Bucharest Barks: Street Dogs, Urban Lifestyle Aspirations, and the Non-Civilized City

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how perceptions and practices related to street dogs in Bucharest, Romania, before, during, and after state socialism, reveal intersections of political economy, citizenship, marginality, social class, and urban development. Bucharest’s stray dog population reached 100,000 during the 1990s. During the time of my fieldwork between 2012 and 2014, their number was estimated at 45,000, following a campaign of sterilization and re-territorialization that had been implemented by City Hall and various NGOs for almost a decade. Mass euthanasia was approved in September of 2013, however, after a pack of dogs was assumed to have killed a four-year-old boy in one of the city’s parks. The euthanasia law initiated a series of conundrums and protests both against and in favor of the dogs’ lives. A clean and ordered urban environment was juxtaposed to the right of dogs to life in debates that highlighted competing visions of civilization, progress, and Europeanization. This dissertation addresses the role played by street dogs in the construction of the material, moral, and sentimental worlds of diverse Bucharest citizens. It focuses specifically on discourses of compassion and responsibility, key motifs through which Bucharest residents talked about different socioeconomic groups and their urban lifestyle aspirations. It also discusses how dogs were used to produce marginality. Some in Bucharest considered begging stray dogs—not unlike begging homeless people or the Roma—to be parasites on society, living off of the resources of legitimate citizens. At the same time, however, the dissertation also examines how hobbies such as dog breeding became associated, after the interwar period, with the upper classes and a bourgeois urban lifestyle. Finally, the dissertation explores ethnographic and archival material regarding the city’s animal population that shows how public officials and various groups since the1860s have used ideologies of sanitation and civilization to regulate the urban environment. In doing so, it also traces the logics of public administration that connect the socialist period with pre- and post-socialist times. This project brings together post-humanist and semiotic theory, and aims to contribute to urban and post-socialist studies in anthropology. It speaks to three domains of study in anthropology: a) the shaping of life in urban centers, b) post-socialist transformations, and c) the constitution of modern societies through human–non-human interactions. The dissertation specifically asks how the human dialectic with the “city” and its animal and material elements contributes to the experiential formation of the self, and to representations of social and racial others after the collapse of state socialism. It also explores how patterns of inhabiting and regulating the urban environment are mediated through everyday practices of caring for street dogs and debating and legislating animal management and sanitation. Ultimately, this manuscript discusses how street dogs are embedded in a social, political, historical, and economic context, making them dense, though contested signs of everything from post-socialist urban degradation, to the socialist or rural mentality of urban inhabitants, to the urban progress and future of Romanian and European civilization.