Stuck here: boredom, migration, and the homeless imaginary in post-socialist Bucharest

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the transnational dimensions of affect by way of boredom to open a perspective onto the scale at which homelessness is internalized and embodied. While boredom is commonly thought of in both literature and in philosophy as a predicament of slowed time marked by the absence of immediate activity, the geographical argument here is that boredom among Bucharest’s homeless is a spatial relationship whose dimensions are shaped by a cultural politics of mobility and stasis that stretches across borders. The critical contribution of this argument is to re-theorize the scale at which people feel out the condition of their historical scene, bringing into view the affective mechanics that intimately reproduce the homeless’ sense of their place not just in the city but within a global order.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• inactivity
• mobility
• belonging
• homelessness

Acknowledgments

This paper benefited from the keen insights and comments of audiences at the Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series at Brown University, the Workshop on Urban Ethnography hosted by the Department of Sociology at Yale University, and the Ethnologie Kolloquium of the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Quotes are taken from conversations that were either audio recorded and transcribed or taken down in detailed field notes shortly afterward. I translated quotes from Romanian to English carefully and with reference to field notes in order to preserve, as closely as possible, the meaning and mood of the moment. Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper to preserve the anonymity of informants. To that end, I have also obscured or changed details that are immaterial to the analysis, such as the exact location or timing of certain events.

2. This research takes a phenomenological approach to affect and is situated most clearly within the approaches of Kathleen Stewart (2007), Lauren Berlant (2011), and Sara Ahmed (2010), rather than the ontological line of affect theory advanced by Gilles Deleuze (1988). From this phenomenological perspective, affect promises a way of theorizing how individual bodies and historical processes come into contact to produce the present (Berlant, 2011, p. 53). The present, here, is understood to be more than an assemblage of texts and knowledges but also a felt sense out of which circumstances emerge (Schaefer, 2013).

3. “Normal,” others have shown in this context, operates as a diagnostic category, one that captures the impasse between agentive possibilities that ought to be available but that have been foreclosed by shifting social, political, and economic structures (Greenberg, 2011 p. 89; see also Galbraith, 2003, p. 5).

4. Affects, Sara Ahmed argues, do not reside in a given subject or object. Rather than psychological dispositions of individuals, ordinary affects are economic in the sense that they circulate between bodies to “align individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments” (Ahmed, 2001, p. 11).

5. For a further discussion on the spatial dimensions of boredom see, O'Neill, 2017).

6. The E.U. member states imposing work restrictions upon Romanian migrants included Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The seven-year work restriction upon Romanian migrants was the longest period permitted under EU law and was allowed under the pretense of providing a transition period for national labor markets (Mahony, 2013).

7. This order of things hearkens to the work of Sara Ahmed (2010, p. 7), who notes, “Happiness is looked for where it is expected to be found, even when happiness is reported missing.” As homeless day laborers in Romania maintain, the inverse is also true: boredom arises through one’s estrangement from the places believed to be brimming with things to do.

8. Others have also complicated the kind of relationship diasporas establish with the homeland, noting the double consciousness of diasporic communities (Gilroy, 1993), for example, as well as the role of negative emotions, such as violence, in shaping a sense of home (Axel, 2002).

9. Importantly, the embodiment and description of this deeply felt boredom and inactivity was distinct from the more pointed litanies about empty stomachs and sore feet, for example, that homeless men and women at times directed towards me and other foreign aid workers (see Ries, 1997, p. 84). As a comparatively wealthy American, homeless men and women at times mobilized these litanies in an effort to obtain specific resources, such as a free meal, new shoes, or a filled prescription, among other things. The problem of boredom, by contrast, emerged separately from these strategic appeals and over the course of extended conversation in order to describe a general mode of being.

10. Automobile Dacia S.A. is a Romanian car company, which was acquired by Renault in 1999 (Dacia, 2015).

11. The Euro Area unemployment rate at the time was 10%, with unemployment in Spain in particular reaching 20.2% (Allen, 2010). The Mundi Index estimated the unemployment rate in Romania, by contrast to be 8.2%, which was on par with Italy at 8.4% (Index Mundi, 2010).

12. Wide variation exists in the value and calculation of minimum wages across the European Union. The minimum wage in Luxembourg, for example, is €1,923 per month while only €218 per month in Romania (Eurostat, 2015).

13. Teresa Caldeira identifies a similar phenomenon in the hyper-segregated city of Sao Paulo, where professional classes living in gated communities consume media and commodities more akin to professionals in other elite cities rather than with city residents living just beyond their walls (Caldeira, 2001).

14. Florin and Andrei’s reckoning of global poverty, and their claim to it, does not hit the mark in any empirical sense. While the standard of living in Romania is one of the lowest in the European Union, development organizations such as the World Bank classify Romania as a middle-income country, one that offers a materially richer life than what is documented in what they call the third-world (see Davis, 2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant [Grant Number: P022A100071], National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant [Grant Number: BCS 1024029]; Institute for International Education’s Student Fulbright Grant; and the Institute for Romanian Culture’s Seton-Watson Grant for Foreign Researchers;Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences [BCS 1024029];Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant [P022A100071].