Underground Inscriptions

Abstract

This essay examines the politics of home in underground Bucharest, and the ways relationships of care among homeless drug users emerge amid everyday violence and exclusion, illuminating the unconventional practices of belonging that take shape in transient communal spaces such as underground electric, transportation, and waste‐management systems. The traces of systemic exclusion in these experiences converge in makeshift forms of kinship and care, provoking questions of solidarity, fragility, and the political potential of recognizing such forms through ethnographic collaboration.

Evictions as infrastructural events

“…Subway tunnels and cars, buses, and other public transportation equipment function as temporary sites for thermal comfort, heating, cooling, and sleeping (Toth, 1993). For instance, the municipal pipes that transport heat around Bucharest above and below ground attract homeless people in search of thermal comfort, who use them as shelters (O'Neill, 2017, p. 20;Lancione, 2019Lancione, , 2020. Similarly, the E subway train in NYC, attracts the largest number of homeless people, because it circulates, unlike other lines, exclusively underground, relatively insulated from extreme weather (Correal & Norman, 2018).…”

Looking Away

“…I find the beginning of an answer in Audra Simpson's (2014) work on refusal in Mohawk communities: in being beyond the ken of your categories, I am—and will continue to be. I find another in Michele Lancione's (2020) contribution to this issue. He writes: “Life at the margins of Bucharest, in its underground tunnels, takes its own form, its own weird assemblage: it is a life that saves itself from its own history, one that refuses institutionalization, and one that constructs its own way of being into the world—that is, its own way of dwelling, by caring for its own unfolding” (Lancione 2020, 33).…”

“…I find another in Michele Lancione's (2020) contribution to this issue. He writes: “Life at the margins of Bucharest, in its underground tunnels, takes its own form, its own weird assemblage: it is a life that saves itself from its own history, one that refuses institutionalization, and one that constructs its own way of being into the world—that is, its own way of dwelling, by caring for its own unfolding” (Lancione 2020, 33). And so, in what follows I want to think about what it might mean, as anthropologists, to turn or look away from our interlocutors to register something other than conceptual closure or the violence‐that‐is‐done‐through‐concepts.…”

Mooring in the Homeless City. A Practice Theoretical Account of Homeless Urban Dwelling and Emplacement

“…By attending to the homeless inhabitation of the city (and the city emerging from that inhabitation) in its makings (Lancione 2020), I wish to unsettle the dominant representations of the homeless city as a landscape of despair (Dear and Wolch 1987) conjured solely by the disciplining structural forces framed as the "carceral city," the "revanchist city," or the "post-justice city" (for a detailed discussion of such framing of the homeless city, as well as a critique of its limitations, see: DeVerteuil, May, and von Mahs 2009). Without diminishing the role of the strategies deployed to control and contain homeless spatiality, I acknowledge the need to attend to "the ways in which homeless people themselves, rather than others" (Cloke, May, and Johnsen 2008:242) shape the contours of their lived urban world.…”