Jan Grill

This article draws on long-term fieldwork among Slovak Roma migrants, identifying processes through which a haunting figure of the Roma migrant emerges across Europe, to argue for more differentiated accounts of continuing and emerging forms of racialisation. It explores how the movement of Roma (whose bodies are marked by their racialised ‘darkness’ in Slovakia) to Britain granted them a temporary escape from this modality of branding while simultaneously exposing them to different categorisations within a re-configuring classificatory matrix. The article develops the concept of ‘migrating racialisation’ in order to empirically trace how historically developed forms of racialisation in Slovakia migrate across Europe through the movement of Roma and non-Roma migrants from Eastern Europe, as well as through particular forms of knowledge circulating within transnational fields constituted not only by Roma migrants themselves but also by various institutions for ‘managing’ or ‘researching’ ‘the Roma’. This concept allows us to analyse how the recent forms of racialisation simultaneously draw on heterogenous histories and nation-state formations, social conditions and sedimented bodily dispositions, which are readjusted to new social conditions, discourses and emerging forms of knowledge produced about Roma migrants over the last decade in British and European contexts.

Based on fieldwork among Roma/Gypsy groups in Slovakia, this essay explores the concept of ‘activation (to) work’ along the shifting lines of economic precariousness and the new politics of social assistance targeting formally unemployed subjects in the context of a neoliberalizing state. Focusing on how ideologies and policies of activation operate in everyday practices, the essay dissects lived experiences and the forms of sociability emerging in these spaces constituted by the centrifugal forces of the state. Particular attention is paid to the contested meanings, politics of waiting, and acts of compassion elicited by subjects’ labour and work simulations.

The transforming Fabrics of Intercultural Relations:
The Modes of Co-Existence in Tarkovce in East Slovakia

This chapter explores the transforming fabrics of intercultural relations in East Slovakia. Rather than theorising models of co-existence in generalising and top-down models assuming pre-existing social formations defined through homogenising ethnic lenses (Roma and non-Roma), this chapter turns its focus on a particular dynamics and differentiated patterns of interaction in a local context of the village of Tarkovce in East Slovakia. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork and historical research, it attempts to provide a historical-cum-ethnographic reconstruction of different modes of co-existence and complex entanglements in the changing group formations and asymmetric power relations since the second half of the twentieth century until today. In this village, Roma live in spatially marginalised segment Taboris, on streets inhabited predominantly by Roma families located ‘in between’ the 'Taboris' and the village core, but some Roma also live alongside non-Roma villagers in the village centre. This chapter examines how the present pattern of spatial and social organization has developed in relation to state policies, changing geopolitical forces and borders, and reconfigured economic strategies. It outlines the historical context in which the traditional majority of non-Roma groupings symbolically and spatially occupied the village centre and Roma villagers settled in the marginalised ‘Gypsy settlement’. Following the political changes in Czechoslovakia after 1948, this order was transformed with the implementation of several socialist policies towards ‘citizens of Gypsy origins’, such as the liquidation of old ‘Gypsy settlements’, state loans for constructing houses, or employment policies. The resulting mixed pattern, in which some Roma moved to the position of immediate neighbours, has generated various social differentiations and reconfigured local hierarchies between local Roma and non-Roma, as well as within the local Roma themselves. These differentiations reflected the key assumptions of the evolutionary ladder of progress embraced by socialist discourses. Some aspects of this spatio-temporal framework and forms of classifications permeated the everyday categories used by ordinary Roma and non-Roma for making moral distinctions on a continuum between ‘backward’ and ‘more cultured’ people – i.e. those ‘living on a (good civilizational) level’. The socialist state categorisations influenced the local classificatory matrix, and Roma individuals selectively and contextually deployed these social differentiations, which fused and intersected with other vectors of difference existing within the Roma world. The second part of the chapter explores the effects of post-socialist transformation characterised by ethnicisation of poverty, neo-liberal reforms and unemployment in the village since the 1990s. Moreover, the social life in the village was greatly influenced by waves of Roma asylum seeking and labour migration throughout the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. The chapter pays particular attention to the most recent re-configuration of the existing social order, power asymmetries and spatial re organisation in relation to the most recent Roma migrations to Great Britain. These forms of migration have been accompanied by simultaneous rural-urban migration of local non-Roma youth in search for socio-economic opportunities. These two processes, reinforced by the conspicuous consumption of the returning successful Roma migrants, have led to increased visibility of Roma in the village centre and to redrawing power asymmetries, and have challenged the ways in which Roma and non-Roma see their mutual co-existence, neighbourliness and modes of interaction. For most Roma villagers, migration not only gave them an opportunity, but also effectively manifested through social practices of Roma migrants that ‘the tide has turned’. Roma migration to Britain challenged some of the existing hierarchies and was perceived rather ambiguously by non-Roma villagers. Some non-Roma villagers suggested that England helped ‘our Roma’ and ‘elevated’ their ‘level’ (living conditions and manners). Others proclaimed that since ‘our Roma were always on ‘good level’ their labour migration only proved that they were able to pursue social mobility given the opportunities and lack of anti-Gypsy discrimination abroad.  Other non-Roma experienced the success displayed by the returning Roma migrants in terms of what G. Hage characterises as ‘relational envy’ (Hage, 2002). Successful Roma migrants were seen as moving faster than non-Roma villagers who frequently experienced their previously privileged position in local hierarchies as challenged.

Focusing on politics of culture in early socialist era, this article explores struggles for imposing particular visions of “folk” during the revolutionary zeal characterizing the post-1948 period's development in the discipline of Czechoslovak ethnography. It examines the self-proclaimed turn from previous ethnographic traditions, accused of bourgeois nationalism, to socialist orientation towards studying “true folk”. By tracing struggles around the re-conceptualization of constitutive criteria and boundaries defining the essential object of ethnographic inquiry, the socialist ethnographers readjusted to the changes by focusing on more “progressive” traditions and shifted towards the “working-class” seen as possessing revolutionary spirit and the true authentic essence of the nation. The article argues that the new ethnographic wave ultimately re-inscribed the essentialist categories they virtually combatted by embedding them within the same structural framework rooted in the national order of things.

After Slovakia joined the European Union in 2004, some of the East Slovakian Roma were among the first migrants to choose the labour migration path to the UK. This article explores connections between various forms of mobility of these Slovakian Roma. It focuses on their attempts to engage in existential mobility—which condition their physical movement to the place of destination—and on their hopes for upward socio-economic mobility. The paper shows how the successful returning migrants have established new hierarchies and contributed to the crystallising of an imaginary of ‘England as a great splendour’. It examines the idiom of ‘going up’, and argues for seeing the Roma’s recent migration as a potential means by which to carve out a sense of a viable life and of autonomy amidst the oppressive circumstances and the asymmetrical relations they have with non-Roma dominant groups and non-related Roma. The article also explores the unequally distributed possibilities and inequalities that migrants encounter on their journeys towards realising their hopes and dreams in migration. Finally, consideration is given to the embeddedness of recent migration in the Roma’s daily modes of interaction, sociability of constant movement and reciprocal relations within kin and friendship networks.

Drawing on research among Slovak Roma labor migrants to the UK, this article examines differentiated modalities of belonging and a crystallization of the category of Roma/Gypsy in one neighborhood in a post-industrial Scottish city. This originally working-class, predominantly white area has been transformed, through several waves of migration, into a multicultural neighborhood. Established residents of the neighborhood express a sense of growing crisis and blame for local decline is frequently placed on migrants and, in particular, Gypsy migrants from Eastern Europe. The article focuses on the shifting forms of ethnocultural categorization that mark Roma difference in Glasgow.