The logic of transnational capital and the ongoing European imperative of ‘competition’ have created unofficial economies, seemingly exceptional situations in which the state is left to grapple with the problem of essential but ‘illegal’ labour in spaces in which it is no longer unambiguously sovereign. This article discusses Romanian labourers working informally, and often temporarily, in an agricultural area characterized by intensive plastic greenhouse production in Almería province, Spain. Informal employment is arranged through personal contacts and connections, advertisements, or anonymously in the plaza, the public square. Wages are often negotiated through the person of a Romanian intermediary, who organizes workers into teams, contracts with Spanish growers, and retains a significant proportion of the total pay. It is argued here that although technically outside of state jurisdiction, some of this ‘illegal’ economic activity embodies normalized, unexceptional features of the ‘official’ labour market. These include the general reliability of obtaining work with predictable wages and some opportunity for occupational and economic mobility within the sector for a limited number of people, as well as work‐related hierarchies, a racialized division of the area's labour force, and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production in the interests of prolonging the provision of flexible and cheap migrant labour with the complicity of the state. Résumé La logique du capital transnational et l'impératif européen de « concurrence » ont donné naissance à des économies non officielles, situations apparemment exceptionnelles dans lesquelles l'État doit résoudre le problème d'une main‐d'œuvre indispensable mais « illégale » dans des espaces où il n'est plus entièrement souverain. L'auteur décrit ici le travail informel et souvent temporaire de Roumains dans une région agricole de la province d'Almería, en Espagne, caractérisée par une production intensive sous serres en plastique. Les embauches informelles s'organisent par contacts personnels et relations, par petites annonces, ou de façon anonyme sur les places de village. Les salaires sont souvent négociés par un intermédiaire roumain qui organise aussi les équipes d'ouvriers, sous‐traite avec les cultivateurs espagnols et se réserve une part conséquente de la paie. Bien qu'elle échappe techniquement à la juridiction de l'État, une partie de cette activitééconomique « illégale » reprend des caractéristiques normalisées et ordinaires du marché du travail « officiel » : fiabilité d'un travail rémunéré de façon prévisible, possibilité de mobilité professionnelle et économique dans le secteur pour un nombre limité de personnes, hiérarchisation du travail, division racialisée de la main‐d'œuvre dans la région, reproduction des relations capitalistes de production en vue de prolonger la fourniture de main‐d'œuvre migrante flexible et bon marché, avec la complicité des pouvoirs publics.

This article traces mutations in the generalised image of the 'heroic' anthropologist since Susan Sontag's interpretation of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques in her 1963 essay, 'The anthropologist as hero'. Firstly, it is argued that a considerable shift has occurred from the Lévi-Straussian 'hard-won impassivity' to 'activist' anthropology in which the anthropologist's emotions are acknowledged and legitimised as part of the ethnographic process. With heroic activist anthropology comes the tendency to assume a single Euro-American vision of rights and responsibilities as universal, although it is suggested that in some contexts this may be in direct conflict with informants' sovereignty and desires. Secondly, as anthropologists increasingly study groups that are located 'at home', the analogy between fieldwork and a heroic journey into the unknown that Sontag posits becomes tenuous. Fieldwork is now carried out in places-the hospital, the airport, the office-that would have been unthinkable several decades ago. In these explicitly de-exoticised contexts in which they are often held accountable to their informants, anthropologists are able to demonstrate a heroic honesty with regards to their subjects of study. Finally, it is suggested that the generalised perception of anthropologists from outside the discipline has not taken these new sorts of heroisms into account, and that this omission has worked to the detriment of anthropology's external image.

Moral vectors, transitional time and a 'utopian object of impossible fullness' * Drawing on recent research in a Transylvanian community characterised by outward labour migration, this article posits a particular situated telos of normality, a 'utopian object of impossible fullness' defined subjectively by different social actors, which provides a sharp contrast to the delineated, singular accomplishments that characterised the collective teleological nature of socialist time. Unlike a discourse of progress, the expectation of utopia in the sense of 'normality', always deferred, always equally imminent, means that the present comes to be expressed as a void where seemingly contradictory moral vectors concerning practices such as working abroad can exist side by side.

Tableaux: The Workshop and the Refuge" Faites le plein d'idées!" the French arm of the Swedish home superstore Ikea's enormous product range enthusiastically encourages the consumer. As one proceeds through the store, one is confronted by a series of stagelike tableaux suggesting different productive activities carried out in the home: writing, gourmet cooking, serious reading, and artistic pursuits. These are not the impossibly tidy, unattainably beautiful montages of highbrow interior decorating magazines. Rather, they are eminently democratic -attainable, unpretentious, and inexpensive. Now, there is no longer any need to actually be a painter, a sculptor, or an architect, when one can acquire the material rudiments of the studio at cost price -a distressed Provençal armoire suggesting an interior full of years of half-used paint tubes, an artist's wooden model figure, or an architect's table and a heavy pivoting professional-style lamp -and put them together in a pleasing configuration in one's home. Likewise, framed prints by artists such as Mark Rothko or Robert Doisneau, heavy books on the coffee table featuring photographs of natives in exotic locales, and a cafetière and coffee mugs next to a cluster of open files crammed with magazines and journals invoke an entire life given over to erudite contemplation and sensitive global travel.Not every model here evokes images of elite intellectualism. Another popular tableau consumers can construct with objects from Ikea is that of the urban farmer -cum -"serious" chef: Le Creuset -style cast-iron cookware, thick wooden chopping boards, and 1950s-inspired kitchen accessories hint at a longstanding expertise in gourmet cooking, while rustic pine furniture, brightly colored plant