Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023).
We decided to put together Romani Chronicles of COVID-19 during the Great Quarantine of 2020 (Boellstorff, 2020) when, like so many others, we were overwhelmed by the sense of urgency, by the sheer scope and unexpectedness of anti-pandemic measures, and by the concern for the health and lives of the people we knew. As ethnographers, we worked with Romani communities in Brazil and Spain and had written about their deep marginalisation and disenfranchisement by the state in areas such as the economy, housing and education, but not health. In early March 2020 we went online to try to grasp what was happening in the lives of our Romani interlocutors, and we were appalled (but not surprised) by the scapegoating of Romani people throughout Europe; by the early confinements imposed on Romani neighbourhoods well ahead of widespread lockdowns; by the discriminatory treatment of Romani individuals in healthcare; and by the disproportionate impact of pandemic control measures on Romani families already struggling to survive.
During the spring of 2020 we saw how, once again, Romanies weighed less in the balance of institutional decision making, and how their growing impoverishment and indebtedness were either disregarded or else acknowledged as unfortunate but unavoidable side effects of actions designed to ‘protect all’ and ‘save lives.’ Against this context, we thought it urgent to attempt to document how the pandemic and its governance unfolded within Romani families and communities, reshaping and being reshaped by Romani lives. Although neither of us had worked in the field of medical anthropology, we saw in the pandemic the extension and intensification of everyday biopolitical processes with which we were very familiar.
In fact, as Angéla Kóczé, Colin Clark, and Éric Fassin rightly point out, by chronicling the health emergency the book analyses institutional and everyday antigypsyism—the racist treatment of Romanies that, deeply normalized in pre-pandemic times, remained disturbingly commonsensical during the crisis. Éric Fassin is also correct in arguing that the pandemic evidenced the location of antigypsyism at an intersection of race and class logics: the racialisation of Romani people is built on the understanding that they have always belonged to the underclass. This underscores the insidiousness of antigypsyism, positioning the ‘Roma question’ in the post-pandemic world at the crossroads of both neofascism and neoliberalism.
This is an important lesson. While many researchers in Romani studies have written about exclusion, poverty or marginalisation, describing them as outcomes of racism variously understood, they have not sufficiently explored how capitalism inherently produces and relies on racialised inequality, whether in pandemic or non-pandemic times. Only recently have scholars such as Barbora Černušáková, Elana Resnick, and Chelsi West Ohueri begun to explore dimensions of ‘racial capitalism,’ grounding their analyses in in-depth ethnographic engagement with Romani communities (Robinson, 1983). While these themes do appear throughout the volume, different insights might have been gained had we and our contributors centred them more explicitly when describing the pandemic’s biopolitics or necropolitics—a term that Éric Fassin does not find fitting but that many of the volume’s chroniclers do, especially those who were living and writing in Brazil under Bolsonaro.
As editors, and as anthropologists trained to build our analytical concepts on those that matter to our interlocutors, we attempted to follow the lead of our many contributors, a complex task given their diversity of outlook, topic, genre and method. For indeed we hoped that the readers would find in the book, as did Colin Clark, many ‘overarching geographies, themes, and concerns’, indicating the huge diversity of Romani experiences. Colin Clark is less satisfied with our use of the term ‘resilience’ in the book’s title. Although we are aware of the limits of the concept, especially in its neoliberal iterations, the notion of resilience was central to how our contributors experienced, understood and depicted the pandemic. The chroniclers emphasised Romani individual and collective resilience in the face of crises both extraordinary and routinised. And, while both resistance (the concept favoured by Colin Clark) and resilience appropriately focus on agency, resilience does so in a more multifaceted way. While centring people’s experiences and knowledge, it allowed us to keep in sight contradictions, compromises and constraints as well as the contextual and relational nature of agency. Resilience also points to capacities and dynamics that might not be recognisable at a given moment, might never get fully actualised and thus be legible, while allowing us to pay attention to transformations and systemic change over time.
Working during the pandemic—when we could not but acknowledge uncertainty and insecurity—we made provisionality, partiality, positionality and instability central to our collective method and approach. This was further thematised in the companion volume which focuses more directly on ethnographic methods in Romani-related contexts during times of crises (Fotta and Gay y Blasco, 2024). We wanted to grasp and convey what was happening at several levels at the same time—in Romani interactions with state institutions, in individual lives, families, within local communities or transnational networks— and how these different scales and temporalities interacted. Via the intertwining yet diverse voices of the chronicles, we attempted to capture the open-endedness and tentativeness of social arrangements just as people were trying to make sense of and navigate a shifting social, political and economic terrain.
We are glad that Jessica Nunes appreciates our effort to provide a ‘nuanced panorama’ that goes ‘beyond dichotomous conceptions concerning continuity or rupture’. We knew that what we were witnessing was not purely the result of the pandemic moment, that the chroniclers’ experiences and accounts emerged also from earlier interacting processes such as decades of economic austerity leading to growing Romani impoverishment or from histories of spatial segregation. Yet we also knew that the moment would pass and that the dynamics that dramatically and devastatingly changed the lives of many Roma in the spring of 2020, especially in the more marginalised communities, would lose their distinctiveness and settle into what was soon called the ‘new normal’.
This is why we decided to conceive of the volume as chronicles. Jessica Nunes and Daniela Mosaad Pěničková pick up on the chronicle both as a genre and as a method. Jessica Nunes draws on Brazilian writer Davi Arriguci to recognise our desire to keep and record things that might otherwise remain invisible among what eventually remains. There are limits to the chronicles, which by are partial and partisan by definition. Drawing on her own experience, Daniela Mosaad Pěničková points out that the Czech chronicles left out important processes that shaped the situtation in segregated Romani communities at the time. She describes the struggles of Romani health mediators who were tasked with assisting individuals in these communities and with collecting important data. This was a successful but short-lived intervention, and her comment thus foregrounds the drawbacks of project-based approaches that dominate official and NGO approaches.
The global epidemic exacerbated existing social inequalities and sedimented into new social and institutional arrangements. It also reshaped our position as editors and writers, making what we were trying to apprehend at once inescapable, elusive and allusive (Blanchot, 1995). This proved to be a practical as well as methodological struggle. During the editing and re-writing process in 2021 and into 2022, as the pandemic evolved and became normalised and new global events took place, we had to keep reminding ourselves and other chroniclers to keep the focus on the moment of the Great Quarantine of 2020 so as to capture its emergence and spirit. In their re-writes contributors unavoidably produced in-hindsight re-conceptualisations or wrote about later events, such as the second or third lockdowns or vaccination hesitancy. Choosing which tense to use in the Introduction was one of the methodological challenges that emerged as the shifting pandemic shaped and reshaped the volume: Should we use the present tense as many chronicles did even though the Introduction was written later? Should we adopt the present perfect to capture the ongoingness of the global epidemic as we were writing the Introduction predominantly in 2021? Or, aware of how books would age and of the problems with the ethnographic present, should we resort to the past simple?
Our attempts to capture the Great Quarantine via chronicles did not combine well with the temporality of book production so that by the time the manuscript was finished and passed the review, many issues already seemed dated and even surreal. This is why, for instance, the Concluding Reflections, as Colin Clark astutely notices, are summative and ‘rather brief and fleeting, unfortunately’. This reflects not only our exhaustion but also the process itself when we felt like we could not intervene in the chronicles anymore, to overinterpret them and should, rather, leave things open-ended.
Putting together the Romani Chronicles of COVID-19 turned out to be one of the most distinct and challenging writing projects we had ever undertaken. We had to work across several languages (only one contributor had English as their mother tongue) and with texts written in a wide variety of writing styles and by authors from radically different backgrounds. None of it would have been possible without a group of committed section editors who put together drafts of country sections. They defined their sections’ thematic focus and identified and communicated with individual country chroniclers. All prioritised the inclusion of Romani chroniclers whilst attempting to recruit writers from different walks of life, who approached the same events from contrasting stakes and from varied perspectives.
Angéla Kóczé describes the book as an ‘innovative path for collaborative knowledge production’, and we see our book as a contribution to a type of inquiry and theorising that includes Romani voices that do not ordinarily make it into traditional scholarship, extending and modifying Paloma Gay y Blasco and Liria Hernández’s dialogic method (2020). We believe that Angéla Kóczé is correct when she observes that, ‘[p]aradoxically, this public health crisis has brought an epistemological and methodological innovation in Roma-related studies’. Our discussions and workshops with scholars involved in Romani-related research from that period led us to the same conclusions, although we would add that methodological and epistemic shifts have been in the making also thanks to the efforts of people such as Angéla Kóczé herself. We considered it important to describe and make legible some of these research trends, new forms of collaboration and ways of scholarly engagement. Once we finished the Chronicles, we co-edited a companion volume (Fotta & Gay y Blasco, 2024) which reflects on some of these issues and highlights methodological and ethical lessons learned during the pandemic.
For us then, the dialogic character of the Chronicles is reflected not only in its content and style, or the way it was put together but also in how we see it positioned within broader conversations within Romani-related research, within anthropology and beyond. This series is another opportunity continue to such a dialogue and we are grateful to Angéla Kóczé, Colin Clark, Daniela Mosaad Pěničková, Éric Fassin and Jessica Nunes for taking the time to read the Chronicles and for their thoughtful reflections. We are also deeply grateful to Carol Silverman and Jean Segata for curating this forum and to Somatosphere for creating the space where conversations such as this are possible.
Bibliography
Blanchot, M. (1995). The Writing of the Disaster. University of Nebraska Press.
Boellstorff, T. (2020) ‘Notes from the Great Quarantine: Reflections on ethnography after COVID- 19’, in The Future of Anthropological Research: Ethics, Questions, and Methods in the Age of COVID- 19: Part I, Wenner Gren [Blog], 19 June, Available from: https://wennergren.org/forum/the-future-of-anthropological-research-ethics-questions-and-methods-in-the-age-of-covid-19/ [Accessed 27 August 2025].
Fotta, M., & Gay y Blasco, P. (2024). Ethnographic methods in Gypsy, Roma and traveller research: lessons from a time of crisis. Bristol University Press.
Gay y Blasco, P. & Hernández, L. (2020). Writing Friendship: a Reciprocal Ethnography. Palgrave.
Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. Zed Press.
