grassroots (or community) empowerment.
Undoubtedly, we have to be critical of several of the developments that these scholars have examined. Yet, the attitude of some of them to criticize both these developments and the civil society actors or organizations that are involved in “NGOization,” “NGO science,” or the “Gypsy industry” more generally, tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and, moreover, often results in opting for disputable alternatives of localism. Indeed, those who reject many of the more organized forms of Roma-related activism because these would be based on the imposition of external knowledge or even of “non-Gypsy paradigms of identity and personhood” (Gay y Blasco 2002: 185) often and implicitly assume that the local, community-based, Romani grassroots, or neo-Protestant alternatives are not implicit in these larger, more ambiguous trends. In contemporary Roma-related scholarship, we rarely find scholars who, in the nineteenth-century tradition of George Borrow, openly defend the existence, then or now, of a “pristine” Romani culture that has been endangered by a “predatory” outside world. Nevertheless, some of the scholars who have adopted a critical or even rejectionist attitude toward Roma-related activism and nongovernmentalism rely on a form of localism that tends to “essentialize the local as discrete places that host relatively homogeneous communities or, alternatively, constitute sites of grassroots mobilization and resistance” (Mohan and Stokke 2000: 264; see also Davoudi and Madanipour 2015). The glorification of local community as the site where Romani activism or resistance should start and be mobilized privileges a notion of politics in which the main aim seems to be, somewhat naïvely, to “carve out spaces of empowerment where ordinary people can define their lives outside the imprisoning architecture of developmentalism” (Corbridge 2007: 185).
Similarly, networks of neo-Protestant communities might provide “an alternative space for social organization that avoids the domination of non-Roma representatives” (Fosztó and Anăstăsoaie 2001: 362). Yet, any naïvely positive appraisal of the role of neo-Protestant communities as alternatives to activist and advocacy networks, or as cases in which agency and participation are unproblematically embedded, disregards the ways in which these (neo)religious practices are also—and ambiguously—implicated in processes of neoliberalization (Comaroff 2012; Freeman 2012; Dillon 2013). A differentiation of CSOs—ranging from professionalized, relatively small, and activist NGOs to faith-based associations and grassroots organizations or groupings—can be firmly grounded in actual practices. Yet, any suggestion that we could easily apply a kind of “ethical” yardstick to this diverse spectrum of CSOs would radically reduce its complexity and fundamental hybridity. This picture resembles the common view, expressed by the most fervent critics of the “Gypsy industry,” of NGOs as sometimes “representing the depoliticized ‘end-points’ of once vibrant social movements, which have lost their once-radical edge” (Lewis 2010: 339).
A rejectionist attitude toward CSO practices omits the fact that the inability or inadequacy of CSOs to maintain a specific activist stance often has a cause that is largely beyond their reach (van Baar 2011a: 174–88, 233–69). This attitude also, and indirectly, assumes that CSOs are a kind of tabula rasa on which diverse kinds of desired activities and responsibilities—such as empowerment, participation, and community building—could be projected (Lewis 2005). To a large extent, therefore, this scholarly approach neglects the politico-sociological context of CSOs. Moreover, it also tends to reduce dramatically the agency of those who work in the critiqued CSOs and thus their anthropological dimension.
Toward a Critical Anthroposociology of Nongovernmentalism
Instead of adopting rejectionist stances toward some CSOs or developing easy binaries or differentiations regarding their affinities or rationales, I would like to call for a critical anthroposociology of Roma-related nongovernmentalism and activism that discusses these phenomena beyond the attitude of being “in favor of” or “against” (some kinds of) CSOs. In this final section, I draft a rough agenda of this critical anthroposociology, which is also based on some promising studies that have recently been published.
One of the central elements of such an anthroposociology involves a careful analysis of what I have called “traveling activism” (van Baar 2011a; 2013). With this notion, I have drawn attention to the significance of how various discourses, strategies, and techniques of activism are translated across space and (ethnic, gender, class, etc.) difference. Indeed, activists “travel” through disjunctive circuits, and the diverse forms of coalition building that arise from these interactions and mediations can serve as a productive source for enacting their activist agenda. Traveling activism overlaps and interacts with what, in Roma-related scholarship, others have discussed as processes of “brokerage” (Voiculescu 2013; Ivasiuc 2014), a term that has its origin in development studies. Looking at activism from the point of view of brokerage, Lewis (2010: 342) argues, the work of activists
is to mediate and “broker” the relationship between their disparate everyday work practices on the one hand, and the organizing ideas of policy on the other, in the pursuit of stability, coherent meaning, and order. This process of brokerage simultaneously subverts and destabilizes the three sector model [of state, economy, and the third sector], because the process makes apparent many of the relationships and activities that operate across sector “boundaries”—including the boundary separating government and non-government—and, in so doing, blurs and complicates policy assumptions about these boundaries.
Analyzing practices of traveling activism, or processes of brokerage, requires the developing of careful, in-depth, and thus time-consuming ethnographies of how everyday practices of activism and CSOs function and of how their main actors, and those with whom they interact in their professional lives, frame and perform their activism. Recently, some have developed vital examples of such ethnographies, which show and confirm the complexities, opportunities, and ambiguities of the everyday realities of Roma-related activism (Chu 2008; Ivasiuc 2014; Ryder et al. 2014). Moreover, Cerasela Voiculescu (2013) has argued that we can extend this debate to everyday sceneries of Romani life and communities. She has clarified that both practices of activism and those of neo-Protestantism, patronage, and clientelism could be seen in the wider context of diverse and interacting webs of power relations that reveal that mechanisms of brokerage are also, and powerfully, implicated in allegedly “marginal” religious, economic, and political practices of everyday Romani life.
I have reserved the term “traveling activism” for those practices of brokerage that are particularly related to the emergence and, seen from a historicizing perspective, revitalization of nongovernmentalism and activism (without suggesting that these practices are not situated in a more complex constellation of power relations). Moreover, the attribution of “traveling” to activism relates not only to mobility within the discursive and nondiscursive contexts of the contested sphere of the “nongovernmental,” but also to activists’ practices of “boundary crossings” (van Baar 2011a: 264–67). Indeed, in the course of their life histories, many activists who have initially associated or aligned themselves with the “nongovernmental” have crossed the contested boundaries of the third and public sectors. While some activists have started to work for governments, others have left professionalized CSOs to commit themselves to forms of grassroots engagements or (radical) public action. Understanding these practices of boundary-crossings and their impact requires a more extensive examination of “the types of relationships and forms of power that link structures and processes across the sectors. How are these constructed, both by individual agency and by broader contextual aspects of politics, history, or culture?” (Lewis 2008: 564). Using life histories in social policy research is a relatively new phenomenon, while it has been a common commitment of anthropologists. Analyzing “anthroposociologically” the life histories and careers of activists who have crossed, or maybe even shifted and blurred sector boundaries can teach us more about the ways in which CSOs and state institutions “are linked through hidden personal relationships, resource flows and transactions, which become more visible at particular historical junctures” (Lewis 2010: 342).
Huub van Baar is an assistant professor
