La Ricerca Folklorica n. 74 ARCHIVE AND ETHNOGRAPHY

This article is not intended to incisively dissect this dilemma with which the dissertation has begun. However, we will try to think critically about the exercise of making history “being a Gypsy historian”, since it is part of the problem as a ramification towards other less covered spheres by debate, such as the academic one. Specially because a strong tension between activism and scientific production must be considered since the end of the twentieth century, when Romani Studies began to emerge.

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2006

“The editors have allocated the 14 chapters to four broad divisions: ‘Romani Studies and its parameters’; ‘Constructions and concoctions of Romany culture’; ‘Orientalism and Gender Stu dies in literature’; ‘Memory, records and the Romany experience’. I question the need for these partitions and terminology in their titles, some of which are ungainly and insert centrifugal rather than centripetal forces into the overall reading experience. For example, why split hairs between cultural ‘constructions’ and ‘concoctions’ unless you are a stairway theorist lost in a soup kitchen? The singular and challenging idea of dramatic analogy that collects contributors from so many disciplines into one thematic forum achieves already a creative unity that need not then be quartered.”

La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 74 (Special Issue “Archive and Ethnography: the case of Europe's Sinti and Roma (19th-20st centuries)”, eds. Elisabeth Tauber and Paola Trevisan), 13-29., 2019

In this article, I reflect on my ethnographic-historical study of the genocide experiences and memories of Roma and the identified gaps between archival and family memory. In order to illustrate these gaps, I draw on my case study of a small community of Roma in Vidzy, Belarus. My field research reveals the interconnectedness of Romani family memory and local memory, as well as the silence of Soviet archival records on the mass killing of a Roma group in a Vidzy forest. In the second part of the article, I seek an answer to the question “How does archival silence happen?” By following Stoler ́s proposition for the ethnography “of” and “in” archives, I try to reconstruct the sociopolitical context of the work of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission, as well as potential tensions between the local population (eyewitnesses) and the Soviet state (representatives of the Commission). For these purposes, I combine an engaged reading of the Commission ́s records with my field observations and other scholarly works in the field of Soviet studies. At a theoretical level, this article seeks to improve our understanding of the archival silence and its potential implications for memory. Additionally, it shows a potential of the ethnographic method in revealing, and even filling, archival silences in the case of ethnic minorities and indigenous populations whose memory nar- ratives have been predominantly oral and who have not yet created their own archives. Keywords: archival silence, family memory, ethnic minorities, Soviet Extraordinary Commission, ethnography of archives.

Music – Memory – Minorities: Between Archive and Activism. Jurková, Zuzana / Veronika Seidlová (eds.), Prague: Charles University Karolinum Press, 49-68, 2020

This collective monograph is written and published as a part of the research project RomaInterbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation between the Two World Wars which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 694656), with Principal Investigator Elena Marushiakova. It reflects only the authors' views and the agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. Apart from the authors, many co-thinkers, colleagues and friends from different countries of Central, SouthEastern and Eastern Europe have supported us directly or indirectly in the preparation and writing of this monograph, too numerous to be listed. Our gratitude goes to all who supported us in our work, and especially to the staff of the

The East European Gypsies. Regime change, marginality, and ethnopolitics. Zoltan Barany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. 408 pp. isbn 0-521-00910-3. We are the Romani people. Ame sam e Rromane džene. Ian Hancock. Hatfield: Centre de recherches tsiganes/ University of Hertfordshire Press. 2002. 180 pp. isbn 1-902806-19-0.

This paper looks at the transnational movement at the beginning of the 20th century of a gypsy kinship of coppersmiths called «Tshoron», which appears in the documents thanks to a specific way of self-presentation. This research draws upon numerous sources such as: U.S. and Canadian immigration national archives; papers of «gypsiologists» around the world belonging to the Gypsy Lore Society based in Liverpool; newspaper archives; a huge iconographic collection. These sources are analysed with the methods of micro-history applied on a global scale. The aim is to think gypsy mobility differently: it is, in fact, not only linked to economical and social practices but is also a way in which these groups maintain themselves in an anthropological way. This also gives the opportunity to question the notion of cosmopolitanism and its relation to gypsy mobility.

2015

This book chapter has appeared in: The Identity Dilemma: Social Movements and Collective Identity, edited by Aidan McGarry and James M. Jasper (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015, pages 150-169). The book has appeared in the series Politics, History and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey. The paper discusses various dilemmas that are related to historical and contemporary processes of Romani identity formation by means of an examination of what I consider as Romani acts of memory. By so doing, I reflect upon what has been called "the Romani movement" and the ways in which this social movement has hitherto been represented in the literature. I argue that an analysis of the Romani movement from the perspective of enactments of memory sheds new light on the hard and complex labor of Romani identity formation, as well as on the prevailing historiography of the Romani movement.

2020

A complex artistic research into the theme of cultural heritage and (neo)colonial processes of material and immaterial dispossession. Starting from the discovery of an old recording in the Phonogramm-archiv in Berlin, the artist embarked on a simultaneously real and spiritual journey to her own African roots embodied in the practice of Candomblé religion. In the form of a social-historical comment called counter-ethnography, an archive (photos, diagrams, maps, newspaper clippings, letters, documents), an actual direct and informal cultural heritage restitution to the moral heirs, as well as a series of artistic works in video, text and performances, the research brought together various theoretical and performative elements into a cross-media artistic project with a real decolonial perspective.