“Ţiganu-i ţigan”: verbal icons and urban marginality in a post-socialist European city

Picker, G. (2013) “Ţiganu-i ţigan”: verbal icons and urban marginality in a post-socialist European city. Civilisations, 62(1 & 2), pp. 51-70. (doi: 10.4000/civilisations.3271)

Abstract

Social science studies have not often looked at the links between broad dynamics of social closure and everyday local idioms of difference in post-socialist Europe. In this article I give a theoretical and empirical contribution to research on the links between “cultural intimacy” and urban marginality in times of massive neoliberal restructuring in the region. Drawing on fieldwork in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) I ethnographically investigate the everyday working of two verbal icons indexing peculiar characterizations of Roma, and I discuss the multiple ways through which they contribute to informing policy making, and ultimately to perpetuating the conditions of social marginality and segregation under which a significant number of Romani families live. Civil servants and the workers of a periphery neighbourhood articulate those icons in different ways, yet similarly constructing a space of cultural intimacy that functions both as a vector of exclusion of Roma from the ethno-moral boundaries of the nation, and, creatively, as a type of sociality securing a certain distance from the EU gaze and its discourse of tolerance.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Picker, Dr Giovanni
• Authors: Picker, G.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Sociology Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences
• Journal Name: Civilisations
• Publisher: Revue Civilisations
• ISSN: 0009-8140