SACR 2011 - Biljana Sikimić - How to be Roma and speak Romanian in Serbia

The Material Culture (Re)Turn in Anthropology: Promises and Dead-ends

8th conference of the Society for Cultural Anthropology from
Romania,

Bucharest
22-25 September 2011
www.antropo.ro


How to be Roma and speak Romanian in Serbia

Biljana Sikimić
Institute for Balkan Studies, Belgrade

In defining the approach taken by the group of linguists from the SASA Institute for Balkan Studies as anthropological-linguistic, we should at once point out that the preference for field work inevitably emerges from experience gained in classic Slav dialectology and ethno-linguistic geography. Presentation deals with the actual dynamics of learning from various experiences gained in field research in Romanian speaking communities in Serbia. The empirical material for this presentation is the result of extensive field work in Serbia and the neighbouring countries, the Romanian part beginning in 1999. Besides the authors‟ narrowly academic objectives, the research team has made all material publicly available in a digital archive, which at this moment contains close on 400 hours of the Romanian vernaculars spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria. A great deal of material was also recorded in Serbian, due to the fact that all these speakers are at least bilingual, while many are multilingual.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• biljana sikimic
• serbia
• belgrade
• bucharest
• roma people
• culture
• language
• anthropology
• sacr 2011