| Popis: |
This paper places anti-Traveller and anti-Gypsy racism within a wider discourse on progress and development. It suggests that the racial pejorativization of Travellers and Gypsies in Europe was greatly accentuated by the growth of nationalism and emergence of Social Darwinism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This caused Travellers and Gypsies to be treated as social anachronisms in an increasingly sanitized and ‘settled’ society. This paper focuses on the Irish Travellers, or ‘tinkers’, and looks at their changing relationships with national society from the colonial period to the present day. It suggests that the modernization and industrialization of Irish society in recent decades caused Travellers to be placed at the ‘hostile’ end of the tradition-modernity continuum. More recently still, it is argued, new strategies of social closure have emerged which are pushing Travellers to the urban fringes of Irish society. Thus quasi-biological constructs of community as ‘kith and kin’ here are not unlike the ‘blood and soil’ nationalism of mainland Europe, and these are aggravating anti-Traveller racism. This means that communities in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, are increasingly perceived as contested terrains inhabited by ‘insiders’ and defended from ‘outsiders’, including, not least, nomadic ‘outsiders’. This genre of racism not only creates Manichean constructs of landscapes as inhabited by ‘safe insiders’ to be defended from ‘criminal outsiders’. Here, as in Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Romania, it constructs Travellers as the opposite to ‘settled folk’ and insists on a radical policing of the borders between safe ‘insiders’ and troublesome ‘outsiders’. |
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