The Untold Story. An Oral History of the Roma People in Romania
Recently, minorities became a fashionable research subject, but Roma people in Romania do not have, in spite of some notable exceptions, their own history. One explanation for their absence from history is that their oral tradition has not generated written evidences, the documents related to Roma’s past, available in archives, being about them and never by them. The purpose of the project is to recover and (re)construct their histories by collecting, preserving and interpreting oral testimonies of the Roma, providing a voice for the silent ones. To manage the complexity of such issues, our Romanian-Icelandic team will undertake an interdisciplinary approach that combines oral history research with anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and media studies. The project will attempt to answer questions about the nature of their cultural heritage and explore ways in which the (in)tangible cultural heritage, respectively traditions (e.g. music) can become tools for empowering Roma communities.