The resurgence of a social identity through Oral History and Cultural Heritage: the Romani nationalist political project
Abstract
From the beginning of the 1970s started to be articulate on several fronts in Europe the Romani nationalist movement: an attempt of political and cultural recognition of the people commonly known as Gypsies. This movement, however, faces challenges on building a unit of belonging discourse within the group, mainly because the ethnic persecution and public policies towards them during their stay in Europe, added with a reasoned prejudice on cultural differences.
In order to construct a collective identity, the movement tries to relabel the Gypsy History, written by non-Gypsies, as a Romani History written by themselves. Museums such as the Museum of Roma Culture in Brno, the Khamoro festival in Prague (both cities in the Czech Republic) and the celebration of Porajmos (the Gypsy holocaust during World War II) are part of this process.
Still, in the absence of broad historiographical tradition, Oral History appears as a basic source. From a literature review using concepts of Miroslav Hroch, Ian Hancock, Eva Davidova, Dominique Poulot, Ecléa Bosi, Michael Pollak, this paper aims discuss the uses of Oral History as a major historiographical source and the Cultural Heritage as representations of this History targeting build a social identity.
The data comes from partial results of the PhD "The Nationalist Romani movement: current global perspectives" from the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University in Prague.