Observații la studiul Deliei Grigore: „Romii din România – o identitate stigmatizată istoric”
Some observations on Delia Grigore's study, "The Romanian Roma – a historically stigmatized identity"

Summary/Abstract: The article is constructed as a dialogue with Delia Grigore’s work, “The Romanian Roma – a historically stigmatized identity”. I started my analysis with a brief description of the historical leaders of the civic movement who dedicated themselves in the 1990s and early 2000s to the modernization of the Roma identity project. I discuss, critically, some of the researcher’s major theses, among them: that researchers’ choice to ignore Roma history until recently, the choice to limit studies on Roma, for a long time, to ethnographic aspects, and the almost total distortion of historical truth are forms of a racism of exclusion towards the Roma; that it is necessary for research on Roma to be organically attached to the identity of the Roma, a condition for the establishment of a theoretical base that would be useful for the progress of the field; the argument that the correct spelling of the word “Roma” is with a double r, to emphasize the nasalized pronunciation of the term; considering Roma social integration policies as “cultural ethnocide”; ignoring the Roma in the Treaty on Minorities signed by the Romanian state in 1919; the persistence, in the ancestral Roma collective memory, of the slave identity; romanticizing identity issues, instead of treating them in terms of social psychology and using research methods specific to the latter.

• Details
• Contents