Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights

5. Balkan Romani Culture, Human Rights, and the State: Whose Heritage?

C h a p t e r 5 Balkan Romani Culture, Humans Rights, and the State: Whose Heritage? Carol Silverman Roma, Europe’s largest minority, provide an illuminating viewpoint from which to probe problematic issues of the definition, ownership, and control of heritage in a historic framework of discrimination. The human rights of Roma are routinely violated, the very existence of their own culture is often denied, and they usually are excluded from the category “nation.” At the same time, their music enjoys worldwide fame in forms appropriated by nonRomani commercial forces. Via four case studies of Balkan Romani music, this chapter analyzes how states, global markets, human rights activists, and international institutions like UNESCO ignore, erase, or reframe Romani culture. Examining the construction of forms of intangible heritage for nationalist projects, I show how Balkan states as well as ethnic identity movements deploy symbols for strategic aims. My focus on Roma highlights the tension between inclusion and exclusion: heritage, as configured to represent national folk culture, excludes Roma as well as other minorities in part because of its reliance on bounded notions of one national organic folk community (Noyes 2006). On the other hand, although Roma object to exclusionary state practices , they rely on similar essentialist assumptions in their own mobilization toward a Pan-European human rights movement. Activists, then, attempt to construct nationalist symbols of Romani culture that can unify disparate groups. Roma pose the question of belonging; they interrogate the 126 Carol Silverman framework of “nation” while employing it for strategic reasons. Inspired by Michael Herzfeld’s concept of cultural intimacy (1997), I investigate the complex performative relationship between Roma, the state, and the market. My performance approach embraces identity issues through the senses and the imagination. Roma play an especially relevant role because in the European imagination, they are known as iconic consummate performers; through the senses, especially music and dance, they are said draw out their patrons. Often they are credited with eliciting in their patrons “the soul of the nation” through music. Although they may “embody” the nation through music, they have a problematic relationship with states in terms of rights, recognition, and resources. Furthermore, their music is often appropriated via transnational markets where non-Roma usually benefit. Despite being associated with music, Roma have been plagued with the popular and scholarly notion that they have no folklore or heritage of their own, especially in the realm of music. They are known as inveterate borrowers , appropriators, and “cultural sponges” who take the “hosts’ music” and sell it back with “Gypsy style.” While it is accurate to highlight the historic service relationship between non-Romani patrons and Romani professional musicians , we should remember that non-Roma have also appropriated music from Roma. Hungary, Spain, and the Balkans provide historic examples of this two-way street. The recent global craze for Gypsy music is a further illustration of non-Roma appropriating from Roma. The older typical Balkan scholarly attitude toward Romani music was one of contempt. For example, as early as 1910, Serbian music scholar Tihomir Djordjević disparaged Gypsies because, when adopting Serbian music, they “gypsified” it (1984 [1910]: 38); in 1977 Serbian scholar Adrijana Gojković wrote that Gypsies “corrupt not only national music of various countries but also new music, for instance, jazz” (1977: 48; my translation); and, as I discuss below, in the 1980s Bulgarian ethnomusicologists demonized Romani wedding music style as kitsch and foreign. In these accounts, “Gypsy style” usually meant improvisation and innovation, criticized because it was in opposition to preserving “authentic national folk music.” Despite scholarly condemnation, Romani musicians have always been respected and hired by patrons. I place these cultural negotiations into the wider current societal framework where Roma are reviled as criminals/vagrants but revered as musicians (Silverman 2012). The current craze for Balkan Gypsy music in festivals and clubs illustrates how globalization may reinforce hierarchies. Ironically, while Balkan Romani Culture, Humans Rights, and the State 127 many non-Romani musicians, DJs, and producers are now profiting from Romani music, Roma suffer gross human rights abuses and musicians are out of work. Furthermore, while Romani music proliferates on the Internet, Roma still have difficulty securing employment in the global Gypsy music market. Asking the thorny question “Who owns culture?” (Brown 2004b), I explore how Roma pose a challenge to heritage studies because of their historical role as appropriators, their exclusion from “the nation,” and the global trafficking...