Object structure
Title:

Long-Term “Ethnicized Silences”, Family Secrets and Nation-Building

Subtitle:

Ethnologia Polona 42 (2021)

Creator:

Soler, Elena

Publisher:

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences

Place of publishing:

Warsaw

Date issued/created:

2021

Description:

24 cm

Type of object:

Journal/Article

Subject and Keywords:

silences ; family secrecy ; Roma ; Slovakia ; ethnonationalism ; Central and Eastern Europe ; migration

Abstract:

This article demonstrates the dynamic relationship between long-term ethnicized silences, family secrets and nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe. How have modern nation-states been imagined and formed on the basis of these long-term silences? In order to illustrate what we believe could be the contribution to anthropology (principally to nationalism studies) enabled by introducing this analytical category of silences, in this research we will focus on a close analysis of the life story and identity journey of a self-identified “Slovak woman with Hungarian-Roma roots” who settled in the Czech Republic in 2009. Through this ethnographic example, and in an attempt to go beyond particularities, some of the themes covered are: what meanings, uses and processes of silences can we find in Slovakia, and what is their relationship to the construction of minorities and to an ethno-cultural model of nation-building (an imagined community)? In which domains and under which power relationships have long-term silences and hidden family secrets prevailed in everyday life? To what extent have those silence frameworks been negotiated and used as intergenerational strategies of family unity and protection? And finally, within the context of migration and the complex processes of Europeanization and globalization, how have those long-term, in this case “shamed”, ethnicized Roma silences been contested and broken, and what is the meaning of this development (at micro and macro levels)? In other words, for nation-states that have long been imagined on the principle of ethno-cultural homogeneity, I ask what can long-term ethnicized silences tell us about the process of nation-building (from the bottom up) and the quality of our EU democracies? Where do we come from, where are we now and, at least in terms of a warning (due to the rise of xenophobic forms of populism and radical nationalism), where are we going?

References:

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso
Ardener, Shirley. 1975. Perceiving Women. New York: Wiley
Basso, Keith. H. 1970. “To Give Up on Words: Silence in the Western Apache Culture.” South Western Journal of Anthropology 26: (3): 213–230
Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. London: Little Brown & Company
Beck, Ulrich and Edgar Grande. 2007. Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press
Bloch, Maurice, ed. 1975. Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society. London: Academic Press
Bohanan, Laura A. 1952. “A Genealogical Chárter.” Africa XXII: 301–315
Bridger, Sue and Frances Pine, ed. 1998. Surviving Post-Socialism. Local strategies and regional responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Routledge
Bryceson Deborah, and Ulla Vuorela, ed. 2002. The Transnational Family. New European Frontiers and Global Networks. Oxford: Berg
Bruner, Jerome. 1993. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Connerton, Paul. 2008. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies. SAGE Journals
Davies, Margaret. 2014. “Home and State: Reflections on Metaphor and Practice.” Griffith Law Review 23 (2): 153–175
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge and Kegan Paul
Eriksen,Thomas Hylland. 2002. Ethnicity and Nationalism. London: Pluto Press
Evans-Pritchard, Edward. 1977. Los Nuer. Barcelona: Anagrama
Habermas. Jürgen. 2015. “Democracy in Europe. Why the development of the EU into a Transnational Democracy is Necessary and How it is Possible.” European Law Journal 21 (4): 546–557
Harris, Erika. 2019. “Nation before democracy? Placing the rise of the Slovak extreme right into context.” East European Politics 35 (4): 538–557
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950. La Mémoire Collective. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France
Hann, Chris. M. 2019. “Anthropology and Populism”. Anthropology Today 35 (1): 1–2
Hann, Chris. M, ed. 2001. Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge
Holy, Ladislav. 1996. The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Hübschmannová, Milena and Jiři. V. Neustupný. 1996. “The Slovak and Czech Dialect of Romani and its Standardization.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 120: 85–109
Ignatieff, Michael. 02/10/2019. “La Contra.” La Vanguardia. Barcelona
Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Penguin Press
Kalamaras, Georges. 1994. Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rethoric of Silence. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press
Kusa, Zuzana and Andrej Findor. 1999. “Frames of the Slovak National Identity Constructions.” Sociológia-Slovak Sociological Review 31 (6): 603–618
Le Breton, David. 1997. Du silence. Paris: Editions Métailié
Martin, Emily. 1987. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press
Pitt-Rivers, Julian A. 1972. The People of the Sierra. University of Chicago Press
Rolph-Trouillot, Michel. 1995. Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press
Rostas, Iulius. 2012. Ten Years After. A History of Roma School Desegregation in Central and Eastern Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press
Salomon, Christine and Christine Hamelin. 2008. “Challenging Violence: Kanak Women Renegotiating Gender Relations in New Caledonia.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 9: 29–46
Scheffel, David Z. and Alexander, Mušinka. 2019. “‘Third Class’ Slovak Roma and Inclusion. Bricoleurs vs Social Engineers.” Anthropology Today 35 (1): 17–21
Siim, Pihla Maria. 2016. “Family Stories Untold. Doing Family Through Practices of Silence.” Ethnologia Europaea 46 (2): 74–88
Snyder, T. 2011. Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London: Vintage
Soler, Elena. 2011. Lactancia y Parentesco. Una Mirada Antropológica. Barcelona: Anthropos
Soler, Elena. 2016. “‘The Velvet Divorce’: Un Viaje hacia la Construcción de la Identidad Nacional Checa desde el Siglo XIX hasta la Disolución de Checoslovaquia.” In Transiciones Culturales. Perspectivas desde Europa Central y del Este, edited by Elena Soler y Luís Calvo. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas- CSIC. P. 7–91
Stewart, Michael, ed. 2012. The Gypsy ‘Menace’. Populism and the New Anti-Gypsy Politics. London: Hurst Publishers
Todorov, Tzvetan. 2014. El Miedo a los Bárbaros. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg
Václavík, David. 2019. “Shaping the Slovak Identity and the Manifestation Thereof in the Social Iconosphere. The Case of the Slovak National Museum.” Historická Sociologie 2: 35–52

Relation:

Ethnologia Polona

Volume:

42

Start page:

113

End page:

129

Resource type:

Text

Detailed Resource Type:

Article

Format:

application/octet-stream

Resource Identifier:

0137-4079 ; eISSN 2719-6976 ; doi:10.23858/ethp.2021.42.2730

Source:

IAiE PAN, call no. P 366 ; IAiE PAN, call no. P 367 ; IAiE PAN, call no. P 368 ; click here to follow the link

Language:

eng

Rights:

Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

Terms of use:

Copyright-protected material. [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] May be used within the scope specified in Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, full text available at: ; -

Digitizing institution:

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Original in:

Library of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Access:

Open

×

Citation

Citation style: