Paper short abstract

At the applied end of my medical anthropological research, I keep receiving the following: When confronted with ethnographically grounded Roma identity politics, imagination of those non-Roma who qualify as Gadje becomes forced outside its Enlightenment box due to anarchist features of Roma cosmology.

Paper long abstract

As eloquently explained by David Graeber in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, adopting identity politics usually prevents authentic emancipation of those suppressed, assisting instead dominant nation-statist political paradigms. According to my personal experience however, Roma identity politics drawn from ethnographic accounts of segregated Roma communities might offer a promising exception to this rule in both respects. Since 2004, the leading applied question of my fieldwork has been: how and why might who be contributing to the relatively miserable health-status of segregated Roma in Slovakia? After spending initial years among segregated Roma themselves, lately I have moved on to join the country's health-system professionals who happen to work mostly on behalf of this Roma subgroup. Along this trajectory, I am naturally being pulled into discussions about 'realistic' options for improving Roma health-status - by physicians, media, politicians, etc. For lack of better discourses at such fora, when attempting to stress both practical and moral significances of the hardly known specific reasoning and preferences of majority of segregated Roma, I often find myself negotiating something as a specific identity. Nevertheless, the very content of my 'Roma identity with respect to biomedicine' appears compatible with other ethnography on segregated Roma from across Europe - especially in terms of exhibiting a strong anti-Gadje logic. Thanks to such oppositional aspects, rather than conforming itself to usual expectations of the non-Romany discussants the thus grounded Roma identity stance instead seems automatically to open as legitimate questions of reasonability of respective Gadje ways initially considered self-evident.