 2014)

It seems that ‘the sweat’, as a malodour that essentially marks otherness, triggers different emotions. In regard to the Lipovans, it is interpreted as an indicator of their industriousness and dignified behaviour, whereas with the Roma it is said to indicate their presumed laziness and faulty morality. Like Narcis’s, the essentialising discourse of my interlocutors from the minimarket becomes slightly more nuanced when other criteria (than the ethnic one) appear in the discussion. For instance, in the following excerpt the conversation veers into a discussion about class: Andreea: How about the house? Liviu: Those [Roma] who can afford to build one, they do. . . Those who cannot [afford it] just live together. . . Cornelia: Yes, but they’re used to living all together. So yes. . . there is a specific smell. . . Liviu: Not all of them, there are also who. . . There are Roma who have housemaids, and they do nothing. They [the housemaids] cook for them and they do nothing, like the boyars. Zamfir: And there are also țigani who sell in the market, they are the vendors. Or other țigani who have other people working in their households and employ Lipovans in the market to sell for them. . . Liviu: Yes, yes. . . I also know, Paulescu [laughing]. Yes, there are Lipovans working for the țigani. Cornelia: Eh. . . The țigan [generally] is a vendor, he sells potatoes and, at the same time, steals [from the customers]. At the end of the day, the țigan or the Lipovan. . . Is the same. . . At this point there’s no difference, it’s the same, one cannot trust. . . [laughing] Liviu: That’s a țiganised [țigănesc] Lipovan [laughing]. (Recorded conversation, April 2015)

What is salient here is that the constant self-identification in opposition to the different others that spans between the locally constituted ‘other positions’ – gypsiness and Lipovans –surpasses a logic of racialisation. It reflects a mutual corroboration and underpinning of racist and classist ascriptions. Despite the acknowledgement that some of the Roma from Rotoieni engage in similar activities to those deemed to be ‘Lipovan-specific’ practices (related to the greengrocery business), the Roma are still alluded to as those

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‘who do nothing’ or those who are immoral and steal from their own customers in the market. In a conversation with four ‘Romanians’ (including myself ), the only Lipovan that was in the mini-market, Liviu, took part in the negotiation of the dichotomy (initially agreed upon) between ‘the lazy and poor Roma’ and ‘the well-off and hardworking Lipovan’. However, when Cornelia suggested that trickery characterises the Lipovans as much as it characterises the Roma, Liviu suggested jokingly that, if the Lipovan steals from his customers, it is because he is a ‘țiganised Lipovan’, that is, a Lipovan who is more like ‘the țigani’ than like the ‘regular’ Lipovans. Differently put, the source of immorality is still something that resides in and emerges, as it were, from the ‘țigani’s way’ of doing things. The offensive and hideous ways in which non-Roma engage in conversations about others’ smells are in fact ways of affirming who they are. If for Engebrigtsen ‘every image of self tends to be seen as a negation of the others’ (2007: 199), the olfactory self-image that non-Roma endorse is one that ‘negates’ the socially objectionable odours: of stuffiness, mustiness and sweat – all relegated to the realms of Roma and/or Lipovans’ sociality. In this repertoire of representations, smells appear as metaphors and slurs imbued with moral significations that order the world into dignified and notdignified inhabitants of Rotoieni, that is to say into racialised categories of people who partly belong or do not belong due to the doings (or not-doings) that they commit or are said to commit to.

Notes 1. Translated from the Romanian: ‘Deci dacă n-are gard poate din start m-ar duce cu gândul că acolo stă cineva care are mai mult pigment în piele decat noi’. 2. Translated from the Romanian: ‘Îți poți da seama’. 3. Translated from the Romanian: ‘Dar mirosul ăla de plastic, eu la alții nu l-am văzut’. 4. The equivalent of about €1.10. 5. Mullaney analyses constructions of virgin identities based on not-doings. 6. Translated from Romanian: ‘chiar daca e una mai curată’. 7. Feminine of ‘Lipovan’.

CHAPTER 8



WRITING SMELLS

Introduction In chapters 6 and 7, I discussed the ways in which non-Roma individuals from Rotoieni contribute to the constitution of gypsiness as a racialised ‘smelly other’ position and, by that means, construct themselves as ‘nonsmelly’, that is to say, hardworking and righteous. They do so by operating with a repertoire of representation of the Roma as passive and uncaring with respect to their bodies and the materiality of their inhabited space. While naturalising these features and reiterating the racist slur ‘that smell of țigan’, non-Roma constitute and self-affirm their position of superiority by inflicting an inferior position on Roma people’s domestic space and racialised bodies. But how do Roma deal with this repertoire that allocates them this inferior position? As Stuart Hall puts it, ‘what [are] the mechanisms . . . by which individuals as subjects identify (or do not identify) with the “positions” to which they are summoned’ (1996: 13–14)? To tackle these questions, with which both chapters 8 and 9 are concerned, I will explore the ways in which Roma relate to local understandings of the olfactory. What do I mean by local understandings of the olfactory? I understand the set of local understandings of the olfactory as being part of a ‘collective knowledge reservoir’ – a term used by Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka (2011: 204) – shared by both Roma and non-Roma. Pfaff-Czarnecka writes about collective knowledge reservoirs as being ‘realised in social practices, in established modalities of negotiation, conflict, compromise and accommodation, and also in a continuous overt and covert reflection about the validity of norms that hold in a given social world’ (2011: 204). In my view, that ‘collective knowledge reservoir’ crystallises into ‘knowledge of how to cope in everyday life’ without which ‘one cannot handle living in society’, as Philomena Essed puts it (2002: 187).

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In Rotoieni, the set of local understandings of the olfactory, to which Roma and non-Roma people in my research submitted, implies the following considerations: (1) the household’s olfactory realm is negotiated and kept under control through engagements with the domestic materiality (cleaning practices in general and bleaching the walls in particular); (2) the household’s olfactory texture is an indicator of women’s morality and industriousness, and thus of the other members of the household too; (3) the stuff y smell and the smell of smoke are particularly socially objectionable; (4) the smells from the house reflect the inhabitants’ level of orderliness and discipline; (5) it is mostly not-doings which are deemed to produce and maintain malodours. In this chapter, the analysis of how Roma engage with local understandings of the olfactory will be facilitated by the examination of the ways in which people express and interpret their olfactory experiences, as well as of the status that they allocate to smells. The individual depictions and interpretations of olfactory experiences of the inhabited space will be explored based on the data generated through olfactory diaries.

The Sensorial Turn In humanities and social sciences, ‘the corporeal turn which introduced the notion of “embodiment” as a paradigm for cultural analysis’ dates back to the 1990s (Howes 2005: 322). One of the debates that emerged is between the supporters of ‘sensory anthropology’ and scholars who have been encouraging the establishment of the ‘anthropology of senses’. According to Sarah Pink, the difference between the two is that, while sensory anthropology engages across disciplines with understandings of sensory perceptions, the anthropology of senses is more specialised and seeks to comparatively analyse hierarchies of sensorial modalities and sensory orders (2010: 331– 32). Constance Classen, one of the most prominent supporters of the anthropology of senses, argues that cultural constructions condition ‘our experience and understanding of our bodies and the world at a fundamental level’ (1997: 403). But such claims are critiqued by Tim Ingold, whose work is inspired by phenomenological approaches, practice theories and nonrepresentational theory. Ingold supports the idea that ‘learning and knowing are situated in embodied practice and movement’ (in Pink 2010: 332). Ingold criticises David Howes’ work for its overreliance on the idea that cultures ‘affect our physical perceptions’ (Howes and Classen 2014: 8) and for its tendency to separate sensorial modalities. According to Ingold, separating sensorial modalities leads to a ‘disembodied’ understanding of culture. To avoid this, the senses should be seen as interconnected in human perceptions: ‘An anthropology of the senses that starts from the premise that

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perception consists in the cultural modelling of received bodily sensations can have nothing to say about how people practically look, listen, touch, taste and sniff as they go about their business’ (Ingold 2011: 315). Howes, however, disapproves of the enthusiasm for phenomenology shown by scholars like Ingold (2000) and Pink (2008, 2012). One point of disapproval is that the phenomenological paradigm has the shortcoming ‘of emphasising the individual and the subjective over the communal and social, and in consequence having little to say about politics of perception’ (Howes 2010: 335). Howes stresses that the anthropology of senses engages with senses not only as an object of study but also as a means of inquiry, reminding us that the ethnographic work is by definition embodied (2010: 334).

Olfactory Diaries as a Practice Referring to Classen, Howes and Synnott (1994) and Bubandt (1998), Pink suggests that in studying the olfactory these scholars understand smells as being coded with social significations that are deeply internalised by individuals, and that in doing so they undermine the importance of individual sensory experiences (2004: 67). In the analysis of British and Spanish housewives’ engagements with their households’ sensory environment, Pink notes: ‘Individual representations of sensory experience are my starting point. I shall interrogate them to understand how my informants’ creation and interpretation of sensory experience and metaphor in their homes might (like other types of performativity) reference, affirm or contest hegemonic gendered uses of smell, texture or sound, or be used to situate a particular gendered self-identity’ (2004: 63). In order to explore what Pink calls people’s ‘creation and interpretation of sensory experience and metaphor in their homes’, I will rely on the data generated through the olfactory diaries written by six of my Roma research participants in September– October 2014. In developing this methodological approach, I have been inspired by the work of humanities and social science scholars who paid attention to the lack of tools in social sciences that could allow for the study of the inhabited spaces’ olfactory dimension and olfactory experiences more generally. For instance, encouraging us to ‘come back to our senses’, Mason and Davies argue that social analyses could benefit greatly from an acknowledgement of sense ‘both in terms of its ontology (what is considered to be “there” to research or to know about), and its epistemology (how it can be known)’ (2009: 587). Hence, the olfactory diaries constitute a methodological attempt to gain access to the olfactory dimension of the domestic space, a

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means to ‘help people to evoke their sensory and corporeal worlds’ (2009: 590) and to reflect on the interconnectivities with the material world in which they are embedded. Regarding sensorial experiences of space that involve a lot more than seeing, Howes points out that ‘the sensorial revolution’ in different research areas (human geography, social history, urban anthropology, architecture)1 stimulated the idea of polysensoriality of the city, which replaces the canonical approaches interested mainly in ‘reading’ or ‘visualising’ the urban space (2005: 323). One example of an architectural perspective is the work of Victoria Henshaw and her colleagues, which engaged with ‘sensewalking’ as ‘a qualitative method of exploring aspects of the physical and/or cognitive experience of being within a particular, often urban environment’2 (Henshaw, Adams and Cox 2009; see also Low 2015 for an account about smellscapes walkabouts). Another study that demonstrates the polysensoriality of space and that inspired my olfactory diaries approach is Mădălina Diaconu’s project ‘Sniffing Vienna’. Based on a phenomenological interpretation of olfactory space, this project was based on ‘urban smellscapes mapping’ as a methodological attempt to investigate urban atmospheres (Diaconu et al. 2011: 223). In my study, the olfactory diaries method enabled the generation of data about how people depict, evaluate and interpret olfactory experiences, based on their particular ways of writing about smells. As Mason and Davies suggest, ‘Experiences and instances of fleeting sensory experiences that have vanished before one has been quite able to put a finger on them often have to be narrated’ (2009: 596–97; emphasis in original). The study by Elizabeth Engen and Trygg Engen linked taste- and smell-related psycho-physical data with linguistic data (1997: 137). Their analysis of the relation between emotions stimulated by certain odours and children’s ability to describe them verbally concludes that the ability to describe reactions to smells depends on children’s development of language. In my research, which was not carried out with children, the act of writing the smells meant paying more attention to smells, thus augmenting my research participants’ inclination to identify and reflect on their olfactory experiences. Thus, analytically, it could be implied that the smells came into existence as they had to be written. Putting the olfactory diaries method in a critical light, it is questionable whether they succeeded in accessing the pre-discursive olfactory experiences of the inhabited space. Again quoting Mason and Davies, ‘access to sensory realms is not guaranteed in the use of “sensory methods”’ (2009: 588). If we replace the act of seeing with the act of smelling in the Foucauldian remark ‘it is vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say’ (Foucault 2002: 10), it could be said that my research participants’ (perhaps pre-discursive and pre-cognitive) olfactory experiences do not reside in what was said (i.e. written) in the olfactory diaries. The way in

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which I try to circumvent these limitations is by understanding the olfactory diaries as a practice by itself. Following Pink, for whom the creation and interpretation of sensory experiences are performative (2004: 63), I understand the olfactory diaries methodological approach as a practice through which my research participants imagined and depicted individual olfactory experiences. The way in which John Dewsbury et al., supporters of nonrepresentational theory, conceive representation is relevant here: . . . not as a code to be broken or as an illusion to be dispelled, rather representations are apprehended as performative in themselves; as doings. The point here is to redirect attention from the posited meaning towards the material compositions and conduct of representations. . . . Representations thus do not have a message; rather they are transformers, not causes or outcomes of action but actions in themselves. (Dewsbury et al. 2002: 438; emphasis in original)

Grammars of Smells The first time I visited the Carols, the family that hosted me in Rotoieni, was in March 2014. It was only the third time that I visited them that I was invited into what they called ‘the guests’ room’ in their three-room house. This room would become mine for the time that I lived with the Carols in țigănie latter in the fall of 2014. The room was cold, and it did not seem to be used on a daily basis by any of the family members. The mother, Maria, brought me lunch while I was chatting with her husband, Iulian, when he suggested moving to the other room, where it was warmer. But Maria vehemently refused: ‘No, no, no, no way to take you there! There’re all kinds of smell for we do everything there. We cook, we sleep there. . . No, there’s smell of food, fryer, smoke, so I can’t take you there. We have no gas left, so I had to put fire in the stove, and it emitted a lot of smoke. . . No way, stay here, it’s better. The air is clear and fresh here’ (excerpt from my field notes, March 2014). Maria, in her mid-forties at the time, was to be one of the writers of an olfactory diary. In addition, Manuel, in his early twenties, and four young people – Gianina, Francisca, Ioana and Alina – accepted my invitation to write an olfactory diary. To Maria and Manuel, I explained individually the rationale of this methodological attempt, while for the young people I organised a one-day workshop in the municipal library in order to clarify the role of the olfactory diaries in the frame of my research. I asked the six of them to write the smells from the houses that they inhabited, every day for two weeks. To guide their reflections and writing process, I suggested the following six items: ‘What is the experienced smell?; Please describe it;

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What is its source?; Do you like/dislike it?; Does it remind you of anything?; Did anyone in the house make any comment about it?’ Despite the fact that these points were intended to guide a descriptive writing process, a close syntactic and morphological analysis of the diaries’ content shows a higher incidence of the use of verbs in comparison to adjectives and substantives. In the following, I analyse in particular the relation between the reported smells (the nouns ‘smell of. . .’) and the verbs through which these smells are expressed. Based on this semanticmorphological analysis that aimed to unfold the status of smells in the diary writers’ accounts, I grouped the diary entries into four categories: smells as actants triggering individuals’ emotions and bodily feelings; smells as produced/triggered by non-human agents; smells generated through human engagement with domestic materiality; and smells’ ability to permeate and occupy material spaces. I now proceed to expand on each of these four categories.

Smells as Actants In the olfactory diaries, smells are often referred to as actants that trigger different emotions and bodily feelings. They are expressed as nouns accompanied by verbs which imply the influence that the specific smells exert on the writers. In this type of construction, the smell has the capacity to act, to provoke and to generate all sorts of reactions inside and outside individuals’ minds and bodies. The following excerpts are illustrative: • ‘In my small kitchen the smell of borsch gives you the sensation of hunger’. • ‘The smell of mămăligă3 gives [one] a pleasant sensation’. • ‘In the evening, in the bathroom, the shampoo, soap and creams smell gives [me] a sensation of cleanliness’. • ‘The smell of grilled paprika from the kitchen, mixed with a strong smell of garlic, attracts me’. • ‘In the bathroom, the smell of soap and water gives [me] a sensation of cleanliness’. • ‘The smell from the kitchen of sarmale4 with vegetables with the smell of sour cabbage made us hungry and gathered us la masă’.5 • ‘In the kitchen, while preparing something for lunch, the smell of onion made me cry a bit’. • ‘In the bathroom the perfume smell left behind by Brândușa6 fully wakes up my sense of smell’. • ‘In the kitchen, the smell of omelette and fried potatoes makes us hungry’.

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Verbs like ‘[the smell of. . .] gives [me/one] a sensation of. . .’, ‘attracts [me]’, ‘triggers’, ‘awakes [my senses]’ seem to be synonymous with the verb ‘provide a feeling of ’. The authors suggest that they are provided with emotions interlinked with physical reactions. Two such examples are: ‘The chlorine smell is sharp, and it provokes my allergy’ and ‘The smell of [autumn] flowers was not giving me discomfort, but [it was] not very pleasant either’. What is particularly remarkable is the tendency to personify the smells7 that sheds light on smells as external corporeal presences that have the ability to speak, view, touch and hear people’s reactions. Such examples are: • • • • •

‘The smell [of coffee] this morning told me “good morning”’. ‘Passing by a bakery, the smell of baked bread saluted us’. ‘When I entered the bathroom a very bad smell greeted me’. ‘The smell of coffee prepared by mother woke me up’. ‘Reaching my sister-in-law’s place, a smell of baked aubergine greets me too’.

These examples speak of what Pink calls ‘the impossibility of separating different sensory experiences’ (2006: 45), illustrating Seremetakis’s notion of the ‘tactility of smells’ that refers to the different textures and surfaces generated by each smell (1994: 29). The personification of smells is one example of how the sensorial modalities operate interconnectedly, not only in the moment of perception but, as the entries provided above show, also in the moment of depicting/verbally representing perceptions. Besides the syntactic analysis, which sheds light on the ontology of the olfactory as something/someone that provokes emotions and bodily feelings, what can be remarked on is the higher incidence of the positively evaluated smells in comparison to those evaluated as disagreeable. The often-invoked ‘freshness’ or ‘cleanliness sensation’ provided by the different smells (of shampoo, soap, creams, toothpaste, perfume) could be read in relation to the local repertoire of representation of houses inhabited by Roma as being disordered and bad-smelling and of the Roma individuals as being careless about their bodies and their inhabited spaces. Even the smell of chlorine, which is mentioned as triggering an allergy (thus negatively evaluated), could be read as a contestation of the representation of Roma as smelly or careless. In Romania, a cleaning product containing chlorine used to be understood as a purifying substance of both the material and olfactory texture of the households, its use being an indicator of high standards of cleanliness. Regarding the repeated reference to the smell of different kinds of food ‘coming from the kitchen’, two aspects can be discussed. On the one hand, reporting the existence of smells of different kinds of dishes (borsch, sarmale, grilled paprika, omelette, fried potatoes or baked aubergine) implies

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that the family succeeds in providing the needed means for subsistence for its members. This has to be read in a context in which being able to provide ‘good food’ for the family (an aspect which has been extensively discussed in chapter 5) is a question of being hardworking, struggling and caring for the family’s well-being – all that Roma (as seen in chapter 7) are deemed not to be. In this sense, writing about the smells seems to have been about what the writers had rather than what they did not have, thus contradicting many of the non-Roma’s accusations that Roma are constantly complaining about their precarious living and ‘beg for anything’, as Isabela (chapter 6) and Narcis (chapter 7) expressed. On the other hand, providing accounts about the smells ‘coming from the kitchen’ is interesting considering that not all the diary writers’ houses had a kitchen in the sense of a space exclusively dedicated to food preparation. In Maria’s house, the room where food was cooked, mainly in the winter, also served as a living and sleeping room due to the limited space that the family had at their disposal. At the time when she wrote the diary, Gianina was living in one room with her parents (Sorana and Aurel) and two sisters, while her paternal grandparents were living in the other room of the tworoom house they were all sharing. I see the act of writing about the existence of a kitchen from which food smells spread towards the rest of the house in relation to the aspiration of an ‘ideal home’ and to the affirmation of the contemporary standards of homemaking which demand the existence of a space dedicated to food preparation. In this sense, the olfactory diaries contain people’s affirmations of what they want to be, and how they wish their houses to smell and be configured. These affirmations are results of the internalisation of standards of ‘normality’ which set out how the domestic space should be structured, standards that are part of those ‘collective knowledge reservoirs’ mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

Triggered Smells Another type of clause structure identified in the diaries is the one in which certain smells appear as ‘triggered by’ and not as ‘a trigger of ’, as shown above. This category of diary entries is about the non-human agents’ ability to ‘spread’, ‘release’ or allow smells to ‘come’: • ‘The grilled paprika releases a smell that spreads to the whole courtyard’. • ‘Going to pick up Alex from school and passing by the garbage truck, it released a smell of garbage and leftovers that’s not pleasant at all’. • ‘Leaving home. An unpleasant smell of the fuel from the construction site [is released]’. • ‘We all felt an unpleasant smell [coming] from the sewage system’.

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• ‘The fried onion has a very good smell, the rice and the vegetables spread their smell in the kitchen’. • ‘From the clothesline in the bathroom, the smell of the recently washed clothes is very pleasant, spread by the detergent used by mom’. These excerpts show a concern with the material source of smells and the individuals’ capacity to detect these sources. While some of the sources are easily detected, as they can be ‘seen’ (e.g. the garbage truck or the fried vegetables), others, such as ‘the sewage system’, are detected without their source being visible to the eye. This discussion about smells triggered by non-human agents is about the materialisation of smells. The materialisation of smells refers to the writers’ inclination to associate the sensed or imagined odours with specific objects, consumption goods and practices that are believed to justify the respective odours’ attributes. In fact, often it is not the materiality as such that is depicted as the generator of smells, but the materials as parts of everyday doings and not-doings. The materialisation of smells is also related to people’s disposition to project smells onto certain objects, consumption goods and practices, not necessarily based on bodily olfactory experiences. Recalling Helmuth Plessner’s conception that material objects have a bridging role between physical and mental realms (2003: 295), one could say that the materialisation of smells indicates, on the one hand, the mind’s need to have a material confirmation of what the body perceives and, on the other hand, the materiality’s ability to mediate olfactory projections. Industrial odorant products appear in the diaries as triggering positively evaluated smells and, thus, combating the negatively evaluated ones. Gianina notes down: ‘While getting up from the bed and going to the bathroom, I start feeling a less agreeable smell due to the human necessities that we have. But it [the smell] was immediately covered by the smell of orange emanated by the new odorant device bought by my mother’. The references to industrial odorant products indicate their ability not only to combat the smells evaluated as ‘bad’, but also to create a cosy atmosphere inside. This aspect, for example, is captured by Francisca’s account: ‘I woke up with a good mood as my pyjamas have the smell of Lenor,8 which makes me feel like [I’m] in a garden with flowers’, or by Gianina’s description of her shower time: ‘The shower gel with the aroma of watermelon is so enjoyable that I don’t even want to leave’. But more than olfactory experiences as such, these accounts encompass the capacity projected onto the odorant products not only to emit enjoyable smells, but also to create an enjoyable atmosphere. The recurring affirmation of the use of odorising products can be seen in relation to people’s ‘modern’ impulse to accommodate the normative and

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regulative olfactory standards in their everyday lives. While people in my research, Roma and non-Roma, submit to such normative and regulative olfactory standards, the way in which Roma accommodate them cannot be disconnected from the representations of Roma as olfactory others. As Hall puts it, the racial discourse has ‘normalizing regulatory effects’ (Hall 1996: 15). It is far from my intention to imply that the use of cleaning products or odorant devices is a direct response to the racialising representations of Roma as having ‘that specific smell’. Nevertheless, the recurring registration of legitimate – assessed as pleasant – smells in the diaries cannot be isolated from this broader socio-political framework that produces and nurtures racialising representations of Roma on an everyday basis. For instance, entries from the olfactory diaries like ‘From the clothesline in the bathroom, the smell of the recently washed clothes is very pleasant, spread by the detergent used by mom’ is reminiscent of the ‘unaired coat’ metaphor employed by one non-Roma woman (Cornelia, the seller from the mini-market; see chapter 7). According to Cornelia, ‘the țigan has a smell of the unaired’, of a coat that has not been aired out in a while. Yet references like the one to the clothes washed with detergent and hung on the clothesline provide an image that contrasts with what Cornelia implied as a ‘not-doing’ specific to the Roma way of engaging with the materiality of the domestic space.

Producing Smells In this category of the depiction of olfactory experiences, smells appear as generated throughout the individuals’ engagement with the domestic space. As the following diary entries show, the focus lies again on the smells’ sources, but with an emphasis on the people’s intended or unintended actions that produce those smells as such: • ‘Just woken up, I open the door to let the fresh air of the morning come in’. • ‘It was all fine until my brother started to make fire in the ceramic stove; this caused a lot of smoke’. • ‘In his garden, the neighbour set fire to some garbage and a smell of smoke spread on the whole street’. • ‘I opened the door of the hens’ and ducks’ coop and a smell of chicken excrements came out from there’. • ‘Afterwards I went to the back of the house, where it was smelling of smoke and of cooked plums; it was the smoke created by my mother where she cooked the plums confiture’. • ‘This [pleasant] smell was produced by my sister while playing with water and shampoo to make bubbles’.

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• ‘I entered the bathroom and I encountered a very unpleasant smell because my sister forgot to flush’. • ‘It seemed that my father had poured [beer] on the carpet and that’s why it was smelling of beer in the room’. • ‘When I went to the kitchen I passed by the bathroom and my brother had left the door of the bathroom open, from there a very bad smell was coming; I went quickly to close the door’. • ‘I put a piece of cellophane in the fire and then I put in pieces of wood; in the house a very bad smell and a lot of smoke emerged’. • ‘I look around to find where the smell [of sweat] is coming from. The smell was coming from the sport shoes and the T-shirt left by my brother under the table where I was sitting’. The authors write about their own and others’ doings and not-doings described as shaping the olfactory texture of their household. Often, the undesired smells and those deemed unpleasant are associated with cohabitants’ or neighbours’ doings rather than with the authors’ own doings. The smell of smoke is explained through a reference to the neighbour’s practice of setting fire to garbage in his own garden. The ‘unpleasant smell’ from the bathroom is ascribed to a brother’s or sister’s negligence regarding keeping the bathroom door closed. The example of the smell of beer poured on the floor refers to his father’s negligence and is used by Manuel to indirectly express his disagreement with the fact that his father consumes alcohol. Some of the examples that I have included in this category point at the purposeful engagement in the production of space by generating pleasant, thus legitimate, smells and by trying to control discredited smells. Gianina expresses her incapability to prevent the smell from permeating the domestic space when she writes: ‘Today in the morning, a very disagreeable smell from the slaughterhouse from the town flooded my room because the window was open’. It seems that smells create continuities between spaces that are supposed to be divided into private–public, inside–outside, polluted– unpolluted. In such cases, the materiality of walls, windows and doors seems to fail in restricting the undesired odours’ access to the domestic sphere, thus allowing the smells’ ‘uncontrolled expansion onto the surroundings’ (Lefebvre 1991: 197). Due to their agency, smells not only govern spaces, but they also institute atmospheres if mediated by certain doings. Opening the door or window and allowing the fresh morning air to ‘occupy’ the house is a doing that the writers of the olfactory diaries mention repeatedly. This is reminiscent of the conversations between the non-Roma in the mini-market, who claim that ‘that specific smell’ from Roma houses is potentiated by the fact that, presumably, ‘they do not open the window to air their house’. Yet, in the

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olfactory diaries, freshness, revitalisation and cleanliness are the main characteristics of the morning atmosphere that they seek to install inside their houses. Apart from instituting pleasant atmospheres, smells also disrupt the olfactory order that people seek to maintain. When Francisca writes, ‘Arriving home from school I find a stuff y unbearable air’, she expresses the same dissatisfaction that Maria articulated in one of our conversations in August 2014: ‘When I arrived from Holland I had to open all the doors because there was a terrible smell, so I opened all the doors and windows. [It seemed that] When it rained, Brândușa didn’t close the window and, thus, it rained on the clothes. Obviously, it started to smell like stuff y clothes. You know the smell? A coat. . . if not used, it starts getting a certain smell’ (excerpt from my field notes). The ‘stuff y smell’ or the smell of unaired clothes, invoked by the nonRoma in their description of ‘that smell of țigan’, is considered by the Roma research participants to be equally repugnant. Yet when non-Roma use it, ‘the stuff y smell’ becomes a racist slur that naturalises and reifies Roma people’s presumed laziness and moral laxity. All in all, this category of excerpts from the olfactory diaries sheds light on smells generated through everyday human engagement with the domestic environment and unfolds the writers’ urge to engage with doings that prevent bad smells from permeating their inhabited space.

Smells’ Obstinacy Focusing on the relationship between smells and perceived spaces, this category of ‘written smells’ refers to the limited agency that diary writers appear to have when it comes to preventing smells from expanding. In the clause structure I discuss here, smells appear as nouns accompanied mostly by verbs like: ‘comes from. . .’ (vine dinspre), ‘spreads’ (se răspândește), ‘inundates’ (inundă) and ‘fills’ ((îmi) umple). In order to reflect on the ways in which the authors verbally represent their olfactory experiences, these verbs were translated into English based on the primary meaning that they have in Romanian. See the following excerpts: • ‘Going to the school to pick up Alex, on Covesnei Street, the garbage is being taken away; smells of all kinds of garbage spread on the whole street’. • ‘When I entered the house, there was a pleasant smell, but I couldn’t guess where it was coming from. [Then I realised that] It was the food prepared by my mother’. • ‘When I came from school, I dropped by to see my father at the fishery; an unpleasant smell of fish came to me while talking with him’.

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• ‘Today the smell of autumn flowers inundated my room’. • ‘Expecting fresh and clear air to come in; in the morning, a strange smell of toilet and manure comes in. So, I asked myself where those [smells] could come from. The smell was coming from the neighbour’s courtyard’. • ‘We asked ourselves where that unpleasant smell [of sewage] was coming from; until we realised that the smell was coming from our neighbour because he takes out the mud with the bucket’. • ‘The coffee with its strong smell filled the room’. • ‘I was on my way to the university. While walking, a car transporting birds was passing by; it left behind a very unpleasant smell’. • ‘A very unpleasant smell coming from the slaughterhouse from the town inundated my room because the window was open’. • ‘On my way to grandmother, together with Andreea, on the road the workers were re-asphalting; the strong smell of fresh asphalt was lingering everywhere’. If the previously discussed examples illustrate people’s engagement with doings through which they affirm their ability to detect undesired smells, to potentially eradicate them or to avoid their intrusion, the entries in this section highlight smells as forces which have the ability to act on their own upon spaces, to occupy them, to transcend material boundaries and to ‘sit’ in place. Interestingly, although the guidelines I provided for the authors suggested that they were to write about everyday smells from the house they lived in, all of them wrote about the smells not only from their household, but also from the spaces they transited on a daily basis outside the domestic sphere. Smells seem to ‘come’, ‘spread around’, ‘fill’ and ‘inundate’ the urban infrastructure and the domestic fabric, but also oneself. This is captured, for instance, by Manuel’s assertion about ‘the unpleasant smell of naphthalene’ that ‘came’ to him or by Ioana’s entry about ‘the unpleasant smell of fish’ that ‘came’ to her. Similarly, Gianina’s ‘Today the smell of autumn flowers inundated my room’ or Maria’s ‘The coffee with its strong smell filled the room’ do not suggest only that the rooms are inundated by the smell of coffee or flowers; they are indirect depictions of the feeling of being bodily ‘pervaded’ by these smells. In other words, the depictions of smells that expand into spaces cannot be separated from implicit depictions of the individual olfactory experiences without which the diffusion of smells could not be perceived and then represented/written in the diary. Francisca’s perception of a room ‘inundated by a fresh and revitalising smell’ is mediated by the feeling of being ‘inundated’ herself by the represented smell, reminiscent of

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Ingold’s argument that our senses are essential parts of our ‘involvement in the world’ (cited in Mason and Davies 2009: 587). Smells have the ability to invade and permeate material or immaterial demarcations of the domestic and urban space in ways that bodies cannot, as smells reach places and bodies before the moving body physically reaches the static bodies (Diaconu 2010: 80) or places. This aspect is captured by the examples of smells that mediate between the family members who are at home (in the house), engaged in different domestic practices, and those returning home. Manuel recalls: ‘It was Sunday when, coming back home and reaching our house, I could smell fried potatoes [a smell which was] coming from a house. The smell awoke my appetite for fried potatoes as I haven’t eaten in a while. It was actually my mother cooking those’. The mothers are those mentioned as cooking, thus enabling food smells to spread in and around the house. These smells become part of the ‘sensorial landscape’ understood as a landscape of ‘artifacts, organic and inorganic’ (Seremetakis 1994: 8). Apart from talking about how ‘intrusive’ smells are perceived (and written) to be, the olfactory diaries also contain statements that illustrate smells as something that is in place. If the previous entries were about how smells ‘come’, ‘inundate’ or ‘spread’, the following examples indicate smell as that which ‘is’ or ‘is to be found’ (se află) in a place: • ‘I entered my sister’s room to help her with the homework, but I couldn’t do it because in the room there was a very bad smell’. • ‘I arrive home and I find a stuff y unbearable air’. • ‘When I arrived home, in the hall, there was an appealing smell which I recognised easily; it was of something baked and something like garlic’. • ‘The smell of fried sausages and of borsch with vegetables can be found in my room’. • ‘It was morning and I woke up to go to the school; when I woke up, in the house there was a very nice smell coming from the kitchen’. • ‘Mother comes home from work and finds everything clean and beautiful and a fresh smell’. These excerpts show the one-to-one relation between the individual and the smell. In this case, unlike the aforementioned examples in which smells are described as moving and expanding, smells are described as encased within the walls of the domestic realm. Smells appear depicted as presences that can be ‘imprisoned’ if perceived as negative and unpleasant, like the smell of naphthalene identified by Manuel in his friend’s flat or the smell of ‘stuff y unbearable air’ identified by Francisca in her house.

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By revealing the ability of smells to transgress material and symbolic borders, the olfactory diaries provide means to think about how their structurally determined living conditions tend to hinder individuals’ attempts to control the olfactory texture of their households. The faulty way in which the local garbage collection service operates, as mentioned in Maria’s writings, allows the smell of garbage to invade the realm of all the households located on Covesnei Street and țigănie. The existence of the slaughterhouse in the area where Gianina’s house is located permits the smell emanated by the activities of processing the meat to ‘invade’ her house, despite her attempt to prevent it by closing the windows. The malfunctioning sewage system causes the proliferation and the expansion of bad smells into the various households’ olfactory realm, as Manuel complains in his writings. To close this chapter, I would like to suggest that these depictions of the authors’ everyday olfactory experiences (lived, materialised and projected) provide means to rethink the idea that smells exist in the space and consider that, perhaps, it is the spaces that exist in a world of smells. Such a world, where smells have no ‘beginning or an end’ (Lefebvre 1991: 197), shapes and is shaped by the ways in which people produce, dispute and sense their lived environment. In the following chapter, the aforementioned correlation between the variable ‘smell’ and the variable ‘material conditions of one’s living’ will be discussed in relation to Roma women’s considerations and attitudes vis-à-vis the local understandings of the olfactory introduced at the beginning of this chapter.

Notes 1. Howes remarks that ‘the study of the senses has traditionally been the preserve of psychologists and neurobiologists who have focused on the cognitive or neurological dimensions of sense perception and disregarded its cultural elaboration. This state of affairs – which resulted in any book on the senses being catalogued as a work in psychology – is rapidly and dramatically changing. The senses are now being investigated by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and literary scholars among many others’ (2006b: 113). 2. The paper is unpaginated. 3. See chapters 4 and 5. 4. See chapter 5. 5. The verbatim translation of la masă is ‘at the table’. But it is also used in a figurative way to express ‘eating together’. In this case, Maria’s use of la masă is slightly paradoxical, as the family does not have a table around which the family members sit to eat. Everyone gets his/her plate of food and looks for a (more or less) comfortable spot to eat, inside or outside (in summer).

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6. Brândușa is the first-born daughter of the Carols, who, at the time, was fourteen years old. 7. The personification of smells might be related to the written style of the accounts. The diary might have been treated by my research participants as a school task for which the requirement is ‘Write a text about. . .’. 8. A well-known brand of fabric conditioner.

CHAPTER 9



MANUFACTURING SMELLS

Introduction The journey through the world of written smells as captured in the olfactory diaries reveals a variety of ontological statuses of smells: as actants that trigger emotions, as producers and products of household infrastructure, as well as entities that have the capacity to expand despite human attempts to control them. I interpreted the writers’ accounts of what they can or cannot do vis-à-vis socially discredited, tolerable or desirable smells as interlinked with local ‘knowledge of language, norms, customs and rules, and knowledge to use the means and resources that make living possible (or successful) in a given environment’ (Essed 2002: 187). In my interpretation, these written accounts reveal the writers as sharers of the reservoir of social knowledge related to the olfactory, reproduced and submitted to by both Roma and nonRoma. To expand on this thought, in this chapter I focus in particular on how Roma women operate with the local meanings of the olfactory and, by that means, how they contest, legitimise or distance themselves from the position of gypsiness as olfactory otherness. I attempt to do this by looking at how the olfactory operates not only within but also outside the hegemonic and racist ascriptions. We will see that the olfactory plays an important role in instilling ‘a renewed air’ within the domestic space, in cleaning the house before Easter, in creating or maintaining a pleasant atmosphere at home, or, more generally, in performing the ascribed roles of ‘hardworking women’.

Sensory Hierarchies Confronted with the question of how to study the senses and sensorial experiences, anthropologists have proposed answers supporting the insepara-

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bility of the senses. In Sarah Pink’s words, this ‘involves departing from the modern Western understanding of the five-sense sensorium whereby our common sense tells us we simply smell through our noses, hear through our ears and see through our eyes’ (2012: 3). While Pink refers to the ‘inseparable interconnected sensory qualities of their everyday life’ (2006: 45), others have reflected on ‘the unified character of the human sensorium’ (Pinney 2002: 85) or on ‘the sensory multiplicity’ (Seremetakis 1994: 9–11). The idea of the inseparability of the senses also relates to what Sullivan (1986) calls ‘a model of synaesthesia’,1 which argues for a switch from understanding cultures as texts, thus writable and readable, to understanding them as ‘sensed’. The model of synaesthesia was criticised for its tendency to assume the interchangeability and equality of sensorial modalities, as well as for failing to acknowledge the way in which senses are hierarchised (Howes 2006a; Howes and Classen 2014). David Howes (2006a) emphasises that, instead of assuming the simultaneity of senses, it is more useful to reflect on the sequence of perceptions and thereby acknowledge the social implications of senses. As an alternative, Howes proposes an ‘intersensoriality model’, illustrated by the example of the Japanese tea ceremony. This ceremony is characterised by a particular ‘aesthetic order’ which entails ‘a sequence of movements with tensions, climaxes and directionality’ (Kondo 2004, quoted in Howes 2006a: 164). Based on the premise that sensorial orders are translated into social orders, the intersensoriality model suggests that the different (traditionally recognised) sensorial modalities (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste) are not equal. The way in which they operate and are organised reflects power relations in societies. In Howes’ words, ‘The dominant group in society will be linked to esteemed senses and sensation while subordinate groups will be associated with less valued or denigrated senses’ (2006a: 164). Such an intersensorial model is also employed by Kelvin Low, who explores how one can make sense of these intersensorial encounters in urbanity (2013: 221). Low links the standpoints of the aforementioned scholars, who describe sensory orders as socio-culturally determined, with other perspectives that consider sensory orders as constituted and constitutive of norms, models of moralities and social regulations (Vannini, Waskul and Gottschalk 2012). Supporting the argument that sensorial modalities do not operate socioculturally and politically in the same ways, the cultural historian Constance Classen encourages scholars ‘to go beyond the audio-visual and recover the senses of smell, taste and touch as subjects of serious inquiry’ (1997: 404). Classen criticises the late twentieth-century anthropologists’ hesitancy to inquire into smell, taste and touch, implying that this was a result of the ‘relative marginalization of these senses in the modern West’ (ibid.). Moreover, Classen frames this bias in relation to ‘the racist tendencies of an earlier anthropology to associate the “lower” senses with the “lower” races’, writing

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that, ‘As sight and, to a lesser extent, hearing were deemed to be the predominant senses of “civilized” Westerners, smell, taste and touch were assumed to predominate among “primitive” non-Westerners’ (1997: 405; see also Smith 2007). My field research has also shown that the different sensorial modalities operate unequally, and that their perception and interpretation are socio-politically informed. Yet my analysis departs from Classen’s idea of ‘sensory models’.2 In my view, this conceptualisation essentialises ‘cultures’ by assuming that people ‘“make sense” of the world’ and ‘translate sensory perceptions and concepts into a particular “worldview”’ (1997: 402; my emphasis). Instead of implying that societies or local contexts operate according to specific symbols and meanings attached to senses, which then fundamentally shape people’s experiences, my analysis is concerned with the circumstances under which such meanings emerge and are negotiated, reproduced or contested. While acknowledging the interplay between different sensorial categories, the analysis in this chapter focuses primarily on the olfactory. Partly, the focus on the olfactory is important in this chapter due to its connections to people’s everyday negotiation of aspirations related to local notions of modernisation or ‘civilisation’ (see also, e.g., Low 2009). Household practices are particularly relevant as practices that enable individuals to embark on a process of ‘becoming modern’. In this sense, the work of Adam Drazin (2002) is quite illustrative. Drazin discusses mytho-historical understandings of cleanliness and civilisation based on his field research in flats in a northern Romanian town. He shows how the consumption of cleaning products, triggered by the development of a market non-existent before 1989 (the fall of the so-called communist regime), entailed adjusting previous standards of cleanliness in order to correspond to those of the ‘civilised Western world’. The philosopher Mădălina Diaconu underscores the role of the olfactory in processes of constructing and negotiating identities (2010: 77), which is also relevant for this chapter. Diaconu reflects on the olfactory dimension of the human body in relation to the notion of ‘alterity’ in phenomenology. Diaconu discusses ‘olfactory prejudices’ (prejuicios olfactorios) as contributing to the constitution and maintenance of sociocultural alterity (2010: 84). Migrants, for instance, are said to acquire triple ‘odoriferous alterity’, being at the same time foreigners, workers and inhabitants of poor or shoddy living spaces (2010: 85). In a similar vein, based on his research about Asian migrants in New York City and the domestication of food aromas, Martin F. Manalansan IV (2006) shows that politicising ‘foreign’ smells is linked to the ‘economic and political interest of global capital in perpetuating racial and class subordination’ (2006: 47). In this context, smell is understood as ‘a social marker’ that ‘provides a strategic mode of communicating identities,

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bodies and temporalities that are betwixt and between’ (2006: 42). These are concerns that I will address in the last section of this chapter.

‘Manufacturing’ the Frumos Smell ‘Changing the smell’3 in the house is one of the main concerns that Maria and other Roma women in Rotoieni expressed when they talked about domestic practices. The cleaning sessions were said to take place on a regular basis, several times a year: in spring (the ‘general cleaning’ for Easter), in summer, in autumn (preparing the house for winter) and for Christmas. These sessions were described as a set of practices that enabled the ‘renewing’ of the atmosphere of the house in olfactory terms. Consider the following excerpt from one of my first discussions with Maria, in March 2014, when my visit caused her to put on hold the chores of that afternoon: I still have to put new[ly washed] pillowcases because I want to change them even though no one slept there;4 I tried to change everything in order to give a new smell5 to the house, to clean and to do everything adequate for the spring time. For the kitchen, where we stayed [on a daily basis this winter], I need a bucket with liming emulsion to bleach because it’s smoked from this last winter; because we have a stove and we have been burning wood; sometimes also shoes. We sold a pig and we got seven million RON,6 then we bought wood for winter, about three tons of wood to burn. But it was not really enough, therefore we replaced it [the wood] with shoes. (Recorded conversation, March 2014)

Producing a desirable smell seems to require a whole set of cleaning activities – from bleaching the walls to changing the pillowcases – which are supposed to contribute to the installation of the desired olfactory atmosphere. On the one hand, Maria’s words speak of her agency in creating ‘a new smell’ in the house and about the doings that enable her to ‘shape’ the olfactory texture. On the other hand, her account alludes to the smells’ ability to act independently of her attempts to control them. Similar to what is revealed by the olfactory diaries, Maria points at her incapacity to prevent the smells (in this case the smoke smell released by the burnt shoes) that expand uncontrollably and permeate the house walls, requiring the renovation of the domestic space in the name of its olfactory refurbishment. The practice of bleaching the walls was often referred to by the Roma women I talked with as part of the doings that ‘shape’ the smells of their households. The following excerpt illustrates how Maria describes the replacement of the classic whitewash paint with a new product for bleaching the walls (water-based emulsion paint7), and the way in which this change impacted the process of ‘refurbishing’ the house’s olfactory realm:

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Andreea: How was it before [using] the water-based emulsion paint? Maria: There was this other kind of emulsion. . . Back then, we were buying whitewash from people who were coming here to sell solid whitewash. And it had to be melted and transformed into a paste. Then, with the lime brush, we were spreading the whitewash on the walls. But it was way better with that kind of liming paste. . . You could really feel that smell of cleanliness, but this new water-based emulsion paint has a smell like lacquer. It smells like lacquer, you know!? After you bleach the walls with this water-based emulsion paint. . . You need to really air! You need to let it get dry and to air the house. But the other one [the other type of liming emulsion] used to have another smell, a different one. . .8 Andreea: And why don’t you still use that kind? Maria: I don’t know. . . It simply entered into practice. . . This water-based emulsion paint. . . One sees it as being more beautiful, the colours turn out to be more beautiful. . . You know. . . You don’t need the lime brush anymore, you just use the trafalet.9 With the trafalet it’s easier, you just move it in all directions to cover the whole surface of the wall. With the lime brush. . . You had to struggle. . . Strokes were visible, and if you didn’t know which was the direction in which you started to bleach, it got dry and you could see shades on the walls. It was not beautiful. . . (Recorded conversation, March 2014)

The word used by Maria, which I translated as ‘beautiful’, is ‘frumos’. Drazin (2002) writes about frumos as follows: The most literal word for ‘clean’ in Romanian is curat. Sometimes, one hears îngrijit (cared for), or in a more general sense frumos (beautiful). Frumos is so ubiquitous a term that it can be used to describe almost any situation or thing, like the word ‘nice’. Tidying up an apartment for visitors is making the place frumos; smartening oneself up, or putting on make-up, is making oneself frumos (frumoasă for women); a good atmosphere at a party or concert is frumos. The work of making people and places frumos can be described in different ways: housework is commonly referred to as curățenie in Suceava; another term might be îngrijire (caring), which may refer to taking care of the family, or of the home, or of one’s person. (Drazin 2002: 111)

In Maria’s account, it appears that making the house look and smell ‘beautiful’ has to do with bleaching the walls, a practice through which the house is emptied of the bad smells and filled with a ‘cleanliness smell’. It is equivalent to the erasure of the smells impregnated in the interior walls of the house from the last bleaching session onwards, and thus, with the installation of a ‘look of cleanliness’ (translated from Romanian: ‘aspect de curat’). The notion of a ‘look of cleanliness’ relates to the interplay of different sensorial categories, suggesting that cleanliness, as produced through (among others)

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the act of bleaching the walls, does not only smell. It is also visual and tactile if we consider the emulsion that has to be prepared for the bleaching process, or the windows and doors that need to be opened in order to allow the air to inundate the house and thus to empty the house of the undesired smell of lacquer. Although the whitewash emulsion is described as producing the desired ‘cleanliness smell’, it is the use of water-based emulsion paint that is considered to materialise an engagement with the ‘contemporary standards of homemaking’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 118). Willing to adopt these standards, Roma and non-Roma use water-based emulsion paint because it is considered to signify contemporary principles of organising the domestic sphere, such as practicality, symmetry of shapes, simplicity and uniformity of colours and wall surfaces. The way in which Maria explains the current preference for the use of trafalet and water-based emulsion paint reveals the practical ‘as an idiom on which householders draw to legitimate their consumption preferences’ (Garvey 2003: 244). However, the use of these new products is more than a matter of preference. I understand it as related to what Nadia Seremetakis calls ‘a politics of sensory creation and reception’, which is ‘a politics of everyday life’ (1994: 4). Although it is described as smelling of lacquer, the water-based emulsion paint is said to be favoured for it guarantees the result of neatly bleached walls, which is one element of contemporary standards of arranging the domestic sphere. Hence, the reception of smells and the ways in which the olfactory is imbued with connotations is intrinsically interlinked with broader market dynamics, as well as with global interplays and the circulation of imaginaries about contemporary standards of homemaking. ‘Subtle forms of power’, as Law suggests, ‘are experienced across aesthetic practices’ (2001: 267). It could be entailed that the use of water-based emulsion paint crystallises Roma women’s attempts to achieve ‘equality-as-sameness’ (Gullestad 1993, in Garvey 2003: 242) in respect to others who also seek to comply with contemporary standards of homemaking. Thus, it is an attempt to make visible this ‘sameness’ on the level of their domestic sphere. Nonetheless, nonRoma are inclined to deny sameness with the Roma. In September 2014, when I spent a morning in a shop selling small household items and cleaning products in Rotoieni, the seller remarked in a scathing tone: They [the țigani] buy only cheap items . . . They only buy the classic emulsion paint, the whitewash, if you know; they can’t afford the water-based emulsion paint, maybe those who come from abroad . . . Yes. . . they are obsessed with bleaching the walls before Easter, before Christmas, no matter if it’s cold outside. But of course, they have to bleach because of the smoke. . . (Excerpt from my field notes, August 2014)

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While denying Roma women’s use of a product that is deemed ‘fancier’, the seller continues by distinguishing between the ‘the țigani of the worst kind’ (de cea mai joasă speță) and those who managed to make a living. Regardless of this distinction, she maintains that the reason that Roma allegedly bleach the walls more often is their lack of constant care for their inhabited space, in addition to domestic practices or behaviours (such as smoking inside the house) that emit smoke smells.

‘The Woman Has to Be a Bit Gospodină’ Maria is not the only one who talked about bleaching the walls as a domestic practice through which ‘the cleanliness smell’ or ‘the frumos smell’ is produced. Valentina, the wife of a Roma man who introduced himself to me as the political representative of the Roma in Rotoieni, expressed in a similar way her concerns related to the olfactory texture of the household. Consider the below excerpt from one of our conversations, which took place in the family’s eight-room house, on a rainy day in March: Valentina: When you bleach the walls it’s like. . . Getting clean. Yes, it’s like. . . even the air changes, it smells like cleanliness. Andreea: And what is this ‘smelling of cleanliness’ like? I’ve heard my grandmother saying something similar [about bleaching the walls]. . . Valentina: It [the smell] gets changed. . . How shall I put it. . . Why do people fast before Easter? To become clean, totally, also the body. . . The same with us [here]. . . Inside the house, one needs to clean! Now you found me in a reasonable condition still but wait for the disaster to start. I have to boil all the pots. . . Andreea: You mean for Easter? Valentina: Yes, well. . . one needs to wash everything; one must wash even the last dust rug in order to have everything clean. To be clean, that is what it [smelling clean] means. To have everything clean requires boiling everything, this is how we are, this is what I’ve seen my mother do, my mother-in-law too. . . This purification brought along by changing, with the springtime coming, you understand? . . . You see that it [the cleaning] starts even in the garden. . . If you see that flower there, you need to dig around it, to take care of it, to water it, so that it’s clear that a new season begins. That’s how it is. . . Andreea: Everyone around does the same here? Valentina: Everyone, even those living in flats, except those who simply don’t want. Who doesn’t want, doesn’t do, it’s not obligatory; but those who lived this way, as we did. We learnt it from the elderly, from my mother-in-law, the same way my mother [did]. . . (Recorded conversation, March 2014)

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This way in which Valentina abstracts her thoughts about the olfactory seems to indicate that ‘the smell of cleanliness’ means ‘no smell’. Her figure of speech relating bodily purification through fasting to the purification of the household olfactory fabric is illustrative of the understanding of smells as sinful and as an ‘onslaught of hygiene and asceticism’ (Lefebvre 1991: 197). If fasting means spiritual and bodily purification that brings along forgiveness from a metaphysical authority (and from one’s own consciousness), eliminating undesirable smells presupposes an authority that requires efforts to eliminate, as it were, ‘sinful smells’. The authority in this case is the set of local understandings of the olfactory (introduced at the beginning of chapter 8), which includes the conceptions that the household’s olfactory realm is kept under control through systematic engagements with cleaning practices and that the household’s olfactory texture is an immaterial insignia of women’s morality and industriousness. The moralising tone employed by Valentina reveals her affirmation of being someone who follows the prescriptions implied by the local understandings of the olfactory. By stating that ‘purifying’ the domestic space through the ‘change of smells’ is something that ‘everyone, even in the flats’ does, Valentina articulates her and her relatives’ sameness with other inhabitants of Rotoieni, whether Roma or non-Roma. Furthermore, Valentina historicises this sameness by emphasising that, once learnt from the family, the domestic practices that one was socialised with become permanent in one’s life as a woman. Valentina seems to suggest that the level of morality attested by a house in which ‘the smell of cleanliness’ dominates is acquired through meticulous bodily engagement with the household’s materiality. ‘Boiling all the pots’ and ‘washing everything’ are doings described as contributing to the ‘household’s purification’. They are regarded as essential in the process of ‘manufacturing’ an olfactory texture of the inhabited space that complies with the personal aspirations which cannot be disconnected from the local understandings of what is a ‘properly taken-care-of ’ household. At the confluence between material and social realms, the local meanings of the olfactory and the household practices are related to how ‘individuals perform their gendered selves’ (Pink 2004: 74). Bleaching the walls, regarded as a practice through which the olfactory fabric of the house is ‘purified’ (i.e. ‘emptied’ of the undesirable smells), is intrinsically interlinked with the figure of the woman and her process of becoming a dignified and caring housewife. Maria articulated this link at different points during our conversations by emphasising that ‘when one [as a woman] got married, she had to have skills for bleaching the walls’. Valentina alluded to that link too when she referred to her mother and mother-in-law, from whom she learnt

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how to deal with household matters and inherited the home-maker’s morality. In becoming a ‘gospodină’,10 in Valentina’s view, it is of moral relevance to engage diligently in practices meant to control the expansion of undesired smells. The feminine adjective ‘gospodină’ is a Romanian word with positive connotations which depicts a meticulous and caring woman, who is particularly committed and sharp-eyed in respect to household matters. Contemplate another excerpt from our conversation: Valentina: So, I can understand that in everyone’s house it can be sometimes better, sometimes worse. What I mean is that the woman has to be a bit gospodină. Because of course, everyone lives as God allows [in precarious conditions], but if you sweep, arrange, wash, do what is needed [it won’t smell in the house]. You [as a woman] need to be organised, so that the smell doesn’t dominate the house or mould [doesn’t appear]. . . . Well. . . it depends on the woman indeed. (Recorded conversation, March 2014)

Valentina seems to imply that, by doing ‘what is needed’ and by being ‘organised’, a gospodină woman is one who deals ‘properly’ with the potential of smells to expand and with the moral dangers implied by the undesirable smells’ expansion. At first sight, Valentina’s statement about gospodină could be understood as a way of contesting the ascription according to which malodours reside in ‘țigani’s domestic sphere’, by emphasising Roma women’s industriousness (e.g. hers, her mother’s and her mother-in-law’s). Yet this way of contesting the subject position of olfactory otherness does not do justice to Roma women. In fact, it is rather oppressive for it makes women accountable for any discourses about Roma households that might emerge. It puts on their shoulders the responsibility of guarding the household from bad smells, and thus of avoiding any potential danger of association between Roma people’s inhabited space and the racist/racialising olfactory tropes. Hence, the way in which Valentina makes women accountable for the household’s olfactory texture provides means to think about how local gendered imperatives operate on the level of how people respond to the racialised positions allocated to them. Valentina’s urge to enact and verbally articulate the engagements with space that are aimed at emptying the house of what are socially constructed as malodours is not so much a way of contesting olfactory politics that shape the social, material and sensorial order of things. Rather, it is an enforcement of them. To complicate the discussion further, it needs to be underlined that Valentina holds a different position within the socio-spatial configuration of the locality. While Maria, who lives in țigănie, explained the emergence of malodours by referring to the precarity and the immediacy of their living con-

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ditions, thus destabilising the idea that ‘țigani’s bad smells are in their walls and skin’ (as some of my non-Roma interlocutors put it), Valentina suggests that the danger of being subjected to the ‘smelly other’ position depends on women’s individual agency and efforts. But besides the rigorousness of Valentina’s normative discourse in relation to what it means to be a gospodină, she does refer to contextual variables that might impact women’s ability to control smells. Her statement ‘everyone lives as God allows’ implies that the infrastructural conditions of one’s living might augment the agency of undesired smells, thus limiting women’s ability to control their expansion. At the same time, her statement indicates a self-positioning above those who live ‘as God allows’, if we consider her higher socio-economic status in Rotoieni and the considerable differences between her family’s living conditions and those of the Roma who live in much more precarious circumstances in țigănie. She acknowledges the connection between the olfactory fabric of the household and limited access to decent housing infrastructure. Yet her remarks seem to hint at a role that the olfactory plays ‘in establishing positions of power within society’ (Howes and Classen 2014: 65) and in affirming those positions. By surreptitiously performing her different socioeconomic status, Valentina distances herself from the Roma from țigănie (thus from the ‘poor ones’), but without blaming them for their precarious living conditions (as many non-Roma do).

Challenging the Olfactory Prejudice The emphasis on the immediacy of household materiality as what generates and favours certain smells could be understood as a way of challenging the script that associates Roma ways of living with socially objectionable odours. I will discuss this point by referring to the discussions that I had with Cecilia11 in Amsterdam, where she had been living since 2012. Cecilia, who previously worked as a social worker in charge of Roma issues in Rotoieni, reflected on how living conditions and the activities in which people engage impact the olfactory dimension of their households and bodies. She described how ‘objective’ living conditions contribute to the constitution and circulation of ‘stereotypes’ and ‘olfactory prejudices’ (Diaconu 2010: 84). Contemplate the following excerpt: Andreea: [In Rotoieni] I’ve heard many times that it is ‘a specific smell’ that distinguishes a Roma house from a non-Roma one. . . Cecilia: Apropos. . . The smell. . . You know the saying that ‘there is no smoke without fire’. There is something somewhere. . . For instance, I was in the market [in Rotoieni], in the aisle with milk products . . . What’s there. . . God forbid! But

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okay, it’s a market, that’s how things are. When you enter there, it’s only ‘Romanians’. To be honest I have never seen țigani, Roma, who sell milk, fresh cheese, cream. . . There might be, I’m not saying no, but I haven’t seen, at least not in our area. So. . . What smell is there in that aisle with cheeses and milk? Of manure, of cow, of slob. . . That’s what it smells like there. If one was to be malicious, one could say something mean about ‘Romanians’ – although poor people, the peasants, who work more than anyone and feed both their relatives living in the city and themselves – but if one was to be malicious, one could say that the ‘Romanians’ smell like manure and the țigani smell like smoke.12 Because they are always around the furnace, in the houses where they live or outside, they cook in tin kettles, they have no gas cooker, so inevitably that smell. . . But those Roma [referring to Roma from a village near Rotoieni], at one point, were working with metal, with aluminium, and from all those materials that they were using, they were smelling of metal, of smoke, that specific smell. But it was through the prism of the fact that they were working with smoke and they were staying there. The Roma [person], who lives in precarious conditions does not have water, not even to wash the hands, smells. . . Because s/he has no water. (Recorded conversation, June 2015)

Cecilia’s account suggests that the olfactory as a marker of otherness operates more effectively when there is no acknowledgement of the power that the materiality of infrastructure has in generating certain smells. Her attempt to materially contextualise the ‘Roma’s smoke smell’ and the ‘Romanians’ smell of manure’ is made in a bid to disqualify the stereotypical logic employed by non-Roma in relation to Roma people. Cecilia seems to contest the ascription of the olfactory otherness position to the Roma by arguing that the material conditions of living and work are prone to make anyone subject to a ‘smelly other’ position. In her words, if operating with stereotypes by ignoring their ‘objective’ sources is unfortunate, ignoring the fact that Roma are victims, as much as non-Roma can be, of ‘olfactory stereotyping’ (given the material circumstances of their lives) is ‘malicious’. Unlike the non-Roma’s discourses, in which the association between Roma and malodours was an implicit affirmation of a self-identification with non-odours, Cecilia emphasises the role of people’s material environment in shaping the odour from their proximity, regardless of these people’s ethnic background. Thinking with Cecilia, no one can escape the oppression of her/his own material conditions which impact how one smells and, by that means, shape the ascription of ‘olfactory identities’. By saying that ‘Romanians smell like manure’ and ‘Roma smell like smoke’, Cecilia seems to intimate that if the Roma are being placed in a world of malodours, ‘Romanians’ cannot be excluded from it either. The metaphor ‘there is no smoke without fire’ is particularly interesting. While the smoke designates the ‘perception of smell’, ‘fire’ designates here

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the material evidence that justifies the perception of that smell, thus the ‘objective truth’ according to which it is ‘incontestable’ that certain people ‘carry’ certain smells. Through this metaphor, Cecilia does not imply that the differences between smells locate people in opposition to one another, as seen in non-Roma discourses. It is rather a way of enforcing that ‘if “we” [Roma] are [said to] smell bad, there are enough reasons to say that “you” [non-Roma] smell bad too’ due to material, thus ‘objective’ and concrete causes. In Cecilia’s words: ‘So. . . There are truths. But those smells do not originate from the fact that you are Romanian, Roma, peasant, living in the city. . . They originate from your lifestyle; from what you’re doing. Shall I go now and ask someone randomly, “How do I smell, of Roma? Of Romanian? Of what do I smell?”’ Cecilia explains that the alleged ‘olfactory specificities’ have their roots in the concreteness of the everyday activities that people engage in. They do not originate from their skin or other naturalised features, as my non-Roma interlocutors often suggested. While explicitly referring to the olfactory stereotypes as having ‘their seed of truth’, Cecilia suggests that smells emerge from doings that are specific to certain we-collectives, without being ‘naturally’ inherent in those that identify or are identified with the specific we-collective. In the last part of her account, more than recalling lived experiences, Cecilia conceptualised her understanding of stereotypes. According to her, while stereotypes are usually maliciously employed and imbued with discriminatory connotations, they can also be elements that make people alike. Anyone, regardless of their ethnic background, can be subjected to stereotypes. In this sense, the association between ‘Romanians’ and the smell of manure can be read as a way of pointing at ‘Romanians’’ commonality with the Roma who are constantly subjected to the position of gypsiness as olfactory otherness. And this commonality is based on the fact that both are susceptible to ‘carrying’ malodours and being stereotyped accordingly. If my conversations with non-Roma illustrate the repertoire of representations through which gypsiness is reproduced as racialised otherness and ascribed to Roma, my conversations with Roma women shed light on how they negotiate and contest this ascription. We have seen that the local understandings of the olfactory operate as ‘regulatory and normative means’ which have the power ‘of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm’ (Hall 1990: 226). But the ways in which Roma women deal with smells from the domestic realm should not be seen as exclusively framed by racist ascriptions. This chapter has considered the corporeality and materiality of the olfactory experiences and cast light on women’s capabilities, sensibilities and knowledge involved in the process of shaping the olfactory texture of their domestic space.

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Notes 1. From a medical point of view, synaesthesia is ‘a very rare condition in which the stimulation of one sensory modality is accompanied by a perception in one or more other modalities’ (Howes 2006a: 162). 2. Classen’s argument, which I am rather cautious of, is that ‘we must try to understand the values of the various senses within the context of the culture under study and not within the context of the sensory model of the anthropologist’s own culture. This means attending to the meanings encoded in all of the senses. Such attention can uncover a wealth of sensory symbolism previously overlooked by scholars and can reveal hierarchies of sensory values different from the visually dominated Western order’ (1997: 402–3). 3. Translated from the Romanian sentence ‘Să schimbăm mirosul’. 4. She was referring to the room that nobody from the Carol family was using on a daily basis and which would be my room during August and November 2014. 5. Translated from the Romanian sentence ‘Ca să dau un miros altfel in casă’. 6. Romanian currency. 7. In Romanian, water-based emulsion paint is referred to as ‘var lavabil’. 8. I also refer to this excerpt elsewhere (Racleș 2021), where I reflect on the dominant sociocultural norms and olfactory politics as local manifestations of global inequalities. The efforts invested in the production of the smell of cleanliness and in the olfactory refurbishment are discussed in relation to how the Roma women in my research reshuffle and accommodate the locally dominant norms. 9. A cylindrical spongy tool which enables the uniform spread of the emulsion paint on the walls. 10. Elsewhere (Racleș 2021), I briefly touch on the notion of ‘gospodină’, relating it to the idea that household work is a terrain of feminised labour (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010). 11. References to Cecilia’s life in Amsterdam can be also found in chapters 4 and 5. 12. Translated from the Romanian sentence: ‘Dacă e să fii răutacios, spui că românii miros a balegă și țiganii miros a fum’.

CONCLUSION



SENSING (NON-)BELONGING

In what remains of this book, I want to expand on my notion of ‘sensed belonging’ by outlining the five contributions that this term makes to (1) theorisations of belonging, (2) material culture studies from the perspective of the sensorial dimension of material forms, (3) Romani Studies with an emphasis on the negotiation of belonging across boundaries, (4) discussions about everyday racism in view of sensorial politics, and (5) considerations of the underside of modernity.

Sensed Belonging The first contribution is an advancement from the understanding of belonging as socially negotiated to a view on belonging as sensed. The analytical lens of sensed belonging stresses the role of the human sensorium and the sensorial features of material forms that constitute the inhabited and transited spaces. As such, sensed belonging refers to everyday experiences deriving from the interplay between people and everyday materialities (objects and spaces) that enable the former (a) to make and sense their place in the social world and (b) to concretise their capabilities as social actors and bodies. (a) In cognate debates on belonging, emotional investments in the processes of acquiring a sense of belonging have been particularly articulated in relation to place attachments and the feeling of being at home (Antonsich 2010; Fenster 2005; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011; Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011; Yuval-Davis 2009, 2011). But despite this acknowledgement of the emotional investments and attachments to practices, places and collective values, the profound sensorial and affective implications have been only sporadically

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considered by theorisations of belonging. Based on an empirically informed inquiry, the lens of sensed belonging reveals how people’s desire for attachments and feelings of being included or excluded crystallise on the level of the human sensorium – that is, the bodily capacity to see, hear, smell, touch and taste – which mediates and enables people to nurture these attachments. From this perspective, this book expands the understanding established in the literature about belonging as emotional investments and attachments by revealing the corporeality and materiality of these investments on the level of the domestic sphere. By seeing the domestic space as the site of relationalities on the level of which belonging is negotiated and contested, this book reveals what homemaking means in the literary sense: renovating the house, demolishing and reconstructing parts of the dwelling, bleaching the walls and preparing the emulsion paint (chapters 1 and 9), drilling the walls and hanging or removing wall-carpets (chapters 2, 3 and 4), cleaning the house and engaging in doings that preclude undesired smells from expanding (chapters 8 and 9). Emotional attachments and investments are thus not only developed as a result of a need to feel at home, but they stem from an everyday engagement with the domestic materiality. Throughout the chapters, I show that the expenditure of both physical and mental energy (cf. Lefebvre 2004) is significant in the process of fostering connections to people and places from ‘here’ and ‘there’ (chapters 4 and 5), of mediating between who one ‘is’ and who one wants to ‘be(come)’ (chapters 2 and 3) as well as between self-identifications and external ascriptions (chapters 8 and 9). The book is thus attentive to the socio-political and material context in which (non-)belonging is sensed, accounting concomitantly for people’s social and bodily capabilities to make and evaluate their and others’ belonging. (b) Furthermore, the notion of sensed belonging makes an intervention in the literature on belonging by bringing to the fore an understanding of belonging as a set of capabilities. These capabilities encompass individuals’ competences and knowledge that enable them to identify the socially approved standards of organising life and space, to evaluate themselves according to those standards and to critically appraise them. In my research, by virtue of their existence in a spatially and socially entangled world, people have the competence to distinguish between social codifications of what is a ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ way of setting up a home (see the chapters in Part I). Keeping in mind that belonging is about a dialectical movement between the individual and the collective, this competence is tantamount to being in tune with the practices and values relevant for the different others that are significant in individuals’ lives at particular points in time and space. While the tendency to adjust in accordance to collectively endorsed practices and values might not be new in theorisations of belonging, this

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book highlights the sensorial and corporeal character of these adjustments. Removing the carpets from the walls is, for instance, a thought-provoking example of an enactment of the so-called ‘modern’ standards of making a home. This enactment requires corporeal and sensorial engagement with the domestic materiality, implying doings such as removing nails from the walls, folding a wall-carpet or giving it another use or eventually replacing it with other items that are not deemed ‘backward’. Another example discussed in the book is related to the olfactory texture of the inhabited space (chapters 8 and 9). The capacity to experience odours (with which most human bodies are equipped) is linked to the capability to distinguish between socially acceptable and unacceptable household odours. This capability mobilises the bodies (particularly women’s) to perform household practices meant to preclude bad odours from expanding into the domestic space and beyond, such as washing, bleaching the walls, opening the doors and windows to allow fresh air ‘to inundate’ the space, as my research participants put it. Belonging as a set of capabilities is thus sensorially experienced and mobilised. With this approach, the book pushes forward the view on belonging as a concern with a home-space – apt to provide a feeling of familiarity, comfort and security – by focusing on what it takes to make and maintain such a space. What are the investments that people make and the challenges they deal with in the process of fostering social and physical connections to ‘a place called home’?1 What is the embodied knowledge that people mobilise and the expenditure of bodily energy involved in making and maintaining such a place? Answers to these questions might also complement the debates on belonging focused mainly on structural and power enforcements that tend to limit the possibilities for negotiating and sensing belonging.

Sensorial Material Forms The second contribution that this book makes is in the field of material culture studies, with an emphasis on the sensorial nature of social entanglements between people and objects. Following the call for research on ‘the multisensory properties of materiality’ (Howes 2006a: 169; see also Basu 2016; Pink 2012; Seremetakis 1994; Tilley 2006), this book stresses what makes the relationships between people and objects possible. It is due to people’s capacities to sensorially experience the material and social world and to the qualities of material forms (such as tactility, visibility or porosity) that people and objects shape each other’s existence and social position. Throughout the chapters, I show that homemaking processes are mediated by an engagement with objects such as wall-carpets that are visible, foldable, removable and transportable across local or national boundaries. In handling their do-

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mestic space, people deal with paintable or coverable surfaces (such as walls and floors) (Part I) and with fabrics that absorb or release odours (Part II). Sensoriality, as that which mediates the relationships between the domestic material space and its inhabitants, is a lens that enabled me to move beyond the comprehension of objects as material forms that encapsulate essential elements of well-defined identities. I followed Thomas (1991) for whom the conception of objects as illustrative of identities is ‘ultimately restrictive’ as uses of objects ‘cannot be reduced to a unitary model or process such as the chain of objectification’ (1990: 26). Thomas rejects ‘any constrictive typology of object-meaning in an abstract domain of man, subject and object’, setting the light on the historically configured ‘variety of liaisons men and women can have with things’ (ibid.). In fact, inquiring into how socio-culturally defined categories of objects classify people into different we-collectives, allowing individuals to identify each other, is an old gesture that takes us back to Mauss and Durkheim’s theorisations of collective representations (see Woodward 2007: 88–92). But by bringing the sensorial lens into the discussion about what objects do analytically and practically, this book reveals objects as partakers in embodied, emplaced and situated processes through which belonging is negotiated, rather than as containers of meaning which epitomise abstract concepts of human existence (such as belonging to a group, identity or difference). The focus on ordinary objects (as opposed to prestige or ceremonial objects) underpins this book’s endeavour to explore the interplay between people and things, beyond the view that the latter own the capacity to carry and display, as it were, the essence of the former. The manifold sensorial layers embedded in the use of wall-carpets demonstrate the uneasiness of reducing the analytical potential of objects to unambiguous objectifications of discourses about who Roma as opposed to non-Roma are. Due to their material qualities (visible, colourful, thick-textured), these objects create a homely atmosphere for those who make a home abroad and enable the reproduction of a familiar domestic environment in a newly founded household. Given their capacity to absorb and to emanate smells, they play an important role in the restoration of the olfactory texture of the domestic space. While demonstrating the importance of the material-sensorial nexus, the book does not argue that ordinary objects escape the cognitive and discursive realms. After all, objects ‘act as a bridge between mental and physical worlds’ (Saunders 2002: 181). The chapters in the first part of the book reveal how practices related to wall-carpets become constitutive of discourses about selves and others. The existence of the carpets on the walls does not materialise the inhabitants’ so-called ‘Roma identity’, neither is it a token of their ‘gypsiness’, as intimated by non-Roma and better-off Roma research participants. Yet both the presence and the absence of wall-carpets materi-

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alise various ways in which Roma people in my research deal with the ascription that equates the backwardness inscribed in wall-carpets with Roma/ țigani lives. Instead of implying that people use and associate meanings with objects in particular ways because of who they are, this book proposes to inquire how people become and are made to be somebody based on their engagement with the material world. With regards to Roma people, instead of suggesting that the ways in which they engage with everyday materiality are shaped by the fact that they are Roma/țigani, I invert this logic by proposing to think about how people become and are made to be Roma/țigani based on their engagement with the material world. In my analysis, this inversion is particularly important as it enables me to deconstruct the essentialising fashion in which wall-carpets are locally construed as a ‘țigani’ thing (chapter 3). Instead of understanding the association between wall-carpets and Roma/țigani in terms of ‘people hang wall-carpets because they are Roma/ țigani’, I treated this association made by people in Rotoieni in terms of ‘people are [i.e. made to be] țigani because they hang wall-carpets’. This emphasis decentres the focus from objects and the ways of dealing with them as epitomisers of people’s internal features, throwing light on how objects are socially envisaged and constructed into such epitomisers. Thinking about ‘how people are made to be țigani because they hang wall-carpets’ does not presume and does not fix this association between the practice of hanging wall-carpets and the racialised position of gypsiness. Instead, it forces us to consider the normative and hegemonic ‘modern’ standards of homemaking that transformed wall-carpets into tokens of backwardness and how backwardness is ascribed to the Roma, thus making people who hang wallcarpets into țigani.2 At the same time, beyond the essentialising and often racialising ascription that conceives wall-carpets as a ‘țigani’ thing, the book also reveals how wall-carpets and their sensorial qualities operate outside this ascription. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that the presence of wall-carpets can be a matter of self-identification with a common ‘aesthetic sensibility’ (MacDougall 1999) that makes a room with covered (as opposed to empty) walls into a familiar, cosy and homely environment. Furthermore, hanging wall-carpets appears as a way of contesting those normative and hegemonic ‘modern’ standards of homemaking that transform these items into obsolete and vulgar items. The concern in this analysis was not the aesthetic judgements per se of carpets on the walls, but rather the relational ways in which social meanings have been attached to wall-carpets in situations wherein their significance is contested. If, through their presence, wall-carpets trigger discourses about ‘we, Roma’, through their absence, under the conditions that delegitimise

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their use, wall-carpets accompany discourses about ‘they, the other Roma’. Chapter 3 shows that the absence of wall-carpets was part of individual negotiations of belonging to ‘modern times’ and to the ‘Romanianised Roma’ we-collective that my research participants talked about. From this perspective, sensing belonging is about removing carpets from the walls and engaging in ‘modern’ ways of setting up the inhabited space, engagement that is possible due to the aforementioned set of capabilities.

Continuities This book scrutinises objects as ‘extensions of the senses’ (Howes 2006a: 166), and as such, as constitutive parts of the processes whereby belonging is negotiated. This emphasis is meant to depart from the perspective on objects as symbols of one’s belonging or epitomisers of essential differences between different we-collectives. This is interlinked with the third contribution that this book makes through an intervention into the anthropological literature about Roma social forms. The intervention is based on a study carried out with Roma who self-identify as ‘modern/modernised’ and Romanianised Roma as opposed to the anthropological literature dominated by studies carried out with ‘traditional’ Roma populations (e.g. Berta with Gabor Roma [2019], Hașdeu with Kalderari [e.g. 2014], Tesăr with Cortorari [2012]). Studies conducted with ‘traditional Roma’ attempted to explain the persistent reproduction of Roma socialities in a world that tended to repress manifestations of historically formed social and cultural differences. These efforts turned into sophisticated theorisations about Roma moralities and worldviews as being essentially different from those of non-Roma in whose world, as the argument goes, the Roma happen to live (e.g. Gropper 1975; Okely 1983; Olivera 2012a; Williams 2003). First, these worldviews are regarded as essential for the reproduction and maintenance of group cohesion and as infusing all domains of Roma people’s social life: the gendered behaviours, the relationships to the dead, politics of marriage, as well as the ways of dealing with the material world. Second, as argued by Gay y Blasco (2011), these ethnographies view individuals primarily as performers of the group identity, whose lives are profoundly shaped by a moral system endorsed by the group with which they identify. Based on research with Roma who self-identify as modern/modernised and Romanianised Roma, this book about relationalities complicates the ‘metonymic understanding of the relationship between the person and the community’ (Gay y Blasco 2011: 446). It does so by conferring attention to singularities and variations in self-identifications, dis-identifications and the

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situatedness of the identification discourses and practices. Contingent on who were the ‘others’ involved in the ethnographic episodes that I – a nonRoma woman – and the Roma research participants were part of, as well as on the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of those episodes, the ‘we’ signposted a sense of togetherness across different kinds of boundaries (among others, ethnic, local, regional, national and class). As shown in the first part of the book, the ‘we’ varied from we-Romanian citizens and we-Romanian citizens from Moldavia (chapters 4 and 5), weRoma from Rotoieni, we-Ursari and we-Roma from țigănie (chapters 1, 2 and 3) to we-Romanianised Roma and modernised Roma (chapters 3 and 4). Without implying that these self-identifications are equally mobilised and fuelled on the everyday level, they do point at the myriad social relationships that Roma are part of, thus contributing to the formation of their understandings of themselves. In this sense, this book has developed an analysis in line with those endeavours to show the permeability of ‘ethnic’ boundaries (such as those made by Gay y Blasco [2011]; Theodosiou [2003, 2010, 2011]). This approach contributes to the cognate debates with a perspective that demystifies the conception of incontestable distinctions between Roma and non-Roma and the assumption of an internal cohesion of Roma ways of being in the world. It does so by dwelling on similarities and commonalities that create continuities between Roma and non-Roma lives. Empirically, the continuities that the book has elaborated on include, among others, views on how a ‘modern’ versus a ‘backward’ house looks (chapters 2 and 3), ways of negotiating modernity (through constant investments in the improvement of the household), challenges encountered as migrants abroad (chapters 4 and 5) and local meanings allocated to the olfactory (chapters 8 and 9). Interestingly, cultivating similarities with non-Roma is not seen by my research participants as a lack of moral integrity or a matter of inability to resist the pressure to adjust according to parameters of allegedly non-Roma civility (see the remarks about Romungro Roma made by Stewart [1997] with regard to Hungarian Rom or by Olivera [2012a] concerning Gabor Roma in Romania). I do not regard the Roma individuals’ engagement in cultivating commonalities as a matter of ‘assimilation’ or as a kind of on-stage performance aimed at gaining credits for ‘behaving’ according to, as it were, non-Roma civility. In my view, the term ‘assimilated’ reproduces old narratives about Roma as being essentially different from non-Roma and implies that, through the process of assimilation, Roma become almost unreflexively absorbed by and into mainstream society. I suggest that this perspective obscures the investments that Roma individuals make in negotiating belonging and the reflective ways in which they identify or distance themselves from the practices and discourses locally construed along continuums like modern–backward, Roma–non-Roma, at home–în străinătate and

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belonging–non-belonging. In a way, the notion ‘assimilated’ goes against the perspective that this book offers on belonging as a set of capabilities which acknowledges the Roma individuals’ efforts, investments and knowledge by means of which they reflectively negotiate belonging in situated ways. But what does the identification as Romanianised Roma stand for? From non-Roma we hear that what makes Roma in Rotoieni Romanianised is the fact that the local Roma do not share practices and traditions that are ‘“typical” for the “real” Roma’ (e.g. identifiable by their clothes or their traditional occupations). Meanwhile, when Roma in my research explain what being Romanianised is, they operate with an idiom of modernisation. Being ‘more modern’ or modernised Roma is affirmed as an attribute that makes the Roma ‘more like “Romanians”’ and less like the țigani as construed by the racialising repertoire of representations that relegate Roma to the realm of gypsiness. It is worth restating that in this book gypsiness does not refer to a set of features ascribed or assumed to be characteristic to people of Roma background, nor is it an unfortunate substitute for ‘Roma identity’. Gypsiness is the position that nobody wants to be associated with and from which everyone seeks to distance themselves. It consists of a set of racist and racialising imaginaries that construe the Roma as inescapably non-modern, uncivilised, indolent and, thus, non-belonging. So, the self-identification as Romanianised Roma overlaps with a dis-identification with the racialised position of gypsiness. Furthermore, being Romanianised Roma does not necessarily mean doing things like ‘Romanians’. The attribute ‘Romanianised’ marks a complex of features and knowledge that enables one to dissociate oneself from the position of gypsiness and from any stigmatising meaning attached to what being a țigan/-că might mean. In this sense, being ‘more modern’ (i.e. than other Roma) presupposes being ready to detach oneself from anything that might be deemed ‘țigan-specific’. As this book has shown, it entails adopting ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary standards of homemaking’ (cf. Blunt and Dowling 2006: 118), for instance by removing wall-carpets or, as I argue elsewhere, engaging in choice-based marriage-making practices (Racleș 2020).

Racialisation and Sensing Non-Belonging The fourth contribution made by this book is that it provides a new entry point to discuss everyday dynamics of racialisation through the angle of sensed non-belonging. Applying the theoretical lens of sensory politics to the sociological and anthropological debates on belonging, the second part of the book reveals the intricacies involved in negotiations of belonging. If the notion of sensed belonging sheds light on people’s sets of capabilities and the possibility of the concretisation of those capabilities, sensed non-

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belonging is about the lack of societal recognition of individuals’ capabilities, about experiences that fuel their feeling of being ‘out of place’ and about injuries that derive from these experiences. I have argued that the local process of negotiating belonging on the level of everyday life has major sensorial implications. Despite the abundance of public representations of Roma as noisy, ostentatiously visible or colourful and filthy, remarkably little attention is paid to the sensuous intricacies of racialisation processes (but see Ivasiuc and Racleș 2019; Theodosiou and Brazzabeni 2010; to a certain extent Bakó 2014). By looking at how smells are made into markers of non-belonging otherness, this book unravels the ways in which racialising dynamics operate and become material on the everyday level. Consistent with the scrutiny of the olfactory as the most vilified sensorial category in modernity (Howes 2006a; see also Lefebvre 1991: 197), chapters 6 and 7 show how the olfactory operates as a device through which the belonging of Roma is contested and negated. Such contestations stem from a racist logic that buttresses imaginaries and vocabularies through which gypsiness is reproduced as the filthy exteriority, construing Roma as unrighteous, indolent and, thus, non-belonging. In this sense, the chapters in Part II provide theoretical and empirical insights that might add to Critical Romani Studies, showing how non-Roma self-affirm a dominant position by projecting inferiority onto Roma people’s domestic spaces and bodies (see also Cortés and End 2019; Vincze 2014), within a sociocultural and hierarchical power configuration that predicates who is morally filthy and who is not. At the same time, based on my conversations with and the olfactory diaries written by Roma research participants, the analysis in chapters 8 and 9 sheds light on how people internalise, respond to or contest the racialising repertoire of representations of Roma in terms of ‘olfactory otherness’. Thus, in addition to the examination of how the olfactory operates within the hegemonic and racist ascriptions, chapters 8 and 9 tackle how the olfactory acts outside this framework. We have seen, for instance, that the olfactory plays an important role in carving the sensorial texture of the domestic space and, by that means, in creating and maintaining a pleasant atmosphere at home. Another aspect that the perspective on sensed non-belonging highlights is significant for human geography debates about the domestic space as a place of self-realisation, where people negotiate relations with others who live within and outside the confines of the domestic space (e.g. Blunt and Dowling 2006). Apart from reflecting such nuances, this book has also pointed at the tyranny of the sensoriality and materiality of the domestic space. A society in which one’s inhabited space is deemed to be the palpable manifestation of individual industriousness and righteousness3 is prone to disregard the fact that the precariousness of one’s living is often a con-

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sequence of structural racism. From this perspective, instead of acting as something that provides shelter, comfort and security, the domestic space – when precarious – comes to surreptitiously act as the materialisation of one’s laziness and unrighteousness. At this point, the angle of the private– public dichotomy becomes irrelevant. Due to their material and sensorial qualities, domestic spaces (particularly houses) can hardly be defined as private. From the outside, houses can be watched through or beyond fences, providing non-inhabitants with the means to develop racist imaginaries and discourses about who the inhabitants are. The sounds and the smells have the capacity to connect inhabitants to those who merely transit a neighbourhood, enabling the latter to access the intimate sphere of doings that the former engage in (or not). Concerns tackled throughout the chapters of this book echo aspects that the literature on social and spatial marginalisation/marginality examines in detail (e.g. Picker 2013, 2017; Pulay 2017; Vincze and Raț 2013) by combining matters of structural racism, precarity of housing and racialising dynamics. The sensoriality of precarious ways of making a living offers a new entry point to these topics. It provides a means to deconstruct the locally constructed link between the quality of inhabitants and the quality of the inhabited space, and to focus more on the everyday dynamics that racialise this link. Within this framework of unjust assumptions, according to which how one’s house ‘looks’ reflects its inhabitants’ worthiness and righteousness, smells appear as markers of racial difference. This empirical finding provides a means to understand how non-belonging is sensed. Experiences of hearing comments about Roma as ‘filthy’, or sensing how others wrinkle their noses when meeting you and entering your house, are in this book revealed as ways in which Roma sense non-belonging.

Unattainability of Belonging The unattainability of belonging is a notion that, as I allude to in the introduction, could serve as a means of analytically grasping the tension that I sensed empirically between, on the one hand, the struggle for the societal recognition of belonging of those construed as non-belonging and, on the other, the constant relegation of those who struggle (for recognition) to the realm of non-belonging. Recognition here means the societal acknowledgement of a living together, that is to say of the commonalities and similarities across the Roma–non-Roma divide. This type of recognition surpasses the claim for recognition embedded in policy projects, legal frameworks and other forms of politics of belonging. Instead, as normative as it might sound, it is about presuming and giving prominence to the efforts the Roma invest

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in negotiations of belonging and to the set of capabilities that buttress those efforts. Lacking this kind of societal recognition is basically how Roma people sense the position of non-belonging socially and historically allocated to them. Chapters 6 and 7 have shown not only how belonging is unrecognised, but also how it is blatantly denied by the racialising repertoire of representations that construe Roma as innately lazy, backward and uncaring about the relationships and spaces they are part of. In this sense, I see the lack of societal recognition as one of the main conditions of what I call the unattainability of belonging. Given the dynamics of constituting gypsiness that have historically relied on the construction of Roma bodies and lives as being ‘behind the times’, uncivilised and unable to cope, as it were, with a continually progressing world, the notion of unattainability of belonging becomes more concrete in relation to the emic category ‘modern times’. In relation to modernisation, unattainability of belonging is about the tension between Roma’s efforts and investments in negotiating belonging to ‘modern times’, and their obstinate exclusion from ‘modern times’. Paradoxical or not, we find ourselves talking and thinking about belonging in contexts in which one’s belonging is not a given; when the script establishes that one does not think and do things similarly enough to those who belong by default. As Probyn puts it, ‘if you have to think about belonging, perhaps you are already outside’ (1996: 8). From this point of view, negotiations of belonging are made on the grounds of the unachievable. If one were recognised as belonging, one would not need to negotiate belonging. Yet, despite the promise that by making the expected efforts one would be recognised as belonging, this recognition is not supposed to come at all. It is precisely by enforcing practices and discourses about others’ non-belonging that positions of power and unquestioned belonging are maintained. From this standpoint, in relation to negotiations of belonging to what people in Rotoieni called ‘modern times’, I find the notion of ‘modernisation’ (as often employed by Roma people in my research) more useful than ‘modernity’. Modernisation is thus a process of becoming modern, but one that is never supposed to end. Looking at the broader global map of hegemonies, the urge to become modernised is an eternal condition imposed on some (e.g. on Roma by Europe or on Eastern Europe by Western Europe) without whom others’ affirmation of modernity would not be possible. As a perpetual process, modernisation presupposes the unalterable condition of liminality of the subjected parties, and one of self-affirmed non-ambiguity of those who, underpinned by transnational public and political narratives, constitute themselves as modern by default. Hence, the urge to belong to ‘modern times’ implies a constant tension between (a lack of ) recognition and acts attempting to reach an ontologically unattainable status.

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Relevance beyond Scholarly Debates Apart from the contributions to these scholarly debates, this book comprises empirically based considerations that could be relevant for anti-racism organisations and Roma rights activists whose efforts are directed at fighting ‘the wide acceptance of antigypsyism in Europe’ (Cortés and End 2019: 20). The term ‘antigypsyism’, first used by Romani activists in the Soviet Union in the 1920s (ibid.: 21), has been reinserted in their work by scholars and activists in a bid to point at a specific form of racism that targets Roma people. It has been argued that the perspective on antigypsyism allows for the examination of the ‘discriminating social structures and violent practices . . . which have a degrading and ostracizing effect and which reproduce structural disadvantages’ (Rostas, Carrera and Vosyliūtė 2017: 71). Moreover, the lens of antigypsyism is prone to enable what Cortés and End called ‘a paradigm shift’ in policy making ‘from a social inclusion approach to a comprehensive anti-racist approach’ (2019: 22). While it does not engage directly with these debates or with the nomenclature of ‘antigypsyism’, this book provides insights into the everyday manifestations of those ‘discriminating social structures and violent practices’ (Rostas, Carrera and Vosyliūtė 2017: 71) and their affective implications. The racialising repertoire of representations of ‘olfactory otherness’ that Roma are subjected to from an early age causes deep injuries. But it is hardly possible to capture or measure these injuries, for instance through barometers that could give policy makers or Roma rights activists a sense of the deep impact that such injuries have on Roma individuals’ school careers, employment or health. The quantitative research on which policy projects are often based can tell us hardly anything, for example, about how Roma pupils prefer keeping their distance from school rather than having to deal with peers’ or teachers’ comments about their alleged ‘need to go home and take a bath’ (as Roma individuals in my research reported). Hardly any national evaluation will tell us anything about the offences that Roma suffer on a daily basis and about the injuries produced by the disdain with which Roma are treated in hospitals, shops or public institutions, for the more or less straightforwardly communicated reason that they would need to take a bath before being attended to. Such experiences deepen the sense of non-belonging in affective ways that can hardly be captured by research or addressed by policy projects. Yet they are crucial for understanding how Roma are disempowered and made to lose confidence in the social structure and public institutions that should be supporting their children’s education, providing means for decent housing, employment and health care, and more generally warranting them a safe place in the world. In this sense, the ethnography-based discussions about how olfactory politics operate locally and racialise Roma

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bodies and domestic spaces might provide social analysts and policy makers with a telling account about the affective dimension of structural racism and discrimination. To the same extent to which this book is about moments of impotence, it is also about instantiations of intention and agency. The perspective on belonging as a set of capabilities throws light on the motivations of and investments made by Roma in making homes and (re)building houses to inhabit, despite the structural circumstances that maintain, racialise and spatialise social exclusion (see Vincze and Raț 2013). The approach in this book might inform the work of actors involved in housing-related projects/initiatives due to its focus on what Roma do and accomplish, rather than on what they need. One example are the constant investments in building and renovating their houses, even while living abroad, that materialise Roma individuals’ capabilities. Pointing at the capabilities involved in the processes of making homes, both in the literary and metaphorical sense, is not futile given the historically embedded construction of Roma as unable and unwilling to integrate, to settle or to dwell somewhere. Making visible Roma individuals’ capabilities and knowledge that go into making social and material places of living is thus crucial for the deconstruction of the misconception according to which Roma would bear the responsibility of the racialising practices to which they are subjected (a misconception addressed, for instance, in Kóczé and Rövid [2019]). The material culture vantage point from which this book discusses ways of sensing (non-)belonging echoes themes of relevance for practitioners, organisations and experts that deal with the cultural heritage and museal ethnographic representations of Roma histories. By detaching itself from the textualist and ocularcentric perspective on objects, this book departs from the longstanding construction of artefacts as symbols or carriers of sociocultural meanings that can be decoded. Regarded this way, objects have for too long been utilised as material forms that contain something of the essence of an identity, a collective way of being or worldview, all abstract conceptions of human coexistence. It suffices to look at the display practices of ethnographic museums from the 1800s that are historically entrenched in European colonial history with its fascination for the non-European ‘others’ (see, e.g., Basu 2016). By prioritising the sensorial dimension of objects and its effect on human–non-human interplay, this book provides a means to think about material forms in a more nuanced way. More than representing and enabling us to ‘see’ parts of who we and others are, about how we and others do things, objects participate in the performances and discourses that we elaborate in relation to who we are and want to become. This analytical lens makes us aware of the embodied character of discourses and politics of identity and belonging. It is from this perspective that curators and initia-

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tors of museums, who assume the task to illustrate ‘the Roma history’ and inform the broad Roma and non-Roma public about Roma ‘identity/identities’ (for such museums, see Marushiakova and Popov 2016; Sambati 2017, 2019), might find the analysis of ordinary objects insightful. This analysis has sought to de-essentialise and de-ethnicise the use, rejection and resignification of objects, without pretending to de-materialise the manifold and situated relationships that we establish with the material world. Furthermore, through the light it throws on the different self-identification practices, the approach to objects in this book might call attention to the perils engendered in museal practices. Among these perils are the homogenisation and exoticisation of people’s manifold modes of relating to objects, through the allocation of fixed and ahistorical meanings to what are deeply embodied and contextual material practices. In 2012, when I started to think about belonging as part of a PhD project, my intention was to explore experiences of belonging. Yet my field research soon proved to be about the conditions of unattainability of belonging and, thus, about Roma and sensed non-belonging. In this sense, the study this book is based on became to a great extent about non-Roma. I sought to critically uncover a few ways in which the narrative about ‘they, the țigani’ derived into an implicit affirmation of non-gypsiness through references to civilisedness, industriousness and righteousness (chapter 7). Construing the Roma as those who are uncaring of the spaces they inhabit and the material conditions they live in, as ‘those who smell’, as those who uncritically and, for instance, stubbornly still hang wall-carpets, is in fact one way through which non-Roma self-affirm as doing and being the opposite. Such narratives become part of a process of self-affirming one’s own belonging, requiring a figure that is essentially and irreparably non-belonging. Hence, the racialising discourses about Roma as backward, work-shy and ‘behind modern times’ that this book has aimed to deconstruct have a lot to do with the shades in which non-Roma paint themselves. This is also a question of self-critique that we, as scholars without a Roma background, need to speak about. Without reflecting on our positionality, non-Roma social analysts (those whose knowledge, bodies and lives have not been systemically and systematically subjected to racialising practices and discourses) will continue to contribute to the reproduction of patronising narratives about Roma. In the absence of nuanced self-criticism and constant questioning of the ways in which we generate and represent knowledge, we will keep reproducing the racialising repertoire that ‘essentialises, naturalises and fixes the subjugated position of Roma in Europe while whiteness remains invisible and unmarked (Imre, 2005)’ (in Kóczé 2018a: 460). Conversely, following Kóczé and Trehan (2009), what scholars and more generally ‘Europeans living side by side with their Romani neighbours’ need

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to do ‘is to acknowledge and humanise their common lives and realities’ (2009: 71). More than nine years have passed since the conversation that I had with Manuela, the Roma woman who told me that the non-governmental organisation which built houses for a few Roma families in the area wanted ‘to modernise them’. Back then, as an MA student in anthropology, non-Roma, tempted to think in rather binary terms, my focus concentrated on the ‘we/ they’ dichotomy, tending to believe that ‘we’ meant ‘we, the Roma’ while ‘they’ referred to ‘they, the non-Roma’. But these socially, politically and historically constructed categories are far from being that clear-cut and easily identifiable. Today it is the question ‘don’t we?’ from Manuela’s statement ‘We also have to be like the others, don’t we?’ (see the Introduction) that I understand as being salient. This tag question, which might also have been ironic without me realising it, is related to that set of capabilities that enable her to negotiate belonging. It is related to the concomitant repetition and contestation of ‘modern’ homemaking standards. Reminiscent of Sorana’s mother’s attitude towards wall-carpets: ‘So, if they’re not in fashion anymore, but I still like them, what?’ Manuela’s tag question also encompasses a reference to the coercion that is implied in processes of negotiating belonging. These processes are coercive in that they require efforts to keep up with expectations, local ideas of normality and appropriateness, while eschewing the inequalities, vulnerabilities and precariousness that prevent some from doing so. All in all, the research on which this book is based, and which initially sought to empirically inquire into the sense of belonging, turned out to be more about the urge to belong, about the efforts Roma people make in order to (be socially acknowledged as) belong(ing). At the same time, this book turned out to be equally about non-Roma individuals’ contribution to the reproduction of the conditions of and narratives about Roma people’s supposed non-belonging. Yet, while showing the tensions emerging from Roma people’s constantly contested belonging, this book testifies beyond anti-Roma sensory politics. It testifies to people’s capabilities to make, negotiate and claim belonging, to create vocabularies and imaginaries of lives together in which the materiality of everyday life actively participates, framing the affective texture of that ‘home where nobody can throw you out from’.

Notes 1. The phrase ‘a place called home’ is famous due to Doreen Massey’s essay thus entitled (1994).

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2. As mentioned in chapters 2 and 3, non-Roma also engage in the practice of covering their walls (both with the type of carpets analysed in this book and other kinds of rugs). In the last two decades or so, the ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ type of wall-carpet has come to be seen as old-fashioned and obsolete. 3. For see a detailed discussion about ‘the morality of domestic space’ in Romania, see, for example, Nicolescu 2011.

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INDEX

absence, 18, 68, 76, 116, 194 of ingredients, 18, 117 of wall-carpets/of carpets from the walls, 14, 17–18, 67–68, 70–71, 74–76, 79–81, 184–86 absences, 10, 13–15, 69–70 aesthetic sensibility/sensibilities, 50, 58–61, 67, 185 aesthetic(s), 1, 34, 50–51, 56, 71, 141 antigypsyism, 192 Ardeal, 78–80, 82n10, 89–91, 93, 105n6 ascription(s), 14, 71, 73, 176, 178, 182, 185 of olfactory identities, 128, 178 racist/racialising, 19, 150, 168, 179, 185, 189 aspiration(s), 9, 18, 54, 70, 92, 103, 159, 170, 175 asymmetries, 17, 33 between the researcher and ‘the researched’/the research participants, 36, 38–39 power, 35 atmosphere(s), 58, 168, 172, 189 familiar, 58, 66 home/homely, 56, 60, 65–66, 184 inside/within the house/within the inhabited space, 57–58, 60, 65, 74 (with regards to smells), 155, 160, 162–63, 171 attachment(s), 3–4, 58, 79, 182 to collective values, 3, 181 emotional, 4, 18, 117, 182 immaterial, 3–4

to locality, 3, 5, 9, 85 material, 3–5, 83–84, 86, 114, 117 place/to place(s), 1, 3, 9, 85, 181 to practices, 3, 56, 58–59, 69, 181 backwardness, 14, 68, 70–72, 142, 185 signifiers/tokens of, 49, 185 belonging, 1–11, 14–15, 17, 20, 28, 35, 38–39, 42, 58, 67, 69, 83–84, 98–99, 118, 128, 147, 181–84, 186–89, 191, 194–95 affirmation of, 18 claims of, 20, 80 contestations of, 20 enactments of, 13 feeling of, 99, 104 materiality/materialities of, 2, 17 to ‘modern times’, 70, 75, 80–81, 186, 191 narrative(s) of, 18, 117 negotiation(s) of, 1, 3, 6, 17, 20, 75, 188, 191 politics of, 102, 190 sense of, 5–6, 50, 99, 113, 181, 195 sensed, 4, 17, 20, 181–82, 188 as a set of capabilities, 5, 20, 182–83, 188, 193 together, 1–2, 67 unattainability of, 20, 190–91, 194 Benarrosh-Orsoni, Norah, 14, 107 Berta, Péter, 12–13, 72, 82n6 bodies, 12, 17, 40, 125, 131, 140, 145, 152–52, 157–58, 165, 171, 181, 183

INDEX

houses/households and, 19, 135, 140, 145, 177 racialised, 84, 127, 152 Roma/Roma peoples’, 1, 17, 19, 129, 189, 191, 193–94 and spaces, 16, 19, 129 body, 12, 64, 115, 131, 135–36, 137n6, 145, 160, 165, 170, 174 (researcher’s), 34, 40, 42 -space continuity, 145 Brickell, Katherine, 82n4, 84, 104, 114 capability/capabilities, 181–83, 186, 188– 89, 191, 193, 195. See also belonging: as a set of capabilities Roma individuals’, 4, 193 women’s, 179 civilisation, 10, 76–77, 170 civilisedness, 75–76, 78–79, 194 Classen, Constance, 16, 125, 152, 154, 170, 180n2 cleanliness, 31, 99, 163, 170, 172 ‘look of ’, 172 sensation of, 157–58 smell/smell of, 172–75, 180n8 standards of, 109, 142, 158, 170 commonalities, 1, 9, 11, 38, 79, 187, 190 (between researcher and research participants), 26, 35–37 between Roma and non-Roma, 37–38 commonality, 2–4, 6, 37–39, 179 quest for, 4 ‘terrain(s) of ’, 2, 86, 142 connections, 5, 17, 19, 54, 84, 103, 114, 170, 183 between ‘here’ and ‘there’, 84 immaterial, 3 with/to people and places, 114, 182 translocal, 84, 104, 105n10, 107, 121 contestation(s), 20, 65–67, 121, 158, 189 of the local meanings of the olfactory, 19, 42 of (‘modern’) standards, 67, 195 continuities, 10, 65, 165, 186–87 corporeality, 25, 104 and materiality, 19, 83–84, 86, 179, 182 Critical Romani Studies, 189 cultural studies, 9

211

Datta, Ayona, 84, 104 dialogue(s), 33, 36, 39–40, 148 difference, 9–10, 13, 38, 44, 57, 75, 113, 127, 132, 135, 139–40, 150, 184 affirmation of, 78, 127 markers of, 136, 142 olfactory, 144 racial/racialised, 136, 144, 147, 190 ‘racialising criteria of ’, 131 representation(s) of, 134, 137n6 between Roma and non-Roma households, 17, 131–32 differences, 1, 5, 9–10, 35, 37–38, 67, 70, 105n16, 145, 148, 177, 179, 186 discourse(s), 2, 5, 7, 13, 40, 48, 50, 65, 71–73, 75, 78, 81, 86, 107, 127–28, 130–31, 136, 142, 150, 161, 176–79, 184–87, 191, 193 local, 67, 131 offensive, 19, 125 political, 16, 126 racialising/racist, 16, 127, 130, 133, 147, 190, 194 distance(s), 7, 9–10, 31–32, 35–36, 67, 70, 72, 77, 79, 88, 104, 148, 192 physical, 3 social, 68, 70–71 temporal, 40 distinctiveness, 1, 8–12 doings, 4, 31, 140–142, 144–46, 149, 151, 156, 162–64, 171, 175, 179, 182–83, 190 corporeal, 145 physical, 63 dor, 107, 117–19 Durkheim, Émile, 11–13, 184 emotion(s), 40, 50, 86, 107, 116, 118, 129, 150, 157–58, 168. See also belonging: emotional emulsion paint, 46, 100, 180n9, 182 water-based, 2–4, 143, 171–73, 180n7 liming/whitewash, 171–72 enactment(s), 2, 5, 12–13, 18, 44–45, 50, 71, 75, 86, 103, 107, 148, 183 Engebrigtsen, Ada, 6, 90, 126, 148–49, 151 Essed, Philomena, 132–33, 152

212

ethics, 25, 40, 108 commensal/of commensality, 118–21 of living, 108, 110, 112 of providing food, 108, 121 of sociability, 13 ethnic/ethnic minority background, 16, 30, 49, 77, 138–39, 148, 179 ethnographic episode(s), 36, 38, 45–46, 48, 187 ethnographic moment, 32 ethnographic research, 8, 26, 40 ethnography, 29, 35, 39–41, 194 sensuousness of, 40–41 Europe, 1, 7, 16, 27, 71, 78, 89, 126, 128, 137n5, 191–92, 194 everyday (the), 1, 13–14, 45 everyday life, 9, 41, 64, 84, 112, 126, 132–33, 144, 152, 169, 173, 189, 195 experience(s), 3–5, 20n2, 37–38, 40–42, 60, 83, 85, 90–91, 95, 102, 114–16, 118, 121, 153, 155, 170, 179, 181, 189–90, 192, 194 abroad, 91, 110 bodily, 50, 160 of discrimination, 37 eating/of eating, 115, 118 as field data, 42 fieldwork, 32 of foreignness, 121 migration, 114 olfactory, 19, 42, 140, 153–56, 160–61, 163–64, 166, 179 sensorial/sensory, 42, 50, 58, 114–16, 118, 154–56, 158 feeling(s), 8, 33, 39, 61, 79, 98, 100, 102–03, 112–13, 118–19, 126, 129, 157–58, 164, 182, 189. See also belonging: feeling of and nonbelonging: feeling of of being at home/home, 4, 117, 181 of deservingness, 95 of discontent, 92 of doing better than other Roma, 79–80 of estrangement, 18, 91, 116–17 of familiarity, 58, 104, 183 of safety/security, 101, 103, 183

INDEX

field, 39–42 data/material, 34, 42, 128 diary/notes, 33, 46, 56, 61–62, 76, 78, 142, 150, 156, 163, 173 ‘of extraction’, 34–35 research, 2, 26–29, 31, 39, 41, 42, 44, 86, 131, 170, 194 site(s), 6, 41 of writing, 32 fieldwork, 7, 16–17, 25, 31–32, 36, 40, 42 Fortier, Anne Marie, 2–3, 6, 20n3 Gay y Blasco, Paloma, 29, 85, 186–87 Gheorghe, Nicolae, 28 gospodină, 174, 176–77, 180n10 Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación, 35–37 Gypsies, 8–9, 17, 27–29, 85–86, 111, 126, 128–29, 148 gypsiness, 6, 18–19, 41, 68, 77, 81, 126–30, 132, 135–36, 137n2, 140–41, 145–47, 150, 152, 168, 179, 184–85, 188–89, 191 Hall, Stuart, 129–30, 132, 137n6, 152, 161 Hancock, Ian, 7, 29 Hașdeu, Iulia, 12, 25 home, 4–5, 7–8, 18, 34, 49, 56–57, 67, 72–73, 79, 83–84, 90–91, 94–95, 98–104, 107–09, 113–22, 146, 159, 163, 165, 172, 182–83, 192, 195n abroad, 98, 184, 187–88 at, 46, 59, 95, 99, 103, 117, 122n4, 165, 168, 181–82, 189 contiguous, 18, 104 food, 18 ideal, 49, 72, 159 ‘is where nobody can throw you out from’, 195 sense of, 58, 121 taste(s) of, 107, 116, 118–19 untastefulness of, 113–14 homemaking, 7, 58, 60, 72, 84, 100, 103, 182 engagements, 18, 86, 105 processes/processes of, 5, 17–18, 67, 84, 99, 104, 183

INDEX

standards/standards of, 5, 14–16, 50, 66–67, 69, 159, 173, 185, 195 homes, 4–5, 10, 65, 72, 85–86, 104, 107, 154, 193 Howes, David, 16, 145, 148, 153–55, 166n1, 169 human geography, 5, 155, 189 identification(s), 6, 13, 79, 98, 127, 187–88 identities, 108, 148, 151n5, 170, 184, 194 olfactory, 128, 149, 178 Roma, 9, 85 social, 8, 116 identity, 3–4, 9–10, 12, 29, 37–38, 69–70, 84, 86, 104, 111, 113, 119, 130–31, 144–45, 149, 155, 184, 186, 193 collective, 2, 60, 148 ethnic, 49, 77, 149 Lipovans’, 138 Roma, 6, 13, 45, 126, 184, 188, 194 inequalities, 38, 180n8, 195 knowledge, 13, 17, 21n16, 31, 35–36, 40–43, 46, 48, 65, 67, 81, 83–85, 132, 136, 152, 168, 182, 188, 194 aesthetic, 60, 67 embodied, 4, 183 ethnographic, 8 generated/generating, 32, 35–36, 38, 41 insider, 12 production, 35 racialised, 136, 137n6, 140, 142, 144 reservoir(s), 152, 160 (Roma research participants’), 33, 39, 44, 63, 95, 179, 188, 193 sensorial, 134 social, 118, 168 Knowles, Caroline, 84 Kóczé, Angéla, 193–94 Lefebvre, Henri, 63–65 Lemon, Alaina, 7, 17, 72, 75, 85–86, 128, 131, 137n3, 140 Lipovans, 82n8, 137–39, 145, 147–51 locality, 3, 5, 8–9, 18, 41, 83, 85–86, 88, 90, 99, 113, 176. See also attachment(s): to locality

213

Matache, Margareta, 29, 48n4 material culture, 10, 15, 35, 42, 82n4, 84, 193 (the field of ), 5, 11, 21n15, 47, 181, 183 material-sensorial nexus, 15, 17, 40–42, 184 materialisation, 15, 17, 117, 137n2, 190 of everyday racism, 130 of racialising discourses/dynamics, 130, 133 of racist slurs, 132 of smells, 160 of translocal connections, 84 materialities, 4, 14, 17, 181 materiality, 5, 15, 18, 41–42, 63, 67, 69, 83, 99, 107, 129, 131, 135, 141, 160, 162, 178, 182–83 affective, 18, 107, 113 of belonging, 2, 42, 86 domestic, 5, 17, 104, 129, 133–34, 141, 153, 157, 182–83 household/household’s/of household, 129, 175, 177 everyday/of everyday/of everyday life, 1, 9, 12, 14, 84, 99, 185, 195 of space(s), 17, 65, 84–85, 100, 140, 152, 161, 190 migration, 7–8, 16, 27, 92, 114, 128 Miller, Daniel, 15, 56 ‘modern times’, 1, 17–18, 67, 70–71, 75, 80–81, 186, 191, 194 modernisation, 10, 70–71, 76, 128, 170, 188, 191 modernity, 16, 66, 70–72, 75, 82n4, 125, 181, 187, 189, 191 Moldavia, 6, 26–27, 48n2, 78–80, 82n11, 86–90, 93, 105n16, 106n19, 138, 187 movement, 3, 11, 17, 20n3, 31–32, 42, 50, 64, 83–84, 104, 107, 113, 153, 169, 182 naturalisation, 17, 132, 134 of racial difference, 136, 144 of smells, 127, 133 of socio-economic divides, 6, 126 Netherlands, the, 8, 91, 103–104, 106n24

214

INDEX

non-belonging, 1, 9, 15, 20, 35, 102, 104, 126, 128–29, 147, 181–83, 192, 195 feeling of, 100, 188–91 sensed, 188–89, 194 not-doings, 144–47, 149, 151, 153, 160 objects, 5, 10–14, 18, 36, 49, 53, 56, 58, 62, 69–70, 73, 81, 84, 99, 107, 117– 18, 134, 160, 181, 183–86, 193–94 ceremonial, 13 everyday, 9, 14 domestic, 5–6, 72 material, 1, 10–11, 20n9, 47–48, 160 ordinary, 13–14, 20n10, 184, 194 prestige/prestigious, 13 as symbols, 13, 16 Okely, Judith, 8–9 olfactory (the), 16–17, 19, 41, 125–30, 133, 136, 144, 154, 168, 170, 173, 175, 177–78, 189 local meanings of/local understandings of, 33–34, 42, 129, 132, 152–53, 166, 168, 175, 179, 187 as racist insignia, 128, 137n1 olfactory diaries, 16, 42, 130, 153–57, 159, 161–63, 165–66, 168, 171, 189 olfactory prejudices/stereotypes, 128, 170, 177, 179 Olivera, Martin, 9, 11–12, 26, 71, 187 ordinariness, 6, 14 otherness, 16, 70–71, 127, 147–50, 189 gypsiness as, 132 marker(s) of, 17, 19, 178, 189 modernisation and, 70 olfactory, 17, 41, 147, 168, 176, 178–79, 189, 192 racialised, 19, 126, 129–30, 137n2, 179 racialised position(s) of, 130, 133 Pfaff-Czarnecka, Joanna, 2–4, 20n2, 152 Pink, Sarah, 41, 153–54, 156, 158, 169 politics, 13–14, 72, 126–27, 186, 193. See also belonging: politics of anti-Roma, 16, 126 of everyday life, 127, 173 of exclusion, 129 of perception/of sensory reception, 127, 154, 173

sensorial/sensory, 15, 181, 188 of translocal place-making, 104 of writing, 29 positionality, 32, 194 power, 66–67, 89, 130, 173, 178, 183 asymmetries, 35 configuration, 189 imbalances, 7, 126 ‘of inner compulsion’, 130, 179 -knowledge, 83 positions, 121, 177, 191 relations, 16, 20, 121, 149, 169 practices, 6, 11, 14, 28, 36, 40, 43, 46, 61, 72, 75, 77, 80, 84, 98–99, 114, 126–27, 129–130, 132–35, 138, 145, 147, 149–50, 152, 171, 173, 175–76, 182, 187–88, 191, 192–94. See also attachment(s): to practices consumption, 50, 160 domestic, 3, 19, 49, 79, 80, 165, 171, 174–75 household, 1–2, 10, 34, 50, 133, 170, 175, 183 place-making, 104 racialising/racist, 16, 130, 147, 193–94 related to wall-carpets, 17–18, 65, 184 of self-identification, 14, 194 of similarity, 10 presence(s), 14, 17, 26–27, 38, 76, 104 aesthetic, 49 material, 10, 14 (researcher’s), 32, 34, 40, 46 ‘silent’, 69 (smells as), 158, 165 (wall-carpets’), 17, 48, 56, 58, 65–67, 184–85 Probyn, Elspeth, 2–3, 108, 113, 121, 191 racism, 131, 192 against Roma, 16, 126 everyday, 125, 130–31, 133, 181 structural, 190, 193 recognition, 1, 5–6, 10, 20, 136 societal, 20, 81, 189–91 representation(s), 4, 29, 32, 40, 46, 64, 84, 114, 129, 132, 144, 154, 156, 161, 193 collective, 20n10 contestation of, 158

INDEX

of difference, 129, 134, 137n6 public, 2, 189 racialising/racialising repertoire(s) of, 19, 125, 137, 161, 188–89, 191–92 regimes of, 129–30 repertoire of, 19, 129–30, 132, 142, 151–152, 158, 179 Romani Studies, 29, 181 Romanianised Roma, 6, 13, 18, 70–71, 75–77, 80–81, 186–88 ‘Romanians’, 14, 20n13, 30–31, 38, 60, 63, 70, 75–78, 80–81, 112, 138, 147–49, 151, 178–79, 188 self-identification(s), 9, 14, 18, 44, 50, 70–71, 76–78, 80, 81n2, 150, 178, 182, 185–88 senses, 4–5, 16, 21, 41, 115, 117–18, 125, 127, 154, 158, 165, 166n1, 168, 170, 180n1, 186 anthropology of, 153–54 classification of, 21 inseparability of, 168–69 ‘lower’, 21, 169 Seremetakis, Nadia, 115–19, 127, 158, 173 similarities, 9–10, 13–14, 35, 69–70, 81n2, 112, 187, 190 similarity, 9–10, 81, 113

215

Spain, 8, 37, 41, 51, 58, 65, 91–94, 101, 103–04, 106n17, 107, 109, 112–13, 117–21 Stewart, Michael, 84–85, 111, 126–27, 187 Strathern, Marilyn, 32, 34–35, 46 Tesăr, Cătălina, 12, 20n7, 31, 76, 186 texture(s), 4, 30, 58, 84, 95, 116, 154, 158, 184, 194 home, 83 of carpets, 63 olfactory, 41, 134, 142, 146, 153, 158, 162, 166, 171, 174–76, 179, 183–84 sensorial, 42, 189 Theodosiou, Aspasia, 20n4, 85–86, 187 țigănie, 30–37, 43–44, 48n7, 52, 57, 63–64, 74, 76–78, 156, 166, 176–77, 187 translocality, 83–84 Transylvania, 12, 27, 38, 72, 82n10, 105n6 Ursari/Ursari Roma, 2, 6, 13, 20n5, 26–27, 43–44, 48, 69, 72, 75–76, 80–81, 187 women (Roma), 12, 17, 50, 54, 63, 65, 99, 113, 143, 145, 166, 168, 171, 173–74, 176, 179, 180n8