The Block - an ethnography of a Romanian block of flats

Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology

Michaelmas Term 2017

Fridays, 1pm-2.30pm, Lecture Theatre, Pitt Rivers Museum (entry off Robinson Close)

Convened by Marcus Banks.

 

Based on long term fieldwork in an apartment building in Piatra-Neamț, my research explores the role various social and material actors play in the maintenance of blocks of flats in Romania, while raising larger questions about the complex interrelationship between people's rapidly changing everyday lives and decaying infrastructure in post-socialist cities. My project expands upon current anthropological debates in architecture, infrastructure and economic anthropology, but in this talk I would like to particularly highlight the contributions my work makes to visual anthropology by discussing extracts from my observational documentary, The Block, that follows the story of the block’s administrator in his effort to mediate relationships between neighbours.