Gypsy-Travellers: stigmatisation and social integration

1
Gypsy-Travellers stigmatisation and social
integration

• Ryan Powell
• Conflict in space and place - accommodation and
  planning issues for Gypsies and Travellers, De
  Montfort University, Leicester, November 29th,
  2012.

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Contested Gypsy-Traveller community

• shared aspects of culture
• shared space of the site
• common response from government and authorities
• BUT...heterogeneity and disidentification among
  different groups

3
Social integration?

• Not straightforward binaries can be unhelpful
• inclusion/ exclusion
• social care/ social control
• integration/ assimilation
• What's the problem with segregation? What's to
  be achieved by reducing it? (Flint, 2009)
• positive and enabling factors of segregation
• strengths and weaknesses of spatial concentration
  (Marcuse, 1997 Wacquant, 2004, 2008)
• integration on whose terms?
• importance of a long-term, historical perspective
  i.e. persistent persecution and stigma
• 'mixing without integration' (Sibley, 1998)
• functional interdependence unequal power
  relations mutual avoidance

4
Gypsy-Travellers perceived to be at odds with
dominant norms

• social integration individualization and
  self-betterment
• group orientation of Gypsy-Travellers
• extended family and socialisation
• inter-generational mixing
• educational differences
• remarkable resistance and cultural continuity in
  the face of pressures to conform
• resistance and maintenance of culture and
  nomadism deemed "less civilised"
• Gypsy-Travellers treated as inferior of lesser
  human worth - key question is why and how is this
  so persistent?

5
Learning from the "ghetto"?

• 2 key and related questions
• why does the stigmatisation of Gypsy-Travellers
  run so deep and persistent over the last 500
  years?
• how have Gypsy-Travellers maintained their own
  identity and culture?
• Loïc Wacquant's concept of the "ghetto" as a tool
  of comparison (Powell, 2013)
• Gypsy-Traveller sites are NOT ghettos
• BUT...commonalities....a weapon of 'confinement
  and control' for the dominant and an 'integrative
  and protective device' for the stigmatized

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Commonalities with Wacquant's ghetto

• spatial confinement and control
• ethnic homogeneity
• retreat into the sphere of the family
• mutual distancing
• shared cultural identity reinforced through
  confinement

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Divergence from Wacquant's ghetto?

• changing economic function?
• parallel institutionalism?
• relationship with the state?
• the above represent areas for further research
  that could enhance understanding through
  comparative analyses with Wacquant's theoretical
  concept of the "ghetto"

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References

• Flint, J. (2009) 'Cultures, ghettos and camps
  sites of exception and antagonism in the city',
  Housing Studies, 24(4), pp.417-431.
• Marcuse, P. (1997) 'The enclave, the citadel, and
  the ghetto what has changed in the post-Fordist
  US city', Urban Affairs Review, 33(2),
  pp.228-264.
• Powell, R. (2013, forthcoming) 'Loïc Wacquant's
  "ghetto" and ethnic minority segregation in the
  UK the neglected case of Gypsy-Travellers',
  IJURR.
• Sibley, D. (1998) 'Problematizing exclusion
  reflections on space, difference and knowledge',
  International planning studies, 3, pp. 93-100.
• Wacquant, L. (2004) Ghetto, International
  Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural
  Sciences.
•  
• Wacquant, L. (2008) Ghettos and anti-ghettos An
  anatomy of the new urban poverty, Thesis Eleven,
  94, pp.113-118.
• Wacquant, L. (2012) 'A janus-faced institution of
  ethnoracial closure a sociological specification
  of the ghetto', in Hutchison, R. and Haynes, B.
  D. (eds) The Ghetto Contemporary Global Issues
  and Controversies (pp.1-32). Boulder Westview.