Wayfinding on Shifting Ground: Turkish Roma(n) Routes to Recognition

Abstract

Over the last 30 years, there has been a rapid mobilization of Romani rights movements that have coalesced into robust international networks of activism and new forms of official recognition. The international movement and its bureaucratic effects have given Turkish Roman an opening to articulate the nature of their disadvantage and their demands. However, even as Roman issues have been incorporated into Turkish debates about tolerance, human rights, and good governance, Turkish Roman work to limit the scope of their claims to the nation and foreground their connections to their neighbors. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Edirne, Türkiye, my dissertation examines the production of widely shared repertoires of disciplinary scrutiny and bureaucratic objectification that problematize Roma(n) in terms of sociality. Linking these widespread discourses to every acts of speaking, I argue that as frameworks for marking and governing difference increasingly focus on culture as the privileged domain of legitimate difference, longstanding concerns about Roman sociality in Turkey produce the characterization of Roman cultural transmission itself as suspect.