Ethnologist says Romani people in the Czech Republic are reducing the plurality of their identity

Nations or ethnicities are usually groups of people so large that their members cannot all know one another personally. They are comprised of men, women, and children, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the subordinate, people of all age categories, villagers and people from large cities. In our contemporary, postmodern, urbanized world, the nation is not such a strong, unifying category as to produce persons with shared characteristics. Today, a whole series of other categorizations influences people more than does their national or ethnic affiliation. This is why the answer to the question of identity must be sought through more precise delineations.

We must determine whether an interviewer of Romani people is discussing them in Bohemia or, for example, in the USA, whether we are discussing certain educational or income categories, whether we are discussing personal identity or a relationship to a nation or state. Another complication for a potential answer to this question is the fact that identity belongs to the category of social construction. Identity is represented by a large number of aspects which people put together for themselves, sometimes eventually reflecting on the whole construct, but sometimes not.

It is very difficult to ask people about their identity directly. A psychologist will ask this question differently than an ethnographer or social anthropologist. The indicators of identity can be compiled in a rather miscellaneous, even arbitrary way. Among the simplest indicators is the question of whether an individual knows today’s date, which day in the week it is, what time it is, where he or she was born. What is that individual’s happiest memory? What will that individual do tomorrow? These questions determine how people identify with the past, present and future. Similarly, we ask whether people consider themselves men or women, who the person they love most is, etc.

Naturally, this set of questions can be expanded to include asking whether people consider themselves members of a nation or ethnicity, whether those around them confuse them with some other nationality, how they characterize their homeland, who else belongs to their nation, whether such persons are closer to them than the members of other nations are, whether they have strong feelings about their own children marrying members of another nation, whether they are proud to belong to their nation, what that nation’s strengths and weaknesses are, whether they believe membership in their nation is a benefit or a detriment to their personal lives. We can ask whether they are proud, when in the company of foreigners, to be a member of that nation, or whether they tend to hide their nationality, etc.

The evaluation of the answers to such questions, however, is complicated by the circumstance that identity is situational. It changes depending on the context in which the person is moving, it changes with the conversational situation. People respond to sports matches between states differently when their team wins and inspires them as individuals – at that moment, national identity has enormous weight. However, a person will behave differently in private, or when in contact with neighbors of the same nationality, where the topic of identity is under-communicated and does not necessarily have any significance at all. The contextuality of identity is so important that in the contemporary urbanized world, where people perform many roles, experts often speak not of a single identity, but of an individual’s identities. Sometimes they also speak of external and internal identities, of declared and lived identities, or, in other contexts, of personal and social identities.

People create their personal identities on their own, and these creations are markedly influenced by their behavior and mindset. However, the proposition that identity is contextual already implies that the response of one’s environment to one’s identity is very important. One’s permanent features greatly influence one’s identity, as do prejudices, stereotypes, and unpredictable reactions from one’s environment. People cannot behave completely arbitrarily, or make completely arbitrary declarations of identity. If they do so, those around them consider them either asocial or crazy. On the other hand, if the reaction from the environment differs from people’s expectations, their identity suffers. The person is uncertain and does not know what to do.

In the case of Romani identities, an entire series of general field investigations have begun with the thesis that there is no overlap between the boundaries for the external identification of Romani people by the majority population and the boundaries of the identification of Romani people by their own group. The flexibility of these boundaries is determined by the subjective nature of various indicators of Romani-ness, including membership in a clan, which is never evidently visible and can only be defined from the inside. The fact that Romani people do not have a nation-state of their own means their identity with respect to nationality and state affiliation will always be dual. The declaration of that identity will always be relatively discretionary and will depend on context.

In the Czech Republic, Romani identity is influenced by the strong stereotyping of Roma that is performed by the majority population. Members of the majority population generally believe they know who the Roma are and what they look like, and they can precisely describe this group on the basis of accepted stereotypes. Romani people often find themselves in the position that no matter what they say, they will be assigned to the group of “Gypsies”, with everything that implies. Only, for example, the census can inform the broader public that Romani people are somehow using and working with a dual identity.

On the other hand, when Romani people are in other countries, or interacting with foreigners in the Czech Republic, the second, “Czech” part of their dual identity is the most essential. When abroad, Romani people are, according to their passports, Czechs first and foremost, and only then something else. The same applies to their view of foreigners in the Czech Republic, with surprising results. Foreigners living in the Czech Republic either permanently or long-term have told me many times that Romani people have often very bluntly let them know that this is their home, not the home of the foreigners, and that their words – as Czechs, as Czech citizens – have more weight here than the words of foreigners.

For these reasons, Romani identity is of significance to only some Romani people. Other Romani people are more interested in their state affiliation, their extended family, their Romani subgroup, etc. Dual identities in the Czech Republic are influenced by the very negative stereotyping of Roma performed by the majority population. In addition to all of the negative stereotypes about “Gypsies” held by the majority population, the notion that Romani people can be identified at first glance by their physical features also plays a role. Both the majority population and Romani people very often work with the notion that Romani affiliation is negative, a stigma which is indelible, permanent, and unchanging. The frequent Romani statement that “I can’t get work because I’m black” is sometimes a highly realistic assessment of the situation here. However, such thinking leads to fatalism and to the feeling that there is no point in working on oneself, that the position of Romani people in society is unalterable. Such fatalism is only valid in certain contexts. We have not yet experimentally tested the degree to which the majority population actually does recognize Romani people, according to what characteristics, and with what degree of error.

Dark-skinned foreigners in the Czech Republic will definitely confirm for me that the majority population rather frequently misidentifies them, and it can therefore be presumed that if many non-Romani people have been misidentified as Romani because they are dark-skinned, then many Romani people who are light-skinned have never been identified as Romani. Does the identification of Romani people by skin color or other permanent anthropological features play a significant role here? Other factors play a similar if not greater role: Clothing worn, cars driven, one’s address, how much money one has, gestures used, the ethnolect spoken, voice coloration, and other indicators which can effectively be altered should a person not want to be identified and categorized at first glance as Romani.

Two years ago we traveled to a town in Britain to visit the much-discussed Romani migrants from the Czech Republic living there. We knew there was a strong Romani community in the town, and we presumed that we would be able to ask our acquaintances about Romani people and find them quickly. The town was not big and the presumption that we would not be able to find a large Romani community in a small-scale industrial town was ruled out in advance. In that industrial town, however, there is also a strong Indian and Pakistani community, and most residents are immigrants from those Asian countries. We were completely lost thanks to our notion that Romani people would be visually distinct from those around them, and we were unable to identify anyone just on sight there. Everyone around us simply behaved like dark-skinned English people.

In the Czech environment, thanks to migration, it will one day be even more difficult to identify anyone by skin color alone. However, it is also possible that many Romani people will be surprised to discover that this will not help them much. The majority will safely continue to consider them “Gypsies” because of their ethnolect and other indicators, no matter what identity they themselves declare.

The problem of negative stereotyping and dual identity is not fatal in and of itself. After all, it is suspicious when anyone is praised in the Czech Republic. Negative stereotypes are applied here to politicians, entrepreneurs, the wealthy, managers, anyone who wants something from their subordinates, poor people, religious believers, indebted persons, and to all nationalities irrespective of whether they are poorer or richer than Czech people. All it takes is for Czechs to come into contact with them. Just like Romani people, the members of all other minorities in the Czech Republic have dual identities, as do former foreigners now holding Czech passports – and Czech countrymen born abroad. However, for the members of most of these other groups, this negative stereotyping does not result in social decline and isolation as it does for Romani people.

There are many groups living in the Czech environment who have created parallel social structures for themselves in which they prosper relatively well and manage to reproduce those structures from generation to generation. At a minimum these are the Russians and Vietnamese, who have partially created parallel schools, cultural institutions, and business sectors in the Czech environment and who independently reproduce a large part of their own social life. The low absorption capacity of Czech society does not threaten their communities. However, a large part of Romani people in the Czech environment are not integrated into majority institutions and do not create their own parallel structures. The results of this are evident in their participation in the labor market, education, cultural self-realization, and functional literacy.

Previously, in an article for the journal “Romano džaniben”, I pointed out how essential it is for young people growing up to learn, in an urbanized world, how to cross over from the family that orients them into the “big world” of institutions. In addition to a child’s identity and that of his or her parents, people can acquire maturity by gaining the identities of a professional, a worker, someone who stands on his or her own two feet and makes his or her own money. They can acquire the identity of a person necessary to others, someone adroit, skilled, who can appreciates him or herself. Those who do not intensively develop this art of moving into extra-familiar institutions, as well as their functional literacy, are disadvantaged and distance themselves from contemporary urbanized society. They fall into isolation, become vulnerable, and seek their own value in opposition to society, for example, by harming and hating it.

In Great Britain, the “identity of the modern outcast” has been described many times and researched in Muslim communities in particular. The British wanted to recognize the mechanism through which young people who had attended British schools and were born in Great Britain had become hard-core Muslims and supporters of holy war against the Europeans. The answer is completely simple. What can children excel at who dreamed in their childhood of all they would accomplish and who saw the reality of such dreams day in and day out through the media, but who then, for various reasons, barely completed elementary school, did not continue their educations for economic reasons or because of the conditions in their families, and whose careers were over before they even began, ending up on the unemployment rolls? Frequently, such people start large families and evaluate their personalities in the role of (impoverished) parents. Some also turn to God, and those who want more from life and feel that the problem is not to do with their own capabilities start to hate the society around them and to confront it. We are also noting this situation in the Romani environment in the Czech Republic, fortunately without any connection to any sort of militant structures. Perhaps because of this, such developments are not attracting much attention here.

In the Romani environment inside the Czech Republic, there is the same plurality of identity types as in any other society. However, because a relatively large number of Romani people belong to the category of the socially vulnerable, and because the population of the Czech Republic is neither capable of nor willing to help anyone else – itself included – there is an evident tendency among the Romani population to reduce the range of their identity types and to reproduce personalities that are fixated only only on their own immediate families or groups of relatives, without developing the alternative identities of neighbor, town resident, professional, citizen of the state, etc. Such a development naturally is a step backward and a negation of the characteristics associated with a contemporary urbanized society.

The author is head of the Ethnic Studies Department at the Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He also teaches at the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University (Department of Cultural Studies, Institute of Ethnology).