2018. The Everyday Life of a Homo Sacer. Südosteuropa (original) (raw)
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Ethnologia Polona, vol. 33–34: 2012–2013, pp. 229 – 241, 2013
Abstract Even though refugee centres are often located in geographic proximity to us, they are, in many respects, a demanding and inaccessible field for ethnographic research. Such field is difficult not only methodologi- cally, or due to social and cultural relations it produces, but also because of the ethical and psychological challenges that the ethnographer is faced with if s/he intends to understand certain aspects of the life of the residents of such a centre. The dilemmas involved in this situation resemble the ones experienced by those working in the most socially sensitive professions. In this article I present selected difficulties I have encountered in the last years carrying out fieldwork in some of the refugee centres in Poland. Those difficulties had their sources in cultural differences and in social conditions. In the paper I describe briefly the conditions of living in these centres and the peculiar relations between the residents, which impact the effectiveness of the works carried out there. Moreover, I discuss the relationship between the cultural relativism and the ethical principles the researcher abides by. Each of these issues is illustrated with actual fieldwork situations.
Konik – Montenegro’s Forgotten Ghetto of Roma Refugees
Czas Kultury, 2016
The Roma are a community for whom the past does not have great importance. What matters is what is happening here and now– that is the prevalent belief among many scholars and researchers of Roma history. It is also used in a certain sense to justify the fact that the Roma have been and continue to be perceived in different categories than other groups. That is what happened in the case of their centuries-long experience of slavery and the extermination campaign during the Second World War. In Sławomir Kapralski’s view, that represents a manifestation of the Roma’s marginalization in historiography.
Living in Urban Interstices: The Survival Practices of Excluded Gypsies in Italian Borderlands
The paper focuses on the case-studies of nomad camps in Italy, especially referring to Palermo, a city in Southern Italy, where three groups of “gypsies” have lived for thirty years in ghetto conditions. The nomad camps, regular or irregular, generally constitute a world out of the city, as an encompassed microcosm, without contact with citizenship or public administration, except for voluntary associations. They represent a borderland or a grey zone in front of the rest of the external urban space. Not physically seeing Gypsy communities signifies not caring about them, about their living conditions, about their culture and about their identity. The only interaction between “them” and “us” happens when the Romani exit every morning from the camp and cross the municipal streets: children roam alone, asking for food or going to school, some little boy is disguised as a girl in order to provoke more compassion amongst passing people. Adults, instead, prefer traffic lights for begging for charity (manghel). And so gypsy children are seen as abandoned, while adults are considered unemployed, who do not want to search for a job and are always “producing” children. Within people’s imagery there is a lot of prejudice in terms of exclusivity: first of all the idea that their occidental space is invaded by this unpleasant microcosm that must stay within its boundaries. Roma people, instead, develop a capacity to survive in urban interstices in order to create an informal support network with Italian habitants, that is the gage (or “non Roma people”). These practices often consist of unusual welfare forms of material help for day by day survival, while living in a condition of human rights negation by the majority of society members. Key words: Roma/Gypsies communities, anthropology of migration, anty-Gypsyism, borders
Czas Kultury, 2016
Wim Willems claims that the Roma appear in the popular imagination chiefly in two roles–as the dregs of society or in a flattering but not exactly illuminating light as Romantic outsiders. Willems underscores that his book does not answer the question of who the Roma truly are or what they are like, but rather how they are portrayed in literary and anthropological texts of the past two centuries. Willems’s research indicates that in the history of representations of the Roma, a collective image dominates which does not reveal the ethnic diversity of the group, but instead oscillates around the position that its cultural system is “inferior,” while the “norm” against which it is so judged is naturally located in the culture of the scholar or author.
No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe Vanishing Others, ed. by Anna Wylegała, Sabine Rutar, Małgorzata Łukianow, 2023
Focusing on the processes of post-war community reconstruction and healing, this chapter outlines the experiences of Roma who spent the early post-war years in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union. The author demonstrates that Roma in the Baltic States, western Belarus, and western Ukraine faced similar challenges and choices, for example “to keep on the move or settle,” “to stay in the Soviet Union or leave for Poland,” and so on. Likewise, they found themselves affected by the confrontation between the nationalist insurgencies and the Soviet counterinsurgency. Analysis of the post-war lifestyles and mobility patterns of Roma reveals that their decisions were, first of all, informed by family and community considerations, such as looking for lost family members, taking care of orphans, and providing for their families. Drawing on published memoirs and oral histories, the author discusses how the Roma communities devastated by the Nazi persecution sought to heal from their multiple losses and return to a normal community life.