Paper long abstract:

When researching the universe of experience of Roma with post-socialist changes, I was seeking how their retrospective accounts allowed them to reframe in social terms what they have experienced as a problematic shift in their personal lives. For long time I believed that such a focus was unproductive since all I was coming across was an a-historical mythmaking in which time frames collapsed into an undistinguished continuity. For my paper I propose to revisit the parol acts with the original intention and approach them as “life stories” (F. Ginsburg). The narratively shaped fragments then arise as part of more comprehensive moral legends in which the topoi of “out of time” could be apprehended only in opposition to the dominant conceptions of time that shape the history of post-socialist changes as myths.