book was imagined in Bucharest, when I was invited to participate in a conference organized by the Roma Cultural Museum in Bucharest in 2014, “Roma Policies in Romania: Between Ethnicity and Social Vulnerability; The Perspectives of Nicolae Gheorghe.” This is where I met Ana Ivasiuc, and where we discussed the importance of Roma activism and scholarship in light of controversies regarding the viability of Roma as scholars, and of activism in scholarship. We held strong views about the importance of demonstrating that the Roma were actively engaged in their struggle for recognition as scholars and in their leadership and participation in Roma liberation, resisting the powerful pressures to give up their identities no matter how they are manifested, and fighting for their dignity.
Among the individuals who come to mind who entered this struggle, Nicolae Gheorghe managed to play important roles, mediating between the political controls of Romanian communism and those of Roma groups he sought to embolden, and daring to explore their unification in the 1970s, when I was carrying out field research in Transylvania. My relationship with Romania was limited as my ability to enter the country ended (Beck 1992b), my academic career choices narrowed, and I adapted to the changing environment.
I met Nicolae Gheorghe during my first two years of doctoral research on the history and political economy of an upland Romanian community (1974–76), supported by the anthropology department of the University of Massachusetts and the International Relations and Exchanges Board (IREX). At that time, I knew him as a sociologist and a student of Romanian sociologist Henri Stahl, himself of Dimitrie Gusti’s Bucharest School of Sociology. My relationship with him intensified when I was alone in the field carrying out postdoctoral research (1978–80) during my second lengthy stay in Romania. My research, supported by IREX, investigated economic specialization in Țara Făgărașului, a valley system whose ethnic Romanian population was studied by the Bucharest School of Sociology.
After inviting him to Șercaia, where I had a room with a German Saxon family, Nicolae came to visit me often, and I visited him in Bucharest. He was tall, dark skinned, black haired, and always talking fast and furious, with great passion and intellectual urgency. We had long, intense discussions about the history, culture, and future of the Roma. He taught me about the Roma and confided in me his own struggles of identity. I was stimulated by his ideas and wanted to support his efforts to create a language he could use not only to describe the Roma, the various conditions in which they were living, and the diversity of identities they held, but also, and in some ways more pressing, to reform the Roma into a cohesive body that could challenge the state to gain the rights and integrity of other Romanian citizens and to improve their lives. While the Roma were the largest non-Romanian ethnic group in the country, they had no unity. Many of the groups did not even identify as Roma. This was a particularly important point; it was a matter of developing and increasing not only Roma self-identity, but also the recognition assigned to this population by the state as a co-inhabiting nationality, a Romanian minority. The vast majority of Roma were living in abject poverty without access to resources to change this condition. We discussed the plight of African Americans and Native Americans for comparison.
The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. Yet, I was aware even in those early times that to understand the Roma, I also had to understand the social and political-economic environments in which they were situated. Romanian regions differed socioculturally. How Roma were integrated within each region by occupation, by their self-ascribed identity, the identity ascribed by other ethnic groups, their relationships with the other groups in which they were enmeshed, and their relationship with the state—this was the puzzle I was seeking to understand. My work still focused on regional economic specialization from a historical perspective as I gained a deeper understanding of the various social groups in interaction with each other.
I am forever grateful to Nicolae Gheorghe for pulling me into the study of the Roma, but even more so for modeling a kind of activist/advocacy research that I sought to implement in the United States ever since. It is a kind of research we now call public or engaged anthropology/sociology. I found refreshing the work Gheorghe was doing, not just collecting data, not just generating information to be used for writing an ethnographic research report for consumption by others with similar academic interests, not just another entry in a curriculum vitae for career and professional advancement, but perhaps accomplishing all these things while also making a contribution to the people engaged through research; he was making a difference in people’s lives. The research had a purpose beyond scholarship. From this perspective, one may say that his influence continues to inspire activist academics well beyond the boundaries of Romania, where he was born, or Europe, where he carried out his activity. This powerful thought motivated us to dedicate this volume to his memory.
For some, engaged anthropology is not perceived as an academic activity at all because it is seen as a role assumed by anthropologists using academic knowledge outside academia. For others, engaged anthropology cannot be scientific because it is not neutral or value free. This is a shortsighted position because it ignores the important contribution made by feminist theory and the use of situated knowledge production and standpoint epistemology. With a few exceptions, non-Roma men have dominated Romani studies. We hope that our volume helps in bringing about change.
Engaged anthropology takes a moral stance. Engaged anthropology is not biased because it takes a social justice position. It takes advantage of this position. When playing an engaged role, the anthropologist takes a critical stand because the intent of the research, besides producing knowledge—translating and making understandable the “strange” and “different”—is to work with people to improve their lives and participate with them as allies in their struggles. This is about identifying the conditions, processes, and forces that produce unequal power relations and disparities. This is about not accepting ideological hegemonies. It is about challenging inequities and injustices. It is about activism. It is about working with the marginalized and vulnerable people in society and bringing the research back to them in an effort to improve their lives. It is about active participation in political work to promote human rights, the right to work and to earn a livable wage, the right to housing, the right to education, the right to healthcare; it is about human rights.
I was inspired by Nicolae Gheorghe, and, as I returned to the United States from carrying out research in Romania, I dedicated myself to exploring how to resolve the contradictions involved in carrying out anthropological research and being an activist in my own society (Beck 1992a). While Gheorghe focused on the particular people with whom he identified and in whose name he entered the struggle, I entered the struggle for liberation by focusing on oppressed people in my own society, who were seeking to alter their life condition, dignity, and justice. Decades-long efforts in anthropology to make scholarship public and engaged are now legitimized and led me to publish accounts to support such work (Beck and Maida 2013; Beck and Maida 2015).
This book is about research and Roma activism. I am grateful to the contributors who have added to the growing efforts of an engaged academy ready to raise into greater prominence the civil and human rights struggle in which modern day Roma are leading the charge. More broadly speaking, the contributors of this volume bring to wider attention the plight of the largest ethnic minority of Europe as one of the more marginalized people of the globe living under regimes of oppression. Too often, oppressed people are characterized as victims who must rely on government or outsiders to liberate them. It is time to recognize that even when people are positioned in contexts of poverty, or subjugated politically, economically, and spatially—all ways that oppressed people are held in place—they have the strength and will to resist and struggle for their own liberation. Outsiders have a role, if they are ready and able to contribute, but only as allies.
I am immensely grateful to Ana Ivasiuc, who has played a central and critical role in producing this volume. Her enthusiasm for this project has brought it to conclusion even when we lost contributors and had to replace them in short order and when each of us had to deal with personal matters that held us up and delayed our work. Our contributors have been extraordinarily patient as has our publisher, Marion Berghahn, whose support has been unwavering. Our editors at
