Personalized Value Struggles amid Marketization: The Search for the Good among Men on the Margins of Bucharest

Abstract

In the most notorious, mixed Roma and non-Roma Romanian neighbourhood of Bucharest, structurally accumulated problems of governance turn into practical challenges that need to be tackled with the means at each person’s disposal. Under conditions of capitalist incorporation and prolonged crises on the post-socialist periphery, the main protagonists of this account—male members of an extended network of Spoitori Roma with diverse livelihoods—strive for relative independence not only from market forces but also from actors who may expose them to abuse. In this article, I reflect on personalized value struggles associated with marketization. Instead of accepting sectorial divisions between formality and informality, I show how marketization elucidates moral evaluations of being and doing good among men who hope to be or become “their own bosses” in precarious urban conditions. Distinguishing folk and analytic concepts, my analysis engages with the moral contestation of the “good” and the ambiguity of value-based human endeavours among different layers of contemporary economic life.

Introduction

Totalizing accounts of neoliberalism and racialization tend to represent the power of the state and market as all-encompassing and omnipotent bodies of action. As a consequence, they often relate to human agency in terms of suffering. In this article, I argue that idioms of suffering cast persons in the role of helpless victims, even if the latter consider this to be an undesirable state of affairs. The need to overcome the terminology of victimhood comes from the recognition of people’s striving for endurance and the realization of values—or in other words, being and doing good. ¹

In an attempt to move beyond the normative frames of wage labour and the tendency of theorizing in the negative by focusing on the “have-nots,” recent scholarship on work has turned towards livelihoods and investment in social relationships among people who subsist—at least partly—without wage employment. ² For instance, recent anthropological studies of recycling consider precarious forms of living and value creation as potential alternatives to wage-based production. ³ Based on fieldwork in Bucharest’s “most ill-famed” neighbourhood, this article engages with value struggles concerning the crystallization and evaluation of “the good” under conditions of urban precarity. ⁴ On one hand, it does so in relation to property (land especially), and on the other in relation to categories of personhood. Instead of assuming a single paramount value or monolithic construction of the good in each society, I look at the ambiguity of value-based human endeavours that lead to only partial and limited results or break down into diverse and conflicting aspirations.

Research questions regarding morality and economy in everyday life commonly orient ethnographers to those interactive settings where the moral order is solidified and contested. Conceptually, I depart from proverbial, commonsense understandings of being and doing good found in the quotidian exchange practices of my interlocutors. First, the article outlines the political and economic conditions of exchange in a neighbourhood that has been a rural–urban buffer zone through most of its history (instead of a “ghetto” in the sociological sense as an institution of ethnic seclusion). ⁵ Second, it investigates the value struggles around the idea of “the good” which are manifested in situated judgements of moral virtues as personal properties and defined using binary terms such as “soul” and “interest.” Third, it pulls threads together to present a story of a major local institution in the neighbourhood—a kiosk that served as a popular hang-out spot for male-dominated groups until its final closure and liquidation.

The main protagonists of this article belong to an extended kinship network of Spoitori Roma from Romania. ⁶ They are engaged in diverse livelihoods, including the scrap-metal trade and plastic recycling, informal vending around outdoor markets, the second-hand car trade, cab driving, working for the public sanitation company in Bucharest, and temporary migration to Spain as street musicians or to the United Kingdom for factory work. Camouflaging to some extent the actual diversity of their income-generation practices, some of my closest male interlocutors liked to appraise themselves as “businessmen” (bişniţar or om de afaceri), “speculators” (speculant), or “peddlers” (ambulant) with a good reputation. These idioms represent different ways of appreciating the values of entrepreneurship or of persons who—according to the proverbial claim—“understand the moves quickly” and who “have no other boss besides themselves.” Akin to the Polish Highlanders documented by Nicolette Makovicky, ⁷ the Spoitori Roma in Bucharest also like to identify the roots of their present-day ventures in a semi-mythical past—in the claim that their ancestors always dealt with “some kind of business” (un fel de bisniţă). These past forms of enterprise equally referred to mobile trade in buffaloes and other animals in the wider Bucharest area and to the men’s lucrative side job as musicians (lăutari) at weddings and other events during times of state socialism—when they were supposed to become full members of the industrial proletariat—or to cross-border retail trade in the aftermath of Ceaușescu’s fall in 1989.

The ethnography in this article engages with the moral dimensions of exchange and livelihood. In analytical terms, the concept of the street economy refers to the livelihoods of precarious vendors who use space as a resource by trading at temporary stalls (or while they are in motion), in accordance with changing regulatory efforts, surveillance, and suspicion in urban public spaces. ⁸ Throughout my fieldwork in Bucharest, it was common to see unregistered street vendors outside of outdoor markets selling more or less identical items (such as fruit or seasonal Chinese-made clothes) as the ones inside at registered stalls, but for lower prices. I have already mentioned that despite the remarkable diversity of their forms of income generation, my closest acquaintances were keen on defining themselves on the basis of these trading activities, which existed due to their negotiations and bribe-based relations with policemen and security guards. In 2012, with years of training in the street economy, the Spoitori Roma traders decided to enter the market for recycling by opening a registered scrap-metal collecting site (or centre) in the neighbourhood. As middlemen, they bought scrap directly from street-level collectors (in smaller quantities) and sold the material in larger units (tonnes) to firms that deal with the industrial management and transportation of recyclables. Capitalist incorporation, as mediated locally by the recycling industry, was perceived by my interlocutors as a large-scale plunder of their country.

Morality, Economy, and Civilization

A practice-oriented approach to “the good” is one that focuses on situated judgements and moral deliberation instead of assuming that pre-given universal divisions are applicable in particular cases. ⁹ In this regard, once people become involved in economic relations, they also enter into some kind of social and moral relationships. ¹⁰ However, groups or persons may experience conflicting forms of moral reasoning regarding their exchange relations with respect to capitalist incorporation. ¹¹ James Carrier ¹² defines moral economic activities on the basis of the obligations that actors develop through durable or repeated forms of exchange. Chris Hann ¹³ prefers to discuss the moral dimensions of the economy instead of delineating a certain type of transaction that makes up the moral economy. This means focusing on the dominant values that facilitate the integration of stratified communities—especially when the normative consensus about entitlements is threatened due to marketization.

Susana Narotzky ¹⁴ argues that ordinary people’s pursuit of freedom by becoming entrepreneurs or being “one’s own boss” reflects how struggles for rights and well-being have become fragmented and personalized in contemporary capitalism. As she continues, amid precarious living conditions in the states of southern Europe, maintaining the aspirations of self-sufficiency and market-based autonomy has become increasingly difficult, which has led to the intensification of struggles about “categories for valuing human worth.” ¹⁵ David Kideckel ¹⁶ describes such a value struggle at the level of personhood and the body in his study of stagnating mining communities in post-socialist Romania. The Romanian folk concept of “getting by” (descurcare) covers diverse practices that are based on the ability to thrive despite limited resources and unpredictable futures. ¹⁷ It also, however, means acting solely in one’s own interests, which leads to embodied states of alienation.

According to the moral symbolism of the street and the household in early post-socialist urban Romania, cleanliness is above all a prerequisite of the home, while the outside—including the streets, politics, and business in general—commonly evokes repugnance for being dirty, especially in comparison to common images of the West. ¹⁸ In historical terms, the public obsession with local causes of backwardness is concomitant with periods of Romania’s integration or re-integration into broader economic and political systems. ¹⁹ This was the case with Romania’s involvement in the unequal exchange relations of the world economy during the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as from the late twentieth century onwards. Instead of an extraordinary event or sudden shock, periods and junctures defined as crises were prevalent during post-socialist restructuring and capitalist incorporation. ²⁰

It has been argued that the last two decades in Romania have witnessed some of the purest applications of the tenets of neoliberalization—including the policies of labour flexibility and housing privatization. ²¹ As Cornel Ban put it, by the time of the European Union (EU) accession in 2007, a disembedded neoliberal regime had already been institutionalized in Romania. The austerity programmes after the 2008–2010 financial crisis consolidated policies in favour of “market rationality over social cohesion.” ²² The issue of corruption was at the centre of political struggles throughout this period, while inconsistency prevailed between widely condemned large-scale rip-offs at the highest echelons of the state and the tolerated petty informal deals of ordinary citizens. ²³ During the 2010s, Romania became an assembly line in the global system of production and the major cities turned into managerial hubs, dominated by professionals and service workers. ²⁴ Residents of segregated urban areas are stigmatized as inferior “Gypsies,” but instead of being an unproductive and excluded surplus, they are typically subjected to adverse forms of inclusion that involve them becoming sources of essential manual labour in deregulated sectors, such as recycling. ²⁵ Waste management systems in Romania are privatized. ²⁶

An element in the formation of social aspirations that emerged following the post-socialist development consensus was the widespread search for local obstacles to the civilizing process and the ultimate bogeymen to blame for Romania’s backward status in Europe. This multi-scalar quest concentrates on exposing society’s dirty laundry or scum in the form of a public disciplinary exercise by politicians, the media, and respectable citizens. The search for the causes of a society’s backwardness solely within the limits of that society is conducive to the stigmatization of members of abject populations as moral outcasts and objects of disgust. ²⁷ At the turn of the 2000s and 2010s, an all-pervasive public speech genre of social anxiety focused on the folk devils—especially (but not only) the Roma—who were perceived as hindering collective advancement towards the good life, ²⁸ or in local terms, “civilization” (civilizaţie). In Romanian politics and society, civilization is a powerful object of social vision and division that operates at various scales, including the high stakes of geopolitical struggles and statecraft, as well as public commentary on the latest news about corruption and the mundane issues of obedience and lawbreaking and proper behaviour in public spaces.

Resembling a single paramount value, civilizaţie enjoyed broad support among the people I got to know in Bucharest, whether in the study neighbourhood or elsewhere. Nevertheless, there were also some critiques. Like the “normal lives” in Stef Jansen’s ethnography of an apartment complex in Sarajevo, ²⁹ civilization may seem to reflect positions of power and omnipresence, but in Bucharest it is mostly reiterated through many forms of perceived vulnerability or its sheer absence in everyday life. For instance, as an indicator of their aspiration to maintain civilized lives, residents in my block of flats would draw a very small square with their fingers in the air to circumscribe the narrowed space of their activities in the neighbourhood. These aspirations could result in minimized personal contact, similar to lives under lockdown. In such separated worlds, the domains of normality or the good themselves appear to be vulnerable—somehow in a constant state of siege. Humans striving for the good life in terms of “normality” or “civilization” tend to exist in a state of partial withdrawal or suspension, as a constantly deferred utopian object with changing parameters. ³⁰ As a matter of fact, many of my local male acquaintances strived to overcome the limitations of civilized lives (and full adherence to the rules) while they engaged in acts of livelihood and social navigation. ³¹ In their view, the pursuit of being civilized also entailed the threat of becoming a fool, a subject of abuse by actors who eventually exploit them. Full adherence to the values associated with civilizaţie could induce limitations or weaknesses in one’s life. The question of how to avoid becoming a victim or a fool is a common stake in ordinary value struggles associated with being and doing good.

“It Was a Field!” Land and Belonging in the Neighbourhood

A booming southeast European metropolis, Bucharest is a case of rapid urban growth-cum-abandonment in which the development of the public sector lags far behind the private one. ³² The capital city has the nation’s highest rate of gross domestic product (GDP) growth and international investment and is also one of the most congested cities globally. Emerging spaces of affluence strongly contrast with infrastructural disinvestment and housing deprivation at the urban margins. ³³ When it comes to urban marginalization in Bucharest, I recommend use of the concept of interstitial zones between the urban and the rural—or the city and its hinterland. ³⁴ The historically developed buffer zones of Bucharest have absorbed populations from both outside and inside of the urban frontiers. The southern peripheries of Bucharest have been associated with the lower classes as part of unequal development in the city.

Following its administrative incorporation into the city after the end of the First World War, the southwestern neighbourhood of Ferentari maintained a rather rural social and spatial character, with adobe and brick houses inhabited by unqualified workers, petty clerks, or farmer-merchants. ³⁵ Most residents were employed as workers by the industrial plants in the south of Bucharest or were “needy” (nevoiaşi). Following the state-socialist scheme of industrialization and urban systematization, further housing units were constructed. In the case of Ferentari, the state-socialist housing project of creating a workers’ quarter remained incomplete. ³⁶ Resembling a village within the city to this day, the neighbourhood had one of the highest concentrations of unskilled and (officially) unemployed workers in the city during the 1990s. ³⁷

I observed a broader mechanism at work in Bucharest. Authorities handle structurally accumulated urban ills (such as problems with stray dogs, drug use, or poverty in general) by making them invisible in the city centre and relegating them to the urban margins. In earlier post-socialist decades, this was the case with families that moved to the neighbourhood after they had lost their homes in other areas of the city due to demolitions, property restitution, or impoverishment. As I discuss in the final section of this article, in the early 2010s something similar happened after the revolutionary changes in the Bucharest drug market—namely, a shift in the use of heroin and other illegal substances to what were commonly known as legal highs or etnobotanice in Romanian.

Perhaps much like among the popular classes elsewhere, local knowledge about the social world is typically expressed and transmitted in proverbial form among the inhabitants of this neighbourhood. As the speakers themselves claimed, such “sayings” (vorbe) possess practical truth-value, hence deserving ethnographic attention as common sense, or the folk concepts and taxonomies about space and society. ³⁸ Whenever I asked the elderly inhabitants about the neighbourhood in the “old times,” the usual assertion was that “it was a field!” (era un câmp!). This laconic expression implied a wide array of meanings regarding the past and the present, the spatial position of the neighbourhood in the city, and the social position of its inhabitants in a grey zone of state power. ³⁹ The field as a folk concept depicts inhabitants as tied to subsequent waves of expulsion and movement. Early settlers were followed by the state-socialist working class with rural origins and hopes for urban employment, as well as those dispossessed by post-socialism who had lost their homes in the city and found refuge in this neighbourhood. The symbolism of “the field” was in line with the materiality of a buffer zone occupied by subsequent waves of settlers who cultivated the environment.

First, the notion of a primordial field, meadow, or a set of empty plots and orchards represented an imaginary zero point for local history, the initial state of shifting limits in a territory where the city was expanding. The notion also refers to a place that is still in motion, as a site of the ongoing flux of people. Second, the symbolism of the field implies the ongoing struggle of local residents to acquire and retain a sense of being urbanites in opposition to the people of the disparaged “countryside” (la țară), including their own relatives—and perhaps also themselves at an earlier stage of life. Rural–urban distinctions were reflected in the regular framing of the opposition between the “boredom” of village life and the everyday challenges of living in a neighbourhood that is a rather “wild” (sălbatic) place in some respects. The field is constituted of mutual negotiations between residents as neighbours because their everyday pursuits are embedded into the making and remaking of the terms that regulate their cohabitation. The appreciation of self-sufficiency was inherent to prevailing local forms of being and doing good. A middle-aged non-Roma Romanian female resident of a dilapidated block summarized the situation as follows:

Ferentari has been home for poor people, for tricked ones, for ex-prisoners, for all the marginalized ones. Only God seems to remember this place even exists, but even he forgets about us from time to time.

As she continued, “no one is here by choice—only by necessity.” The neighbourhood is depicted as a place where nobody would come voluntarily, recalling initial acts of violence—such as evictions, demolitions, impoverishment, and the post-socialist privatization of state-owned public housing units. Many residents recalled the ways in which their families had been deprived of their homes in other parts of town. The same persons, however, sometimes also shared an unambiguous sense of belonging to their current habitat. For instance, Lucian, a talented Spoitor trader, once recalled his former acquaintances who had already left the neighbourhood. Wherever they went, usually abroad or to prison, from his point of view their departure could be taken as a sign of irredeemable weakness. These persons were defined by their inability to endure or tolerate (rezista) the various challenges of surviving and thriving in the neighbourhood. As a result, Lucian constituted the place as a storehouse of potential strength and as a home that should not be abandoned. Resistance as endurance or perseverance was central to his aspirations for the good.

The idea of the field also returns in a very contemporary sense: as an asset of popular politics and claim-making involving the use of local history. According to rumour, in 2013 an entrepreneur came to reclaim a large plot in the neighbourhood in accordance with the controversial legal framework of land restitution. In the end, he obtained only land being used as a parking lot. Soon after, a whole new block of flats was erected there with apartments for rent and sale and a supermarket on the ground floor. Inhabitants of the area followed the process with discontent. Many argued that the transaction must have been the result of bribery at the mayor’s office. Residents told me indignantly, “bullshit! (pula!) It was a field!” In this case, the notion of the field re-emerged as an asset in popular critiques of the entrepreneur’s alleged inheritance and the injustice of restitution as expropriation. Inhabitants of the neighbourhood again recalled the urban expansion and the time before the 1970s and 1980s when the limits of the built-up area were closer to the city centre. In their line of reasoning, the land reclaimed by the entrepreneur could not be anyone’s private property because it was used for military exercises or had been an agricultural zone with flowers, fruits, and vegetables. This time the notion of “the field” served as a reminder of the essentially arbitrary nature of claims for primacy and property over land that belonged to everyone (and to no one at the same time). The memory of the one-time field—and the original state of equality between settlers—was revived even in the midst of the most contemporary political struggles involving land claims.

Anti-Groupism, Camouflage, and Exchange

In most of the media- and policy-related representations of the neighbourhood, a few streets with the most dilapidated collective housing units were the main targets, if not the sole focus. ⁴⁰ In an interstitial zone mostly comprised of streets with rural-type family houses, inhabitants had to cope with active reminders of the disrepute that these “ghettos” (as they were labelled in local parlance) radiated. The stain and disgrace of place affected them equally, irrespective of their own stance. ⁴¹ One widely shared local norm is that people should judge each other strictly on the basis of personal qualities, not in terms of “racial hatred” (ură de rasă), or according to the group to which they belong. To quote a popular saying, “there is no forest without brushwood” (nu e pădure fără uscături). Falling into disgrace was a feared but also familiar experience to many residents. The conclusion was that an essentialized group cannot be judged based on the performance of individual members—or the other way around: individuals must be accountable for their actions. This stance is diametrically opposed to the tendency of conceiving externally bounded and internally homogeneous groups as the basic constituents of the social world. ⁴²

A man in his twenties known as Gicuță lived around the corner from the block of flats where I stayed. He had a Roma Romanian father and a non-Roma Romanian mother, so he usually introduced himself as a “halfie” (jumi-juma). He worked as a storekeeper, although he was most passionate about repairing motorbikes. In his own words, “Those in the city centre like to live separately, but it’s different here at the margins of town, here people live together and they mix with each other.”

As the late Roma Romanian sociologist and civil leader Nicolae Gheorghe argued, state-socialist policies put people from different social backgrounds together in the same urban neighbourhoods, some of which came to be associated with Gypsies from the outside. ⁴³ Based on field research in the first decade of the 21st century in an area of the neighbourhood with deteriorating collective housing units, the activist-anthropologist Miruna Tîrcă argued for the pre-eminence of idioms about shared deprivation or “miserability” (amărăciunea) over claims of ethnic belonging among Roma and non-Roma Romanian residents. ⁴⁴ It was not because of ethnic strife but poor housing conditions that interpersonal tensions occasionally exploded on the streets. I would add that, in such areas, much of people’s everyday life unfolds in front of others. The common assumption is that neighbours always know and gossip more about each other’s lives than is either necessary or desirable.

The local prevalence of anti-groupism does not mean that residents were simply indifferent to matters of identity or ethnic belonging in their engagements with each other. In fact, ethnicized forms of name-calling were common to street life among “Gypsies” and “Romanians.” This could take the form of slurs and cursing. There was hardly any final slur that could not be returned by the next reproach, and the exchange of slurs could go on in endless spirals. Partners usually found something more to say about a person beyond what had already been stated until they ran out of energy or became bored. Exchanges of this kind are common to teasing rituals, such as the “winding people up” that involves publicly losing or earning face in the name of dominant masculinities among black and white youths in South London. ⁴⁵

Anti-groupism is a strategy of conviviality that responds to the history of expulsions and population mixing. In the form of the will to avoid collective generalizations, it recognizes each person’s efforts to be self-sustaining. Importantly, it is more than just a static idiom about everyday peace-making. It is based on people’s active striving to prevent the escalation of conflicts for which there may be many reasons. However, when it comes to practical judgements, the anti-groupist stance faces a further challenge—namely that of camouflage or maintaining a façade. How can one discern people’s actual motives, decipher who people actually are, and who and what may stand behind them? These questions were burning for my acquaintances as they widely shared the view that in today’s world people often hide their real interests behind pleasant appearances. As they put it, “many people smile at you but they are speaking ill of you behind your back.” Beyond anti-groupism, suspicion seemed to be another guiding principle of social relations, based on the assumed divide between people’s actual motives and their pretensions. My acquaintances were preoccupied with guessing the hidden goals and deeper motives that lay under the surface across many different scales—whether in relation to the real intentions of their neighbours and relatives or to the current issues of power and politics in Romania and the world at large. As they preached to me countless times, good impressions should never be given full credit: at least a modicum of doubt must be preserved in all human relationships. Such dispositions of doubt and anxiety were acquired during the trials and errors involved in staying alert and safeguarding one’s integrity to avoid becoming a victim of harm or fraud. ⁴⁶ To quote Laurențiu, a male inhabitant of the neighbourhood in his early thirties from a mixed family of Roma and non-Roma Romanians,

I may have a lot of friends, but if I’m in trouble, they are not really my friends anymore. We are friends only in need (prieteni la nevoie), when we have [stuff]. When we don’t have any, they say they are busy.

“Friends in need” may remain loyal only until resources are extracted from each other. After that, they act like strangers with no bonds or obligations. There was widespread concern in the neighbourhood about deception, camouflage, and predators who pretend to be friendly folks only to abuse a person’s trust in them. One way of evaluating a person’s goodness is recalling feelings of abuse after support was not returned reciprocally. To distinguish themselves, my acquaintances preached moral lessons about the varieties of rip-offs and the fine differences between them. In these contemplations, “profiteers” (profitori) were those who abused the goodwill of others by ripping them off and not giving back anything in return. “Perverts” (perverşi) inflicted harm by simply taking money away without concern for fellowship in the name of sheer self-interest. They reduced all human affairs to a price as financial demand in a transaction. Perverts were despised as they provided living proof that vulnerability and compassion—or the need for social obligations—can expose a person to abuse by others. For instance, during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020–2021, some people I know left for the United Kingdom to work at a meat-packing plant. After the pandemic curtailed their livelihood, they initially worked as street cleaners and drivers of garbage trucks in Bucharest for the sanitation company. Later, in the context of migrant labour in the United Kingdom, their lack of language skills exposed them to the need for translators, who were more experienced Romanians employed by the same company. These people asked for money in exchange for each piece of advice useful to the newcomers, which truly made them perverts in the eyes of my acquaintances.

At the root of moral dilemmas concerning what is good, one could identify popular religious expressions concerning the relationship between God and humans, including the need for the latter’s responsibility. The aforementioned middle-aged non-Roma Romanian woman alluded to this in her depiction of the neighbourhood as the home of the marginalized. The Spoitori scrap-metal traders often complained to me privately about the hardships involved in supporting their families, their bodily pains, and the thoughts that chased them during sleepless nights. To quote one such expression of social and existential dependency,

Only God knows what he wants with me. The good man is a fool (fraier) because God crucifies those who are good. And he doesn’t even look at the bad ones who are committing crimes. They are healthy, they don’t have any problems, but the good people die.

Here, God puts the good ones to the test, which is the cause of the gulf between those who hardly get by and those who make illicit fortunes. Full compliance with the moral obligations associated with goodness may result in exposure to abuse, fraud, and being ripped off. In terms of the practical implications, the category of the good—exemplified by a person who gives to others selflessly—and that of the fool were sometimes disturbingly proximate. In everyday practice, the main goal of my acquaintances’ worldly minded role-playing and mimetic battles was to avoid being helplessly exposed to harmful social relations, self-inflicted damage, or abuse by arbitrary power. To put it differently, acts of being and doing good unfolded in the shadow of the risk of being and becoming a fool, which could refer to a state of exploitation and victimhood—hence the proverbial claim that valorizing self-protection means to know “how to be a bandit sometimes.” ⁴⁷

As with other forms of deception or failure to understand the moves in one’s environment, unsuccessful businesses could also make a fool out of a man. Following an unsuccessful day at the market, Lucian, the trader, could be in a desperate state of mind. Failure happened whenever his negotiations and attempts at bribery failed to work with policemen or security guards. The same occurred if his calculations turned out to be wrong and he had to carry home unsold merchandise in his red Dacia car—a burden in a literal sense. In such cases, he never missed the chance to blame the ever tighter restrictions on street trade in 2010s Bucharest and the policemen who got a “free hand” from the government to “terrorize” the neighbourhood and the street vendors instead of dealing with crime and corruption among the powerful. Policemen started to demand larger “fines” (amendă) instead of the former “bribes” (spagă) from unlicensed vendors or simply confiscated their merchandise. However, Lucian never failed to blame himself for not being able to perform well. In contrast to his usual pride, on such evenings, he satirized himself as a clown on the street and uttered random words in various languages to express his profound sense of disorientation. This was apparently all part of the personal price he paid for his business failures.

Amid seemingly omnipresent risks due to being ripped off in public space, honourable forms of exchange were marked by immediate forms of mutuality and collaboration. ⁴⁸ David Graeber ⁴⁹ suggested that everyday (or baseline) communism works counter to the principles of accumulation, as it involves satisfying immediate needs by sharing capacity. An elementary form of this mutuality was the ritual of “honouring” between men, whereby a partner’s invitation (typically for drinks) induced a sense of obligation to reciprocate—ending up in prolonged cycles of giving and receiving respect. As a neighbourly-cum-brotherly gesture, peers could borrow each other’s cars for an evening test with the idea of perhaps swapping them afterwards. In all such cases, the major stake of the exchange was to prove that it is not money that moves a person, but whether the person puts money (or other material assets) into motion. Passions and interests were framed in opposition when the donor in such settings was called a “man of soul” (om de suflet), distinguished from the deplorable “man of interest” (om de interes) who accumulates money and other material goods for himself, without giving to others. Nevertheless, as with interests, certain manifestations of the soul were perceived as excessive and harmful to the integrity of persons or the sense of good they were striving to realize. I return to this in the last section of the article on the fall of a local institution—a corner shop—and the rise of scrap-metal trade in the neighbourhood.

In the course of their hanging out in the street, men formed communities of affect based on shared beliefs about the influence that people have over each other in a state of proximity. They typically strived to avoid expressions of pain, hardship, or suffering in each other’s company. A person’s sorrow or despair could be contagious, risking emulation by others. After all, each person had his own sense of shame and history of failures, and these were not supposed to be invoked by others either directly by unpleasant questions or indirectly by their own public lamentation. If woes emerged, others did their best to put a stop to them, mostly by a quick turn to joking. This custom was based on a strong tacit sense of equality induced by hardship. There was no amount of severe trouble and personal distress that could not be matched by that of others. In principle, overt plaintiveness could always trigger the same reaction from others. The avoidance of such negative spirals was one of the main principles of a hang-out group as a unit based on “laughing” and “joking” (râdem, glumim), and hence maintaining “high morale.” Laughing and joking offered a way to accommodate subject matter that could potentially be revolting. As part of this practice, playing or listening to music—most notably the local ethno-pop genre manele ⁵⁰ —was common in the outdoor spaces of the neighbourhood. In such a setting, instead of the usual cheerful melodies, a man once started singing a partly improvised sad or moaning song (ascultare) to his peers, accompanied by his accordion. Others of the company soon asked him to finish or to leave the spot, claiming they know all too well what the song was about. Complying with the request, the singer moved away and continued his performance in front of his own house surrounded by a smaller group of peers. The performance was again interrupted when one of the men suddenly started to cry. This sudden outburst necessitated a rapid switch from the sad song to cheerful melodies to restore the high morale and dignity of the participants.

Trustworthy relations and regular appearances at a public spot create a share in the symbolic ownership of that place. The owners of a spot are responsible for one another as they cultivate each other’s good reputation—like promoters who take a stand against the omnipresent risk of being branded with a bad name. These relations are somewhat similar to the operation of secret societies, where the mutual sharing of knowledge and the denial of access to outsiders—in other words, the creation of parallel worlds—are a dominant means of boundary maintenance and control. ⁵¹ As Katherine Verdery ⁵² noted, collective secrecy represents one of the few opportunities to build trust in conditions of uncertainty. As with practices of secrecy and concealment in peasant societies, the content of the secret is not the point but rather the contexts and techniques in which it is maintained or used for either intimidation or abuse. In the neighbourhood, such concerns justified the widely held saying that others always know and gossip more about a person than they suppose.

The Fall of a Local Institution and the Rise of Recycling

Remaining a person of “good soul” (suflet bun) in the eyes of others—without allowing room for abuse by them—was the main challenge of street life in the neighbourhood. The story about a local institution, a corner shop, illustrates this ambiguity. Bogdan, a young non-Roma Romanian man, worked as a salesclerk in one of the small grocery stores near a corner that was a site of regular gatherings of male-dominated hang-out groups. A non-resident of the neighbourhood, Bogdan, worked in the kiosk to finance his university studies. His high level of education was not an obstacle to cultivating friendly relations with men from the area who were also his customers. He was proud of the knowledge he had gathered throughout his years in such a notorious zone of Bucharest.

During the workdays of the other salesclerk, the rigorous Mrs Ioana, the area around the corner shop was desolate. Conversely, on Bogdan’s workdays, hang-out groups gathered around the corner to listen to manele from mobile phones or someone’s car until late. On those days, the shop took on the role of a local centre for discussion and debate. In exchange for drinks or other items, some youths helped Bogdan with services such as cleaning the shop or ordering and loading merchandise. The Spoitori traders used the spot in their own way, as a quasi-office that they visited just to borrow the calculator and do some quick “counting” (socoteală) before rushing back to their own business. After closing time, Bogdan and his compatriots did the cleaning, put the garbage out, and put things in order around the store. Apart from the exchange of items and services, Bogdan was willing to let acquaintances have products on credit and pay their debts once they had recovered financially.

In the summer of 2012, the main news at the corner spot was that Bogdan had disappeared after being fired by his boss for theft. “Theft” in this case referred to the release of products from the store with little control as much as the outstanding debt amassed by customers. In search of an explanation for his fall, Bogdan’s friends accused him of being too “soft-hearted” (sufletist), although many of them had benefitted from his generosity. In the story of Bogdan, the soft-hearted person was eventually unable to restrict his exchanges of products and services within the limits of mutuality. Consequently, he was turned into a fool who ended up being blamed for the faults of others.

After Bogdan’s departure, the corner was no longer the same spot for the hang-out groups. In the early 2010s, so-called legal drugs (legale or etnobotanice) revolutionized the local drug market. Many former users of heroin or other substances made the switch to legale. For a while, so-called legal drug shops freely traded these substances across town under the pretext of selling pesticides. Following the moral panics fostered by media reports, these specialized stores were generally prohibited and expelled from the city centre. Nevertheless, I saw legal drug shops freely operating in the neighbourhood an entire year after the putative prohibition. As a result, the neighbourhood attracted more drug users than ever before, and visible drug use in public spaces increased. Soon after these revolutionary changes, the corner shop closed down completely. Abandoned by the local hang-out groups, the corner was soon occupied by largely homeless drug addicts. After its demolition, all the ironwork that made up the shop ended up at the collecting site of the Spoitori traders as scrap metal.

As a local non-Roma Romanian construction site worker put it, “there are two businesses that are truly thriving in Romania today: construction, and demolition.” The scrap-metal trade thrives on both businesses. Rumour had it around 2012–2013 that the final domestic destination for scrap metal collected in Bucharest was a port on the coast of the Black Sea, where shipments were sold as part of global waste flows. ⁵³ In their passionate commentaries, Spoitori traders describe these flows with moral and political indignation while playing down their own involvement in the supply chain as middlemen who occupy a niche between the street-level collection of scrap and the industrial management of recyclables. Semi-homeless drug users represent disposable labour for scrap collection, available due to their constant need for cash and willingness to do more dangerous work such as manual garbage selection or scrap collection at the street level, which involves risks such as climbing up on walls, digging, or entering buildings under demolition. Traders knew that the police could punish them if they found illegally obtained materials on their premises. However, from tons of merchandise gathered in the collecting centres, it is rather difficult to trace back whether certain items are actually stolen or not.

As the traders put it, theirs is a country of enormous beauty and natural resources that was sold out (ţara vândută) by corrupt politicians after the fall of state socialism. Three decades after his death, during times of capitalist incorporation and recurrent crises, Ceaușescu has reappeared in popular politics, this time as the ultimate representative of good, the last truly patriotic Romanian leader who kept giving to his country (as testified by the development of infrastructure, roads, and blocks of flats in his time)—as opposed to all post-socialist politicians busy only with growing their own fortunes. At this point in the moral reasoning, the scrap-metal traders took a political stance as indignant citizens exposed to abuses of power through large-scale rip-offs and political misconduct. From 2020 onwards, social unrest culminated in denial of the existence of COVID-19 and subsequent anti-vaccine and radical right-wing mobilizations within their circles, based on the belief that the pandemic was a global plot, arranged for the further enrichment of the wealthy and the dispossession of the poor.

Conclusion

In a capitalist moral economy on the urban margins of the southeast European periphery, struggles about categories for valuing human worth are transposed to the domains of personhood and exchange relations. The search for the good is embedded in the relational field of making a livelihood, in which other-regarding and self-interested morals clash. Being aware that their neighbourhood is the most notorious in Bucharest, protagonists of this account strive to distance themselves from the state of marginalization and hope to become “their own bosses” as they evaluate the kinds of work they engage in or may have access to. Their moral reasoning throws light on the practical pitfalls of “civilization” and private accumulation to the detriment of generosity and sharing. Being one’s own boss means striving for personal dignity and relational autonomy based on the idea that it is not money that moves the person to action, but whether a person puts money (or other material assets) into motion. However, personal goodwill and control over one’s resources must be maintained with caution due to potential harm or abuse. Acts of being and doing good are associated with the risk of becoming a “fool,” which may refer to rip-offs, states of exploitation, victimhood, or exposure to non-negotiable acts of arbitrary power. As part of a paramount value struggle, persons strive to cultivate secrecy for themselves while constantly testing what lies behind the facades that others maintain.