CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Lilla Eredics |
|---|---|
| Title | Roma Women's Lived Experiences at Sebesmanko: Struggles for Social Reproduction and Respectability in Wage Work and Everyday Relations |
| Summary | At the center of this thesis are Roma women’s lived experiences in a semi-rural locality: based on ethnographic research and oral histories of Roma women, their mutual struggles for social reproduction and respectability unfold in the domain of labor relations and everyday life worlds. By a multi-scalar historical contextualization of the researched locality shaped by structural transformations from the 1960s, the thesis reveals that both inner and outer narratives have portrayed the respective Roma community as the “striving Roma”. This ethnicized social position implies that the local Roma here aspires for jobs in the world of formal wage work, compared to Roma communities who engage in informal “gypsy activities”. The historical specificity of this social position stems from their traditional profession of blacksmithing and the greater opportunities in the agglomeration economy. By focusing on Roma women's lived experiences, the thesis reveals that the position of the “striving Roma” for them comprises a joint struggle for social reproduction and respectability: the sort of strategies Roma women deploy in the world of wage work and the sort of assets they can or cannot capitalize upon in intimate and kin relations co-constitutively structures their capacity for realizing economic stability and symbolic recognition within the community. In this complex struggle, Roma women have gendered and ethnicized room of maneuver: their strategies for preserving fundamentally low-valued labor positions mainly in cleaning or catering; their relations to their kin, position, and acts in marriage and motherhood are all fundamental aspects of the route Roma women are navigating through for reproduction and respectability. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar; Zentai, Violetta |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/eredics_lilla.pdf |
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