Review article Staging strife: Lessons from performing ethnography with Polish Roma women. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-7735-3749 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7735-4556-4 (paper). x + 264 pp. Reviewed by Martin Fotta When a few years ago one of my PhD supervisors lent me a copy of a then newly published book that promised to describe the dynamics of theatre production that involved Roma women in Poland, I licked through it, skimmed the index and then stuck it on a shelf. here was so much more to read for my PhD, and the book’s main themes – collaborative research and theatre production – did not seem directly relevant. Besides, the book’s approach sounded like a sort of post-1990s anthropological navel-gazing. hus, ater two weeks had passed, I returned it to my supervisor and thought little more of it. When I inally read Kazubowski-Houston’s Staging strife, however, I was pleasantly surprised how refreshing the book was in the context of the anthropology of Roma/Gypsies and how in the process of reading it my mind constantly returned to my own ieldwork and to my position as a scholar more generally. Like most ethnographies, monographs of Romanies usually rely on a specific authorial legitimacy: an ethnographer arrives in the ield dependent, peripheral, but open to learn, and through a trajectory that involves a combination of efort and events that, in hindsight, are seen as having redeined one’s relations with informants, she not only becomes accepted, but emerges endowed with a knowledge of the community’s culture that is in some ways even superior to that of the people themselves (Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2007: 144–50). Introductions to most ethnographies start with narratives of such transformations of child-like creatures into authorities on ‘their’ communities and in this way legitimise scholarship that follow. Staging strife is not like this: its claims to authority are at best ambivalent and, in the rare instances when KazubowskiHouston tries to explain why the Roma she met acted the way they did, it ofers several plausible explanations without settling for the one that would be the most coherent for whatever reason. In part, this is because the book focuses on the process of doing ethnographic research while the project she had set out to do failed in many ways. And here lies one of the book’s key lessons, one that speaks to some current debates in anthropology: any analysis should treat Martin Fotta is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz ,  Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Email: Fotta@em.uni-frankfurt.de Romani Studies , Vol. , No.  (), –  – (print) – (online) doi: https://doi.org/10.3828/rs.2017.5 96 review article both successes and failures symmetrically, and, moreover, failure should be viewed not as a limitation but rather as an invitation to rethink our concepts, especially if that ‘failure’ is due to informants’ obstinacy to, or reshaping of, our original research interests. While collaboration between anthropologists and informants has a long history, it is only in the past two decades or so that collaborative or participatory research has become more explicit and deliberate. It aims at decentring the power relationship between ethnographer and informant, with the latter no longer the object of study, but instead a research participant. Such collaboration can occur at any, ideally every, stage of the research process: conceptualization, ieldwork and data production, analysis and interpretation, or presentation and dissemination of results. In the wake of the post-colonial critique and the crisis of representation in anthropology, collaborative approaches promise to produce research that is more politically and ethically sound and that, moreover, generates diferent results than those produced by more ‘standard’ approaches. Speaking from within the anthropology of Roma, Heather Tidrick (2010: 128–9), while encouraging researchers to conduct ‘gadžology’, that is, to explore how institutions marginalize Roma, suggests that collaboration could lead to new theorizations and unsettle the ways in which academics-asinstitutions help replicate existing power imbalances through their knowledge production (see also Tremlett 2013). Collaboration therefore oten (but not always) merges ethnography with advocacy, resulting in an activist research produced within the community that can be used by the people themselves.1 For instance, participatory visual research by environmental anthropologist Krista Harper and the Sajó River Association for Environment and Community Development, a local Hungarian Roma organization concerned with environmental justice, has documented ecological problems faced by their community and presented it to a national and international audience (Harper and he Sajo River Association for Environment and Community Development 2009). Besides creating a space for the Roma to represent themselves, this research challenged the dominant framing of environmental issues in Hungary as separated from social issues, while the research dissemination also facilitated new alliances between the association and environmentalists working at the national level (Harper 2012). he process of collaboration, as Adriana Helbig (2007) shows, is not 1. Of course, many ethnographers working with the Roma/Gypsies get involved in advocacy and activist work, either as academics or as engaged citizens, in ways that do not result in written texts, or else they produce newspaper articles and political documents that would not be easily characterized as ‘scholarly’. Here, however, I am interested in research that is also productive for ethnographers as professional academics and that results in work valued by the scholarly community, such as academic journal articles and monographs. review article 97 always straightforward, and oten requires negotiating complex power relations and interests. Such tensions, which arise in a space delimited by the reality of power and the egalitarian ideal of collaboration, are also tackled in Staging strife. It is also unsurprising that, like Kazubowki-Houston, all of the other anthropologists I mentioned in this review are women who draw inspiration from feminism; ater all, before the so-called crisis of representation in anthropology of the mid-1980s, feminists who were also anthropologists had already questioned relations of power within the research context as well as any automatic right to represent the Other. Some anthropologists working with the Roma have focused not only on the production of academic knowledge by Roma outside academia, but also on the collaborative production of academic texts themselves. Carol Silverman (2012), for instance, asked her Romani collaborators (mostly activists and artists) to comment on portions of her book and, through providing their interpretations of her interpretations, aimed at acknowledging multiple views. Paloma Gay y Blasco and her long-term Gitano informant, Liria de la Cruz Hernández, are attempting to go even further and are writing a book together. his collaboration is unique because it takes reciprocity (and hence authorial equality) and polyvocality (in this case bivocality) as far as they can go. heir irst copublication – an article entitled ‘Friendship, Anthropology’ (Gay y Blasco and De La Cruz Hernández 2012: 1–14) – discerns clearly between their voices and focuses on analysing socio-cultural worlds of both authors. While it remains to be seen to what extent this collaboration can escape asymmetries, it is worth keeping in mind that the project is unusual, since even in most deliberate collaborations the aim is to produce knowledge only about one side – for instance, about the Roma/Gypsies. In addition, their article recognizes that ultimately it is what one could call ‘the anthropology machine’ that holds this project together: disciplinary interests bring anthropologists to their ‘ields’ (a term that becomes strikingly inadequate); ethnographic method deines the roles, at least initially; and, ultimately, it is oten the concerns about the discipline that result in calls for more participatory arrangements. And here for me lies one of the biggest insights that Staging strife ofers: anthropological projects require intensive emotional and relational work to hold the venture together, while academic interests (even when deined as a ‘better’ or ‘diferent’ kind of knowledge produced in collaboration, itself deemed ethically and politically more progressive) and scholarly conventions always constitute one reason for why tensions and power struggle arise. hese banal facts become much more visible within collaborative projects when ethnographers are concerned about the nature of inequality, but when, nevertheless, they still hope to produce an outcome in a genre that is recognizable to the academic community, be it an ethnography or, in Kazubowski-Houston’s case, ethnographic theatre. 98 review article Staging strife: Lessons from performing ethnography with Polish Roma women is essentially an auto-ethnography. As Kazubowski-Houston puts it, it is ‘an account of my ethnographic journey and my encounters with power along the way’ (p. 17). As a PhD student at an anthropology department in Canada who had also studied and practised theatre, she came to her native Poland in order to create and stage an original piece of theatre with Roma women. In the process she hoped to learn about their lives while also empowering them to express their strife publicly. he irst two chapters of the book shed light on her motivations and research plans, but also on her fears and prejudices. Inluenced by Gramsci’s and Foucault’s analyses of power, by a Polish tradition of avant-garde theatre and by participatory research methodologies, her project aimed at producing a collaborative ethnographic theatre performance with the Roma that would be based on their experiences. She believed that theatre, with its combination of physical and narrative aspects, would enable her to explore forms of knowledge that are otherwise diicult to capture – in the present case, about the experiences of violence that shape Roma women’s lives. In addition, visual metaphors on which theatre performance is premised, would allow her to inluence audiences and hence to efect change. Ater her initial failure to undertake a project with a small community of Romanian Roma who had agreed to collaborate during her pilot research but had since been deported, she decided to work in Elbląg, her native town. his choice shaped the project in several ways. Kazubowski-Houston and her husband were employed by and received some initial support from the city’s cultural centre. hey were also able to stay in her mother’s one-bedroom apartment, which saved them money but also created extra emotional and practical pressures (for instance, she describes how in the evenings she wrote up her ield notes in the bathroom in order not to wake up her son!). When Kazubowski-Houston started her project in July 2002, Elbląg was economically deprived, with unemployment standing at 32 per cent. he Roma community was small, impoverished and highly distrustful. Unsurprisingly, these structural characteristics inluenced people’s responses to her plans. Although over time the Roma women became used to Kazubowski-Houston spending her days with them by the tramline where they were telling fortunes as well as to her visiting their homes, they refused to participate in the ethnographic theatre project. Besides informal conversations she recorded women’s life histories and, as the third chapter argues, in this way learnt about the kinds of violence that characterize the lives of these Roma. Although she was unsure whether she would be able to conduct her PhD project in the way she had imagined, the insights that she gained and the rapport that she established became key for what followed. Finally, ater six months some women asked her whether she was still interested in doing a theatre project with them. Five review article 99 women participated, but on their own terms: they agreed to co-write and codirect the play, but, afraid of racist responses from non-Gypsies as well as the opinions of other Roma, they would not act. Kazubowski-Houston therefore hired young non-Roma Polish actors with whom she had worked before to perform the play. he chapters that form the core of the book (three, four, and ive) describe the process of putting together the theatre performance. he account of the process, and in particular the author’s relections on the conlicts of interests and power struggles that unfolded, is truly fascinating. he project started with pre-rehearsal sessions, during which the author, the Roma women and the actors developed the script based on stories that the women told them. Interestingly, Kazubowski-Houston observes that unlike the informal conversations and life histories, which centred on the women’s personal problems and theirs hopes for a better future, the women’s narratives during these sessions highlighted their coping strategies (p. 77). hrough their narratives, the women tried to convey to the actors that they were strong and resourceful. hese pre-rehearsal sessions, from which male actors were excluded at the Roma women’s request, were followed by meetings in which the two groups had an opportunity to separately touch base with Kazubowski-Houston and relect on the project. However, while during the pre-rehearsal sessions the participants were generally polite to each other, during the separate meetings they invariably complained about one another and tried to win KazubowskiHouston over to their side. he description of subtle changes that developed is particularly revealing of the ways roles of participants oten shited, responding to group’s power dynamics and people’s mutual (dis)trust. It also prompts one to relect on the process of othering within the project, as exempliied by the way Roma women’s punctuality was constructed by both the actors and author alike as a priori strange or special. In the pre-rehearsal and rehearsal sessions the greatest source of conlict was over diferent understandings of theatre and representation. he Roma women preferred a representational style based on realism and verisimilitude and saw in theatre mainly an opportunity to represent their ‘culture’. hey also wanted the play’s narrative to adhere to a type of aesthetics characterized by melodrama and spoken word. he actors, and to a certain extent the author, were horriied. his was not only a collision between ‘low art’ and ‘high art’, which relected the divergent aspirations and class position of the actors and the women, but was also symptomatic of making assumptions about what is emancipatory or politically progressive. Kazubowski-Houston feared that the women’s desire to focus on dancing and to centre the narrative on a traditional Roma wedding ceremony would represent Roma culture as timeless and reinforce conservative and oppressive politics. Ultimately, Kazubowski-Houston’s discussion 100 review article raises a question about collaboration itself: when ethnographers feel that what their collaborators desire is harmful, should they try to protect them from their own ideas (p. 138)? And, more narrowly, should anthropologists or activists aim at changing people’s views on art and its politics? Over time the author’s attempts at neutrality became more and more fraught, and even counter-productive. Ultimately, power struggles within this ‘constructed community’ gave way to anxiety over the play’s fate, and the book neatly captures how Kazubowski-Houston tried to keep the project together and how she was tempted to give up. During the rehearsals, for instance, when the Roma women were excessively critical of certain actors for failing to suficiently embody the Roma way of doing things, the actors responded by sarcastically exaggerating their gestures. It is unsurprising, then, that when the play was inally performed in public, nobody mourned the project being over. Overall, the book is well written and enjoyable to read. My main problem with it is its rather schematic presentation of the life of the Roma women (and the non-Roma actors), who do not come across as fully rounded individuals deined by their relationships with others. Kazubowski-Houston gives several reasons why women joined the project, some given by the women themselves, other deduced by her. She also notes diferent sources of tension and hierarchies between the Roma women and how they played out throughout the project. And yet the book does not tell us how the process of theatre-making was seen by the community and how it was incorporated into people’s everyday lives. Instead, the book focuses on the author and on her ‘encounter’ (quite literally) with these Roma women in the context of the project. I also ind Kazubowski-Houston’s conceptualisation of violence and power rather undertheorized, which misses an opportunity to explore how, for instance, racism, domestic violence and mental health problems – structural and symbolic violence – relate to and reinforce one another. Despite these drawbacks, the book should in my eyes become a required reading for all NGO activists, artists and ethnographers who plan to work with Roma/Gypsies. I am certain that if this were a ‘normal’ project it would be deemed a success: the Roma women co-wrote and co-directed the play, the theatre was almost full, the response was generally positive and the participants smiled at each other while drinking champagne ater the performance; a inal report can be written up and photographic evidence provided. Luckily for us, this was a collaborative research project by an anthropologist who cared deeply about power, inequality and how these become manifested. KazubowskiHouston is ambivalent about outcomes of the project, and the book is an extended relection on the potential of performance ethnography and the nature of collaboration – particularly the power relations within collaborative review article 101 projects and the pitfalls of collaboration. It turns out, for instance, that the audience ignored the anti-racist and political message of the play. Rather, they focused on the actors’ performances and saw the play as representing Romani culture. Formal discussions with the audience, which Kazubowski-Houston had originally planned, might have facilitated the process of relection and politicization, but these had to be dropped as the Roma women were against them. Kazubowski-Houston also feels that she imposed her own aesthetics and understanding of politics while ignoring the women’s desire to celebrate their culture, that she ‘denied [them] their right to speak for themselves’ and revealed herself to be ‘a western bourgeois liberal’ (p. 139). Staging strife is a welcome meditation on how practical considerations, mutual distrust, personal interests and expectations participants hold about non-participants’ reactions, are all factors that shape collaborative projects. his speciic ethnographic theatre performance turned out to be a compromise between avant-garde theatre and soap opera, but ultimately, it seems to me, such compromise – and thus a certain sense of incompleteness or imperfection – must be inherent to any collaboration. Postscript When Kazubowski-Houston returned to Elbląg in 2011 there were only six elderly Roma women living in the town – all the other Roma, including their families, had emigrated (Kazubowski-Houston 2012). hese six women, some of whom participated in her irst project, wanted to work on another theatre piece again. In the process that ensued, under the guise of iction, through nonpublic non-collective dramatic storytelling, they related their stories, expressed their conlicting feelings about their relatives and engaged the ethnographer as a co-performer. So maybe the original play was not a failure ater all. References Gay y Blasco, Paloma and De La Cruz Hernández, Liria. 2012. Friendship, anthropology. Anthropology and Humanism 37(1): 1–14. ——and Wardle, Huon. 2007. How to read ethnography. London & New York: Routledge. Harper, Krista. 2012. 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Tidrick, Heather. 2010. ‘Gadžology’ as activism: What I would have ethnography do for East-European Roma. Collaborative Anthropologies 3(1): 121–31. Tremlett, Annabel. 2013. ‘Here are the Gypsies’: he importance of self-representations and how to question prominent images of Gypsy minorities. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(11): 1706–1725.