Gellner Seminar with Arpan Roy on Thursday, 6 February 2025.

The Department of Mobility and Migration and the Czech Association for Social Anthropology are pleased to invite you to the 215th Gellner Seminar Series Lecture. The lecture titled ‘Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference’ will be given by Arpan Roy, PhD.

 

Date: 6 February 2025

 

Time: 14.00 – 16.00

 

Synopsis: This talk will be a presentation of the recently published book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference (University of Toronto Press, 2024). Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of perpetual war and instability. The book focuses on how Doms are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship, even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized - a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference nor detected by the antennas of the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman, Roy makes a case for such alterity for Romani people and other groups in the region. Analysing intimate ethnographic scenes through anthropological theories of kinship, psychoanalysis, social theory from the Global South, and more, the book reveals how alterity in the Middle East does not adhere to rigid identitarian categories. Ultimately, Relative Strangers demonstrates the inadequacy of transposing models of pluralism centred on European and American experiences of minoritization onto other contexts . 

 

Biographical Sketch of Arpan Roy: is a Marie Skfodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is the co-editor of Naseej: Live-Weavings of Palestine (Pluto Press, 2025). He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. His current research is on Christian missionary work in the Arab world. 

For online attendance join here.

 

For more information on the Gellner Seminar Series: http://www.casaonline.cz/?tag=gellnerovsky-seminar

This lecture is organized as part of the project "Unequal Citizenship and the Transnational Mobilization of Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian Roma in Response to the War in Ukraine," with the support of the Czech Science Foundation (GA 24-14388L).

 

Pdf version here.