MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO ROMANY STUDIES MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO ROMANY STUDIES SELECTED PAPERS FROM PARTICIPANTS OF CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY’S SUMMER COURSES 2007–2009 MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO ROMANY STUDIES Selected Papers from Participants of Central European University’s Summer Courses 2007–2009 edited by MICHAEL STEWART and MÁRTON RÖVID CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY PRESS BUDAPEST This book is one of the products of the training program entitled “Multi-Disciplinary and Cross-National Approaches to Romany Studies – A Model for Europe” (2070– 2010), which was financed by the European Union Marie Curie Conferences and Training Courses “Romany Studies” – MSCF-CT-2006-045799. Published by CEU Summer University Central European University Október 6. utca 12. H-1051 Budapest Hungary E-mail: [email protected] © 2010 by Central European University Linguistic revision © 2010 by Christopher Ryan Cover designed by Anca and Sorin Gog Photo of the front cover was taken by Concetta Smedile, participant of the CEU Summer Course in 2009 Photo of the back cover was provided by the Hungarian Museum of Photography Copyedited and typesetted by Andrea T. Kulcsár All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-9776-76-0 CONTENTS Introduction . .1 Michael Stewart OPERATIONALISING “ETHNICITY” AS A THEORETICAL TERM “What Makes Us Gypsies, Who Knows…?!”: Ethnicity and Reproduction . .13 Judit Durst Constructing Culture through Shared Location, Bricolage and Exchange: the Case of Gypsies and Roma . .35 Judith Okely The Romani Musicians on the Stage of Pluri-culturalism: the Case of the Kalyi Jag Group in Hungary . .55 Katalin Kovalcsik Harming “Cultural Feelings”: Images and Categorisation of Temporary Romani Migrants to Graz/Austria . .71 Stefan Benedik OPERATIONALISING “ETHNICITY” IN PRACTICE Crediting Recognition: Monetary Transactions of Poor Roma in Tercov . .91 Yasar Abu Ghosh On the Borders of Gender. Marriage and the Role of the “Child” amongst Hungarian Gypsies . .108 Cecília Kovai “Passing”: Rebeka and the Gay Pride. On the Discursive Boundaries and Possibilities of Skin Colour . .123 Kata Horváth The Employment of Roma, Turks and Bulgarians. A Comparative Report Based on the Outcome of the Multipurpose Household Survey 2007 . .131 Alexey Pamporov v vi Contents ANTI-ROMANY RACISMS History and Memory From ‘Time-Banditry’ to the Challenge of Established Historiographies: Romani Contributions to Old and New Images of the Holocaust . .153 Huub van Baar The Other Genocide . .172 Michael Stewart “The Unhidden Jew”. Jewish Narratives in Romany Life – Stories. .196 Zsuzsanna Vidra Contemporary Manifestations Nomads’ Land? Political Cultures and Nationalist Stances vis-à-vis Roma in Italy . 211 Giovanni Picker Not Always the Same Old Story: Spatial Segregation and Feelings of Dislike towards Roma and Sinti in Large Cities and Medium-size Towns in Italy . .228 Tommaso Vitale and Enrico Claps Romany Responses The Web against Discrimination? Internet and Gypsies/Travellers Activism in Britain . .257 Marcelo Frediani Romany/Gypsy Church or People of God? The Dynamics of Pentecostal Mission and Romani/Gypsy Ethnicity Management . .271 Johannes Ries Claiming Legitimacy in/of a Romany NGO . .280 Hana Synková Short Biographies of the Contributors . .293 Michael Stewart INTRODUCTION Challenges for Scholarship in the Field of Romany Studies Listen to the Mayor of a poor, north Hungarian village who is quoted by Judit Durst in this volume saying the following: I just don’t understand this question about who is a Gypsy. It is quite clear, isn’t it? Everyone who is a Gypsy is a Gypsy. You can smell them from a kilometre. There is no definition for this—I can’t find one. You have to accept that a person who was born a Gypsy has a different temperament; they live differently and behave differently. I grew up among Gypsy children. Everyone who is a Gypsy has remained a Gypsy. It makes no difference if they have a bath every night, the smell remains, just like with horses. There is a specific Gypsy smell. And they can smell the smell of Peasants on us. This claim from an elected public official—the tone of which will not surprise anyone familiar with the current political climate in some parts of Hungary—brings clearly into view the broader political and social context in which we publish this collection of studies by senior scholars and their students. Across eastern Europe, and to some extent in other countries of Europe where ‘anti-Gypsyism’ has political currency—either at a local level as in the United Kingdom, or at a national level, as in Italy—Gypsies are a population about whom it has until recently remained acceptable to be unapologetically racist. This is a point I will return to below, but I am also struck by the fact that the Mayor’s claim gains its full meaning only if we acknowledge the degree of rhetorical hyperbole in play here. Far from it being ‘quite clear’ in Hungary or most parts of Europe ‘who the Roma are,’ they are in fact what sociologists and demographers refer to as a ‘hard to see minority.’ Indeed, some years back the sociologists János Ladányi and Iván Szelényi conclusively demonstrated that observers systematically disagreed over whether to classify any given third party as ‘Roma’ or not. In a cunningly devised experiment the sociologists demonstrated that in Hungary, in 35% of instances a second interviewer classified a person previously labelled as Roma, as non-Roma and this interviewer was uncertain as to the classification in a further 16% of cases. The same figures for Romania were 28% and 34% respectively—indicating that in every other instance observers, in these countries at least, do not ‘know’ if an unfamiliar person is ‘Roma’ (Ladányi and Szelényi, 2001, p. 85). 1 2 Michael Stewart This is not to make an absurd social constructivist claim that ‘the Roma do not exist.’ As the Romany activist and International civil servant, Andrzej Mirga, is fond of saying, ‘you may not know who we are, but we do’—a stance that reflects a political commitment to openness to engage with anyone who thinks of themselves as Roma or ‘like the Roma’ and is not to be confused with the name-calling ‘realism’ of the village Mayor. Rather, it is to note that in the absence of state institutions that might clearly define the Roma, in the way citizenship regimes, educational institutions, passports etc. determine state affiliations, the Roma will never possess the kind of clearly demarcated ‘group’ boundaries and ‘distinctive features’ that those gathered within nation-state categories have acquired. This much has recently been acknowledged from a completely different political stance in a recent statement by the European Commission, which published its first policy communication on the subject of Roma inclusion on 8th April 2010. Here is how the Commission defines the subject of their intervention: The Commission uses “Roma” as an umbrella term that includes groups of people who share similar cultural characteristics and a history of segregation in European societies, such as the Roma (who mainly live in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans), Sinti, Travellers, Kalé etc.. The Commission is aware that the extension of the term “Roma” to all these groups is contentious, and it has no intention to “assimilate” the members of these other groups to the Roma themselves in cultural terms. No ‘once a Roma, always a Roma’ rhetoric there. To put this another way, one of the recurring themes of the papers in this volume is how the all-pervasive methodological nationalism of anthropological and other social scientific approaches produces false and misleading accounts of Romany lives in Europe today; and how, therefore, rich and honest analysis of Romany lives demands that authors transcend the ‘ethnic’ frame of reference. Katalin Kovalcsik notes how the real history of the development of Romany musical forms in Hungary was both misunderstood by folklorists at the time, keen to discover ‘pure, national’ traditions and is now misrepresented by academics keen to establish the political power of this form in modern identity politics. It is only by the most careful and attentive listening to what the ‘actors’ say on the ground and by remaining resolutely faithful to the actual idioms used that we can begin to work with the complexity of the ways Roma make sense of the world they live in. But this is not all. Our notions of ‘culture,’ of ‘ethnic group’ or ‘people’ are so utterly rooted in the schemas derived from practices of nation states (which are, or at least strive to be, homogeneous, neatly bounded entities) that Romany communities appear as an anomaly. A theoretical rigour is therefore demanded of analysts in this Introduction 3 field—as Picker, for instance, demonstrates with his subtle and careful search for the traces of nationalist politics in the apparently neutral policy constructions of two Italian towns. Indeed, the stance of the racist mayor mentioned above may in one sense be best seen as an effort to create a type of rhetorical order where there is no such clear demarcation of distinct populations in reality—as the EU statement also quoted above acknowledges. But the problem exists not just for the racists and xenophobes who seek to identify ‘foreign or alien elements’ in the nation who can be blamed for national decline. It is equally an issue for those who would defend Roma or promote the well being of communities known as Roma. A striking example of this came in late 2009 from the offices of two of Hungary’s Ombudsmen responsible for minority rights and data protection. Concerned with the treatment of ‘ethnic data’ by public and private institutions and the de jure repudiation of all such data in Hungarian public life, Dr.s András Jóri and Ernő Kállai were concerned with two contradictory phenomena.