| Text only | |||||
 |
 |
||||
|
|||||
PhD Candidate in Anthropology
E-mail: |
|
Personal website: |
|
Address : |
Department of Anthropology |
Personal Post-Fieldwork Weblog
Personal Fieldwork Weblog (2007)
Network of Concerned Anthropologists
politics, power and human resourcefulness; ‘postsocialist’ transformations, Romania and Eastern Europe; EU integration; personhood, ethics and morality; food production, politics and activism; development issues and the history of economics; practice-based learning and radical education; social theory and 20th century philosophy; representation, language and social semiotics.
Key words
European Union (EU) policy, EU standard regimes and integration, policy effects, state, exchange, market, livelihood strategies, power, personhood, subjectivity, morality, hope, time, consumption
Tentative Thesis Title
EU Integration as Reconfiguration of Value: Human Work and Resourcefulness in the Southern Carpathian Mountains of Romania
Going beyond both 'postsocialism' and the policy discourses of EU integration, my thesis focuses on the (im)possibility of action from the perspective of vulnerable rural populations in a mountainous region (Carpathians) of Romania. Throughout fieldwork, I followed the food commodities produced in this area and investigated how agrarian policies affected their livelihoods by engaging with policy-makers' life worlds as well as with the life worlds of those usually classed 'peasants'. Subsistence agriculture that has sustained the latter's livelihoods increasingly after 1989 stands in stark contrast to the kind of farming advocated by Romanian and European authorities. For the majority of the people I worked with, the realization of this transformation was out of reach. I focused on the strategies people deployed in their work, even in this situation where most of their livelihood activity was pushed into illegality.
Paying particular attention to the way in which particular animal husbandry products (cheese, meat, brandy) and the relationships they entailed changed because of incoming EU legislation, my research was driven by a desire to find how people evaluated and coped with the changes, and how they hoped their livelihoods would be transformed by EU integration. I paid attention to changes in animal husbandry practice, followed people in their work, and efforts to submit to the legislation, or to circumvent it. I explored the contradictory effects of the restructuring of rural space by paying attention to local market and consumption patterns.
I inquired into what kinds of subjects people needed to transform to stay attuned with quickly a shifting social field where notions of personhood, success and failure were being reconfigured. With an analytical framework that puts the reconfiguration of value at the centre, it becomes possible to re-instill into economics questions about morality that are usually cast aside by policy discourses, and everyday life discourses alike. I seek to illuminate this issue, in my chapters, with very different theoretical approaches, in order to show, first, that the theories we use have consequences, and, second, that some ethnographic material may be more advantageously explored in one way rather than another. Thus, I draw out the ways in which very divergent groups of people (villagers, local elites, policy-makers and bureaucrats, and CEOs of private companies) practiced and engaged with EU integration.
I also seek to trace the ways in which patterns of action come to be seen as 'structure' and 'system', limiting the possibility of action of certain people, and enabling that of others'. I draw on anthropological theories of the state and focus on the misfit between policy frameworks and the life worlds of people. I ask vexed questions about what belonging to 'Europe' and the 'EU' means from a Romanian perspective, as well as what 'EU integration' might mean in a highly differentiated Europe. Finally, I wish to draw out from my ethnographic material what action is possible and can be hoped for in the current political and economic contexts of Europe.
Supervisers: Alexander King and Johan Rasanayagam
Drawing the Social
In collaboration with Gray's School of Art of Robert Gordon University, and with various practitioners from differing disciplines, I have been organising a series of workshops (2008-2009 ) for a group of postgraduate students and staff of Aberdeen University School of Social Science (Anthropology and Sociology departments) to explore drawing as a research and thinking method. This included both a development of graphic representation skills of social scientists as well as an intellectual engagement with the potential of drawing as a process of inscribing that works in a more engaging way than filming or photographing. This is because drawing challenges a rigid dichotomy between image and text that is often assumed to exist. Indeed, drawing is not about 'imaging' the world, but rather involves a temporal movement resonating with movements going on in the world.
Unlike training in architecture, art or archaeology, social scientists' postgraduate research training is heavily focused on developing academic writing skills and does not include formal instruction in drawing, drafting and notational skills. The workshops aim at redressing this imbalance as they develop the participants' skills surrounding graphic representation techniques as well as their abilities to 'think with the pencil'. The workshops are facilitated by practitioners from the disciplines of art, architecture, design, geography, archaeology, and anthropology from universities and art school across the UK.
This project resulted in an exhibition that was displayed at two conferences and will be on permanent display in the Department of Anthropology at Aberdeen. I am also working on a web resource to make the methods we explored during the workshops more widely available.
Sixth Century Studentship (2005-2009)
AT 3504 Anthropological Theory (teaching assistant, spring 2008)
Publications
2009 'Confusion, Secrecy and Power: Direct Payments and European Integration in Romania' L'Annuaire Roumain d'Anthropologie, Special Issue, 46, edited by Thomas Sikor and Stefan Dorondel.
2009 'Autopoiesis and Structural Machinery' for an edited volume in memory of Professor Paul H. Stahl, edited by Stelu Serban of the Institute of South-East European Studies, Academia Romana, Bucharest.
2009 'The Principle of Hope: Relating to the European Union in Rural Romania' in a volume edited by Janette McDonald and Andrea Stephenson, Global Interdisciplinary Research Series, Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford.
2009 Review Chris Hann (2006) Not the Horse We Wanted: Postsocialism, Neoliberalism and Eurasia. Munster: Lit Verlag. Forthcoming in Sibirica.
2009 Review Christina Grasseni (2009) Developing Skill, Developing Vision: Practices of Locality in the Italian Alps. Oxford: Berghahn. Forthcoming in Social Anthropology.
2008 Review Parkins, Wendy & Geoffrey Craig (2006) Slow Living. Oxford: Berg. Anthropological Notebooks, XIII (2): 153-155.
2008 Review Wilson, Thomas M. (ed) (2006) Food, Drink and Identity in Europe. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi. Social Anthropology 15 (3): 409-411.
2007 Review Inda, Jonathan Xavier (ed) (2005) Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: 235-236.
2006 (with Andrew Whitehouse) 'Sound and Anthropology: Body, Environment and Human Sound Making – Conference hosted by the University of St Andrews 19th-21st June 2006' Anthropology Today 22(6):25-26.
Outreach Publications
2008/06 'Society, Sexuality and Gender Relations: A Perspective from Social Anthropology' Forum für Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur. Luxembourg.
Presentations
2009/02 'Work, Value and European Integration in Rural Romania' Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, Nae Jobs: Skills, Workfare and Struggles over Work, Alternative Economic Strategy Seminar, STUC, Glasgow.
2009/01 'European Integration, Modernist Rhetoric and Everyday Talk about the 'Transition' in Romania' The End of Transition? Jointly organised by the Department of Anthropology and Ethnography, and the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
2008/09 'Das Prinzip Hoffnung: Relating to the European Union in Rural Romania and Inconclusive Evidence' Hope: Probing the Boundaries, Mansfield College, Oxford.
2008/09 'Cazul Giovanna Reggiani: Stigma si Cetatenie Romaneasca.' [The Giovanna Reggiani Case: Stigma and Romanian Citizenship] – Consecintele migratiei temporare in tarile de origine a migrantilor, Sinaia, Romania.
2007/09 'The Power of EU Integration' MACE Training Course on Resource Property – Concepts and Tools for Research on Agriculture and Natural Resources in Central and Eastern Europe, Sinaia, Romania.
2007/06 'Land Use Policy and Practice, Empty Mountains and Deepening Inequalities in a Subcarpathian Valley' Private Property: Postsocialist Promises and Experiences Workshop held at the New Europe College (Institute for Advanced Studies) Bucharest, Romania.
2006/11 'Belonging to the EU from the Perspective of Smallholder Farmers and Food Producers in Romania' AnthropoEast – The Anthropology of South-Eastern Europe: Poetics and Politics in Anthropology, Second International Conference in Ethnology and Anthropology, Craiova, Romania.
2006/09 'Personhood, Power and Morality in Romanian Agriculture' Departmental Seminar, University of Aberdeen.
2006/06 'Why Ethics are Good to Think With Anthropologically: The Case of Genetically-Engineered Farming in Romania' CASS Postgraduate Conference, University of Aberdeen.
