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    STUDIA EUROPAEA - Issue no. 1 / 2011  
         
  Article:   ETHNIC DEFAMING AND THE HISTORICAL RESEARCH. ON THE CASE OF GYPSIES’ DESIGNATION IN TRANSYLVANIAN SAXONS CULTURE OF THE 19TH TO THE 20TH CENTURIES.

Authors:  MARIAN ZĂLOAGĂ.
 
       
         
  Abstract:  

Connecting the social studies with cultural discursive strategies regarding the Self or/and the Other is far from being a real preoccupation among the Transylvanian Romanian or Saxon historiographies. In order to properly read and understand the semantics of discourses and their implication in the representation of Otherness, I think historians have a lot to learn from their colleagues from the field of social sciences. My plead here is that a fertile dialogue between the two fields is out of risk if dealt with reasonably. Moreover, it may be fruitful for better understanding the intimate processes involved in the (re)production of negative representations of the others. I analyze here the manner in which some concepts have been instrumentalized in the field of Gypsy studies, distinguish between the political agenda of the users and the paradigms they had chosen to work within. Professing a socio-cultural approach, I try to offer an alternative by showing a potential way out from an area biased by contested ideological agendas. I do that by borrowing the concept of ethnophaulism from the field of social psychology and use it as theoretical framework. The qualitative insights its use may offer shall be demonstrated through the empirical investigation of the Saxon anthropological, journalistic and fictional narratives from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries.

Key words: history and social psychology, Gypsy studies, Transylvanian Saxons Gypsies, ethnonym, exonym, ethnophaulism.

 
         
     
         
         
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