Abstrakt
In anthropology, the relation of Roma to the past has been a central concern in conceptualizing Romani forms of attachment and belonging. These being enacted in the present, the past is seen as a "foreign country".
However, since 1980's we have been witnessing a rising engagement of various European Roma and pro-Roma agents with struggles over the recognition of the memory of the Holocaust and Romani victimhood. Be it in artistic expressions, memoir writings or in political participation, the shift towards historical framing signals a rather different attitude towards the past.
The apparent contradiction has been highlighted in several contributions that sought to explain it by reference to new politics of identity, to ethnic emancipation and Europeanization, or by discerning the formation of a Romani elite as the bearer of an emerging political subjectivity. In this talk, I will attempt a dissection of a commemorative practice identified as name-reading, a practice that is constituted at the nexus of inclusive politics of commemoration and what is called the archival mode in Holocaust commemoration.
Dissecting the practice should allow for raising questions that would connect a practice of commemoration with some of the cultural frames of memory identified by anthropologists of different Roma communities. I will be asking: Does name-reading serve what commemoration is supposed to do, that is actualize the past for the needs of the present?