Anamaria Berbec-Chiritoiu

Short presentation

I am a social anthropologist working at the intersection of legal, moral, and political anthropology. As of January 2025, I work as emerging researcher in the ERC Project 'Out of Sight', PI Prof. Don Kulick, investigating social (im)perceptibility among Romanian Roma.

I've been conducting research with Roma in Eastern Europe for over a decade, looking at how the social exclusion of Roma reflects onto the Roma’s own notions and practices of kinship, social order, exchange, and moralities.

Keywords

• social imperceptibility
• social exclusion
• kinship
• social order
• central and eastern europe
• ethnographic theory
• Romanies

Biography

I received my PhD from the Central European University (2022, Vienna). My thesis, titled 'Making Virtue Out of Necessity In a Southern Romanian Mahala,' examines how the Roma from a marginal neighborhood in southern Romania attempt to assert themselves in a non-Roma social landscape that denies them access to basic resources and, what is perhaps even more vexing, dignity.

In 2010, I completed an MA in Anthropology and Community Development (National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest), and in 2012 I completed a second MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology (Central European University, Budapest). Before embarking on my PhD, I worked for several years as an engaged researcher for a community development NGO in Bucharest, Romania, on topics such as labor, access to education, social marginalization, and post-conflict intervention. In 2013 I co-authored (with Ana Ivasiuc) a collection of Romani life-stories in collaboration with Unicef.

In 2019, the CEU Doctoral Research Support Grant enabled me to spend a semester as Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and in 2020 I was awarded a writing-up fellowship by the ‘Law & Anthropology’ Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale).

As of 2019, I have been an editor of the Anthropology Matters Journal, issued by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK.

Since 2024, I am a member at large of AAA's Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

Research

I am a social anthropologist working with Roma in Eastern Europe for over a decade now, both as an academic, and as an engaged researcher. My research explores how the social exclusion of Roma reflects onto the emic ideologies that underpin the social reproduction of 'Romaniness.' In particular, I am interested in how the Roma's emic processes of social ordering shape their resilience in both material and ideological terms. Most broadly speaking, my research unpacks the connections between legal, moral, and political regimes among Europe’s most marginal population.

My current book project draws on 16 months of ethnographic research in a marginal Roma neighborhood in southern Romania. It describes how Roma attempt to circumvent marginalization through the cultivation of virtue, especially in the spheres of kinship, social order, and vernacular law. Theoretically, the book seeks to overcome the stalemate between ‘suffering,’ ‘otherness,’ and ‘resistance’ that characterises much contemporary research on marginality, and offer a new theoretical synthesis of virtue ethics and political economic approaches.