Unveiling what should remain hidden: ethics and politics of researching marginal people

There are not many sources that could help us understand the historical roots of Roma marginality in Europe. However, historians more or less agree that the Roma occupied low and marginal areas of social space since they emerged in Europe around the 14th century (Crowe 2007; Horváthová 1964). In other words, “in preindustrial Europe ... the Gypsies were harried as they travelled and harassed when they settled” (Stewart 1997, p. 4). From historical sources, we can assume that anti-Gypsy sentiments had been permeating public opinion as early as in the 16th century, and that they were only boosted by the social and economic insecurities generated by the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century (Crowe 2007, p. 35). From that century onwards, the Gypsies became an object of state control through banishment, expulsion or physical extermination (see esp. Horváthová 1964, p. 60–61, or Kappen 1963). Under the rule of the Habsburgs (esp. Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II.) a slight change in the State policy occurred: From then on, the Roma were not to be persecuted due to the sole fact of their ethnicity, but instead be settled, renamed and forbidden to speak their own language in order to be fully assimilated and turned into working and tax-paying “New Citizens” (Barany 2002, p. 93). Failing to fulfill its goals, the policy of total social and economic assimilation of the Roma population was later abandoned – once again – in favor of exclusionary rather than “integration” or assimilation policies, again orchestrated by the State. The exclusionary tendency of the State towards the Roma in Europe undoubtedly reached its culmination in the Roma holocaust during the Second World War (Lewy 2000).

In his seminal work, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserl made a comment on Gypsies as an element which, in his mind, did not belong to Europe. Of course, Husserl was not personally responsible for the historical persecution of the Roma in Europe, yet he openly revealed what I think has been the dominant way of conceptualizing the Gypsies: as a fundamentally alien element that does not fit into the idea of how society and the State is, or should be, organized and/or understood (Husserl 1970, p. 273):

We pose the question: How is the spiritual shape of Europe to be characterized? Thus we refer to Europe not as it is understood geographically, as on map, as if thereby the group of people who live together in this territory would define European humanity. In the spiritual sense the English Dominions, the United States etc., clearly belong to Europe, whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe, do not.

Together with the era of Habsburg rule, state socialism in East-Central Europe represents the most complex attempt to integrate the “citizens of Gypsy origin” into the mainstream society by means of total social and economic assimilation. The Roma population was supposed to be integrated, and the “Gypsy question” thus be solved, by means of specific economic (mandatory labor), cultural (mandatory education) and social (spatial and ethnic desegregation) policies. There is too little space to go into details, but in retrospect, the “integration” policies under state socialism failed generally as they were unable to solve the problem of enduring Roma marginality (Barany 2002; Guy 1975; Kalvoda 1991; Pavelčíková 2004).

To conclude the brief historical excursus into the history of Roma marginality in East-Central Europe: Historical records show that the Roma were never allowed to become fully fledged members of the dominant social and economic systems, constantly being perceived as “unwanted elements” and targeted by either exclusionary, or assimilationist policies – always orchestrated and directly facilitated by the State and its disciplinary apparatuses. Such a historical perspective would reveal the fundamental role which the State has always played in shaping the external context for the “pariah group par excellence” (Kornblum 1975, p. 124).

As to the contemporary state of affairs, the European societies have obviously made little progress in solving the problem of enduring Roma marginality. My argument is that the State (including state-like organizations such as the European Union) still plays a crucial role in molding the life context of the Roma (Gypsies) in an attempt to control and contain them. At this point, I would argue that since the fall of state socialism, the State² – again, alongside state-like actors such as the European Union – has been producing an inconsistent conglomeration of policies and practices that often take the form of inclusive rhetoric and policies from above, supplemented by exclusionary practices from below. One of the European Union’s largest integration projects entitled “Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005–2015” declared its goals as follows³:

The Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005–2015 is an unprecedented political commitment by European governments to eliminate discrimination against Roma and close the unacceptable gaps between Roma and the rest of society. The Decade focuses on the priority areas of education, employment, health, and housing, and commits governments to take into account the other core issues of poverty, discrimination, and gender mainstreaming.

However well intended the project to end the centuries of Roma marginality has been, it seems that we are still quite far from fulfilling the Decade’s goals. Apart from yielding some unquestionably positive results, the years 2005 to 2013 have witnessed a new wave of anti-Roma sentiments, violence, and anti-Roma policies and practices throughout Europe. The massive expulsions and deportations of Balkan Roma/Gypsies from the countries of Western Europe⁴, the recent killings of Roma in Hungary⁵, society’s broad anti-Roma protests⁶, and building fences and walls around Roma neighborhoods in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania⁷ only reveal that the well intended inclusive rhetoric at the European Union level is not always accepted as a point of departure for concrete practices and policies at the local (municipal) level. In the meantime, international monitoring bodies continue to publish reports showing how the inequality and discrimination of Eastern European Roma has barely been reduced (Dzeno 2006; Halász 2007; Amnesty 2009; FRA 2009; GAC 2006; Halász 2007; Ringold 2000).

The plethora of contemporary anti-Gypsy sentiments, practices and policies, both in the past and present, forces one to rethink the role of the State in the reproduction of enduring Roma marginality. From a historical perspective, the State should not be seen as a neutral body of bureaucratic institutions, but rather as an active agent who shapes the ways in which its marginal people are able to live their lives. It is the State which is responsible for establishing and maintaining the external context within which the marginal people are forced to find their own ways how to live lives worth living. We can illustrate the fundamental role which the State plays in controlling and disciplining its Roma population with a concrete example – it will allow us to see how anti-Roma policies are openly enforced today at the local (municipal) level from below, clearly in conflict with the European Union’s integration rhetoric imposed from above.

A new wave of “conservatism” swept through Europe-in-crisis, creating an open space to be filled with another new wave of anti-Roma practices and policies. The spatial (residential) segregation of Roma in Eastern Europe is a case which illustrates how symbolic purification of public space from dangerous and defiling elements (Sibley 1995) has become one of the tools for excluding those who have been perceived as outsiders. “Anti-homeless architecture” and anti-loitering law do not only “purify” public space from unwanted elements (such as the homeless, vagrants, Gypsies and other threatening and symbolically defiling agents) – it transforms the very idea of public space, while forcing citizens to withdraw from it to take refuge in their private spheres. To give an example of these practices, the following passage is taken from a 2011 public notice posted in the city of Rotava in the western parts of Bohemia:

The subject of this [public notice] is the ban on sitting, staying, walking on or leaning against build structures that are owned by the municipality … It is forbidden to place obstacles in the public places (benches, desks, chairs and other furniture used to sit on, tables, grills, blankets and similar textiles) without the explicit consent of the municipality, because these are activities that could disturb the public order in the city or could be in conflict with good conduct, public safety, health and property.⁸

The city of Rotava, where I have carried out parts of my fieldwork, witnessed an inflow of Roma migrants from other regions of the Czech Republic in the past decade, arousing strong anti-Roma sentiments and actions on the part of local society and local state structures. Public notices such as the one above, along with concrete practices (such as the removal of benches from public space), have been observed in other cities and towns in the Czech Republic and may be interpreted as a form of social control exercised against those who are perceived as posing a threat to the established social and symbolic order (Bancroft 2005; Sibley 1995).

After assessing the fundamental role which the State (bureaucratic field) plays in producing specific material and socio-legal context within which the Roma need to find their place, we now address this process in detail.

Marginal people navigate their everyday lives on the fringes of the dominant socio-economic system, often having to deal with the stigma attached to their social (and/or ethnic) status. Being deprived of full access to resources which are otherwise accessible to members of the society at large, lacking skills and knowledge to be perceived by the distributors of social recognition, as well as having limited access to social services, marginal people have to rely on irregular, precarious and often unpredictable sources of income.

The economic strategies of marginal people can be seen as “open” in the sense that these people must be ready to make use of such opportunities and resources (both material, social and informational) as soon as they emerge (Day et al. 1999). Life on the margins consists mainly of waiting and waiting again for the right opportunity.

Koloman’s life may appear to the outside observer as slow, if not ‘boring’ (it is he himself who describes his life as boring). In fact, ‘not much has happened, you know’ is the most common answer I received at any time when asking what has changed since our last encounter. Such a statement reflects the nature of things most of the time: ‘nothing has happened’ in the sense that no big changes have occurred in Koloman’s family’s life. Often, however, I was quite surprised to find rather dramatic changes taking place rather suddenly: Koloman finding a new apartment to rent for his family, or his unexpectedly leaving the city for an expedient job that ‘you know, just suddenly appeared’ … To put it in another words: in his life, Koloman usually waits. Unhappy with his and his family’s current living situation, Koloman waits for an opportunity: an opportunity that is unpredictable, since it often pops up suddenly, unannounced and unanticipated. In this sense, Koloman relies not on the limited amount of recognized forms of capital (money, education or skills utilizable in the labor market), but rather on resources embedded in social capital that he is not aware of yet: a friend offering a part-time job at a construction site, an acquaintance suggesting a risky but relatively profitable ‘deal’, or another random resource which could be utilized to make Koloman’s family’s life more bearable.

Koloman’s case corroborates the observation that life on the margins operates by means of “isolated actions, blow by blow …,” leading marginal people to “vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers” (de Certeau 1984, p. 37). After I turned my attention to how Koloman manages the unpredictable resources and opportunities, I realized the importance of “impression management” for his relative success not only in the underground economy. I have no objective way to assess Koloman’s craft to induce the right impression in the right people, yet this skill has astonished me so many times: making a great impression in the eyes of the landowner, his children’s schoolteacher, the social worker responsible for assessing the needs of his mother-in-law, the judge in his eldest son’s court case … and the list could go on.

Not only Koloman, but also other Roma families living on the margins whom I have come to know, often unemployed and thus depending on irregular and unpredictable sources of income, are forced to rely on irregular sources of income: from actively searching for materials to be collected, recycled (and/or repaired) and then sold, to exchanging services for cash (mostly by providing cheap unskilled labor, or more informal services), to passively waiting for the “right moment” to utilize their personal skills to effectively act and then disappear without being noticed. The craft of impression management and the art of becoming “invisible” come hand in hand. These forms of economic strategies remain relatively under-researched, perhaps due to the fact that they have been morally condemned by both the dominant society and the State apparatus (along with those researchers who, fearing that their research could contribute to their informants’ bad reputation, simply “ignore” such practices). This includes such arts and crafts as “impression management” in the presence of utilizable resources, beggary, or even thievery (Horváthová 1964, p. 330; Sutherland 1975, p. 28).

Having their lives relatively determined by their disadvantaged position with regard to social and economic resources embedded within the dominant social and economic system, marginal people are nevertheless still a part of it and are never completely “excluded”. Stigmatized by both their ethnicity and economic strategies, these people never find themselves completely “outside” the socio-economic system. Living on the margins of a system means not to live outside of it, but on its fringes – in the shadow area where formal social control is relatively weaker. Limited access to the recognized forms of capital does not rule out having access to irregular and “morally questionable” resources (i. e. those which are “morally questionable” from the perspective of the members of the dominant society).

The relational perspective on the State and its marginals (i. e. the mutual relationship between the center and its periphery) allows us to recognize that marginal people are never totally “excluded”; their life is possible only by means of utilizing marginal and often stigmatized (but never fully “excluded”) resources. In other words, marginal people can be fully understood only once we recognize how they are actually embedded within the dominant system, albeit marginally. That is exactly why the Roma “cannot be understood in isolation from the wider society of which they have always formed a part” (Bloch 1997, p. xiv). People without a fixed and secure position in society, such as the Roma, “maintain their autonomy by adapting to the dominant culture” in the sense that they “have successfully stayed apart from the larger society because that society provides their economic base” (Sibley 1981, p. 14; see also Sway 1984). In other words, there is a “paradox of Gypsy ethnicity” to be explained: “how Gypsies keep themselves distinct while appearing to assimilate” (Silverman 1988, p. 273; see also Okely [1983] 1992).

Marginal people who are economically dependent on the dominant society which at the same time excludes them must make sure to give the “right impression” in the eyes of the beholder. Koloman is very keen on how he and his actions appear to the people “who have power” (by “people in power”, he means State agents such as policemen, social workers and other state bureaucrats, teachers, landlords, doctors and – perhaps – also ethnographers). Koloman recognizes that his family depends to a certain degree on the impression they produce in these agents. People who are almost constantly subjected to the controlling and disciplining gaze of the State are simply forced to develop methods of “impression management” (Gmelch 1986, p. 313–314; Silverman 1982; for an analytic frame of studying strategies of impression management, see Goffman 1969), enabling themselves always to wear the proper “mask” when on “stage” (Goffman 1959). People selling “street newspapers” develop techniques to make themselves more visible without “annoying” the by-walkers too much, so do beggars who have mastered techniques to arouse compassion in bystanders. Koloman also has particular strategies and techniques that “work” in the sense that they deliver positive results: making the right impression and thus actualizing potential resources.

Making the right impression, or having the process of impression management under control, is a solution to the problem of how to appear in the eyes of the (always possibly exclusionary) beholder. Another solution would be to “become invisible”, i. e. to produce a discontinuity between appearance on the outside, and autonomy and sense of identity on the inside. Because of their marginal status, “the Rom have developed one set of rules for behaviour in obtaining economic and political gain from the gaje and another set of rules for the same behaviour with their own people” (Sutherland 1975, p. 20). Both the gadje and the State (especially when they meet in the figure of the policeman, the teacher, the social worker, the journalist or the landlord) are always potentially threatening forces. In minatorial situations, and in those in which “impression management” is out of the question, marginal people can resort to “becoming invisible” as an ultimate means of deflecting the gaze of the State’s disciplinary agents. With regard to “becoming invisible” as the everyday strategy of marginalized people, a particular case might help to illustrate the main point here.

Academic interest has for some time focused on researching Roma migrations, especially those from the East to the countries of Western Europe (Guy 2003; Lee 2000; Matras 2000; Guy et al. 2004). Recent Roma migration has generally been perceived and researched as “a way of solving the economic problems” (Uherek 2004, p. 91), or as a means of escaping socio-economic and political problems, such as discrimination, or as an escape from serious interpersonal conflict (Weinerová 2004, p. 114). Vašečka and Vašečka (2003) mainly regard modern Roma migration as a result of disillusionment and the degradation of the socio-economic status of the “Romani socialist-style middle class” (Vašečka and Vašečka 2003, p. 37), which are again basically economic motives. Prónai in his article on Gypsy migration in Hungary (2004) states that the motivation for migration among the Hungarian Gypsies has been economic, but often with some political considerations as well (Prónai 2004, p. 126). Matras’ conclusions on the overall motives and causes of recent Roma migrations are in accord with those of the above-mentioned authors, as he sees such migrations to be motivated by reasons of economic or personal security (Matras 2000, p. 37–38). Without questioning the importance or validity of such claims, my own ethnographic experience led me to a slightly different conclusion regarding the possible causes of contemporary flows of Roma migration (see Ruzicka 2009).

I refused to “fit” my research experience and my data into the pre-established categories of economically and politically motivated migration, as I realized that it is perhaps impossible to generalize Roma migrations under one analytical umbrella (Grill 2011, p. 81). To avoid the pitfall of pre-established categories, I proposed another category: that of “invisible migration.” Current research, I argue, has focused mostly on the “visible” forms of Roma migrations – receiving the highest level of media coverage, they become visible on account of the strongest social and political interest (Clark and Campbell 2000). Not only does such a perspective conform to the image of the overall Gypsy history as a history of “forced migration” – a history of “exodus” (Kendrick 2004; Clébert 1967, p. 46). It also presents Roma migration as being caused by some exogenous forces. In my own ethnographic research, I observed forms of migration that did not fit into the category of labor or political migration, nor was I able to see any exogenous forces that would limit the choices of my informants. Due to the particular political development in former Czechoslovakia, and due to the State’s policy of “liquidation of Gypsy settlements” in the 1960 s and 1970 s, parts of Roma families from the Gypsy settlements in Eastern Slovakia moved to Czech industrial cities to seek better housing and employment opportunities (Jurová 1996). Other parts of these families sometimes refused to be moved, remaining in their settlements. Kin-based social networks, now stretching between the Czech and Slovak states, have often been maintained for decades and presently serve as a kin infrastructure facilitating forms of Roma migration. Applied to migration such kin-based networks have also been used for such “endogenous” reasons as gathering and maintaining resources or identifying suitable spouses (for details, see Ruzicka 2009). Due to the fact that these forms of Roma migration have been going unnoticed by the dominant society (i. e. not arousing anti-Gypsy sentiments, nor stimulating any form of media coverage, not to speak of academic research), I referred to them in terms of “invisible migration.” A further interpretation might be that such “invisibility” has been a conscious strategy of the marginalized people who at once need to gather resources available through their kin networks, while remaining hidden from the gaze of the outsider (Williams 1982). There are forms of migration that go unnoticed by the State and by “outsiders”, i. e. by members of the dominant society (bureaucrats, policemen, ethnographers etc.) who are always seen as possessing the power to endanger one’s security or chances for success.

Marginal people navigate their everyday lives with limited resources, constantly being scrutinized and subjected to the omnipresent gaze of the state institutions and members of the dominant societies. Being subjected to various forms of formal and informal social control, these people must maintain the right impression by subjecting themselves to the formal and informal demands, while at the same time keeping distance from them in order to preserve their own identity, sense of self-worth, and cultural autonomy. A certain compromise between submission to those in power and keeping distance from them is thus a crucial determinant of the craft of living on the margins.

Marginal people apply contextual tactics rather than explicitly and deliberately planned strategies to navigate their lives through the space of limited resources, constantly being observed by agents of social control. In other words, these tactics are used to “maneuver ’within the enemy’s field of vision’ … and within enemy territory” (de Certeau 1984, p. 36–37). The art of “correct” impression management, along with the craft of going unnoticed, invisible, and remaining hidden, is one of the most important forms of the “art of the weak” (de Certeau 1984, p. 37). The problem arises when these smart tactics, these “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985), seen as the last resort in their own terms, suddenly become transparent, visible and unveiled, exposed to the panoptical eye of the State and its’ servants.