Paper short abstract:

Suspicion between a non-Roma researcher and her Roma interlocutors has been chosen as subject for this paper. Besides describing a story of unsuccess, major factors responsible for mistrust are revealed and discussed. Subsequently, it is highlighted, how suspicion towards a researcher is embedded in different perspectives on institutions, and create a social distance between Roma from a ghetto in Romania and the non-Roma outer world.

Paper long abstract:

Contrary to the Mead-controversy where suspicion in fieldwork has been attributed to lack of competence or failure, the present paper considers suspicion as important ethnographic data. Through re-telling the difficulties of a research carried out among the Roma residents of a Romanian shantytown, I try to reveal all the mechanisms that are responsible for suspicion and distancing the researcher from her/his informants. Embedded in Eastern-European social and political changes, mistrust in this field goes back to an initial territorial stigma attached to the locals in the early 1990s. My research site, "the Green block of flats" has become a ghetto due to massive unemployment and differences in living conditions, where isolation from the outer world has been enforced by misunderstandings with local institutions. Being "used" by NGOs and subjected to unfulfilled treatment under the label of "helping the Roma", shantytown-residents could but reject the newcomer researcher who seemed to be one of "them".