Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
eliminating what was considered to be an inappropriate socio-ethnic legacy. But the new
fashion for multiculturalism imposed mainly by the European institutions and moneys on the
freed Eastern Europe States has provoked a radical turn in policies addressing Roma/Gypsies.
In post-socialist States, minorities are now benefiting of a special status and sometimes even
political representation in Parliament, as it is the case in Romania, which enhanced the
construction of ethnic communities. On the one hand these minorities distinguish themselves
ethnically from the titular Nation; on the other hand they are supposed to become
homogeneous social groups, as if ethnicity was a strong enough factor to abolish the internal
differences. In the case of the Roma, such differences concern mainly language, religious
affiliations, type of labour and traditional occupation assigning the sub-groups names, wealth
and the level of education.
Before delving into my topic – rich Roma houses as a challenge to informality – I
would like to discuss deeper the matter of the construction of the Roma community itself
around poverty and discrimination. This construction ignores, as aforementioned, other
groups who are either integrated and invisible or, on the contrary, very visible because of
their ostentatious wealth.
The construction of a ‘Roma community’ around poverty,
discrimination and solidarity
Poverty and discrimination are the classical western socio-economic notions used to describe
different groups of Roma. Chosen indicators are generally limited to income, unemployment
rates, housing, hygiene, health and education, to name a few, a highly ethnocentric
perspective to which a humanitarian concern for ‘these poor and discriminated people’ is
added to engage morally into action.
Contemporary anthropologists can easily recognise here the same
miserabilism
or
bonism
that invaded anthropology when it had to come back home after decolonisation. Poor
people were and still are our new savages. This is particularly true in urban anthropology
because of the old North-American sociological heritage of the School of Chicago that
almost exclusively paid attention to the marginals in the cities and to those citizens who
embody the hobo-like individual – replaced in France by the SDF or more generally in
Europe today, by the Roma.
On the positive side of the Roma stereotype, however, several social scientist
have
pointed out solidarity as being one of the defining characteristics of Roma communities.
1
See among others Michael Stewart (1997).
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