Secrets in a Landscape of Meaning: Evaluative Categories of Romanian Construction Workers in Germany

• In Event: Places and Performances as Cultural Objects

Abstract

In his classic account, Paul Willis links an interpretative social critique to the uncovering of actors’ categories. By revealing "the cultural viewpoint of the oppressed" (Willis 1981:203), ethnographers craft explanations showing how structures and meanings shape each other. While these insights may help counteract inequality, they can also endanger the people involved. Here, ethnographic texts can provide information about research participants to various people in the field that would otherwise be inaccessible to them (Richardson 1996), thus perpetuating existing inequalities.
I encountered this paradox during a thirty-month, multi-sited, transnational ethnography among Romanian construction workers who work in Germany while their families live in Romania. These workers critically evaluate an overcrowded dormitory a German city as a "Șerpărie", where a bed in a four-person room with a personal space of six square meters costs 350 euros per month. The Romanian term translates as "snakes' den" and is metaphorically used to describe impoverished urban areas in a derogatory manner. The workers carefully hide this categorization from their landlords and families, fearing sanction or stigmatization. Their secretive use of the term poses a challenge to writing since landlords and spouses have enough contextual knowledge to identify the workers despite anonymization (Tolich 2004; Jerolmack, Muphy 2017). How can their secrets be written about in a less risky way?
To navigate this risk, this paper situates secrets within a landscape of meaning (Reed 2011) and introduces the concept of "site-specific auditoriums": people or organizations with whom the actors share the same landscape and from whom information or categorization is hidden. Considering these as potential readers enables the development of tailored writing strategies in addition to anonymization for less risky writing. The paper concludes that an interpretative social critique therefore consists of an imagined conversation with the field even when researchers are no longer physically present.

Author

• Christian Konstantin Sperneac-Wolfer, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main