This thesis considers the relationships between rural humans, their pigs and other nonhuman animals in Prundu Bârgăului and Ilva Mică, villages in the county of Bistrița-Năsăud, northern Romania. I argue that all my informants’ animals had positive effects on their owners’ health and wellbeing, but that pigs have a special status. Pigs are relatively cheap to keep and fatten, their meat is notionally Romania’s national food, and they make a unique contribution to peasants’ empowerment as ‘natural’, ‘traditional’ agriculturalists, while also being twenty-first century Romanians. I argue that pig rearing has helped humans cope with socio-political trauma, namely their exclusion and misunderstanding by successive political establishments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I explore the private rearing, killing and consumption of pigs and the long-lasting human-pig relations of care, trust and attention. I do this by examining the political context of the region and the growing pressures from Romanian and European welfare and farming authorities on local peasants to develop their modes of labour. I also explore the influence of Orthodox religion and village norms on local patterns of pork consumption, and on the emotional aspects of human-pig interactions. Besides being a multispecies ethnography which considers the agencies of various animals on social life in northern Romania, this thesis is also a reflexive text. I show the development of my relationship with my informants through discussing culinary habits. I demonstrate the importance of commensality, hospitality and emotionality in negotiating my identity as a Romanian, vegetarian, ‘ex-local’ researcher, and the identities of my informants as traditional, curious and open-minded, peasants
