The main activity of the first 14 months of the project was to conduct participant observation in the Bessarabian Roma community . The Bessarabian Romas are originally from Eastern Romania, but many of them have been settling in Paris for fifteen years.To carry out this participant observation, I spent approximately two months among the community in the towns of Tulcea, Constanta and Galați, in Romania. Within the families, I participated in daily life as well as in exceptional family events such as weddings and divorces. I also continued to socialize with the Bessarabian Roma in Paris and – at the same time – I conducted an online ethnography on Facebook. As part of this ethnographic work, I collected eleven life-narratives of elderly people in the communities in Romania and France. Along with ethnographic work, I have done some archival investigations in state archives in Tulcea, Constanta and Galati County archives, and in the Bucharest central archives. Analysis of data collected through ethnographical and archival investigations produced two important findings.
First, comparing data from archives and marriage registries with genealogical information collected from the Roma people, I reconstructed genealogies of the people I met during my fieldwork, going back to the nineteenth century. Those genealogies intertwined, and I considered those cross-genealogies as a single kinship network. In this way, I have modelled the kinship network of the community.At the same time, the project has reconstructed two horizontal networks: the network of Tulcea county nomadic people between 1927 and 1947 and the network of Facebook friendships in 2018-2019.
The second step was to collect different representations of “what is a marriage” within the community. The ethnographic research accounted for the conception members of the kinship network have of marriage, its function and how it has changed over time. The research has ascertained the difference of viewpoints between women and men. Beyond shared representations, the project documented cases of negotiations at a personal level between the ideal and the actual marriage. Marriages change over time. The ways of getting married today and 50 years ago are different in the Roma communities.
The marriage transformation points to a paradoxical modernity of the group. First, age at marriage is not constant. The marriages immediately after the Second World War, after the return from deportation, were early, often before the age of 15. In the 50s and the 60s, the marriages occur later, around twenty years, before becoming more precocious again in the 80s and 90s, during the economic crisis and the crisis of the transition. Finally, in recent years, age at marriage is again around 20 years. These transformations are linked to cycles of improvement or deterioration of the community’s socio-economic situation. The recent adoption of the payment of bride-price, usually seen as an archaism, is nowadays associated with the strengthening of the capacity of young people and women to choose in the context the traditional domination of elders and men. The project demonstrated how women’s emancipation in the Roma community is both real and developed and – at the same – unclaimed and hidden.
Finally, I take into consideration the controversies related to age at marriage and the alleged trafficking in Roma children widespread in our society, and I work on the sources of anti-Gypsyism. I have devoted an article to this subject in the journal Communications (107, october 2020). In France in the last 10 years, the agenda setting of Roma’s age at marriage, associated with other racial stereotypes, has strengthened the spread of anti-Gypsyism, which led to the anti-Roma violence of spring 2019.
