"Gadžology" as Activism: What I Would Have Ethnography Do for East European Roma

Abstract

"Gadžology" as Activism:What I Would Have Ethnography Do for East European Roma Heather Tidrick (bio) Gypsy stereotypes are unnervingly familiar even if you have never traveled to Budapest: They do not want to work; they just have babies so they can live off the social benefits system. Watch your pockets on the tram. Be careful in the Gypsy quarter—be sure not to go there after dark. As my own role as an American in Hungary has shifted over the past decade, though—as an English teacher just out of the University of California in the late 1990s; then an editor of Romani rights reports with the European Roma Rights Centre; and since 2003 a graduate student researcher—I have found it amazing how far-reaching adherence is to the ugly dominant narratives about Roma. This essay has two main goals: first, to recall the significance of the politics of knowledge in the articulation of bio-power (Foucault 1978)—for Roma in Europe, like Jews and many other groups who have experienced stigmatization, the contours of their oppression are profoundly influenced by notions of their cultural alterity, whether these expressions of their apparent distinctiveness appear in journalism, scholarly writing, or NGO promotional materials. I offer a few contemporary examples of such representations in the case of Roma and discuss the consequences of these representations. Second, because scholars play a political role in creating texts, I advocate a methodological stance that foregrounds inherent human dignity and vigilantly guards against the further reproduction of dominant, extremely destructive narratives about stigmatized groups. I discuss how these principles have shaped my own research agenda on the interplay between social policy and institutional practices with Roma. By playfully proposing "Gadžology" [End Page 121] (the study of non-Roma, or gadže, from a Romani point of view) as the counterpoint to "Romology," I attempt to highlight the ways our disciplinary boundaries can define our object of study to the detriment of both theory and ethics—and to challenge us to formulate alternative and liberatory avenues of scholarship as ethnographers. Power, Knowledge, and Romology Many writers too easily traffic in Gypsy stereotypes without the evidence to support their claims. Political scientist Zoltan Barany references the supposed "higher-than-average levels of Gypsy criminality" (2002, 180); journalist Isabel Fonseca claims that Roma have no words for "time," "danger," "warmth," and "quiet" (Fonseca 1996; Hancock 1997); and anthropologist David Scheffel (2005) points to apparent Romani deviance as a key factor in the segregation of Roma from Slovak community life in Svinia (and, implicitly, elsewhere in Eastern Europe). One only has to scratch the surface of these destructive claims to recognize the thin epistemological footing on which many of the authors in the multidisciplinary field of Romani Studies stand. Ian Hancock situates Fonseca's misinformation on the Romani language within the long "Gypsylorist" tradition of falsely claiming lexical paucity to illustrate supposed lack of virtues among Roma (Hancock 1997). Examples illustrating Romani "deviance" in Scheffel's account include such atrocities as a child throwing a pencil across the room in frustration—suggesting deep flaws in his interpretive frame as well as the self-acknowledged limitations in his ethnographic data collection. "Criminality" was the main justification the Third Reich used for their attempted extermination of Roma and Sinti during World War II.1 The link made between a supposed tendency or predisposition toward crime and the bodies and biology of Roma dates back to Cesare Lombroso's nineteenth-century criminological anthropological theory identifying Gypsies as a "race of criminals."2 Barany's uncritical use of the loaded term is not supported with any actual crime statistics. Such knowledge claims about Roma constitute essential features in the landscape of past and present international Romani politics. In this context, I argue, producing a text about Roma (be it written or visual) is a political act. In continuing to recycle such tropes as Gypsy criminality, deviance, and cultural paucity, scholars and journalists often participate [End Page 122] in reinforcing structural inequalities and systematic social exclusion of Roma in the places where they constitute a visible minority.3 Putative knowledge about Roma informs social policy and program development in countless ways...