When We Write We Listen to Ourselves: Letters from the Imaginary Border Between Research and Friendship - Ana Chirițoiu and Izabela Tiberiade

Ami and Izabela are friends. One is an ethnic Romanian and a PhD candidate in anthropology, the other, thirteen years her junior, is an ethnic Roma and an undergraduate student. Their friendship took off when Ami was doing her field research about kinship among Roma. Izabela was fresh out of high school at the time; she taught Ami the Romani language and answered all her questions about Roma (even the silly ones). While she was explaining the world she had been raised in, with its practices and values, to the researcher that had moved in with her family, Izabela started to ask her own questions about the world Ami came from. A few years later, in the letters below, they talked about a recently published book written by a Spanish anthropologist, Paloma Gay y Blasco, together with her gitana friend, Liria Hernández, with whom Paloma had conducted her fieldwork many years before.[1] The book gave Ami and Izabela the opportunity to discuss about their own researcher – informant relationship and to sound out the blurry border between scientific interest and friendship, as well as to understand what it meant for a Romani woman to make her own choices and to become an individual while she belonged to such a tight-knit and rule-bound group as the one Liria belonged to. [1] Paloma Gay y Blasco and Liria Hernández, Writing Friendship. A Reciprocal Ethnography, “Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology” Series, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).Read by actress Katia Pascariu , with an illustration by Andreea Chiricăhttps://theanthro.art/when-we-write-we-listen-to-ourselves-letters-from-the-imaginary-border-between-research-and-friendship/