Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
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Roma were recognized as having a culture, even if not on a par with other nationalities, and they were represented, albeit stereotypically, in many films, including Aleksandar Petrović’s I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) and Emir Kusturica’s The Time of the Gypsies (1987). Kusturica’s films and Goran Bregović’s music were popular in Romania, but they did not change the general perception of local Roma – not even in the sense of producing romantic stereotypes.
The economic-political changes of the transition to neoliberalism affected most Roma profoundly, especially those working on collective farms, which were dismantled, or in low-skilled jobs in plants and factories that were closed down. Social security was also significantly reduced. Roma found themselves with a recognized ethnicity, but holding fewer economic rights and placed outside national and European citizenship. However, some of these changes benefited the nomadic or semi-nomadic Roma, most of whom had been unemployed during socialism and who recovered some of their goods and valuables confiscated by the socialist state.
Despite the change in paradigm in relation to Roma, from a social problem during socialism to an ethnoculture during post-socialism, the majority of Roma continue to experience marginalization, and their economic condition has worsened. However, while the majority of Roma are poor, there is a burgeoning middle class of Roma activists, intellectuals and successful entrepreneurs. Affluent Roma spark resentment and are associated with and blamed for the negative effects of the transition to a market economy. Because of long-standing suspicion against Roma, Roma success, whether in the entertainment industry or in business, is often resented by the majority and perceived as illicit.
Methodology
This is a multisited ethnography that brings together different sites, people and performances in productive tension. I spent a total of seventeen months conducting fieldwork in Romania between 1999 and 2007, and I made a few more visits there between 2008 and 2012. The main vantage point for this ethnography is that of Pod. Pod’s story is not unique, and similar Roma settlements can be found across Romania. Roma’s reliance on recycling practices and their dispersion within Romania have been widespread phenomena over the last two decades (Zoon 2001). These settlements expanded within Romania after 1989, as many Roma lost their unskilled or low-skilled jobs and sought informal work, recycling from and living next to waste sites on the outskirts of urban areas.
Over the eleven years I visited Pod, its landscape changed considerably. Some of the improvised huts I saw in 2001, piled with rubbish, some out of sight of passers-by, had been replaced by 2008 with fully built houses proudly set on the main road. These constructions testified to the lucrative side of the informal collection of recyclables, and to some Pod residents’ efficient management skills. Most of the intra-community economy circulated through informal arrangements, which often involved a main collector for whom others collected recyclables in exchange for goods or credit. Living conditions did improve during the 2000s for some Roma in Pod; but some things did not change. In 2001, there was no running water or electricity, and virtually no medical facilities. Residents collected water from a broken pipe, and powered electrical equipment with batteries. They had no access to healthcare, and many children either did not go to school or else attended special schools for children with disabilities. This situation had not improved much by 2012. For example, despite the existence of a medical facility built with European funds, no medical staff were available and it was closed down.
As a ‘co-performative witness’ (Conquergood 2001; Madison 2011, 25) in Pod, I got to know the complexity of people’s lives, and not only the hardships and struggles. As Madison aptly puts it: ‘Performative witnessing is also to emphasize the political act (responsibility) of witnessing over the neutrality (voyeurism) of observation.’ (2011, 25) Inside their homes, which I visited often, residents built a safer world of ‘normalcy.’ My co-performative witnessing sometimes involved performing together at dances and celebrations, events that were both frequent and necessary: they made life worth living. At celebrations, guests were not allowed to pay, and were expected to be served. Tables full of food and drinks greeted visitors at these special times, even when the goods were being paid for with credit from the better-off Roma.
As a co-performative witness in Pod and elsewhere, I accompanied my Roma friends and acquaintances to state institutions, on doctor’s and social services appointments, and I went on field trips with Roma school mediator Armando to visit Roma students who were struggling academically. I engaged and built connections with many different people in Pod: I got to know adults and children, young Roma who were studying in schools for the disabled because of their ethnicity, and undocumented adults. Elsewhere I met Roma and non-Roma activists and artists, young people and school staff. I conducted formal and informal interviews, and I attended school performances, concerts and festivals, fairs and exhibitions, in different parts of Romania and abroad in London and Paris. In many of these instances I could gauge how Pod residents’ everyday experiences of citizenship differed from or resembled my own. I experienced, for example, how Roma performances abroad were often received by non-Roma audiences as expressions of national folklore that excluded Roma even as the latter were performing onstage.
Throughout my fieldwork in Romania I consumed and engaged with different types of media, from television and radio to newspapers, with an eye to how Roma were represented. This was a frustrating experience, given the racism and sexism of mainstream media, the misrepresentation of Roma and the lack of Roma voices. Roma in Pod engaged with different media, mainly television, and they reappropriated some of the cultural products for which they felt an affinity. When watching daytime North American and Latin American soaps, literate residents read subtitles aloud to small groups of (mostly) women gathered around small black-and-white television sets. More recently, television sets in Pod often played music by both Roma and non-Roma from the manele-focused music channel Taraf, identified as a ‘Ţigani’ channel. Roma in Pod appreciated ‘Gypsy soaps’, even though these represented gadge’s32 exoticized projections of Gypsiness.
Aside from my own analysis, when I discuss media representations of Roma, including in the television soaps, I will present Pod residents’ views of these productions. In the early years I watched North American soaps with Pod residents, and in the later years I discussed Gypsy soaps with several Roma from Pod in both formal and informal interviews, which changed my own perception of the soaps. In mapping the reception of the soaps and music performances, I also use audience comments from soap websites and YouTube. My media ethnography is situated between a fully embedded reception analysis (Abu-Lughod 2005) and one focused on audience members who participate in or comment on programmes through social media (di Leonardo 2012; Imre and Tremlett 2011). While Roma have rarely been analysed as consumers of media, including television (see Tremlett 2013), I engage with both the majority’s consumption and the readings of a Roma counterpublic that identified with or challenged the images of Roma presented in these cultural productions.
I am a gadgi (non-Roma) and Romanian citizen of mixed Romanian-Hungarian descent, with a Ph.D. gained in the United States and currently working in the United Kingdom. Some of my non-Roma Romanian friends and acquaintances rolled their eyes upon hearing about my research topic, and worried that I would reiterate or add to many Westerners’ mistaking of Romanians for Roma; some asked me ‘please don’t make us all look like Ţigani.’ My Western location at the time of my fieldwork in Romania, being the United States and, after 2005, London, bestowed upon me a certain cachet among some of my informants: one of the Romnja in Pod decided I was Spanish, a nation to which she felt connected; one Romni from the village of Clejani called me a ‘foreign gadgi’, as opposed to a local, Romanian gadgi. At times the perception of my identity shifted – for example, when a lawyer asked me whether I was a Romni friend’s daughter, even though we were both in our thirties. This instance, when I was taken for a Romni by a non-Roma, was a shocking (for me but not, as it turned out, for my Romni friend) reminder of the widespread gendered stereotypes about Romnja as young, over-fertile mothers with dozens of children. Several times, when I accompanied friends and witnessed similar situations, the casualness of such incidents and the everydayness of racism really struck me. My shock reflected my privileged position: for my Roma friends and acquaintances these incidents