Battles over democratic citizenship in Europe

The European Commission has come to the bewildering decision to support the mass fingerprinting of Roma in Italy, a decision which the European Roma Rights Center and the Open Society Institute Justice Initiative have challenged the EC to defend.

I am so disturbed by this whole situation in Italy.

(See also EU Roma Policy Coalition.)

The latest episode of Italian xenophobia

"The reaction to the death of these children goes beyond anything that has happened before. The incident has exposed a long-held social realism in our country: that many working-class people think the Roma no better than animals, and the government is using this xenophobia to win votes and popularity. People are ashamed. The deaths of these girls has come to represent something more, perhaps a battle for Italy's soul."
-- Francesca Saudino, a campaigning Naples-based lawyer with Osservazione, a Roma rights organization, quoted in The Observer in an article on the recent (non)reaction in Italy to the deaths of two teenaged Romani girls on a beach in Naples

I heart the interwebs -- alternative news round-up

One thing I like about reading my news from a custom-designed list that makes use of RSS feeds of a variety of international sources (NPR, New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC, etc. . ) is that I'm able to see a lot more variation in the top stories than you do if you read the top US newspapers. It's even more interesting than the days when I read the World Press Review magazine.

Case in point: Although the New York Times is reporting on the German dairy strike, the US seems oblivious to the fishermen's work stoppages in Spain in protest of rising fuel prices: "'Compliance is total. The entire Spanish coast is at a halt," Jose Caparros, of the fishermen's co-operative in the major northeastern port of Barcelona, said." Apparently Portugal has already seen similar action and Italian and Belgian fishermen are expected to follow suit, according to Al Jazeera and the BBC.


Of course, I personally am interested to see social work and anthropology and Eastern Europe in the mainstream news today, and Roma in the international press.

First off, social work: The Supreme Court has ruled that child welfare workers in Texas overstepped their bounds in their removal of the children from the polygamist compound outside Eldorado last month.

Next, Eastern Europe: Croatia has jailed a war crimes general following his conviction in the Croatian court. As the BBC reports, "The UN war crimes tribunal's decision to transfer the case to Zagreb was in recognition of the progress Croatia had earlier made in dealing with war crimes investigations, the BBC's Balkans analyst Gabriel Partos said."

And finally, anthropology gets its five minutes in the spotlight. The secret to Stonehenge finally been uncovered (and now reported all over the mainstream press). My favorite commentary on the recent discoveries at Stonehenge has to be the interview with Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap.

Meanwhile, in northern France, archaeologists are "seeking to uncover a suspected mass grave of hundreds of Australian and British troops from World War I."

Also, there's also been yet another "uncontacted tribe" 'sighted' in the Amazon by Brazil's National Indian Foundation (Fundacao Nacional do Indio, whose website was down last I tried). True to the form of salvage ethnography, there are folks convinced we need to save them.

CNN reports:"'These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist,' said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International. 'The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct.'" I just wonder how long it'll be before they send in a translator to communicate with them.

© Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

On the other hand, in the international press, there are some new, disturbing reports on Roma. One of the oldest Romani populations in the world, that of Istanbul, is experiencing dislocation due to urban renewal in Sulukule. Human rights advocates are very concerned for the Romani families who have been living in the neighborhood for centuries. There are allegations that illiterate families have been asked to sign papers they don't understand, and that "tenants in Sulukule were left on the streets as the houses they resided in were sold and then destructed by the municipality."

In Italy, meanwhile, schoolchildren's drawings are telling a frightening tale of xenophobia and violence underlying the recent firebombing of a Romani camp outside Naples, according to the Daily Mail.

"Burning the houses of the Roma is justified," wrote some children. Another said, "They steal babies and use them for begging or sell their organs for transplants." The frightening messages of hatred communicated without filter through the words and images of children give startling insight into the dangerous social situation for Roma in Italy.

Coulda woulda shoulda

I should have been in Budapest today.

But instead I am writing. Writing, writing, writing. It's late, but it's coming, finally.

'Tis good, though. I think that what I'm writing isn't crap. Lately that feeling is pretty unusual, I have to say. Actually, I think it might even be good. But it's early to tell.

It's taken me AGES to get through my field data from Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania to the point that I can make heads or tails of it. I didn't leave my house all weekend, and today only went as far as the cable company a few miles down the road to restore my troubled internet service. I filed away about two inches of papers into a three-inch binder, added tabs to six field notebooks, and have been creating indexes for myself. I feel like this is the kind of stuff they don't teach you. An archival methods course would be so handy. I know there are probably more intuitive digital ways of creating cross-referencing tools. But I'm just working with the skills and tools I've got. This is even before transcribing, which will add PILES and PILES to the data I've already got in the form of field notes, photographs, and documents from field contacts.

I've started making a more comprehensive database than I've had up until now, except the one in my head, and realized today that I probably have met at least a few hundred people "in the field" at this point who have something to do with my project. No wonder I feel a little loopy sometimes, and like I haven't had a real chance of synthesizing my life while I've been doing coursework. Thank God I took a semester to do independent study so I could start to process this, a little.

Grad school highs and lows

The good news: I have finally, after more than a year and a half of delay, finished my two final papers for Qualitative Methods. I have my portfolio all ready to submit, and will do so tomorrow. It's not perfect, but it's done. And that is something. And actually, I do really like one of the papers, and my colleague I wrote about seemed to, also. That's also something.

The other good news: I have a paper idea for my Democracy course (also for finishing out a long-incomplete class) that my other professor likes, that she thinks will work well with the course materials, and that I know will also help me tremendously in kick-starting my work on my research internship, which I have to finish next semester. I'm going to examine ideas of participation embedded in housing programs for Roma in Central Europe, considering cultural assumptions about Roma implied in the policies and implementation, and reflecting on connections to rhetoric of the deserving and undeserving poor in American social welfare history. There's really a there there, and I'm excited about it, I have the field data to support this line of analysis, and I'm looking forward to thinking about it.

The bad news: I'm supposed to have submitted work to the professor with whom I'm doing an independent study, today, in preparation for our meeting tomorrow. I have nothing done. I've been teaching, writing and helping prepare the final exam for the Anthro 101 students, writing for other courses (see above!), and commuting to and working in Detroit to finish out my field placement at AFG. Really, that's about all I've been doing except writing in my blog and taking photographs. I've had the occasional Gilmore Girls break to keep myself vaguely sane, but then gone back to writing. And obviously I've taken care of the minimal daily requirements of sleeping, eating, maintaining the minimal level of hygiene, and filling up my grocery cart and my gas tank. Seriously, that's really it. But, it doesn't change the cold stark fact that the work isn't done. Fuck. What do I do?

What I want to do is delay our meeting yet another few days and bust my ass reading and writing this weekend. But I fear I've lost my credibility now. Argh!!! Why is this so hard? And I'm so damned tired -- I only got back from our exam meeting in Ann Arbor at 11:00 last night. SIGH.

Update: I wrote to her asking for another damned extension and telling her about my revised schedule plan. I'm going to work work work tomorrow afternoon and Friday and the weekend and Monday, so that by the time Wednesday rolls around, I can hopefully have solid work done on my doctoral papers and can focus on my field placement. And then somewhere in there I'll fit in my grading for 101.