Roma Activism. Группа авторов
activism. Echoing earlier calls for ethnographic research on activism (Juris and Khasnabish 2013: 8), he calls for an anthroposociology of Roma-related activism focusing on life histories of activists, often traveling between scales and sites and, in the process, blurring or shifting boundaries.
The second contribution in the volume—Ana Chirițoiu’s interrogation of the activist response to the 1993 Hădăreni conflict, in which mob violence led to the lynching of several Roma men and the burning of Roma houses—enters in dialogue with Huub van Baar’s argument on several levels. Chirițoiu’s account of activism in the aftermath of the conflict constitutes a prime example of in-depth analysis of activism, critically revisited over two decades later by Nicolae Gheorghe, as one of the main actors shaping the activist agenda around the case. She mobilizes her ethnographic research on the Hădăreni conflict and shows the contradictions of early activism reinterpreted—and thereby placed in a larger historical and sociopolitical perspective—by Nicolae Gheorghe. She reads the Hădăreni case as a cautionary tale of early postsocialist Romani activism and uses a historicizing approach to underline the contradictions inherent in the early post-1989 Romani movement, locked in a double bind of state opposition and transnational activism, in which local understandings and experiences were consciously effaced in favor of universal notions of justice and rights. In the process, “local knowledge” was lost between transnational strategies of the Romani movement to put Roma issues on the European political agenda as a matter of security, and to establish its own legitimacy by using universalizing human rights vocabularies. To some extent, this contributed to what Gheorghe himself (Gheorghe and Pulay 2013) characterized as a state of crisis of an activism largely estranged from “the local.” Chirițoiu’s analysis focuses on the process of truth-production deployed by the various actors involved in the postconflict intervention, and shows how the legitimizing use of repertoires pertaining to trauma and victimhood inhabits a “structural contradiction between humanitarian ‘emotions’ and strategic ‘procedures.’” Through her refined, ethnographically informed analysis, “the local” reemerges, with clarity and in all its complexity, as a pertinent analytical site of research on political activism and its discomfitures.
Notwithstanding the multiplication, over the last thirty years, of ethnographic research sites—from multisited (Marcus 1995) to digital (Pink et al. 2015) ethnographies—“the local” remains for anthropologists a relevant site of research, a locus of knowledge production that deserves to stand central to scholarly investigation of forms of activist mobilization. “The local” features precisely at the core of László Fosztó’s chapter. He focuses on the analysis of incongruities between activist agendas and local understandings of conflict, identity, and coexistence. Nicolae Gheorghe remains at the core of both activist mobilization and critical appraisal of the forms activism embodied, but moves on to a more scholarly reflection on the role of local knowledge in the process. Fosztó recounts his own experience of activism “from the margins” on two occasions, both involving Gheorghe and other activists and scholars, and both having at the core a conflict, either physical (the violent clashes and destruction of Roma property in Harghita county in 2009) or symbolic (the battles between proponents of “Rom” or țigan—in Romanian, “Gypsy”—as the “correct” ethnonym for the Roma). Analytically, Fosztó stresses the advantage of embedding inquiries on activism in the wider dynamics of state transformation, for, as he rightly claims, activism is almost always driven by attempts to transform the state. He also calls for nuanced understandings of both “state” and “activism,” which seem all too often to be placed in the inescapable roles of the “good” activists versus a reified “bad” state.
By following closely the diverse threads of meaning woven in the case of the Harghita conflict, Fosztó shows how Nicolae Gheorghe, together with anthropologist Gergő Pulay, came to understand the various ways in which meanings became “lost in translation.” The interpretation of the pro-Roma activist response as an anti-Hungarian, provocative manifestation, the refusal of the local communities to allow activists to meddle with the conflict, and the self-identification of the Romungre (Hungarian-speaking Roma residing in a predominantly Hungarian area of Transylvania) involved in the conflict as Hungarians, rather than Roma, unsettled simplistic and binary framings of the events in terms of “ethnic” conflict between Hungarian oppressors and Roma victims. While unveiling how local understandings differ in substantial ways from activist agendas, these misinterpretations also raised questions about the pertinence of activist discourses on Roma victimhood and universalistic human rights vocabularies, and signaled the need to call for an alternative discourse on “shared responsibility” and for a dialogue with local forms of knowledge (Gheorghe and Pulay 2009). As a result of a common, thorough reflection on the events by activists and scholars, new ways of engagement emerged as alternatives to contemporary forms of activism, and the role of critical scholars in the process was key to reaching nuanced understandings.
Fosztó advocates for nuanced understandings also in the second, symbolic, conflict recounted in his chapter, rejecting partisan positions on the necessity to impose one or another “correct” ethnonym. The reflexive encounters he narrates speak of the paramount meaning of local knowledge and the necessity, contra a “one-size-fits-all” approach, to allow for space for self-identification. Fosztó’s analysis is a persuasive argument on the urgent need to permanently intersect scholarly reflexivity and activism, while allowing for researchers to shape their own posture either as fully engaged activists or as critical observers “from the margins,” or, indeed, anywhere in between.
Renewing Epistemologies
The sober tone of the first part is followed in the second section by contributions with a clearly more engaged resonance, advocating for epistemological renewal within Romani studies. The three chapters of this part are critical of some of the current dominant dynamics in Roma-related research, and propose crucial shifts of perspective to enable and generate renewed kinds of scholarship better attuned with activist engagement. The contributions of this section take stock of scholarly literatures outside the narrow field of Romani studies and address wider issues of power relations within institutions producing knowledge.
Andrew Ryder explores the debates around the epistemological implications of conducting engaged forms of research, especially by Roma academics. In recent years, the EANRS, as the main forum of exchange among academics involved in researching Roma issues, has been the stage of telltale battles announcing a decisive transformation: power and the legitimacy of current hierarchies are being contested by Roma researchers increasingly joining the ranks of Romani studies academics and unsettling notions of objective, neutral knowledge. In many ways, this is a war already fought elsewhere and in earlier times: the birth of public anthropology as knowledge serving the aim of building a just world (Beck 2009; Beck and Maida 2015) bears testimony to the force of the idea that the potential of research should be used for emancipatory goals. The antithetic argument maintains faith in the illusion of objectivity, claiming that engaged research necessarily implies biased premises on which it is judged improper to construct meaningful knowledge. At stake are, unmistakably, definitions of “meaningful”: while for adepts of scientism, meaningful knowledge is objective, detached and neutral, for activist researchers, the meaningfulness of their knowledge is derived from its usefulness to bring about transformative change. Through a factional conversation creatively staged, Ryder reenacts the dialogues within the EANRS, deliberately polarizing the positions on this debate so as to render the fracture all the more striking. He comments on the opposition between scientism and critical research by stressing how the first favors the detachment of academics from the object of their inquiry, whereas the latter values embodied knowledge from the standpoint of the researched, blurring, in the process, the boundary between researchers and the people whose lives they investigate—and thus also between research and activism. Ryder emphasizes that research is shaped in crucial ways by institutional and economic factors, and comments on the example of EU-funded research, which, in the case of Roma-related knowledge production, risks reinforcing existing problematic power relations. On the one hand, while the participation of Roma in research is a trendy buzzword in applications for funding, it appears to be more often than not tokenistic; on the other hand, the bureaucracy inherent in the process of accessing EU funds acts as to favor professionalized NGOs above community-based