engleski

‘ You Want to Push us Back into Mud’ : Negotiating the Musical Tradition of Roma in Croatia

The title is a quote from a meeting of the committee for the evaluation of applications aimed at safeguarding traditional culture of Roma. The purpose of the program and accompanying fund, which has been established by the Office for National Minorities of the Croatian Government, is to provide Roma performing groups with musical instruments and costumes, as well as instructors and leaders. Members of the committee are Roma activists, public sector workers, and scholars. Quite expectedly, the issue of traditionality appears as the main contestable point in their work. As a rule, public sector workers and scholars favor the concept of tradition that in one or another way connects the present with the past, while Roma activists position it entirely in the present. Actually, activists’ main concern is not how to define a tradition but rather how to negotiate between different Roma communities, organizations and leaders. A kind of compromise is that the former let the present identifications of communities govern the idea of tradition, while the latter redirect their attention from negotiating Roma power relations towards focusing on the concept of tradition. When dropped to the level of concrete decision-making regarding musical instruments, the result is that any instrument is considered traditional except synthesizers and sound systems. These constitute an ongoing dispute, and the above quotation comes from such a situation – it was a Roma activist’ s reply to a folklorist’ s argument against supporting the acquisition of synthesizers within a program intended to safeguard Romani traditional culture. This example is a complex narrative that grips into all three themes of the meeting: Roma music and dance, representation of minority musics and dance in the mass media and the marketplace, and cultural policy and safeguarding minority musics and dance. Starting from its ethnography, I focus on tensions and issues glued with today’ s glocalizing politics of empowering via safeguarding.

Roma; music; tradition; Croatia; safeguarding; funding; government; NGO

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