of their intersection, pointing toward spaces of moderate renewal or radical ruptures in both. And to formulate our intent in the familiar language of the gift, the volume’s impulse is to return the gift to the people and the institutional nodes in the Romani movement that have allowed or encouraged the contributors to examine current developments through research, in the hope that activists and researchers will find it useful to reflect upon the legacies of Roma-related research and activism explored in the volume, and, by developing critical reflexivity, to be part of a meaningful renewal of both. Ultimately, the volume speaks of activism as a mode of research (Juris and Khasnabish 2013: 8), but also of research as a vital posture of engagement.
Ana Ivasiuc is an anthropologist affiliated with the Centre for Conflict Studies at the Philipps University in Marburg, Germany. Through her past activity as a research coordinator within a Romani NGO in Romania, she has conducted research at the confluence between Romani activism and academia. After obtaining her Ph.D. in 2014 from the National School of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest, she joined a Roma-related postdoctoral research project at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. She is the winner of the 2017 Herder–Council for European Studies Fellowship.
Notes
1. A note on terminology is in order when writing about “the Roma” as if the label denoted a coherent and self-evident whole. Some of the contributions of the volume approach “the Roma” in their many identitary manifestations: Hungarian Roma, or Romungre from Transylvania; Turkish Muslim Romanlar; Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers from the United Kingdom, etc. Some others speak of “the Roma” as a more vague and general umbrella term. The editors’ choice has been to let the authors use the term that they saw fit, in a bid to reflect the heterogeneity of “the Roma” under this single label. Whereas many scholarly works include a discussion on the preferred terminology and opt for various strategies of labeling, often concurring with political views on the (in)correctness of particular terms, we have preferred to leave out such discussions, treated more in detail in other works (among many others, Vermeersch 2005; Tremlett 2009; Agarin 2014; Law and Kovats 2018). Within the volume, Fosztó’s chapter deals with the naming battles in the Romanian context, offering insights into the political stakes of such controversies. While being aware both of the heterogeneity of groups artificially brought under the label “Roma,” and of the politics of labeling, on the one hand, and identity production, on the other hand, this discussion is beyond the scope of the volume. For linguistic parsimony, we will use “Roma” to mean the constellation of groups self-identifying as Roma, Gypsies, Sinti, Manouches, Kaale, Romanichals, etc., and Roma/Romani as the alternating forms of the corresponding adjective.
2. There are some inconsistencies in the different accounts of the events in the Hungarian, German, and Romanian press. I am grateful to László Fosztó for pointing this out to me.
3. For an overview of the politics of Roma in Europe and a sophisticated analysis of its complexities, see Law and Kovats 2018.
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