Critical analysis project

European Journal of Sociology http://journals.cambridge.org/EUR

Additional services for European Journal of Sociology:

Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here

Patterns of Exclusion Janos Ladanyi and Ivan Szelenyi, Patterns of Exclusion: Constructing Gypsy Ethnicity and the Making of an Underclass in Transnational Societies of Europe (New York, East European Monographs no DCLXXVI, Boulder, Co, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2006).

Judith Okely

European Journal of Sociology / Volume 49 / Issue 03 / December 2008, pp 506 - 511 DOI: 10.1017/S0003975609000289, Published online: 06 March 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003975609000289

How to cite this article: Judith Okely (2008). European Journal of Sociology, 49, pp 506-511 doi:10.1017/ S0003975609000289

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/EUR, IP address: 128.143.23.241 on 12 Apr 2015

p a t t e r n s o f e x c l u s i o n *

R o m a o r g y p s i e s have a high profile, especially after the

collapse of communism. They are the most scapegoated group in

Europe. Some of us who studied Gypsies from the 1970s are intrigued

by the growing research. A sociologist once informed me that Gypsies

were irrelevant in race research since this lumpenproletariat should join

the white working class. Fortunately, a younger generation of social

scientists, facilitated by Ladanyi’s CEU initiatives, want to understand

the perspectives of the stigmatised. Thus Patterns of Exclusion, as

a detailed study by established social scientists, is welcome. It is en-

lightening as to the long term changing political and economic contexts

for Roma in Central and Eastern Europe, with implications beyond.

Its centre-piece is an historical and ethnographic study of one

village in northeastern Hungary from the mid nineteenth century to

2000. It provides the background to the perplexing contexts of Gypsies

before, during and after communism. There are painstaking searches

of censuses and church records. After scrupulous investigation of stati-

stics, fascinating comparisons and contrasts are made with the parallel

circumstances of the village peasants.

The study presents in detail the major transformations, with

Gypsies moving through seemingly cyclical phases, for which the

authors use standard sociological concepts: first, lower class, then

under-caste, next underclass. During communism, the changes are

classified as a move back from under-caste to lower class. The authors,

drawing on Myrdal and Lewis, interpret the most recent position most

negatively, namely the controversial classification of the Gypsies as an

underclass, emerging from a ‘‘culture of poverty’’, with less emphasis

on ethnicity.

The stages commence in 1857 after a census. 5 % were Gypsy, 15 %

were Jewish, the majority identified as peasants. Intriguingly, in the

light of the Gypsies’ economic niches elsewhere in the 20 th

century,

Gypsies were recorded as day labourers. Living within the village, their

demographic features were similar to other residents.

* About Janos Ladanyi and Ivan Szelenyi, Patterns of Exclusion: Constructing Gypsy Ethnicity and the Making of an Underclass in Transnational Societies of Europe (New York, East European Monographs no DCLXXVI, Boulder, Co, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2006).

506

Judith Okely, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Hull University and International Gender Studies Centre, Oxford [J.M.Okely@hull.ac.uk]. Arch.europ.sociol., XLIX, 3 (2008), pp. 506–511—0003-9756/08/0000-914$07.50per art + $0.10 per page�2008 A.E.S.

In that era, peasants and Gypsies were economically symbiotic. The

Gypsies provided berry picking, blacksmithery, broom making and

musical entertainment. They were neither landowners nor concerned

with animal husbandry. Even when subsequent government gestures

were made towards the redistribution of land, Gypsies were usually

excluded.

I immediately recognized the classical non-peasant economic niche

which Gypsies have occupied over centuries; namely the occasional

supply of goods and services. Additionally, the study confirms, as found

elsewhere, that Gypsies embraced the ethnic category of gadjo (non-

Gypsy) maintaining separation from the ‘‘other’’, whether peasant or

townsman.

From the mid 19 th

century, it is argued that the Roma could be

classified as a ‘‘lower class’’. By 1900, most Jewish families apparently

out migrated, except tragically a few who died in Auschwitz. From this

date, Gypsies were moved to the edge of the village. By the interwar

years, the Roma became an under-caste, due to spatial isolation, but

continued economic contributions to the peasant community.

Under communism, the authors suggest, the Gypsies reverted to

the earlier lower class status. Infant mortality declined. Social divisions

between Gypsy and peasant narrowed. They worked along side each

other. The Gypsies moved back into the centre. But after 1970, the

majority of peasants, mistrusting collectivization and with improved

circumstances, left the village, as also upwardly mobile Roma.

Communism brought positive and negative transformations. With

a huge demand for unskilled manual labour, Gypsies were expected to

embrace permanent waged work rather than self-employment. They

escaped relative poverty. The authors repeat a familiar claim that the

Gypsies’ ‘‘traditional’’ occupations had declined with industrialization,

seemingly without alternatives.

With the collapse of communism, de-industrialisation progressed,

factories closed, and auditing increased redundancies. The first to be

rendered jobless were invariably Gypsies. They had lost pre commu-

nist work practices. Facing permanent official unemployment and

welfare dependency, few had training within the dominant system.

Although schooling increased under communism, many Gypsies were

unjustly sent to schools for the mentally retarded.

By 2000, nearly 100 % of the village population was Roma. Nobody

under 30 had a waged job, although the reader might guess at self-

employment. With a population explosion, a mother’s age at first

childbirth dropped to below 17 for 40 %. The authors’ conclusions are

507

patterns of exclusion

pessimistic, suggesting a change very different from earlier eras. These

rural Gypsies are classified neither as a lower class, nor as under-caste

but as underclass. This concept carries the full historical load of earlier

sociological debates applied to western ghettos, but not emerging

Roma/Gypsy ethnographies.

In addition to this village study, Ladanyi and Szelenyi embark on

broader scale comparisons with Gypsies in Hungary, Romania and

Bulgaria. These rest on interviews, after scrupulous methodological

discussions. Approaches of experts are contrasted with seemingly detached

interviewers. Identification depended on specified external criteria, in

contrast to self-definitions. The authors reject Barth’s ethnic self-

ascription as ‘‘fuzzy’’. Granted, the latter is problematic. Gypsies have

a history of ‘‘passing’’, according to context. Since external criteria

change in time and over time, and may contradict those prioritised by

insiders, I would defend Barth’s primacy of self-ascription and descent

in ethnic identity. This requires long-term acquaintance.

Despite these reservations, the interviews reveal significant national

contrasts. In Bulgaria, Roma are the most spatially segregated, with the

greatest poverty and least official education. They were more likely to

self identify as Roma, and consistent with the interviewers. In contrast,

only a third of those in Hungary and Romania, presumed to be Roma

by the interviewers, self identified as such. A quarter of the Hungarian

Roma population lives in ‘‘the mainstream’’, especially urban centres.

Only Roma in rural ‘‘ghettos’’ live in extreme poverty. Thus Roma

society is ‘‘class fragmented’’. The situation of Roma in Romania is

somewhere between Hungary and Bulgaria, moving from under-caste

to either lower or underclass.

All this general background is crucial for understanding the post

communist context of Gypsies or Roma and their high profile before

EU acceptance of accession by former communist states. The existing

EU member states may have been less concerned with the Gypsies’

deprivation than with fear of western migration, which to some extent

has been confirmed. Predictably, many Roma/Gypsies migrating to the

UK ‘‘pass’’ according to nationality not ethnicity.

While the book’s historical and current empirical material is rare

and valuable, it is the analytical conclusions with which I disagree.

Ladanyi and Szelenyi emphasise the culture of poverty, although they

distance themselves from its caricatures. But they cannot escape the

theories’ subsequent association with different contexts, for example,

US urban ghettos. Granted, they modify the notion of passive victims

passing on poverty through socialization and stress external structural

508

judith okely

factors. Dismissing suggestions that habits, values and culture are the

cause, they acknowledge the consequences. But unlike Michael Stewart’s

critical preference for exclusion, and notwithstanding the title, the

authors ultimately accept ‘‘that those in poverty often share some

unique cultural traits: a culture of poverty’’ (p. 17).

The authors cannot erase the history of the culture of poverty. It has

been near toxic for Irish Travellers. At a 1991 Dublin conference,

I witnessed a non-Traveller researcher publicly apologising to irate

Travellers. Building on a government report, her influential thesis had

emphasized their culture of poverty. The Travellers had then lived the

policy consequences. Since they allegedly lacked any autonomous

culture, officials advocated training for wage labour, housing and

assimilation.

Nonetheless, embedded in the ethnographic detail of this study,

I find glimpses of alternative perspectives. The fieldworkers indeed

recognized ‘‘the hierarchy of prestige and power was rooted in local

kinship networks’’ (p. 82) which ‘‘constituted the primary fabric upon

which the social order of Roma society was based’’ (p. 210). To follow

through such knowledge requires sometimes years of sensitive collec-

tion. Lenka Budilova and Marek Jakoubek have gained long-term

perspectives among Gypsies in Slovakia. One seemingly bounded

locality or village is recognized as the site of inter-group contestation,

something which Ladanyi and Szelenyi acknowledge (pp. 210-211).

Simultaneously, Budilova and Jakoubek found that descent and alliance

relations stretched far beyond the ‘‘village’’, across regional and even

national borders.

Kinship is the cultural core among Gypsies, in contrast to frag-

mented households with which the culture of poverty has been asso-

ciated. Indeed, in the post communist Hungarian village, even when

women become mothers at an increasingly younger age, the fathers live

with them, alongside extended families. Michael Stewart has elabo-

rated Roma solidarity of kin networks, across gender and age, against

welfare surveillance.

The village ethnography provides poignant accounts of failed but

well-meaning enterprise initiatives, both by the research team as ad-

mirable activists, and other non-Gypsies. Although some projects started

well, all eventually failed. While the authors acknowledge incom-

petence by outsiders, they attribute some responsibility to the Roma.

Explanations offered for failure include the Gypsies’ ‘‘excessive

egalitarianism. . . rejection of hierarchy. . . lack of trust, and a short- term outlook’’ (p. 96).

509

patterns of exclusion

However, given kinship loyalties, inevitably when one Gypsy is

expected to assume a leadership role, s/he will necessarily support kin.

The authors’ denigration of egalitarianism confirms their prioritization

of a type of leadership resonating with an unfamiliar line-managerialism.

Similarly, the lamented ‘‘lack of trust’’, like it or not, is built into the

history of gadjo/Gypsy ethnic boundaries and survival.

I suggest the Gypsies’ applications for pig farming funds reflected

crucial kinship organization. Two Gypsies made separate applications,

thus bye-passing internal rivalry and conflict. It was therefore un-

fortunate that their rejected applications were not appreciated for

structural realism.

Paradoxically, I recognize long-term cultural traditions in what are

denigrated and attributed to this ‘‘new poverty of culture’’. Travelling

Gypsies, both before and during communism, were forceably settled.

1960s Polish Gypsies had their horses and waggons impounded. Such

groups, with a deep history of geographical mobility, can retain values

of flexibility and opportunism facilitating multi-occupations, long after

travel is outlawed. The village Gypsies had once had that occupational

flexibility, deemed ‘‘unskilled’’, yet crucial.

When communism censored self-employment, Gypsies unofficially

engaged in the informal economy. Now non-Gypsies appropriate that

petty-capitalist niche and racists boycott Gypsy entrepreneurs. The

authors suggest that industrialization only destroyed Gypsy occupa-

tions. I argue that Gypsies have adapted to industrial change. British

Gypsies quickly embraced motorisation to enhance nomadism. Black-

smithery is re-constituted for ‘‘tinkering’’ with motors. Mitric’s 2003

film Pretty Dyana follows Belgrade Gypsies transforming cars into

mini tractors for waste collection. Recycling expands. Technologies

offer new possibilities. A ‘‘short-term outlook’’ is precisely the Gypsies’

strength. Nomadic history, as ideological legacy, is cultural capital.

Gypsies are self-educated in flexibility for changing contexts.

Anthropologists will contest the assertion that we only ‘‘emphasise

the resistance of Gypsy communities to change and their exceptional

ability to retain traditions’’ in contrast to the authors’ ‘‘evolutionary

perspective’’ which ‘‘sees linear change and emphasizes continuity’’

(p. 192). On the contrary, anthropologists document and celebrate the

Gypsies’ ever creative ingenuity through change. I echo Stewart’s scep-

ticism towards the classification of Gypsies as merely an underclass.

The 2008 EASA Ljubljana conference included anthropologists’ re-

cent fieldwork among different Gypsy/Roma groups. Their analyses

revealed continuous adaptability.

510

judith okely

Ultimately, despite my disagreement with the conceptual interpre-

tations and conclusions, this study’s extraordinary detailed material

and many insights are vital. There is a need for similar research into

the Gypsies’ changing historical conditions throughout Europe.

j u d i t h o k e l y

511

patterns of exclusion