Sometimes, the most “innocent” images are the most dangerous.

Confirmation of this statement can be found in the children’s stories that have for many years employed characters taken from the world of the gypsies in order to indoctrinate children and teach them obedience. During the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some of the teaching designed to inculcate the values of the official culture and promote family discipline was carried out through stories in which rebellious children—those who dared to disobey their parents and leave their comfortable homes—frequently ended up being stolen by bands of gypsies and vanishing into thin air.

These kidnappers, described as living on the fringes of civilized society, represented all the evils of barbarism—pagan, immoral, uncouth and criminal—in contrast to the alleged virtues of the national culture. Heading the long list of illegal actions attributed to gypsies in these stories, that of child stealing is a hackneyed theme that appears over and over again in European children’s literature.

Taking a critical look at pictures that we assume are self-evident and true is not a challenge that we normally face. Nevertheless, the first step in the process of recognising genuine equality of rights involves finding out how representations of groups of people marked by some form of discrimination were historically produced and then reflecting on how many implicit prejudices are involved in them. Unless an effort is made to eliminate the presuppositions held by the social majority about what these “others” are like, legislation will make no difference. This is of course an uncomfortable task, because it brings us brought face to face with how far we are prepared to go to live in a society that is inclusive and just, and also a complicated one, because the objectives are not always obvious, even in the fight against discrimination. A case in point is the marked hierarchization of victims shown in the history of the way the Allied countries came to terms with the horror of the massive violence perpetrated under Nazism after the Second World War was over. A picture may help us penetrate the cultural underpinnings of our political attitudes. Among the best-known and most often reproduced photographs of Nazi terror is that of a young girl, her head covered with a scarf, looking apprehensively out of the wagon that will carry her off to Auschwitz, just moments before a soldier seals the door. In reality, this is not a still photograph, but a fragment of a short film that Rudolf Breslauer was forced to film; Breslauer was a Jewish prisoner from Westerbork, the transit camp that the train was leaving from.

The first issue of a new review, Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, is now available online. This special issue explores the role of emotions in shaping political, social and cultural traditions/decisions among marginalized communities and, at the same time, looks into how marginalized identities or emotions of marginalized communities are viewed by dominant groups.

Articles: PJHS-_Emotions_and_Marginalised_Comm

• “Ethnographies of trauma and migrant emotions: South Asian visual narratives of war and displacement”, by Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes
• “Tears on silk: Cross-cultural emotional performances among Japanese-born Christians in seventeenth-century Batavia”, by Susan Broomhall
• “Uncivilized emotions: Romantic images and marginalisation of the Gitanos/Spanish gypsies”, by María Sierra
• “The politics of emotions: The Dalit and lower castes in Uttar Pradesh”, by Sujoy Dutta

Los días 6 y 7 del pasado mes de junio se celebró en la Universidad Libre de Bolzano (Italia) el workshop internacional On categories and boundaries: Intersections in the history and ethnography of Europe’s Sinti and Roma (19th- 21st centuries).  Esta reunión científica tenía por objetivo continuar con los trabajos iniciados en encuentros precedentes sobre el tema, como la Conferencia de Oslo de 2016. Desde una perspectiva interdisciplinar y un comprometido enfoque transnacional, el grupo de investigadores que han participado en esta edición se han ocupado tanto de la construcción histórica y etnográfica de la gitanofobia en el plano institucional, con sus diferentes relatos de memoria individual y colectiva, como de la movilidad de este sector de la población. En este sentido, las estrategias coercitivas estatales aplicadas a la restricción de su circulación en Europa permiten reconstruir visibilizando la problemática de este colectivo en la documentación oficial, custodiada en diferentes archivos históricos nacionales.

La escritura es una poderosa arma de combate y de transformación social. No es difícil comprobar que muchas de las culturas y colectivos históricamente oprimidos han acudido a ella como instrumento de réplica, reafirmación y dignificación. En Romani Writing: Literacy, Literature and Identity Politics (2014), Paola Toniato elabora un meticuloso estudio sobre el papel que la escritura y la literatura han tenido en el desarrollo de la cultura romaní europea. Lo hace partiendo de la necesidad de explorar tanto la repercusión de las políticas educativas en el desarrollo de una cultura escrita romaní, como la función política actual de la literatura producida y protagonizada por los propios gitanos.