The Representation of Roma Otherness: a Reflexion of Constructing a Subject-Matter of Czech Social Sciences

Since the year 1989, we can observe a significant development of the scholarly interest in Romani population in the Czech environment. We believe, however, that the way of constructing the research subject­matter after November 1989 did not bring a corresponding framework for the reduction of social marginalization of the Romani people. In the text, we analyse examples of three different approaches to the study of Romani people whereby we see a paradox in the fact that although these approaches hide behind the emphasis on “the support of understanding”, “the search for problems´ roots”, and “the proposal of solutions”, their way of otherness conceptualization in fact does not offer any alternative to the public discourse within which the Romani people are perceived as being “fundamentally different”. For this reason we suggest to move attention from the discussions searching for an explanation concerning the otherness of Romani people to the research into the logics of its reproduction within the science. In the text, we focus on the reflexion of the most significant expressions of Romani people’s exoticisation and the related limits within the explanation potential for the understanding of social reality. The Romani people´s otherness, in our opinion, is irreplaceable as the theme for ethnographic research, but only providing the reflexivity of epistemological position, the understanding of otherness as (re)produced by social practice, and the thorough involvement of the broader all­society context in the entire analysis.