
Paloma Gay Y BlascoUniversity of St Andrews · Department of Social Anthropology
Paloma Gay Y Blasco
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Publications (44)
Doing anthropology and writing ethnography are always collaborative, even though this collaborative dimension is most often hidden in the texts that anthropologists write. In this chapter I reflect on the conflicts and entanglements that accompany the collaborative process of producing anthropological knowledge, reflecting on the radical experiment...
This book has been written by two co-authors, Liria Hernández and Paloma Gay y Blasco. We use two different fonts in order to make visible each of our voices. Liria, a Gitana street seller from Madrid, met Paloma, a Paya anthropologist, in 1992 when they were both in their twenties. They became close friends and worked together as informant and ant...
This book has been written by two co-authors, Liria Hernández and Paloma Gay y Blasco. We use two different fonts in order to make visible each of our voices. Since Liria left her Gitano environment in 2009, she has lived among Latin American and North African migrants in inner-city Madrid. The authors discuss how Liria’s sense of herself has been...
This book has been written by two co-authors, Liria Hernández and Paloma Gay y Blasco. We use two different fonts in order to make visible each of our voices. When Liria eloped from her family, she challenged many of their conventions regarding acceptable female behaviour. Paloma’s decision to help Liria also betrayed the trust of Liria’s family. I...
This book has been written by two co-authors, Liria Hernández and Paloma Gay y Blasco. We use two different fonts in order to make visible each of our voices. Liria and Paloma have approached the writing of this reciprocal text from very different standpoints. Liria has been guided by her Evangelical beliefs and her certainty that this book is part...
This book has been written by two co-authors, Liria Hernández and Paloma Gay y Blasco. We use two different fonts in order to make visible each of our voices. Through two conversations in which they interview each other, Liria and Paloma look back together on their teenage lives, as two girls growing up in very different areas of Madrid—Liria among...
This book has been written by two co-authors, Liria Hernández and Paloma Gay y Blasco. We use two different fonts in order to make visible each of our voices. Liria and Paloma met in 1992, when both were young women and Paloma was doing anthropological fieldwork among Liria’s family and neighbours. After Paloma left to return to finish her Ph.D. in...
This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernández, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist. In this unique reciprocal experiment, the former informant returns the gaze to write about the anthropologist, her life and her environment. Through finely crafted and deeply moving text, Hern...
A Reciprocal Ethnography: Studying Roma and Non-Roma Lives Collaboratively
Most academic representations of Roma women are produced by non-Roma scholars and the lives of Roma women are generally studied in isolation from those of non-Roma women. In this article we (Liria, a Gitana street seller, and Paloma, a non-Gitana anthropologist) discuss our...
In this article I reflect on my attempt to co-author a reciprocal life story with my friend Liria de la Cruz, a semiliterate Gypsy/Roma street seller from Madrid—a book where we examine together our intertwined stories. Much has been made of the assumed capacity of collaborative methodologies to transform ethnography for the better. Yet as Liria an...
en I contribute to the debate about the persistence of Roma marginalisation in contemporary Europe by analysing the conflict that took place in 2008 in Madrid over the segregation of Gitano (Spanish Roma) children in state schools. Tracing the changing place of Gitanos in the city since the early 1980s, I demonstrate how current practices of educat...
In this article I take a dichotomous approach, exploring two periods in the development of Pentecostalism among Gitanos in Madrid, and two analytical approaches to the Gitano Pentecostal phenomenon and its relation to gendered subjectivities, identities and identifications. I first look back to the early spread of Gitano Pentecostalism in the early...
In this article, I analyse the narratives that American adopters of Chinese children put up on Internet family websites in the early 2000s. I focus on what these narratives reveal about the complex articulation of notions of kinship and of individuality in twenty-first-century America. These website accounts illustrate both the relational nature of...
In this article we, as informant and anthropologist, attempt to write ethnography together and to propose a collaborative and egalitarian anthropology. We start from the awareness that ethnographic knowledge is made by ethnographers and informants, and should be owned by both. We write together and separately, about each other and about ourselves,...
Ethnographic representations of Gypsies/Roma have traditionally emphasized the role of the person as exemplar and performer of Gypsy/Roma distinctiveness. They have also depicted Gypsy/Roma life as driven towards cultural closure and towards the eschewing of moral ambiguity. Here I explore these ideas via the story of a Agata, a Gitano woman from M...
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
For an anthropologist of Western Europe such as myself, the
setting of Fosztó's ethnography appears remarkably fragmented: here
are Roma who describe themselves as 'Hungarian Roma' and who live
amongst another minority, ethnic (but non-Roma) Hungarians, in a
village in Romania. Unlike...
What transforms the process of ethnography endowing it with its thing-like, modal character as an ethnography? This article examines how ethnography becomes an ethnography on the one hand, through the manipulation of descriptive and analytical diversity and, on the other, by way of the ambiguation (and disambiguation) of authorial agency. The purif...
In this paper I concentrate on cosmopolitanism's ‚protean quality’ (Hannerz), its elusiveness and flexibility both as analytical tool and as experience. I explore the life of Agata Gonzáles, a Gitano (Gypsy/Roma) woman from Madrid, tracing the emergence of a cosmospolitan subjectivity. In this ethnographic context, cosmopolitanism appears and disap...
In this paper I concentrate on cosmopolitanism's ‘protean quality’ (Hannerz), its elusiveness and flexibility both as analytical tool and as experience. I explore the life of Agata González, a Gitano (Gypsy/Roma) woman from Madrid, tracing the emergence of a cosmopolitan subjectivity. In this ethnographic context, cosmopolitanism appears and disapp...
Paloma Gay y Blasco, Sheena Macrae, Peter Selman and Huon Wardle challenge the methodology and findings of an article published in the previous edition of Adoption & Fostering (Chou and Browne, 2008). The debate continues with a letter from the USA, followed by Browne and Chou's response.
How to Read Ethnography is an invaluable guide to approaching anthropological texts. Laying bare the central conventions of ethnographic writing, it helps students to develop a critical understanding of texts and explains how to identify and analyse the core ideas in order to apply these ideas to other areas of study. Above all it enables students...
Although Gypsies have often been described as people ‘oriented towards the present’, the question of how their approach to the past might illuminate their particular mode of being in the world has been left largely untheorized. In fact, understanding how Gypsies manage the past is essential to understanding the processes through which they survive...
In this article I explore the imaginative and practical links that the Gitanos of Jarana, in Madrid, make with other Gitanos and Gypsies elsewhere. What kind of diaspora do they see themselves as belonging to? The context to my investigation is the fast growth of both Gypsy Pentecostalism and Roma international political activism – two movements th...
Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain. Victoria Loree Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff. eds. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. ix. 443 pp., illustrations, bibliography, contributors, index.
This article analyses the impact of Gitano Pentecostalism on the political life of a group of Castilian Gitanos in Madrid, focusing on the sphere of relations among patrigroups. The article begins by outlining the background against which Gitano Evangelism works as a political force, centring on Gitano modes of managing conflict and of allotting ma...
This article addresses anthropological conceptualizations of 'sex' (as biology/nature) and 'gender' (as culture). Anthropologists find it difficult to conceptualize gender except through a binary and reproduction-oriented view of sexual difference. Using data collected among Gitanos (Spanish Gypsies), the article illustrates how to understand the p...