Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women by Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston (review)

Staging Strife is a rich ethnographic exploration of the successes and failures of a collaborative ethnographic theater project undertaken by a Canadian anthropologist with Polish Roma women. The book deftly analyzes the multiple positionalities of the participants, including the author, the Romani women, and the nonRomani Polish actors. All of these interactions are placed in a broader framework of political and economic crisis in post-socialist Poland and pervasive discrimination against Roma in all areas of life. Reading this book, one can learn a great deal about Polish Roma, about the power and problems of theater as a tool of social change, and about the challenges of collaborative anthropology.

The ethnographic performance takes place in Elbląg, a midsized industrial town in Northern Poland; the town is plagued by unemployment, but poverty disproportionally affects Roma, who are almost all unemployed. The interviews with Roma women about hierarchy and historical stereotyping are particularly revealing of their daily humiliations, family dynamics, educational challenges, and health problems; their meager incomes derive from fortune-telling and occasional market sales. Despite poverty and the structural violence they face, these Roma women are extremely adaptable and resourceful. Although Kazubowski-Houston does not speak the Romany language (the first and daily language of her informants), she did get to know the women very well; her insights into gender relations and family conflicts are particularly valuable. The Romani women provide detailed life histories chronicling non-Romani prejudice plus a pointed self-critique of their own Romani culture, including early marriage, male privilege, and domestic violence. This critique exists side by side with pride in some Romani traditions and rituals such as music, dance, and cleanliness rules.

The Romani women’s evaluation of their own culture as well as their constant exposure to the hostility of non-Roma both played a major role in how they wanted to shape the theater piece at the center of the author’s project. Because of their vulnerabilities, Roma were constantly afraid of negative consequences of the performance, and they never totally trusted the actors. Roma advocated for a realistic staging of a tragic female life history with a melodramatic plot line, similar to a soap opera aesthetic. They insisted on including traditional folklore, as well as dance and ritual. The Polish actors (whom Kazubowski-Houston engaged), on the other hand, looked down on realism and melodramatic conventions, despised the soap opera aesthetic, and advocated for a more abstract avant-garde aesthetic that was foreign to the Romani women. The actors also seemed quite judgmental, viewing the Romani women as passive in the face of their cultural oppression and ignorant of performance theories. Moreover, the actors, who purported to fight against discrimination and embrace a liberation agenda, revealed their implicit racism in both subtle and obvious ways. For example, they talked about Romani culture as “primitive” and “sealed off” (p. 87). Actors were portraying Roma because Roma were afraid of the consequences of appearing onstage. Consequently, Roma remained critical of their portrayal. Instances of these various conflicts are insightfully analyzed in numerous micro-situations in this fine book.

The central theoretical thrust of the book is the analysis of hierarchal power dimensions inherent in collaborative ethnography. The book unabashedly examines the representational battles that arose during rehearsals and in the final performance. An excellent overview chapter on performance ethnography (chapter 1) also includes Kazubowski-Houston’s background and her reflexive positionality. Kazubowski-Houston, who is from Elbląg, is careful to portray her changing role in this project; she honestly describes her own prejudices, inner thoughts, doubts, and insights. She details her interventions to overcome financial and material challenges and to resolve personal conflicts among all participants so as to bring the project to fruition. Her discussion of the morality and ethics of fieldwork is extremely valuable.

The book is structured as Kazubowski-Houston’s chronological journey of the theatre project...