Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
Europe, all Romanian citizens were taken for Roma. It is a matter of fact that the reputation
of Romanians in general has suffered a lot from these events. It is not infrequent, even
amongst an educated population in Western European countries, to find this sort of confusion;
Eastern Europe and Romania in particular hitting only the front page for scandals of
pollution, corruption or other kinds of crime and catastrophe.
Another side effect of the multicultural model, as we shall see, is the ethnicization of
research itself. As a consequence, research focused on particular minorities as if they were
not a part of the national community and had no common history and memory, particularly a
long common socialist, and fascist interwar past, affecting them all, not to mention their
shared Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman history. Hence many anthropologists, either locals or
outsiders, taking the ethnic groups for granted and homogeneous, produced very good pieces
of ethnography indeed, stressing ethnicity and what is supposed to characterise each minority,
according to the old traditional culturalist model. In addition, sociological
intercultural
research
has too often been limited to superficial reciprocal analysis of representations,
conducted with written questionnaires or calibrated interviews. Research on Roma ‘identity
strategies’ are mostly linked with how they declare themselves in the census, or with which
religious affiliation they choose, but rarely rests on their habitat.
In Eastern Europe, Roma are a popular example of an exoticizing process. In the
specialised literature, they are described as eternal victims of the bad ‘Romanians’ who first
‘enslaved’ them (Pons 1995) and later ill-treated them (Fonseca 1995). One should recall that
Vlachs (= ethnic Romanians) were equally ‘enslaved’ by their landlords, Romanian or Greek
Boyars and monasteries, and that there was no Romanian Nation, in the modern sense of
Nation-State, before the middle of the 19
th
Century. Furthermore, Romania, with its present
borders, including Transylvania, was created in several steps following the Traité of Trianon
(1920).
This is why a purely ethnic approach is not appropriate to tackle issues such as
Roma/Gypsies and their housing, be it a tent or a palace. My intention here is to analyse the
flourishing of Roma/Gypsy palaces in Romania as a socio-economic phenomenon, rich with
symbols that of course have to be interpreted but most importantly must be linked with the
striving for a new social status (Bourdieu 2001: 281-323) rather than with the demonstration
of typical ethnic traits. Despite the visibility of these palaces and their glamour, they are
diverse in styles and uses, reflecting diverse groups of Roma following different models and
different strategies in different cities of Romania. Moreover and most significantly,
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