‘England was the last hope’: An ethnographic study of duty, favours and mistrust among Romanians in London

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2020-2021, this thesis explores the lives and stories of Romanians in North-West London. It mainly draws on intimate ethnographic observations from a year of living with and studying the daily lives of a Romanian family whom I call the Boians. The thesis gradually steps beyond the Boians’ threshold to also draw on interviews with other Romanians in London, casework at a local charity, and participant observation at Romanian community organisations.

The ethnographic tension I document in this thesis is born out of a Janus-faced kind of Romanianness, since my participants both valorised and discounted the Romanian way of being and doing things. Fervent debates about how one should behave towards other Romanians abroad pointed to the importance of duty. Underpinned by gendered norms and labour, duty to care for family was key to my participants’ experiences as most Romanians called on their families during their time in London. However, practices of reciprocity and help expanded beyond kinship boundaries to weave intricate webs of favours, reminiscent of (post)socialist informal economies. The resulting networks forged between Romanians both strengthened and frayed, underlined by a pervasive mistrust in one’s co-nationals. The role of mistrust became apparent not only in Romanians’ relationship with each other, but also in their relationship with the state. Illustrated in their narratives about the COVID-19 vaccine, I argue that conspiratorial thinking was a key element of my participants’ political attitudes, intent on expressing their discontent with their experiences of mobility and their hopes for the future.

By using the Boians’ stories and those of other Romanians in London, the main contribution of this thesis is to further anthropological understandings of migrant identity formation. I argue that by paying attention to migrants as moral actors first and foremost, we can discover their political views and use ethnography to document how these manifest in their everyday lives – whether as a set of complex moral norms shaping their relationships or as fuel for surprising electoral results.