Advocacy Trumps Accuracy?: Stereotypes of East European Roma and Ethnography

Collaborative Anthropologies welcomes response to and critical commentary on previously published essays, provided that the article adheres to the journal's guidelines and is in keeping with civil discourse. The publication of such articles is not guaranteed, but should they be published, author(s) of the original articles in question are given the opportunity to respond. In this instance, Tidrick did not offer a response.

This short essay is an unsolicited reaction to Heather Tidrick's contribution to the "Ethnography-as-Activism: Student Experiments, Dilemmas from the Field" section in the 2010 issue of this journal (Tidrick 2010). Precisely because the articles were all written by graduate students and future practitioners advocating a closer relationship between anthropology and advocacy in the name of social justice (Kirsch 2010), I think it important to point out how the search for a cause worthy of advocacy may lead to a lack of responsibility with regard to essential scholarly conventions. I single out Tidrick's contribution for the sole reason that she writes about a situation I know fairly well—the attribution of negative stereotypes to East European Roma—and that she implicates me in this through distortions of my published work.

Tidrick takes issue with "dominant, extremely destructive narratives" encapsulated in negative stereotypes that imprison East European Roma in popular notions of deviance and criminality (Tidrick 2010: 121). She charges that "[many] writers too easily traffic" in these stereotypes "without the evidence to support their claims," and she mentions a handful of names, including mine (2010: 122). Apparently I employ deviance in my book on a divided community in Slovakia (Scheffel 2005) "as a key factor in the segregation of Roma from Slovak community life in Svinia (and, implicitly, elsewhere in Eastern Europe)" (Tidrick 2010: 122).

Tidrick's allegation of my "implicit" generalizing from a specific setting in Slovakia to all of "Eastern Europe" constitutes a willful disregard for my explicit pleading to the contrary. As I make abundantly clear in the introduction to the book, I took the unusual step of using the real name of "my community" in order to warn against the act Tidrick accuses me of:

Because even the little material at our disposal shows remarkable differences between individual settlements, [and, therefore] it is important not to pretend that the community described here is a typical settlement that could be encountered anywhere else. Svinia has its own configuration of socio-economic traits, and in the absence of comparative material it is crucial not to jump to unwarranted generalizations.

(Scheffel 2005: 15-16)

I issued this warning in the awareness of all kinds of distortions to which my ethnography could be exposed from people looking for "scientific" evidence to prop up various stereotypes attached to the Roma. Tidrick's misuse of my work shows that this tendency is not confined to bigots and racists.

Tidrick is right that deviance and criminality—without quotation marks—are mentioned in my book as a very significant factor in shaping the coexistence of ethnic Roma and ethnic Slovaks in the described community. When it comes to the empirical evidence provided for this claim, Tidrick lumps me together with other disseminators of false stereotypes and opines that "[one] only has to scratch the surface of these destructive claims to recognize the thin epistemological footing on which many of the authors . . . stand" (2010: 122). Specifically, she claims that

[examples] illustrating Romani "deviance" in Scheffel's account include such atrocities as a child throwing a pencil across the room in frustration—suggesting deep flaws in his interpretive frame as well as . . . limitations in his ethnographic data collection.

( Tidrick 2010: 122).

Having collected and presented an extensive ethnographic sample of murder, rape, incest, assaults, drug use, theft, usury, and many other forms of deviance and criminality recognized as such by the Roma themselves, I find Tidrick's belittling of an extremely serious condition that hangs like a dark cloud over the entire community troubling and irresponsible. Of course, we all know the dangers of revealing disagreeable attributes of the people we work with, and there are some famous...