Ambiguous transitions and abjected selves: Betrayal, entitlement, and globalization in Romania's Jiu Valley

This dissertation examines the experience of anxiety among miners and mine-related people in Romania's Jiu Valley coal mining region in order to contribute to an understanding of the impact of political, economic, and social marginalization in post-state socialist Eastern Europe. By considering the person-centered level of analysis, this work argues that what appears to be "resistance" or a political "regression" among workers in Eastern Europe is frequently concealing a deeper, individual experience of self-exclusion and self-denigration---"abjection" becomes central here---in the face of the obsolescence of the coal mines in the globalizing economy. It is argued that it is increasingly important to recognize that not only must Eastern Europe's so-called post-1989 "transitions" be considered in light of transnational forces of globalization, but that it is essential to have conceptual tools for thinking about those relics of earlier modernity (heavy industry, in particular) that are being expelled from inclusion in the global.;The research for this dissertation was based on 33 months of fieldwork in Romania, 22 months of which were carried out in the coal mining town of Lupeni in the Jiu Valley between 1998--2000. The research relied on interviews and workplace participant observation using techniques drawn from person-centered interviewing methods. Analysis of the data involved discourse analysis informed by psychoanalysis, cognitive anthropology, and psycholinguistics. Theoretically, this work can be situated at the intersection of psychological anthropology and political economy.;This dissertation shows that traditional approaches to the study of Eastern Europe tend to obscure the impact of political economic change on individuals due to the exclusion of person-centered level of analysis. The work argues that the impact of political economic decline has led to (1) the systematic disintegration of social categories of belonging, (2) the growing sense of secret, sinister, and conspiratorial forces arrayed against the people of the Jiu Valley, and (3) the internalization of psychic processes of self-abjection that make inclusion in a globalized future impossible to think. More broadly, this dissertation concludes that any notion of a totalizing global must be re-thought in light of those "margins" that have been expelled from processes of globalization.