Organised by the Institute for Minority Studies, HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, with the support of the Inequalities and Democracy Workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute.

Date: Thursday, 26 June 2025, and Friday, 27 June 2025 (morning only)

Place: CEU Budapest campus 1051 Budapest, Nádor utca 13. room 301 (entry from Nádor 15.)

Conveners: Martin Fotta (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences) and Gergely Pulay, (Institute for Minority Studies, HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences)

Summary: This workshop brings together anthropologists to critically engage with themes raised in the volume Gypsy Economy: Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century (Berghahn, 2016), a decade after its publication. It will provide an opportunity to reflect on how the academic and epistemological niche envisioned in the volume has developed. Key topics include shifts in anthropological practice; precarity and economic strategies; global crises and locally experienced insecurity; and transformations in livelihood practices, moral frameworks, kinship, and informality. It will explore what new directions have emerged since, or remained invisible at the time the book was written, the limitations of ethnographic representation, and how ethnographic engagements with economic practices not solely based on wage labour have evolved over the past decade. By bringing together scholars working on these themes, it aims to serve as a starting point for a more sustained conversation on these issues in the CEE region.

Workshop Programme

DAY 1

10.00-10.15 Opening & Welcome

10.15-12.30 Session 1

1. Cǎtǎlina Tesǎr - Is there such a thing as Gypsy economy? Lessons from an ethnography of South Transylvanian Cortorari Roma

2. Gergely Pulay – Personalized value struggles and the search for the good among men on the margins of Bucharest

3. Martin Olivera – “From two chickens to three sheep”. Growing up and becoming richer in uncertain times. Some ethical and methodological questions based on long-term fieldwork among the Gabori

12.30-14.00 Lunch Break

14.00-16.15 Session 2

1. Marco Solimene - Navigating anti-nomadism: Work (in)formalization, “housing transition” and scrap metal collection in contemporary Rome

2. Daniel Sosna - The Charm of Mixing: Playing with Opacity among Romani Waste Pickers in West Bohemia

3. Judith Durst - The moral economy of debt relations in rural Hungary

16.15-16.30 Break

16.30-17.15 Discussion

17.15-17.30 Break

17.30-20.00 Film screening and QA (with the support of the NRDI research project ‘Moralities of dependent relations in the era of financialization’, FK 143543)

 

The Chalice. Of Sons and Daughters (2022, 84’)

by Dana Bunescu & Cătălina Tesăr

Peli and Nina are a couple from a traditional Roma community in Romania who were married by arrangement and are parents to a little girl. However, local custom posits that a marital union can only endure if the couple conceive a boy who can later inherit the family's badge - the chalice (tahtai).

The screening is followed by a discussion with Cătălina Tesăr

 

DAY 2

9.30-11.00 Session 3

1. Martin Fotta – Householding as a Mode of Integration

2. Jan Grill – 'Fixing up' revisited: Differential mobilities, precarity and new economic strategies among Slovak Romani transnational networks

11.00-11.30 Closing Remarks