Roma and Sinti: The “Other” within Europe

Kopf, Sabrina

doi:10.1002/9781118257203.ch18

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Some have worked with language minorities across national boundaries as well as with nomadic peoples such as Travellers, Sámi, Roma and Sinti (e.g. Binchy 1994;McDonagh 2000;Okely 2006;Beach 2012;Kopf 2012;Payne 2014). With nomadic peoples especially, as the field loses its territorial, placed and landscaped boundings, its definition becomes more dependent on the cultural features of a group of people and its location is frequently cross-bordered (see Beach 2007).…”

Section: Multi-sited Fields: Language Across Placementioning

confidence: 99%

Re-locating the Ethnographic Field

Craith

Hill

2015

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

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When considering the ethnographic field, language-use has been of continued anthropological concern. Traditional approaches to the field have associated language-use with concepts such as place, territory and ethnicity and have tended to bound them within a single site. However, in conditions of increasing globalized mobility, approaches to both fieldwork and language-use within the field are changing. Using existing scholarship on minority-language communities in Europe alongside original fieldwork with Somali migrants in Glasgow, this essay considers the dynamics of that relationship within the contexts of single-sited, multi-sited and online fields. It finds that, for an inquiry focused on both language use and mobility, established modes of thinking about the field are a methodologically restrictive practice on 'being there'. Instead, the authors argue for rethinking the field as a "spoken" one where, with language at the fore, emphasis is placed on 'being there'. KeywordsClosed community, Great Blasket Island, multi-sited fieldwork, online ethnography, Somali *** At the beginning of the twentieth century a number of Celtic folklorists visited the Great Blasket, a small island at the most westerly tip of the Dingle Peninsula off the south-west coast of Ireland (Nic Craith 1988). The visitors included Nordic scholars such as Carl Marstrander, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow as well as British scholars like Kenneth Jackson, George Thomson and Robin Flower. They were in search of a traditional, pure, Irish-speaking community and keen to study an authentic language and lifestyle. These folklorists were impressed with their findings. From their perspective, they had encountered a Neolithic lifestyle untouched by modern civilisation. On this small Island they had discovered a closed community speaking a very pure form of Irish Gaelic with an oral 2 tradition untouched for centuries. The remoteness of the location had served to maintain the purity of language. Being surrounded by the sea had ensured that the community had minimal contact with the mainland.The scholars encouraged the tradition-bearers to recount their life experiences, and with time several scholarly accounts as well as the reflections by the Islanders themselves were published (e.g., Ó Criomhthain 1929;Ó Súilleabháin 1933;Sayers 1936). Introductions to the English-language translations of these autobiographies emphasised the closed nature of the Island community. In his preface to Island Cross-Talk by Tomás O'Crohan, Pádraig Sugrue asked the reader to 'imagine that small, lonely island, the most western habitation in Europe cut off from the life and knowledge of Europe' (Enright 1986: 5). In a subsequent edition, Tim Enright begins with an extract from Virgil's Aeneid (Enright 1986: 1). E. M. Forster advised readers of O'Sullivan's Twenty-Years-a-Growing that they were 'about to read an account of Neolithic civilization from the inside' (Forster 1933). Luce (1969: 151) described the Blasket writers as 'peasants, eking out a scanty living' whose wri...

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Section: Multi-sited Fields: Language Across Placementioning

confidence: 99%