funding streams. Scholarly assessment reflects this development in different ways: while some saw the governmentalization of CSOs as the consequence of their professionalization and a way to exert power through government structures, others analyzed it in terms of the rise of a “Gypsy industry” (Trehan 2001 and 2009; Barany 2002; Kóczé and Trehan 2009; Rostas 2009) and deplored the deviation and downgrading of activism toward mere self-interested service provision under neoliberal conditions. Finally, the third and ongoing period is marked by the “ethnic turn” of policy-making, with the instatement, in 2011, of the “EU Roma Framework” and the obligation of member states (MS) to devise national “integration” strategies. In the process, while the slogan “Nothing for the Roma without the Roma” became a mantra repeated in official documents and declarations of European Commission representatives, the participation of Roma civil society organizations in policy-making was minimized to formal consultation, with little, if any, influence.
Van Baar contends that the post-1989 development of the category of nongovernmentalism needs to be analyzed in the larger historical context in which it operates. Shaped simultaneously by both a participatory democratic and a neoliberal project focusing on the same concepts of empowerment and rights—in opposite directions, however—the Romani movement is a heteroclite and ambiguous phenomenon embedded in contemporary global political dynamics. This sharp and nuanced analysis is a welcome reminder to engage critically with developments within Romani activism, for some forms of activism contribute to the depoliticization of Romani issues by translating political vocabularies of empowerment into technocratic advocacy for individual inclusion on the labor market, seen—in neoliberal guise—as the passe-partout solution for all ailments.
Van Baar critiques certain strands of research on Roma activism for their tendency to affect a binary opposition between, on the one hand, a localism praising forms of grassroots, bottom-up, “authentic” mobilization of Roma (such as Pentecostal mobilizations), and, on the other hand, a form of universalizing activism imposing frames, practices, and vocabularies foreign to Roma “culture.” He insists that forms of activism and mobilization must be analyzed in the wider historical developments in which they occur, against naïve constructions of “good” versus “bad” 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
