The current frailties of the Romanian health care system are often explained by resorting to the previous regime’s institutional framework, rarely accepting that they are also the product of post-1990 reforms and the neoliberal means of system reconfiguration. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the ways in which two “products” of these reforms actively contribute to the augmentation of private medical services and to the diminishing access to quality care in the public system: the bureaucratization of primary medicine and the “dual medical practice”. More specifically, I use the concept of “informal exchanges” in order to explore the variety of transactions that occur between patients and the health care staff and to document the means through which its main social actors understand, reproduce, legitimize or blame the very existence of these practices. Then, I analyze how referrals to private medical units increasingly replace informal payments, simultaneously laying even harder obstacles in the access to health care for those in need.

In line with socio-anthropological theories meant to deconstruct the secularization teleology (Berger, 1997; Luckmann, 1967; Shah, 2015), this paper aims to document recent transformations in the field of Spirituality and Religion. Inheriting the analytical dichotomy between neo-liberal and anti-capitalist forms of spirituality, introduced by Carette and King (2005), I aim to emphasize both the common points and the ruptures between the subjectification technologies used within transformative self-development and self-help programmes, on the one hand, and a form of alternative Neo-Pagan spirituality, which opposes the capitalist way of organizing social, economic, political and cultural life, on the other hand. The rupture between anti-capitalist and neo-liberal forms of spirituality rests on identifying the extent to which the spiritual domain is colonized by an economically mundane ideology, in which the subject is invited to look upon spirituality as an internal resource meant to satisfy all the tropes of the neo-liberal economic imagery: optimization, efficiency, amplified productivity, abundance and prosperity. In addition to the ethnographic justification of this theoretical construct that supports the existence of two opposed poles of constituting a spiritual self, I will adjoin the cultural relationship between spirituality and capitalism to the wider problem of secularization, by arguing that spirituality is a byproduct of late modernity and a leitmotif of the power technologies through which the neo-liberal subject is produced. 2

Starting off by categorizing the specific means through which modernity manifests itself in the field of religion and utilizing an ethnography-based methodological strategy, the following paper documents the emergence of Zalmoxianism, a contemporary replica of the religion of the Dacians, which are considered the ancestors of Romanians; they used to inhabit areas around the Carpathians and the Lower Danube before the Roman Conquest (106 A.D.). While subscribing to the theoretical precepts meant to surpass the sociological prejudice according to which modernity exhausts a religiously transcendent view on the world, this paper closely analyzes the conceptual deconstruction of secularization as a total phenomenon while sat the same time isolating the social actor as a non-secularized segment.

In order to ethnographically capture the ambiguous ways in which medical informal economy is understood, legitimized or questioned, a bottom-up analysis is needed; before highlighting the systemic valves due to which these informal practices appear, we need to document the specificities of the medical act and of the way in which disease and hospital culture are internalized by the patient. In this paper I will argue that attributes inherent to the specific way of understanding, organizing and practicing modern medicine are one of the main reasons why informal exchanges are legitimate and reproduced. Informality-as-gift, i.e., the situation in which the medical act is not in any form conditioned, most often seeks to replace the "medical gaze" with a human gaze, appropriate, non-hierarchical and non-paternalistic, "forcing" the healthcare professional to a type reciprocity that takes the form of recognizing the other's humanity by personalizing the therapeutic or care relationship.

In this paper I will engage in a process of highlighting the way in which liberal and, later, neoliberal political agendas regulate and establish formal semantic registers in the field of medical informal economy within the Romanian public healthcare system. How accurate is the legalistic approach, which classifies any extra-payment as a bribe? Despite the questionable legal status, the voluntary informal economy acquires the role of establishing bridges at human level between doctor and patient. Far from pleading to accept the conditioning of the medical act by an additional payment from patients or their family members, facts that obviously fall within the scope of illegality, I claim that the labels of “corruption”, “bribe”, “informal payment” cannot be correctly applied to the whole phenomenon of informal exchanges. Moreover, the gifts offered as a form of gratitude or to tame the “medical gaze” even have a role of social link between doctor and patient, helping to bind an unwritten human contract between the two who, in fact, are victims of the same system and its political decision-makers.