Description
This compelling ethnographic study describes how two groups of Romanianindustrial workers have fared since the end of socialism. Once labor’s elite, thecelebrated coal miners of the Jiu Valley and the chemical workers of the Fagarasregion had many social privileges and often derived genuine satisfaction from theirwork. Today, they are a rarely noted casualty of postsocialist transformations.Fear, distance, and alienation are the physical manifestations of stress experienceddue to their precarious job status, declining health, and loss of a social safetynet. Kideckel traces these issues in the context of labor, political relationships, domestic and community life, gender identities, and health. Drawing on more thanthree decades of fieldwork, he presents many narratives from select individuals, intheir own words, providing a poignant and illuminating perspective on the everydaylives of ordinary people. Contents Preface 1. Getting By in Postsocialism: Labor, Bodies, Voices 2. How Workers Became “Others”: Talking Alienation 3. Postsocialist Labor Pains: Fear, Distance, and Narrative in the Workplace 4. The Postsocialist Body Politic 5. Houses of Stone or of Straw? Postsocialist Worker Communities 6. Strangers in Their Own Skin: Workers and Gender in Postsocialism 7. The Embodied Enemy: Stress, Health, and Agency 8. What Is to Be Done? Notes Works Cited Index
