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This text is based on the experience of a long term fieldwork in an impoverished urban setting of Bucharest. The aim of the article is twofold. First, it highlights some of the conditions that reproduced the poverty of poverty research in social sciences – especially in disciplines that rely on ethnographic methods. Informed by these concerns, the second part of the article provides a reflexive account on fieldwork as a process, showing how different situations and stages of involvement in a community open up situated sources of experience that constitute the researcher’s knowledge. As a non-native speaker of Romanian, I put special emphasis on the question of language as a medium of understanding the categories and distinctions by which people organize their social worlds. Language and interaction provide the elementary units which make fieldwork similar to any other learning process.

Keywords: fieldwork as process, ethnography, urban marginality, public space, language and interaction, researcher and informants