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.
Although intergroup friendships have been shown to reduce prejudice, little research has considered whether interventions fostering intergroup friendship would be effective in highly prejudicial ...contexts. We conducted a quasi‐experiment (N = 61) to test whether a contact‐based intervention based on intergroup friendship could reduce bias against Roma people among non‐Roma Hungarians. Participants in the contact condition engaged in a face‐to‐face interaction with a Roma person, and responded to questions involving mutual self‐disclosure. Through pre‐ and post‐test questionnaires, we observed significant positive change in attitudes and contact intentions among participants in the contact condition, while these effects were not observed among participants in the control condition. Positive change was moderated by perceived institutional norms, which corroborates the potential of contact‐based interventions.
Gianpiero Cavalleri is Associate Professor of Human Genetics at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and is the lead author of a 2017 ...study into the genetic structure of the Irish Traveller community. The study provided an estimate of when Irish Travellers split from the ‘settled' population in Ireland. This population-based genetic research project involved researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, University College Dublin, the University of Edinburgh and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and looked into the history and structure of the Traveller population in the context of ‘settled' Irish as well as neighbouring European and Roma Gypsy groups. A full-text version of the study first published in the journal Scientific Reports https://epubs.rcsi.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.ie/&httpsredir=1&article=1100&context=mctart. This interview took place at RCSI on Tuesday 21st November 2017.
The romanticised and stereotyped construction of the Romani people absorbed by mainstream society has contributed to the obliteration of their cultural complexity and their ensuing alienation. The ...present article analyses how the memoir The Stopping Places (2018), by the British Romani writer Damian Le Bas, makes a case for the borderlessness of his people. It is the main purpose of this study to underscore Romani identity as inherently multidirectional, hence allowing for a relational, intercultural dialogue aimed at transcending the long-standing Romani vs. non-Romani tension. For this purpose, Le Bas' network-like journey across some key stopping places is read as an endorsement of the synchronicity and interconnectedness characterising our present world. His narrative is an empowering attestation that foregrounds the fruitful interactions between the Roma and other cultures and sets the assumedly distrustful and protective Romani as an example of cultural flexibility.
People of Romani background are usually labelled as members of an “ethnic minority” and identified along dominantly ethnicized notions and markers. Discursively, this neglects individuals’ different ...self-perceptions and multiple belongings. This contribution looks at interactional data and material from workshops conducted in Germany as part of the EU-wide initiative RoMed (Mediation for Roma). The initiative aimed to strengthen opportunities for local participation by people of Romani background in various European cities and communities between 2011–2017. A conversation analytical approach (e.g. at practices of categorization) is used to examine excerpts from group discussions ahead of a meeting with public officials. From an intersectional perspective I look at how boundaries are drawn, blurred, or destabilized between issues of religiosity and ethnicity. The article discusses boundary-drawing as a symbolic ordering process, highlighting the hegemonic discourses which are reproduced and challenged in the investigated linguistic material. The boundaries drawn and negotiated show the delicate balance between the staging of ethnic and religious affiliations and concerns and their political mobilization.
Through the example of specific locations settled by the Roma population in Slovakia, the study offers a grounded picture of Romani religiosity and spirituality in the twenty-first century. The ...author provides a brief overview of the analytical grasping of this phenomenon in the scientific community, as well as remarks on the seemingly neutral analytical terms used for the description of religiosity and spirituality among the Roma, which may contain clichés or be eventually culturally and intellectually colonialist. Based on multi-sited ethnographies in Slovakia, the author elucidates how traditional Romani Christianity is confronted with Pentecostal and neo-Protestant Christianity, which are considered non-traditional within the traditionally Roman Catholic Slovakia. To avoid scientific exotization of Romani religious culture, the author describes the main elements of traditional Romani Christianity based on the emic insights of non-Pentecostal Roma from various localities and through the lenses of the Pentecostal discourse (converts and pastors). She also mentions the fluid and postmodern features of Romani Christianity, which have preserved numerous traditional elements fluidly mixed with post-traditional and ultra-modern forms of spirituality and religiosity.
This book offers an in-depth exploration into the current educational climate and the impact of these policy measures for Roma people in seven Western and Southern European countries and seeks to ...raise awareness of this forgotten minority and to assess the policies implemented to integrate the Roma people into the education system.
In Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt sociologist Alexandra Parrs draws on two years of fieldwork to explore how Dom identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested in the specifically Egyptian ...national context. With an eye to the pitfalls and evolution of scholarly work on the vastly more studied European Roma, she traces the scattered representations of Egyptian Dom, from accounts of them by nineteenth-century European Orientalists to their portrayal in Egyptian cinema as belly dancers in the 1950s and beggars and thieves more recently.
Romanian State Secret Police (Securitate) files produced before 1989 can be accessed today through a lengthy process that requires official research authorization through a government office, the ...National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității - CNSAS). The CNSAS General Document Fund includes large issue-related files under the umbrella of “The Gypsy Problem,” with thousands of pages of both national and county-level reports and recommendations. This paper teases out the granular documentary clues (spie, as Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg describes them) in some of the Securitate files to explore the way in which a pattern of documentary communication is built to frame Romani identity as idiosyncratically marginal, oriental, and parasitic. A particularly interesting aspect of the knowledge production imposed through these files is reflected by anecdotes that purportedly illustrate the character of the Roma. This study analyzes the relations of power built through hermeneutic devices and language choices which build “truth formulae” (Weir) that reify a particular view of Romani ethnicity, class, and gender. This archival (de)construction has implications for a long view of policy, political memory, and exclusionary societal attitudes today and in the future.
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