The End of Roma in the Czech Republic? Heretical Essays of Anthropologists from Plzeň

A network of young anthropologists, based mainly at the Faculty of Arts of the University of West Bohemia in Plzeň, published recently several books which have shattered established views on Roma. According to one of the leading figures in the group, Marek Jakoubek, Czech Roma do not exist as „a people“ or as „an ethnic group“. Their traditional culture, which developed in their Slovak settlements, has been destroyed by migration to the Czech lands. But even in Slovakia they did not make for an ethnic group, since they had always lacked a common identity. It is even more the case in the Czech Republic where they have become part of an excluded social underclass. The practical consequence of this thesis is far reaching: policies which have conceived of the problems of co-existence between Czechs and Roma in ethnic terms should be reformulated into social terms. What middle class Czechs and their elites identify as another ethnic group, is in reality a „culture of poverty“ (O. Lewis) with fragments of vanishing traditional culture of Roma village settlements. The article appreciates the main thrust of the argument. It claims, however, that spokespersons of the group, such as Jakoubek and another young scholar from the same university Tomáš Hirt, throw the child out with the bathwater, when they completely deny the importance of the symbolic aspect of exclusion – the collective stigmatization of the excluded as „Roma“ or „Gypsies“ – and, as a consequence, deny any utility of practices of multiculturalism which are able to cope with it.