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Romani writing: Literacy, literature and identity politics
Abstract
The Roma (commonly known as “Gypsies”) have largely been depicted in writings and in popular culture as an illiterate group. However, as Romani Writing shows, the Roma have a deep understanding of literacy and its implications, and use writing for a range of different purposes. While some Romani writers adopt an “oral” use of the written medium, which aims at opposing and deconstructing anti-Gypsy stereotypes, other Romani authors use writing for purposes of identity-building. Writing is for Romani activists and intellectuals a key factor in establishing a shared identity and introducing a common language that transcends linguistic and geographical boundaries between different Romani groups. Romani authors, acting in-between different cultures and communication systems, regard writing as an act of cultural mediation through which they are able to rewrite Gypsy images and negotiate their identity while retaining their ethnic specificity. Indeed, Romani Writing demonstrates how Romani authors have started to create self-images in which the Roma are no longer portrayed as “objects”, but become “subjects” of written representation.
... This would be the case of the foundational work of Rajko Djuric (2002), who mapped the literary activity of Romani authors in Europe, sorting them out by nationalities. More recently, other scholars (Toninato 2014;Blandfort 2015;French 2015;Zahova 2016Zahova , 2020 equally have resorted to linguistic or national frames to describe or analyse Romani literary practices. These scholars draw attention to the plural and hybrid character of Romani writing, pointing out a number of common conceptual and thematic threads that transcend location and language. ...
In the context of the sociopolitical articulation of the Romani diaspora, this paper explores how its narrative is supported in four literary works written in different languages and national settings – Fires in the Dark by Louise Doughty, Camelamos Naquerar (We want to speak) by José Heredia Maya, Goddamn Gypsy by Ronald Lee, and Dites-le avec des pleurs (Say it with tears) by Mateo Maximoff – shaping a transnational/diasporic
literary production. Departing from the existence of a common Romani ethos, the analysis focuses on how these literary works shape a transnational/diasporic literature by representing the specificities of the Romani history – in particular the recollection of traumatic collective experiences – through a number of narrative strategies, such as self-representation or the depiction of cultural memory.
... Initially, progressive literary studies focused on the representation and stereotypes of "Gypsies" in mainstream works (Solms and Strauß 1995;Hölz 2002;Saul 2007;Solms 2008;Hagen 2009;Bogdal 2011;Brittnacher 2012;Patrut 2014). More recently, Romani literature (and Romani art more generally) has become an independent category that is in the process of being shaped (Djurić 2002;Blandfort 2011;Toninato 2014;Blandfort 2015;French 2015). These two approaches are concerned with different issues. ...
Romani literature was exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair at specific stands and events for the first time in 2019. This article reviews the presented literature and authors and discusses advantages and disadvantages of establishing the category “Romani literature” within the context of the Frankfurt Book Fair. It argues that the category provides a new platform for Romani authors as well as for Romani identity politics and was set up with the aim to fight existing racism against Roma. Making oneself visible as a diverse minority at such an event can help to break up stereotypes and constitutes a success after centuries of underrepresentation. At the same time, the article uncovers the danger of feeding into essentialism through the label “Romani literature” and reflects on the limitations of emancipatory politics when participating in a predominantly commercial event.
The article deals with the identity formation and coming-of-age processes of Romani girls who have migrated from Romania to France. First, some more general reflections on the identity formation processes of young women in diasporic Roma communities are made. In this context, identity hybridization processes are described with Bhabha’s “third space” concept. Following this, the literary staging of such identity negotiations will be examined using the example of two selected French narratives: the fictional life story Gadji! (2008) by the non-Romani writer Lucie Land on the one hand and the semi-autobiographal Je suis Tzigane et je le reste (I´m a Gypsy and I remain one, 2014) by Anina Ciuciu (and co-authored by the non-Romani journalist Frédéric Veille) on the other. At the same time, the question will be asked whether and which differences can be observed between the presentation from an external viewpoint or that of a self-perspective and how these differences should be interpreted.
This article offers a survey of writing by the Roma in former Czechoslovakia and current Czech Republic over a span of six decades. It traces the beginnings of Romani literature in two Romani journals published by the Union of Gypsies-Roma between 1969 and 1973, reveals some covert centres of activity in the relative silence of the Normalization years of the 1970s and 1980s, and highlights the milestones of development following the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Bringing developments up to present day, the essay shows the Czech Romani literary field as vibrant and ambitious and full of promise.
This article presents a close reading of the Romani characters and their actions in five stories by Viennese Romani writer and activist Samuel Mago and in two stories by his brother, Hungarian award-winning journalist Károly Mágó, in their bilingual Romani and German collection glücksmacher - e baxt romani. Brief biographies and an outline of the history of Roma and antiziganism in Austria provide background to textual analysis that focuses on how characters in the stories engender baxt/“Glück,” which means both happiness and luck. This dual meaning has inspired philosophical, psychological, economic, and anthropological studies, but literary scholars have rarely examined the concept in texts by Roma. For the protagonists in the brothers’ stories, happiness and luck become based less on monetary fortunes than on other means to live and survive in dark times of persecution and discrimination. The characters’ decisions unveil perceptions of baxt that rely largely on acquiring food, preserving and passing down family heirlooms, receiving an education, and freeing oneself and one’s family from persecution.
The theory of minor literature (based on Kafka’s hybrid identity in Prague) is applicable to the complex case of Czech and Slovak-Romani writing, including fictional portrayals of the Roma. The Irish-American writer Colum McCann’s Zoli, published in 2006, features a Slovak-Roma woman who becomes an acclaimed poet under the Communist regime, only to be cast out by her community and forced into exile. Two years later, Irena Eliášová (a Roma writer born in Slovakia who lives in the Czech Republic) published her novel Our Settlement (Naše osada), a far more affectionate view of the Roma society of her childhood. Both writers walk an uneasy balance in presenting Slovak-Roma culture from both insider and outsider perspectives. In McCann’s case the intention of bringing one of Europe’s most misunderstood minorities to anglophone readers struggles to avoid cultural appropriation, while Eliášová’s use of multilingualism negotiates the power dynamics between Czech, Slovak, and Romani.
Since the late 1990s and particularly after 2000, Romani literature has been characterized in part by the influence of international and global developments within the Romani movement as well as the growth of digital technologies and the internet. Romani publications are going digital in different formats, including the digitization of public domain materials, e-books, audiobooks, internet publishing and social media publishing. This article discusses how digital technologies have been incorporated in Romani literature production and proposes a typology of the digital forms of Romani literature. It also provides an analysis of the issues and challenges that are observed in Romani digital publishing, some of which are specifically related to this type of publishing, while others apply to Romani literature in general.
This article traces the beginning of Romani literature. It focuses on the work of Alexander Germano in the context of the history of a unique Romani literacy project developed in the USSR before the Second World War. It shows the peculiarity of the Soviet Romani literature and in particular the personal activities and contributions of Germano, the man considered the progenitor of contemporary Romani literature (with works in all three main genres of literature: poetry, prose, and drama). The study is based on a number of years of archival work in a variety of archives in the Russian Federation and to a great extent in Alexander Germano’s personal archive, preserved in the town of Orel (Russian Federation). The documents studied allow us to clarify the blurred spots in his biography, to reveal his ethnic background and identity, and to highlight the reason for the success of the Romani literary project. The example of Germano shows that the beginning of a national literature depends on the significance and public impact of the literary work of a particular author, and is not necessarily related to the author’s ethnic origin and identity.
Slovak and Romani folk tales and fairy tales are intertextually linked with the German tradition due to geographical and cultural closeness; however, most of them manifest specific regional differences and local color. Slovak and Romani folk tales (and folk songs) obsessively return to motifs of dying and dead mothers, stepmothers who make trouble for the orphaned children, and the starvation, cruelty and injustice that these children suffer. This paper critically revisits the traditional opposition between positive mother figures (associated with positive characteristics such as creating and giving life, protecting, sheltering, feeding, and nurturing) and negative mother types: stepmothers, mothers-in-law, and evil witches, who frequently replace absent (dead) biological mothers. Drawing on the work of Shuli Barzilai, Marilyn Francus, Jack Zipes, and Marina Warner, I discuss the motifs of absent and monstrous mother figures in an original Slovak folk tale, ‘Little Fawn Brother’, and a Romani fairy tale, ‘Black Brother and White Brother’. The texts feature dead mothers as well as several versions of substitute mothers, including wicked stepmothers, evil mothers-in-law, and a ghost mother, all of them failing to protect and nurture the (unwanted) children. Although both tales are conventionally narrated from the perspective of the children, who are struggling to develop their own identity and independence, my analysis offers an alternative perspective: the viewpoint of the (unwanted) mother figure.
"Theorizing the Hybrid" is a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore that critically engages the metaphor of hybridity as it is currently employed in the analysis of narratives and discourses, genres and identities, material forms and performances. Authors in the fields of folklore, cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, literary history, ethnomusicology, and comparative literature reflect on the nature, value, limitations, and dangers of hybridity as both an analytic model and a social practice. Articles consider topics ranging from the premodern to the cybernetic, the biological to the political, the highly localized to the transnational.
This article uses empirical data gathered during a pilot study funded by a local education authority to consider Gypsy and Traveller parents’ perceptions of education. It examines the changing role of education within the lives of Gypsy and Traveller parents and children reflecting changing social circumstances, in particular how many parents now feel schooling has a greater place in their children’s lives than would have been the case a generation ago. The research demonstrated that many families felt their children could learn skills at school and that would be necessary to generate an income in the future. This adaptation towards schooling designed for a sedentary population carried with it a large degree of concern from the point of view of Gypsy and Traveller parents around issues such as cultural erosion and safety, (issues that in the past may have led to many children not attending school). Employing concepts such as Goffman’s umwelt and Putnam’s description of defensive bonding social capital this article considers such concerns. It examines how parental anxiety about the transition from primary to secondary schools and the associated perceptions of risk posed by the permissive culture of the sedentary population materialize. It also explores how this transition coincides with parental tensions surrounding the ‘early onset adulthood’ of Gypsy and Traveller children who are regarded within their families and communities as being adults from an early age. Within this context, the article examines some of the very fluid adaptations being made by families to changing economic and social circumstances and also the roles adopted by members of the education ‘community’, in particular Traveller Education Services, in their relationships with Gypsy and Traveller families.
This article argues that the ambiguous status of a travelling ethnic group has implications for the state's interest in the assimilation of that group. The social reproduction of the group through the education of children becomes a crucial site of struggle. The Gypsies have to adapt to or subvert the dominant hegemony of sedentarism and the priveleging of a permanent place for identity. They must also retain control over their social reproduction through their children's upbringing. They have for centuries virtually monopolized the education of their children. Education outside the Gypsy community can be what Althusser defined as part of the state apparatus. Alternatively, the Gypsies might, through their traditions of working within but independently of the dominant larger society, find ways of subverting a state educational programme of assimilation, using it for their own ends to ensure their survival as a self-determined group. But government policies directed towards Gypsies' schooling are largely aimed at incorporation. Schooling is not a neutral intellectual liberation, as many educational `aficionados' of Gypsies believe.
The level of political mobilization among ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe has often been regarded as directly dependent on the strong or weak ethnic identity of the groups involved. Less attention has gone to the role of ethnic leaders in creating ethnic group identities for political purposes. This article explores the influence of political mobilization on ethnic group formation in the case of the Roma (Gypsies) in the contemporary Czech and Slovak Republics. It examines the various ways in which Romani activists in these two countries have “framed” Romani identity. The article suggests that activists’ conceptions of Romani identity are closely tied to their political strategies. At the same time, Romani activists have not been able to gain complete control over the production of Romani identity. They have had to deal with powerful schemes of ethnic categorization promulgated by the media, public officials and policy documents.
We explore issues generated by a current research project exploring the views of teachers and children on the conflicts that may be generated by the meeting of the cultural norms of traveller families with the expectations and value assumptions of schools.
This article draws on data generated from a 3½‐year ethnographic study of the interface between Gypsy culture and the educational system in England. The evidence suggests that Gypsy children have distinctive spatial orientations that are embedded in their own culture and life experience. These relate to issues revolving around degrees of nomadic and sedentary lifestyles, and also around spatial awareness deriving from the site environment. In combination, these features have the potential to make the transition between home and school problematic. Moreover, the utilization of space by Gypsy children is often misinterpreted within schools, being at odds with, and constituting a challenge to, the structured social space of the school environment. In view of the multiple meanings of space, this raises issues about the lack of flexible responses in institutional contexts.
In this selective review of the growing literature, the author focusses on the common links between the artisan, trader and entertainer minorities, the distinctiveness of their economic and social organisation, and the various attempts that have been made to classify the groupings identified. Reference is made to both nomadic and sedentary groups in Europe, North America and Asia. -J.Sheail
There are many parallels between hybridity theory, especially as it has been developed in the work of Bhabha, and theories of liminality in anthropology, particularly in the work of Turner and Douglas. These share a stress on sited performance and the specific positioning of actors. However, the stress in hybridity theory on the colonial encounter as the source of reflexivity and double consciousness does not engage, I argue, with the fact that cultures produce their own indigenous forms of transgression and hence also of critical reflexivity and satire: ritual clowns, carnivals, poetry, and the like. Moreover, while transgression is a potential tool of resistance which upturns taken-for-granted hierarchies, it plays dangerously on the boundary and, taken out of context, can become a source of offence, especially for postcolonial diasporas struggling for recognition. This raises the question: what are the creative limits of cultural hybridity?.
The development of Romani language use in the Republic of Macedonia is discussed here primarily in terms of its relation to education and other public and official contexts. The paper gives a detailed account of the statistical and legal position of the Roms in Macedonia and former Yugoslavia, followed by a linguistic account of the standardization of Romani for official use in Macedonia with comments on dialects, political action, publishing, the educational establishment, and the situation in other Balkan countries. Romani has gradually risen in status from total legal absence to legal equality with all other minority languages, even if the de facto realization has not yet met the de jure possibilities. The standardization of Romani and the fixing of the Arli dialectal base with other elements, together with a consistent orthography, has made significant progress.
This paper examines inclusionary processes and examples of 'good practice' in primary and secondary schools for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller pupils in one inner London Borough in the UK. It will explore the role of the Traveller Education Service (TES) and argue that the support provided by the TES to schools is essential for the development of 'good practice', but at the same time it stresses that the TES is not a substitute for the school's educational and welfare responsibilities. The paper will also argue that the commitment of the head teacher and senior management team to the inclusive ethos of the school is crucial in setting the tone of the school towards positive treatment of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller pupils. Where an inclusive ethos works successfully it is often the result of a wider social engagement between the school and community. The paper will draw on qualitative interview data with parents, head teachers, deputies, heads of year, teachers, and classroom assistants at the schools.
Background:
Data provided by the social sciences as well as genetic research suggest that the 8-10 million Roma (Gypsies) who live in Europe today are best described as a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations. The relationship between the traditional social structure observed by the Roma, where the Group is the primary unit, and the boundaries, demographic history and biological relatedness of the diverse founder populations appears complex and has not been addressed by population genetic studies.
Results:
Recent medical genetic research has identified a number of novel, or previously known but rare conditions, caused by private founder mutations. A summary of the findings, provided in this review, should assist diagnosis and counselling in affected families, and promote future collaborative research. The available incomplete epidemiological data suggest a non-random distribution of disease-causing mutations among Romani groups.
Conclusion:
Although far from systematic, the published information indicates that medical genetics has an important role to play in improving the health of this underprivileged and forgotten people of Europe. Reported carrier rates for some Mendelian disorders are in the range of 5-15%, sufficient to justify newborn screening and early treatment, or community-based education and carrier testing programs for disorders where no therapy is currently available. To be most productive, future studies of the epidemiology of single gene disorders should take social organisation and cultural anthropology into consideration, thus allowing the targeting of public health programs and contributing to the understanding of population structure and demographic history of the Roma.
Travelling Roma have for centuries been portrayed by non-Roma (Gadźé) in idyllic or sharply negative images that have little connection with the social context of Romani nomadism. Romani authors have begun to resist and relativize such representations, thereby giving rise to an autochthonous written literature. This article analyzes texts in which Romani authors challenge the stereotypical image of the 'travelling Gypsies' by emphasizing the reality of an independent nomadic way of life. It argues that Romani authors are acting as translating subjects in two ways: by being translators of Romani texts, and as Roma activists engaged in 'translating' their culture for non-Gypsy audiences. The article further argues that an important part of Romani literature is devoted to autoethnography, conceived as a strategy used by the Roma to represent themselves 'through the eyes of the other' without losing their cultural specificity. The Roma's use of writing and translation are interpreted as alternative sites of enunciation which question the rigid Roma/Gadźé polarity and open up new possibilities for negotiating Romani identity through dialogue and mutual recognition as well as demarcating their own space. A crucial factor in this context is the growing use and appreciation of a unifying Romani language, romanes. Increased use of romanes in written form presents, among other things, new opportunities for translating Gypsies to challenge asymmetrical power relations between Roma and Gadźé.
[When] we speak of a cultural revolution, we most certainly see the aspiration to extend the active process of learning, with the skills of literacy and other advanced communication, to all people rather than limited groups, as comparable in importance to the growth of democracy and the rise of scientific industry … The long revolution, which is now at the centre of our history, is not for democracy as political system alone, nor for the equitable distribution of more products, nor for general access to the means of learning and communication. Such changes, difficult enough in themselves, derive meaning and direction, finally, from new conceptions of man and society which many have worked to describe and interpret. (Williams 1961) The literacy-schooling equation: does it depend on a single point of view? Since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been unquestioningly assumed that literacy is both the purpose and product of schooling (Cicourel and Mehan 1984), and that the possession of literacy will improve the quality of life for individuals, social groups, and even society as a whole. However, as this chapter will show, the terms of this equation cannot be taken for granted. Raymond Williams, above, presents in perhaps its most idealized terms, a view of literacy as the key element that transforms human consciousness through the achievements of schooling and other social changes.
Utilizes hitherto unexamined documentation on the Romnichel Gypsies in the US to trace the evolution of their adaptations to the rapidly modernizing urban centers in the East between 1850 and 1930. Romnichels began immigrating to the US from England around 1850 when the country was undergoing the mechanization of its agriculture, rapid development of its industries, and growth of its urban population centers. These developments brought about an increasing demand for horses, which provided the Romnichels an opportunity to expand their peripatetic horse trading activities. -Authors
This book reflects on humanistic education by examining the limits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secret is not a mystery revealed but an utterance not understood, the likely fate of all instruction based purely on authority. This study reviews the pedagogical relationship in the European Bildungsroman from the point of view of the mentor rather than that of the young hero, but it also extends beyond the novel to encompass works in which the category of fiction has a crucial and constitutive function, for a growing awareness of limited authority on the part of the mentor figures is closely related to fictive self-consciousness in the texts. Rousseau's semi-novelised treatise, Emile, is relatively unaware of the fictive nature of its own authority; whereas in Sterne, Wieland, Goethe, and Nietzsche, the situation is reversed, culminating in the conscious impasse of authority in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While all these latter writers achieve their impact despite, indeed because of their internal scepticism, in the three subsequent writers, Lawrence, Leavis, and Coetzee, the impasse becomes more literal as the authority of Bildung is eroded in the wider culture. Yet in all cases, awareness of pedagogical authority as a species of fiction, to be exercised in an aesthetic spirit, is a significant prophylactic against the perennial pressure of reductive conceptions of education as instructional 'production'.
The attribution of low literacy levels among Gypsy children to difficulties of access to schools neglects underlying sociocultural explanations. There has been little analysis in reports/studies of Gypsy attitudes toward literacy, nor of outcomes of acquisition. Informed by new literacy theory and by the discourse of previous ethnographic studies, and by acculturation theories, this article draws on findings from an ethnographic study of English Gypsies (1996–2000), and data from a follow-up study, involving original and additional participants (2005–2006). The article explores attitudes across age groups, highlighting social reasons for resistance to literacy, and argues that policy makers should consider effects on group membership and ways in which formal literacy can constitute a mechanism for disempowerment.
For Serbian Gypsies, telling and listening to stories are important traditional behaviours, shared and transmitted among kin generation after generation. This paper discusses two traditional stories told by Serbian Gypsies: Lena - Losing a River and Cut, Cut Her Hands off! By examining the content of the stories and the social setting in which they are told, it is argued that the tales illustrate how oral narratives can deal with universal adaptive problems, while simultaneously offering guidelines to overcoming these problems in new and unique social environments.
This article is premised on the view that culturally, the periphery is greatly influenced by the society of the centre, but the reverse is also the case. This is a case study of the impact and implications for global culture of periphery-to-centre cultural flows. It is argued that the Trinidad carnival and the overseas Caribbean carnivals (e.g. Notting Hill, London; Caribana, Toronto; Labour Day, New York) are products of and responses to the processes of globalization as wellas transcultural and transnational formations. Carnival is theorized as a hybrid site for the ritual negotiation of cultural identity and practice by the Caribbean diaspora.
There is considerable conflict between Romani Gypsy child socialisation and education processes and mainstream education practices. In Romani communities children are encouraged to show initiative and independence at an early age. They learn by participating in the communities’ economic activities and observing adult verbal and non‐verbal communication skills. In mainstream education, by comparison, they learn in an enclosed classroom where they are rarely able to initiate or create their own learning experiences. Due to the increasing demands of industrialised societies, literacy is vital for Romani people. However, education systems are at present failing to meet the needs of these children. Structural inequalities such as poverty and racism, coupled with differing viewpoints on the benefits of education, continue to contribute to the low participation rates of Romani children in mainstream schools.
This paper examines the place of Gypsy-Travellers within the British legal system. It considers the function of the law in establishing moral and social norms and pathologising aspects of Traveller life. It examines how a variety of legal principles, discourses and bureaucratic agencies combine to construct travellers as deviant with regard to the moral and social order. It considers the attempts in British law to control Travellers' spatial practices and nomadic lifestyle, and the ambivalent nature of legislation in this area. The Caravan Sites Act 1968 is examined in terms of its formation and implementation. The origin and impact of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 are assessed. It contends that the criminal justice system has its own rationality which may conflict with both that of the formal law and other parts of the state. It is argued that institutional discrimination exists within the legal system, based on ingrained ‘sedentarist' assumptions about what constitutes a normal way of life. Both the 1968 and the 1994 Acts can be criticised in these terms. Travellers have, however, been able to resist many of the practices of legal and spatial enclosure to which they are subject.
Since the 1990s, cultural diversity in Spanish classrooms has increased notably with the arrival of immigrant origin students. This fact, together with the European Union discourses about consideration for cultural differences, have contributed to the appearance in Spain, and particularly in Catalonia, of an intercultural discourse. This article analyses the evolution of educational policies up to the current dominant discourse (from exclusion to incorporation in the school and the classroom, passing through segregationist actions) emphasising the difficulty nowadays of putting this into everyday practice, among other things for the lack of references and the absence of resources. This is done through the analysis of different official documents, as well as recouping different pieces of research on this question by both the author and others.
Journal of Democracy 9.3 (1998) 142-156
For the approximately six million Roma (Gypsies) who live in Eastern Europe, the transition from communism has been an altogether deplorable experience. Though entire sections of society (unskilled laborers, pensioners, and so on) have been hurt by the marketization processes that began nearly a decade ago, none has been more adversely affected than the Roma.
A wide variety of long-marginalized groups whose exclusion had been based on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or other grounds had greeted the fall of the ancien régime enthusiastically, expecting an end to state-sanctioned discrimination and societal prejudices. On the whole, marginal groups -- and especially ethnic minorities -- have been more successful in acquiring rights and stopping discriminatory practices in countries where democratization has advanced rapidly than in countries where the process has been sluggish. One feature common to all East European states, however, is the desperate situation of the Gypsies.
Reliable estimates put the world's Gypsy population at about 10 million. As Table 1 shows, Europe is home to about 8 million Roma, almost three-fourths of whom reside in Eastern Europe. Another million live in the United States. In a number of Western democracies, the Roma continue to suffer discrimination -- some of it de jure, but most of it de facto. Even though the Roma of Western Europe tend to be at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale in the countries where they live, their standards of living are far superior to those of their East European brethren.
In Eastern Europe, a relatively prosperous region by global standards, the vast majority of Gypsies live in misery and want. Prejudice against them is wide and deep, and, on several occasions since 1989, has led to vigilante-style violence and pogroms. The Roma's progress in attaining political representation in proportion to the size of their communities has been halting at best; their political power remains minimal. Perhaps most troubling of all, the key markers of their predicament are nearly identical in all of Eastern Europe. Their situation poses a threat to the democratic society that political and civic elites aspire to consolidate.
A good handle for understanding the Romani predicament is provided by the concept of marginality (which, put simply, denotes the domination of one group of people by another). Marginality is a multidimensional notion with separable political, social, and economic aspects. A group such as the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia or people of Indian ancestry in Trinidad and Tobago may be economically influential but politically marginalized. Moreover, marginal status itself may change: a group or an entire nation that was once politically excluded may, in time, find itself in the dominant position (as did Estonians with the demise of the Soviet Union).
The uniqueness of the Gypsies lies in the fact that they are a transnational, non-territorially based people who do not have a "home state" that can provide a haven or extend protection to them. For the Roma "every country is a 'foreign' country, a 'country of residence'; there is no homeland to go back to, or even to turn to in a symbolic capacity." This explains why Romani communities do not, strictly speaking, constitute a diaspora. There are, to be sure, other ethnic groups whose situations are somewhat similar: the Kurds, for instance, are transnational and without a motherland, but they are territorially based; the Jews are also transnational and used to be non-territorially based until the birth of the modern state of Israel; the Berbers of northern Africa are transnational and seminomadic, but they, too, have a homeland, west of Tripoli, to which they periodically return. On the other hand, the Gypsies -- whose distant origins can be traced to northern India -- are unique in their homelessness, a situation that, in important respects, explains their marginality as well as their relationship to the states of Europe and beyond. If, following Karl Deutsch, we envision ethnic stratification as a "layer cake," then the Roma have remained firmly ensconced at the bottom tier throughout their long existence in Europe. Characterizing the Roma as a pariah group subjected to widespread and intense societal rejection, Frederik Barth...
Discussed in this paper is the range of ethnic identities utilized by three North American Gypsy groups: the Rom, Romnicel and Ludar groups. Cultural characteristics that each group considers essential to its ethnic identity are described. In addition, the groups are compared with respect to their own perceptions of cultural similarity and dissimilarity. (Author/EB)
Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism has led to an unleashing of ethnic strife and a worsening of the economic conditions of the Roma, who by any measurement occupy the lowest rung of the social ladder. In the former Yugoslavia, the situation has been aggravated enormously by war, rampant nationalism, forced emigration, ethnic cleansing, and economic sanctions. The nearly four-year war in the region took a heavy toll on all the successor states except Slovenia.
By using the method of participant observation, both in the school and in the community, we were able to gain insight into a series of aspects that characterise the everyday school life of Sinti children in Italian schools. By describing the first school day of four Sinti children I attempt to point out some of the fundamental differences that exist between the children's community environment and the school's institutional environment, differences that lead to discontinuities that the children have to find coping mechanisms for.
This article analyses and welcomes the decision of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights which held that the use of special schools for Roma pupils was contrary to the right to an education coupled with the prohibition on discrimination. The decision has wide ramifications for the education of minority, particularly Roma, pupils who are often sent to remedial schools or special classes as an alternative to mainstream, integrated education. It is argued that such segregation, whilst it may arise from a legitimate intention to address educational disadvantage, cannot achieve such a goal in a climate of separation and intolerance which permeates the wider society. The Grand Chamber’s willingness to scrutinise the wider societal context and to allow statistical evidence to suggest a prime facie case of indirect discrimination, will be welcomed by those seeking a more pro‐active non‐discrimination platform from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
My premise in this article is a simple one: first, that the liberty to maintain one's cultural behaviour is dependent upon one's civil liberties; and second, while not all legal rights are civil, all civil rights are nevertheless legal. Furthermore, if we are to deal with the situation effectively, we must address it not only as a cultural or civil or legal issue, but as one having far‐reaching political ramifications as well.
The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe promised bold opportunities for the various ethnic groups populating that vast, diverse region. Yet if history had any lessons to teach these groups it was that democracy, or at least the political systems that emerged in the midst of the rubble of the Berlin Wall between 1989 and 1991, was no guarantor of whatever idealized rights the region's ethnic groups hoped would come in the wake of the collapse of the communist dictatorships that had dominated these parts of Europe for decades. Communism, had, in many instances, done nothing more than stifle the festering ethnic tensions that had exploded in the nineteenth century and short-circuited the complex, lengthy process of resolving these conflicts. Consequently, for those knowledgeable about the essence of these conflicts, it should have come as no surprise that Yugoslavia, for example, was torn asunder by ethnic violence so terrifying that it took the intervention of the Western world's great powers to end the most violent aspects of these wars of ethnicity.
One of the most serious problems facing the post-revolutionary Indonesian political élite has turned out to be the maintenance of mutual understanding between themselves and the mass of the peasant population. The attempt to build up a modern national state out of a plurality of distinct regional cultures has been hampered by the difficulty of communication between people still largely absorbed in those cultures and the metropolitan-based nationalist leadership more oriented to the international patterns of intelligentsia culture common to ruling groups in all the new Bandung countries. On the one hand, the activist white-collar nationalists of the large cities are attempting to construct an integrated Indonesian state along generally western parliamentary lines; on the other, the peasants of the Javanese, Sundanese, Achenese, Buginese, etc. culture areas cling to the patterns of local community organization and belief with which they are intimately familiar.
This article proposes a model that provides a tool to gauge the preparedness of ethnic and other groups for political mobilization. It argues that successful ethnic mobilization requires a well-specified bundle of "mobilization prerequisites" that can be used to evaluate political and social movements in a variety of contexts. The model is applied to elucidate the East European Gypsy communities' modest success at ethnic political mobilization. The article assesses the explanatory power of the independent variables and explains Gypsy electoral politics and behavior.
Anthropologists have long hypothesized that major differences in the school experiences of various populations lie in the discontinuities between their cultural backgrounds and the culture of the schools. Research has, therefore, generally focused on differences in cultural values, cognitive, motivational, communicative, and interactional domains that are presumed to affect school experience. This paper attempts to refine the cultural discontinuity hypothesis by distinguishing between three types of discontinuities: universal, primary, and secondary discontinuities. It is suggested that each is more or less associated with a distinct type of school “problems” and that some problems of racial or castelike minority students in societies like the United States arise principally from secondary cultural discontinuities. ANTHROPOLOGY, BLACK AMERICANS, CULTURAL DISCONTINUITIES, CULTURAL PLURALISM, MINORITY EDUCATION.
This paper draws on findings from a longitudinal study of Gypsy Traveller1 students attending English secondary schools. Analysis of over 400 interviews with 44 Gypsy Traveller students, their parents and teachers over a 5-year period identified several pull and push factors that impact on secondary school engagement and retention. Of these, cultural dissonance (a result of conflicting expectations between home and school) and social exclusion feature strongly. Students who relied on maladaptive coping strategies to deal with psychosocial stress associated with cultural dissonance and social exclusion tended to drop out of school early. These maladaptive strategies are referred to here as fight (physical and verbal retaliation and non-compliance), flight (self-imposed exclusion) and playing white (passing identity by concealing or denying one's heritage). Those who were retained in school to the age of 16 displayed more adaptive strategies such as cognitive re-framing, developing social support networks and adopting a bicultural identity.
This article is a comparative analysis of state-socialist policies towards the East European Gypsies (Roma). I make two related arguments. First, the Gypsy policies of East European states evolved differently and resulted in considerable variation. Second, notwithstanding the state-socialist social control policies, a measure of independent Romani activism did emerge laying the groundwork for post-socialist Gypsy mobilization.
This article explores Gypsy Travellers' changing views on their children's education. It highlights the positive means some schools use to encourage greater involvement of Gypsy Traveller parents. It argues that current educational policy needs to be re-developed to incorporate more effective and affirmative responses to interrupted and nomadic learning. It draws heavily on interviews with Gypsy Traveller families in an effort to give 'voice' to an under-represented community.
Romani is a stateless, non-territorial minority language with no written tradition. The present paper offers a survey of recent codification efforts. Codification is regional and decentralized, with only marginal international orientation or institutional commitment. Texts tend to show moderate or elaborate adjustment of the majority language alphabet, with occasional 'soft' neologisms. In a pragmatic corpus analysis, three action-oriented functions of Romani codification are identified: a communicative function, an emblematic function, and a mobilizing-rallying function. Overlaps among those functions, and emerging, potentially autonomous functions, are identified for two domains: political journalism and educational material.