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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork among Romani groups in Eastern Slovakia and transnational networks in Great Britain, this paper asks how migration reconfigures hierarchies and dependencies crucial both for survival strategies and social reproduction of inequalities among the poor Romani networks.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks what happens when a historically sedimented pattern of (inter)dependencies transform under rapidly changing conditions and effects of transnational migration. Drawing on fieldwork among Romani groups in East Slovakia and transnational networks in Great Britain, this paper examines how migration contributes to transformation of the existing social and racialized hierarchies and asymmetrical inter-dependencies crucial for survival strategies among the poor Romani networks. This historical configuration related to their dependencies on more powerful non-Roma villagers and/or on Romani families with certain degree of upward socio-economic mobilities. In the first case, dependencies related to successful accumulation of ‘gadjikano’ capital (connected to more powerful non-Roma actors and institutions). The second type of dependencies related to family and social ties among Romani networks. Since the 1990s in the rural areas of CEE, many economic strategies among the poor Roma became more precarious, insecure and over-reliant on these networks that facilitated types of labour, exploitation and predatory indebtness. These relationships were also embedded within and shaped by wider moralizing and racializing discourses of ‘welfare dependence’. The expansion of transnational migration to Great Britain (since early 2000s) generated new flows of people, goods and capitals and reconfigured these pre-existing interdependencies. The paper examines what some migrants described as ‘tied has turned’ and analyse how the returning migrants and transnational networks reconfigured some of these dependencies but also deepened social differentiations in their struggles to re-cast certain relationships from those previously seen as being ones of dependence to ones of non‐dependence, refusal or reversal.