**4. Pernio (frostbite or chilblains)**

Pernio (frostbite or chilblains) is a vascular disease affecting small vessels of the peripheral skin. Persistent low temperature (cooling) or freezing of the skin causes pernio. Persistent hypoxia of the tissue eventually results in necrosis and ulceration. In a chronic stage, scleroderma-like change may follow.  The epidermis may reveal spongiosis, basal vacuolation, and

#### **Figure 2.**

*Wet gangrene (gross appearance of two cases and H&E). Infected deep irregular ulcers are formed in the back of the foot (left) and the base of the second toe after autoamputation (right). Histologically, Gram-positive cocci in the necrotic upper dermis are observed in the debridement specimen (the courtesy of Dr. Yasuhito Kaneko at Department of Dermatology, Shimada Municipal Hospital, Shimada, Japan).*

keratinocyte necrosis [12–14]. Representative features are displayed in **Figure 3**. These histopathologic pictures are seen in other vascular disorders, provoking a chronic irritative process of the skin.


3.5.2. QTLs for Sympodial Node Height Bearing First Effective Boll Set (SNH)

One QTL, *qSNH1*, influencing Last Effective Boll Set with a LOD score of 3.42 was detected in the F2 population and it was located on chromosome 6. Putative QTL in this region accounted for 17% of phenotypic variance. So, this QTL explained 17% of the total phenotypic variance (Table 6 and Figure 4).


**Meet the editor**

Krzysztof Biernat, Ph.D. (Mech.Eng.), is a professor of the Automotive Industry Institute (PIMOT), acting as the head of Bioeconomy Department and coordinator of the Polish Technology Platform for Biofuels, a member of the Coordinating Committee of Polish Technology Platform for Bioeconomy.. He is also the Deputy Director of Institute of Ecology and Bioethics at the State University

Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, Warsaw. He is also a member in the American Council on Renewable Energy and Panel Experts of the International Renewable Energy Agency. He specializes in chemical thermodynamics of environmental processes as well as obtaining technologies, quality evaluation and use of exploitative liquids, including biofuels, and biorefinery systems. He is author of above 200 publications in the area of properties and exploitative conditionings of fuels, biofuels and other liquids, as well as environmental protection. He is a member of many national and foreign scientific societies, including the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.


*Article* **Numerical Evaluation of the Hygrothermal Performance of a Capillary Active Internal Wall Insulation System under Different Internal Conditions**

**Dobrosława Kaczorek**

Thermal Physics, Acoustics and Environment Department, Building Research Institute (ITB), Filtrowa 1 Str., 00-611 Warsaw, Poland<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
**Abstract:** In certain situations, internal insulation is the only possible renovation option. However, it is risky where there is high humidity in a building and ventilation is not working sufficiently. The internal insulation retrofit changes the original thermal and moisture balance of a wall, therefore, it is necessary to carefully design it already at the initial stage. This paper analyses four interior insulation systems based on open diffusion capillary active materials: wood fibreboards (flex and rigid), perlite boards, and microporous calcium silicate. The hygrothermal performance under the climatic conditions of Central Europe (Poland) was assessed using the WUFI Plus software, taking into account the dynamic variation of indoor and outdoor conditions. The analysis included three insulation thicknesses with different ventilation rates and varying moisture loads. The results show that the hygrothermal properties of the wall change with the increase of insulation thickness and depend on the individual moisture properties of the material. In addition, both the reduction of moisture load and more intensive air exchange improve the hygrothermal properties at the interface between the insulation and the wall. Of all the solutions analysed, the system with perlite board and the system with wood fibreboard showed the worst hygric properties. Conversely, the highest risk of mould and interstitial condensation was recorded for the flex wood fibreboard solution.

**Keywords:** hygrothermal simulation; capillary active internal insulation; mould risk; moisture effects


People create cultures and environments compatible with their genotypes. The Roma remained locked into their own little traditions and kinship groups, where centuries old and successful behaviors in evolutionary terms continued to be applied and transmitted from generation to generation. (Čvorović 2014: 191−2)

The research by Jelena Čvorović on Serbian Roma is one of many striking examples of "geneticization," or the use of genetic evidence and authority to support the reduction of identity, the future, and culture to genetics, creating a racialist ideology and practice.1 Along with anthropometric

1. Jelena Čvorović is a leading expert at the Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade.

Victoria Shmidt is Senior Post-Doc and the leader of the project Critical History of Genetics in Central Eastern Europe] at Zentrum für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, University of Graz, Mozartgasse 14, 8010, Graz, Austria. Email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Christopher R. Donohue is a historian at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). BG 31 RM 4B09 31 Center Dr Bethesda MD 20892. Email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
*Romani Studies* 5, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2024), 111–133 issn 1757-2274 (online) doi: https://doi.org/10.3828/rost.2024.6

Published open access under a CC BY licence. https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/

measurements, geneticization is among the most durable ways of producing spurious knowledge about so-called "differences" between population groups labeled as the "majority" or "minority." In such an ideology, the majority is the bearer of norms, "culture," "values," and "tradition," and minorities are conceptualized as deviating from those norms, including those categorized as Jews (Reuter 2006; 2016), African Americans (Morning and Maneri 2022), Saami, and Slavs or Central and Eastern Europeans, among others.

In the twentieth century, and especially after the Second World War, geneticization had been rooted in (and continues as) an ongoing reproduction as a network epistemology – with centers and peripheries – analyzable in comparative and global contexts, and dependent upon both transnational genealogy(ies) and reception(s). In her grim inquiry into eugenic and racist legacies and present-day genetics and genomics in social and behavioral research, Rina Bliss highlights the role of the "flat," root-like structures of genetic research "based on interlocking lateral ties and a smoothy ranged career ladder" (Bliss 2018: 56). Genomics, for Bliss, is, in fact, an autonomizing field, and not just "some flash-in-the-pan intellectual movement, but that is perhaps because autonomization is a different beast in this day and age" (Bliss 2018: 56).

One of the mechanisms behind surviving genetics-informed racialization is keeping its entrepreneurs immunized from critical, or even questioning, anti-racist sentiments. The case of applying social biology to geneticization of Romani people is one of many examples of contemporary race science operating in an echo chamber, "a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been actively discredited" (Nguyen 2020).

The principal goal of sociobiological synthesis, according to its author, Edward O. Wilson (2000: 23) "is an ability to predict features of social organization from a knowledge of [these] population parameters combined with information on the behavioral constraints imposed by the genetic constitution of the species." The central tenets of sociobiology, such as positing the inheritance of certain behavioral patterns, the interplay of natural selection and adaptation as the engine of human evolution, almost immediately upon publication attracted the attention of racially minded scholars.

For instance, Richard Lynn (2006) and J. Phillippe Rushton (1988) both seek to demonstrate the interrelation between "racial differences" and the core patterns of human behavior developed during evolution as part of a survival strategy. According to Lynn and Rushton, "non-whites" possess a "lower IQ," invest less energy and time into their children, and, as a consequence, have more children. This stands in contrast to "whites" or "Europeans," who devote more resources to their offspring, who consequently have higher IQs, and who have fewer children. Such rhetoric hearkens back to turn-of-the twentieth century conspiracy theories about the "replacement" of "whites" by "non-whites," found in discussions of "race suicide" by the sociologist Edward A. Ross, the U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, and many others (King and Ruggles 1990; Bracke and Aguilar 2020; Ehsan and Stott 2020).

While racially minded scholars in the United States applied sociobiology to "prove" the genetically determined inferiority of African Americans, Jews, and other marginalized groups, their Central and Eastern European (CEE) colleagues easily transferred these epistemic patterns to Roma. Tamás Bereczkei,2 Petr Bakalář, and Jelena Čvorović, the main proponents in the CEE region of applying sociobiology to Romani studies, begun collaborating with their US and British counterparts in the late 1990s. The main narrative in the first part of this article outlines the critical historicization of these alliances and their operation as an epistemic bunker for advocates of scientific racism. We focus on this network as an epistemic structure created through the manipulation of trust in Western, "progressive," science. We explore how it can exist by adding a superstructure of discredit and authority, including those supplied academic journals and publishing houses. Further, we follow how this so-called "epistemic bunkering" promotes a dynamic that evolves over time, namely, that arguments become more radical, as well as more insulated (Furman 2023).

We argue that the deconstruction of scientific racism should include not only the critical historicization of the layering and the interconnection of various approaches to the geneticization of those "minoritized," but also the analysis of its critical deconstruction. We approach this deconstruction through interpreting the inadequate coverage of sociobiology as something determined by multiple epistemic bubbles that operate in favor of filtering information and reinforcing ideological separation (Nguyen 2020).

Two distinct groups of experts have attacked the geneticization of "minorities" – those who focus on the political implications of scientific racism and those who embrace biologically informed critiques of racism. The former, as a part of social critique, highlight the misuse of genetic evidence to delegitimize various forms of surveillance over minoritized groups, while the biological critique aims to reveal the falsity of arguments by relying on technical, material, and scientific progress in human genetics. Their arguments also trap them within their own epistemic bubbles. The mutual intellectual isolation of these two groups should be seen as one of the preconditions for the ongoing genetics-substantiated racialization of Roma.

2. Tamás Bereczkei is one of the most popular Hungarian psychologists. He possesses degrees in biology and philosophy and leads the Evolutionary Psychological Research group at the University of Pécs.

In the second part of the article, we explore the different pathways for deconstructing the geneticization of Roma, with a particular focus on the lacuna that proponents of either social or biological approaches to criticizing racism face. To recognize the limits and options of existing strategies to deconstruct sociobiology as an engine of reproducing racialized views on Roma, we examine critical approaches through the Bhaskarian division of negation strategies. We intend to demonstrate how the omission of particular knowledge in each of the two streams of critique prevents their proponents from developing consistent radical negation of sociobiology suitable for promoting epistemic justice and acknowledging the variety of cognitive experiences among Roma.

First, we detail specific arguments against sociobiology by those who view race as a social construct. We underscore that the premise of "race" as a social construct, however correct, opens theorists up to the charge that they are denying all differences. With uncritically skeptical views on biology and genetics, this approach is at risk of *wrongful depathologization* (Spencer and Carel 2021), on the verge of reducing the specifics of Romani people or even denying them an identity through trivializing the longue durée of their racialization.

We then explore the unprecedented lacunae of critical reactions to sociobiology in the context of the limitations of strategies for debunking the research by Rushton and other representatives of the persistent "racial realism" among biologists and geneticists. We discuss the strategy of *de facto* neutrality – which challenges the idea that a scholar can be "racist or sexist or elitist or anything of the sort" (Silverman 1990: 7) – as a major mechanism for preserving epistemic bubbles among those who use the idea of progress in genetics to legitimize scientific racism. We question the usefulness of conceptualizing geneticization in terms of what we call "anti-science," in which the work of anti-pseudoscience has the rhetorical and substantive task of "cleansing" evolutionary biology from hypotheses and theorizations that do not meet the criteria of validity and reliability of scientific knowledge, including "Rushtonism" or discussions of "dysgenic fertility."3

The main sources for our analysis are the publications of racially minded scholars and those who seek to deconstruct their arguments.

3. Dysgenic fertility, the belief that declining IQs depend on the number of children in a family and their birth order, remains one of the cornerstones of racialized geneticization.

#### **The restoration of overt racism in applying a sociobiological lens to Roma**

#### *Sociobiology: Essentialization through biologization of family life*

In its understanding of social evolution, the most common phenomenon explained by sociobiology, "the outcome of the genetic response of populations to ecological pressure within the constraints imposed by phylogenetic criteria" (Wilson 2000: 32), has led to the opposition between the progressive power of human collectives and individual "backwardness": "[A]s global culture advanced into the new, technoscientific age, human nature stayed back in the Paleolithic era" (Wilson 2000: 10). This particular view of behavioral patterns among humans as embedded in progressively developed groups while also being carriers of archaic (if not "animal") behaviors has logically moved towards prioritizing the family as a bridge between group and individual accounts of biological and genetic development. Thus, Wilson notes that "in many groups of organisms, from the social insects to the primates, the most advanced societies appear to have evolved directly from family units" (Wilson 2000: 26). This interpretation of evolution as an internally conflicting process in which family either catapults individuals to progress or fixes their "backwardness" is reflected in what is perhaps the most controversial explanatory scheme developed in sociobiology, the *r/K strategy* of reproduction.

In sociobiology, evolution and fitness are viewed as a series of trade-offs, with different biological and cultural manifestations and feedback mechanisms. According to this sociobiological paradigm, the maximization of reproduction would have specific developmental and intellectual consequences, driving a specific path of evolution in human beings (as it did in animals) and situating them along the traditional scale between "savagery" and "civilization."

And true to his principle of taking a population as the crucial actor and seeing this population in terms of gene frequencies (Myers 1990: 207), Wilson described different species as more or less aligned with either the r-strategy (to produce more offspring) or the K strategy, in which investment and maturation over the life-course, as well as survival, is privileged, rather a matter of sheer numbers. This and other explanations regarding evolution have made sociobiology a target of critiques from Marxist biologists (Segerstrale 1986), who underscored the consequences of the misapplication of population genetics, and the uncritical mixture of science and reactionary politics in the epistemologies offered by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists (many of whom soon adopted sociobiological analogies and explanations). While rejecting sociobiology as an example of vice epistemology, Lewontin, (1975) recognizes the high probability of producing epistemic vice through

applying social biology: "Sociobiology is not a racist doctrine, but any kind of genetic determinism can and does feed other kinds, including the belief that some races are superior to others."

Wilson as well remains selective in his criticism regarding eugenics. He has argued that sociobiology, by showing altruism to be adaptive, actually refuted Social Darwinism, with its emphasis on individual fitness and social behavior, while also maintaining that no biological doctrine should be viewed as a direct prescription for social policy because of the "naturalistic fallacy" (Myers 1990: 286). Wilson also continued this tradition of disciplinary imperialism by putting biology on the top of the science hierarchy as the main producer of reliable explanations of behavior.

The recent discovery of friendship and outright support among Wilson and racially minded thinkers (Borrello and Sepkoski 2022) is another opportunity for recognizing the epistemic vice of sociobiology, which calls for more consistent examination. The use of r/K and other theoretical postulates by Rushton and others, and Wilson's support of Rushton, are among the clearest examples of using major biological and genetic theories for "race science," making it impossible to differentiate between "good" science and "barbaric," or pseudoscientific applications.

#### *Sociobiology: The last bulwark of scientific racism?*

Together with the uncertainties about the "problem" of "race" and its theorization, which has inclined racially minded scholars to enthusiastically adopt sociobiology, as significant is its persuasiveness, achieved not through combining compelling facts or developing complex arguments, but through using a specific approach to narrating the history of evolution that appears to answer both social and biological questions with some degree of definitiveness (as well as generality). Sociobiology becomes, in a real sense, a rigorous theory of "everything," uniting both micro and macro perspectives into a new kind of "synthesis" (Smocovitis 1992). Accordingly, "Sociobiology incorporates and transforms the conventional narrative of natural history texts, with their sense of an immediate encounter with nature, by stripping them of narrative elements and then reconstructing the fragments into a grand narrative of evolutionary adaptation" (Myers 1990: 214, 194). Wilson does not animalize people nor does he anthropomorphize animals. However, Wilson endows certain types of behavior with the function of agency, bringing these patterns into the position of a powerful explanatory scheme (Myers 1990: 211).

For Rushton, an animator of this specific narrative in its most extreme guise, human races and their different "histories," their different "genes," and even different biologies, represent the main driving forces behind different patterns of reproductive behavior and levels of civilization. By asserting significant genetic differences between human "races," Rushton exaggerated Wilson's argument regarding the role of populations and their reproductive strategies in human progress. Not only was natural selection used as a proximal mechanism for gauging the speed of progress, but the implied direction of evolution as distinct for different "races" was a kind of "natural law of energy flows" (Rushton 1987: 12).

Rushton's thinking about "races" reached its culmination in the interpretation of the collision of groups with differing r/K strategies:

[G]enotypes (of different races) reproductively compete by allocating energy either to sexual behavior directly and increasing the number of offspring produced, or by diverting some energy to traits such as altruism, and the capacity for family and social organization, thereby increasing the chances of offspring maturing to adulthood. (Rushton and Bogaert 1987: 533)

One of the multiple absurdities promoted by Rushton in his attempts to attribute to "race" the role of a main factor in reproductive behavior included the claim concerning the unproven fact of the higher incidence of dizygotic twins among African Americans as a signifier of r-strategy "because they produce more than one egg at a time" (Rushton and Bogaert 1987: 53) Thus, according to Rushton, the reproductive strategies of non-whites reduced the potential for human progress and encompassed all aspects of culture and environment where the "producing patterns of culture [is] maximally compatible with their genotypes" (Rushton and Bogaert 1987: 533).

The issue of "whether the racial differences are based in evolution as well as in culture" (Rushton 1989: 45) was solved by Rushton by admitting multiple discrete spaces between different "races," with the idea of "genetic distances of various human populations from other primates as well as from each other" (Rushton 1989: 45). Rushton promoted the division of the "races" into more or less ("White," "Yellow," "Black") historically racist and vulgar continental categories, while stressing "a divergence time of about 110,000 years ago for the Negroid–non-Negroid split and about 41,000 years ago for the Caucasoid– Mongoloid split" (Rushton 1989: 50). Accepting "Blacks" as a more "primeval" race offered a way of bridging Rushton's racialization through applying r/K strategies of division with Lynn's interest in the so-called "racial differences" in IQs (Rushton and Bogaert 1987).

Lynn (1999: 147), apart from Rushton, was obsessed with evidence in favor of "dysgenic fertility" on a global scale, collecting "evidence" in favor of a negative association between the intelligence of adults and number of children, "the most direct and persuasive argument." Lynn's account of "genotypic intelligence" among whites and Blacks was interwoven with a syncretic ideology combining age, education level, and a fundamental and insurmountable division between "races." In his writing, Lynn heavily relied on the outputs of the research by another famous (albeit not as notorious) psychologist, Robin Dunbar, who actively engaged in bridging sociobiology and evolutionary psychology through researching the supposed interrelation among reproductive strategies, language, and the evolution of the brain. One of the predominant emphases of Dunbar's research, the relationship between reproductive decisions and parental strategies, was combined with Lynn's intention to demonstrate that the "racial" origins of differences in intelligence originated from certain reproductive strategies. Namely, researchers underscored that with each additional child, there would be a proportional lessening of parental investment, and consequently, a lowering of IQ. These authors also underscored (mistakenly) the "fact" that certain non-European cultures privileged "fecundity" over intelligence (Vogel and Motolsky 1997). Multiple forms of prejudice against Roma in CEE countries consistently reverberated with this profile of epistemic injustice.

#### *Roma in the focus of sociobiology: Exaggeration of scientizing prejudice*

Rushton, Lynn, and Dunbar started to cooperate with racially minded scholars from Central and Eastern Europe in applying their approaches to the geneticization of Roma at the moment sociobiology began to lose its authority among Western audiences. From the second half of the 1990s until the middle of 2010s, these collaborations resulted in more than three dozen joint publications, in "race science" publications such as *Mankind Quarterly*, part of a wider network of "race science" journals, such as *Personality and Individual Differences* (Gresson et al. 1997; Schaffer 2007). With the direct support of Richard Lynn in 2014, Čvorović published her most significant work aimed at racializing Roma by applying a genetically informed argument, *The Roma: Balkan Underclass*. The book was affiliated with the Ulster Institute for Social Research, one of Lynn's institutional "offspring." The more than twenty-year cooperation can be explained by the multiple "bunkerizations" of those who apply sociobiology as a vehicle for reductive racialized arguments using genetics and genomics.

Among the reasons for the international application of sociobiology to the geneticization of Roma was the increasing delegitimization of "race science" in the West, which nevertheless continued to operate as a kind of "dissenting science" that paradoxically increased the attraction for cooperation with CEE colleagues. The region had continued to function as one of the most significant rare spaces for continuing the practice of "race science" and obtaining new evidence for "understudied populations" in ways that would escape the attention of Western ethicists. This approach articulated the general understanding, on the part of Western European geneticists, of the post-communist space as a kind of scientific and ethical "Wild West." Bakalář, Bereczkei, and Čvorović also emphasized the organic continuity between the original theory of E.O. Wilson and their own analyses.

Consequently, sociobiology in the CEE region stands outside of and has benefited from its distance from the more well-known critiques of sociobiology as evidenced in the *New York Review of Books*. In the late 1980s, the reception of sociobiology among socialist experts, psychologists who mostly dedicated their efforts to adapting Attachment Theory (Matějček and Langmeier 1981: 41–42), and medical experts within military studies (Konvička 1988: 194–99), was overwhelmingly positive. It is thus remarkable that a very modest critique primarily stemmed from a prosaic emphasis of late socialist genetics on achieving a balance between social and biological factors. This critique completely ignored the stormy debate which had unfolded in the late 1970s and early 1980s between Wilson and his leftist opponents. While these experts ignored the boundary between "pure" sociobiology and its misuse, in the eyes of CEE academics (and some in Western Europe and the United States) Bereczkei and Čvorović continue to be viewed as respected scholars.

But the story does not end there. Bereczkei and Čvorović are accepted by the international community of Romani studies scholars, which faces multiple complexities in differentiating "proper" and "improper," spurious and refined, use of biologically and genetically informed arguments regarding Romani identity. One example of such insensitivity is the discussion among these authors of their work as offering "a useful insight into the range of historical questions that might be explored by seeing Roma as co-collaborators in the production of historical evidence" (Taylor and Hinks 2021: 639).

The unusual popularity of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is most succinctly explained by the contradictory messages of its racist, anti-feminist thinking, while being nonetheless embraced by the educated public (Cassidy 2005). As in the United States, in Central and Eastern Europe the leveraging of sociobiology and genetic evidence by racially minded thinkers has a direct impact on the lay community through various campaigns organized by extreme right-wing movements. Since 2009, the Czech public has had the opportunity to become acquainted with all the "news" in the field of using the sociobiological argumentation in favor of racial discrimination on the website *Délský potápěč* (translated as "Delian diver," a reference to efforts needed to understand pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus).4 Along with publishing translations of the interviews with the most notorious scholars affiliated with the far right in the United

4. This phrase refers to the ancient Greek metaphor of deepening knowledge about the world.

States, such as Kevin MacDonald, this website provides much space to local experts, including Bakalář (*Délský potápěč 2018*). The efforts of *Délský potápěč*  have not been ignored by public figures affiliated with traditionalism or various forms of right-wing ideological mobilization. Such influence can be shown in the consistent anti-migration position and "anti-Gypsyism" of such personages as Michal Walter Kraft.5

In Western countries, such critical public communication of the sciences has mobilized anti-essentialist, anti-racist voices, and significantly transformed public reception of these sciences, including their direct connection with scientific racism. Such mobilization has not occurred in post-socialist Europe. Petr Bakalář, to take one example, was ostracized by liberal journalists for his two books in Czechia, *Tabu v sociálních vědách*  (Taboo in Social Science, 2003) and *Psychologie Romů* (The Psychology of Roma, 2004). He nevertheless maintains his stature among those educators who openly criticize the politics of inclusion regarding Romani people, and not only in Czechia. Through reading the English overview of his Czech book published in *Mankind Quarterly* (Bakalář 2004), racially thinking Greek and Romanian experts (Lervåg et al 2019; Dolean and Tincas 2019) quickly and easily absorbed Bakalář's "hypothesis" aimed at explaining the "intractable" inferiority of Romani children. Mixing well-known surveys conducted during the 1970s by socialist psychologists of Romani children (Bakalář 2004) with concepts adopted from sociobiology represents one of the tactics that has made Bakalář's statements so convincing – so much so that his speculative texts continue to be used by the students of educational faculties in Czech universities (Königová 2015).

While those CEE proponents of scientific racism have easily adopted racial realism, with its argument that "race" operates as an agent of either human progress or "backwardness," its direct application to Roma has been accompanied by methodological difficulties, due to the necessity to which "race" the "Gypsies" belong. Solving this task *per se* has deepened the multiple racial hierarchies in which Roma are already embedded. Thus, in order to bring Roma closer to "blacks," Rushton and Čvorović have introduced multiple comparisons to differentiate "Gypsies" from "Whites" and "South Asians," the latter of whom, according to Rushton's racialized hierarchy, occupied the top of the hierarchy (even in comparison with "Whites") in terms of their genes and contributions to "Western civilization":

5. In 2021, Kraft was convicted for "inciting hatred against a group of persons or restricting their rights," but he continues his public career, including the dissemination of materials prepared by *Délský potápěč*. The most consistent example is Kraft's twitter: https://twitter. com/walterkraft6.

The Roma have had a very different history in the intervening period than other South Asians. They retain a brown-skinned, East Indian appearance, and their geographic origin has been confirmed by linguistic analysis of their Romani language as well as by genetic sequencing studies. For the most part they have not intermarried with native Europeans and have retained their cultural traditions. (Rushton et al. 2007)

Along with promoting a hypothesis concerning the negative historical role of climate in the development of Roma, who, like African Americans, lived in conditions that (ostensibly) forced them to adopt an r-strategy, Bakalář (2004) touches upon another speculative analogy – that their membership in the lowest caste was what led Roma to become enslaved.

Along with this speculative historicization aimed at pushing Roma closer to African Americans with their "short history of human progress" and their "inferior" genetics, these authors actively transferred their racially informed views to particular reproductive behaviors. This strategy of racialization was reinforced by opposing Romani reproductive and parental strategies to those of the majority, well-known or titular nations, such as Serbians, Czechs, or Hungarians. This opposition was aggravated by the speculative attribution of "animal" strategies explored by sociobiologists to Roma while the "majority" population was not marked by such "animalizing" behavior.

Propelled by research aimed at understanding the evolution of altruism among birds and mammals (Brouwer et al. 2012; Emlen 1982; 1991), Bereczkei and Dunbar (1997) conducted several observations among "rural Roma" for "proving" the essential role of altruistic agents in reproductive strategies aimed at increasing fitness among Roma families. This speculative research should be seen as a replica of the overtly racist study of the same type conducted by Lee Cronk,6 Dunbar's colleague, among Kanjar females and the Mundugumor of Papua New Guinea (Cronk 1989). Roma survival, according to Bereczkei and Dunbar (1997), hinged on a daughter being the first-born:

Gypsy mothers of daughters who act as helpers should have (1) shorter inter-birth intervals and (2) longer reproductively active life spans (the period between first and last offspring) than mothers of non- helpers; if (1) and (2) are both true, then it should follow that (3) mothers of helpers will have more children than those having first-born sons, whereas no such differences are expected among ethnic Hungarians.

Regarding the Otherness of Roma, Čvorović reified such an argument in favor of juxtaposing Roma to Serbians by positing Bosnians as falling between Serbians and "Gypsies" and introducing as an added variable the differing

6. Cronk is a well-regarded biological anthropologist working at Rutgers University, one of the leading anthropological departments in the United States. Among his colleagues is Robin Fox, another proponent and supporter of sociobiology.

religious affiliations of Roma, either Christians or Muslims (Čvorović, 2004; Čvorović, 2011; Čvorović and Lynn 2014). Unsurprisingly, the imposition of "descendant-leaving success, measured by numbers of surviving children and grandchildren" as the main unit of analysis underscored "the similarity between Roma and Bosnians as opposed to Serbians." (Čvorović 2014: 128) Along with this move to tie Roma to other "non-white" and "non-Christian" minorities, Čvorović emphasized the innate indifference of Roma mothers to the loss of children as a kind of epigenetic strategy:

[T]he loss of children is so common in the general Roma population that probably every woman grows up with the certain knowledge that she will lose children. For example, one of the interviewed mothers, a Muslim Roma with several living children and three that have died, could not remember the cause of death of her children, nor could she remember all the names of her living kids or the years of their births. (Čvorović 2014: 144)

Stressing the lesser position of Roma with regard to the degree of civilizational and civil progress and the consequent effects on reproductive strategies reinforces the view of Roma as the "only group that never integrated into European society, despite living in Europe for many centuries … those on the lowest position among migrants of different ethnic groups" (Čvorović 2014: 159–61). Bakalář has underscored this argument through referencing the speculative survey conducted by Pavel Říčan (1998), another racially minded Czech psychologist, who claimed the "negative assimilation" had relegated Roma to either be melted into the "White" majority or remain "backward."

Along with viewing Roma as those who "*do not want to integrate,*" (Čvorović 2014: 160, emphasis in original) these proponents of racial realism clashed between attributing to Roma the pressure of isolation and their "primitive" efforts at adaptation, and describing everything as somehow genetic:

Everywhere, the Roma always depended on the needs of, and interaction with, their host populations as a source of their livelihood; many times the Roma adapted to the different requirements of their social and environmental surroundings. The result is the great diversity of Roma tribes. (Čvorović 2014: 126)

This view represents a paradoxical challenge in racializing Roma, either as self-isolating, or as fully assimilated into the host population, while also reintroducing intra-racial hierarchies among Roma.

On the top of this hierarchy, Čvorović and Rushton placed Romani "elites," or those with the highest cognitive performance, who, because of "several historical waves of fleeing," had abandoned their racial group (Rushton and Čvorović 2009: 485). The bottom rung was occupied by the "Muslim Roma," a hybrid population comprising a genetic mix between European Christians and Turkish Muslims who, like other South Asian/North African populations, according to Ruston, averaged "an IQ of less than 90" (ibid). Religious affiliation was posited for explaining "the most striking behavioral difference between the Roma of Serbia" (Čvorović 2014: 119). Introducing the paranoid collision of "race" and religion, Čvorović highlighted a new threat from a new generation of Roma, i.e. their very plausible connection with Islam that "itself represents a challenge for Europe since Europe's traditional low birth rate, together with rapid reproduction by both Muslim immigrants and by native European Muslim populations" (Čvorović 2014: 191).This representation echoes precisely the theory of the "great replacement" that has motivated far-right, anti-migrant populism in Europe, as well as inspiring genocidal violence in Europe and the United States (Feola 2022). How then has this reductionism that seeks to reestablish a hierarchical order as "natural" due to genetic differences among "races" been confronted and criticized?

#### **In search of the antidote: Epistemic bubbles of anti-racist sentiment in Central and Eastern Europe**

The critique against geneticization in general, and of misusing sociobiology in particular, is embedded in wide-ranging discussions that in one way or another produce boundary work that regulates knowledge regarding heredity and its role in human life. Among the most apparent divisions is the opposition of "true" science to "pseudoscience". The contest between biology and social science as the most effective measure for attacking the geneticization of Roma is crucial as well.

The historically determined diversity of critical arguments against geneticization can be mapped through applying the Bhaskarian division of three interrelated strategies of negation: real, transformative, and radical (Bhaskar 2015). Among other reasons for differentiating the strategies of dialectic negation, Bhaskar emphasizes the idea of negation as a kind of "geo-history" in ontological terms, with reverberations for scientific progress in epistemological terms. While indicating the double binding of the subject-matter of the social sciences as "both intrinsically historical and structured by relations of internal, as well as external, interdependency," Bhaskar brings forward "a constraint upon the kinds of permissible theory-construction," (Bhaskar 1979: 50) such as the racist or anti-racist understandings of heredity. This constraint should be seen as one of the driving forces of epistemic filters that are introduced by the proponents of one or other strategies of negating geneticization.

*Real negation* aims to emancipate those who have previously accepted geneticization (or its successors) because of limited options to reflect upon the acceptance of geneticization as a tool of injustice. In real negation, we encounter the ground for all further forms of deconstructing geneticization. Profiling the approaches for deconstructing geneticization leads to a recognition of the predominance of real negation among social scientists who apply various tools to filter biological knowledge associated with the main sources of racial thinking.

Biologists, or those who affiliate themselves with producing medical and scientific knowledge, primarily introduce *transformative negation*, which stems from accepting the unproductivity of total negation of any hereditary explanations or attempts to research heredity. We see transformative negation as the ongoing process of differentiating the positive outputs of genetic research from their inevitable negative side through misusing genetic arguments. Further, this strategy easily excludes knowledge by labeling it as "pseudoscience," which paradoxically leads to a missing systematic critique of the interrelation between "real" and "pseudo" science.

Recognition of the inevitability of abusing genetic arguments remains a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the much-desired process of critical reflection on the production of biological knowledge. *Radical negation* is the practice that embodies this process, through sustainable practices of doubt in laws, regularities, and rules, or every construction that shapes the linear, evolutionary, framework of biology, and genetics in particular. The potentiality of radical negation as the most desirable method for anti-racist sentiment is only possible as a consequence of the interdisciplinary interconnection of social and biological arguments against racism based upon the systematic revision of what Bhaskar defined as the *necessarily*  incomplete status of theory (1979: 53). In this turn, radical negation is a highly communicative virtue that can be practiced only within a particular type of communication free from hegemony and other forms of dominance, with a minimized level of hegemony or sensitivity to hegemony (Medina 2013: 42).

Immediately after its publication, Wilson's *Sociobiology: The New Synthesis* was attacked by Marxist biologists who recognized the main argument provided by Wilson as a dangerous attempt to reintroduce the reductive core of evolutionary explanations, adaptationist programs, and axiomatical postulates. Lewontin and other scholars in his circle called for the transformation of metaphors and analogies introduced in the early stage of institutionalizing biology (Lewontin 1972). These efforts have had a lasting impact on progress in genetics (Hubálek 2021: 451–3). Lewontin had offered his own set of analogies aimed at freeing biology from reductionist metaphors and from the social implications so easily drawn from them (Kaye 2001: 438). While the radical negation manifested by these biologists left behind a number of contradictions, including a lasting contradiction with their own previous, "pro-race" view on human development, this critique has established a pathway of intensive work and interdisciplinary reflection regarding the dual nature of biology as a science that is neither "pure" and free from the risk of producing the grounds for prejudice, nor "impure" scientific racism. However, this pathway remains blocked within the debates about geneticizing Roma – primarily because of multiple interferences of epistemic filters that shape the critical arguments and leave the different camps of critics apart from each other.

#### *Social critiques of geneticization: A real negation of biological arguments*

*Real negation*, as the most basic and historically most established form of distancing from "contaminated" knowledge such as "race science," concentrates on the most visible consequence of its application, the essentialism resulting from the false abstraction that nourishes scientific racism. Real negation relies on opposing racial thinking to the "think[ing] of human groups with the vivid sense that groups consist of individuals and that individuals display the full range of human differences" (Barzun 1965: ix), an idea introduced by liberal critics of scientific racism in the interwar period. This idea persists among many experts who aim at eradicating violence legitimized by genetically informed arguments. Moreover, with the acceptance of the negation of essentialization as the core issue of racial thinking, real negation remains extremely limited in developing systematic alternatives to injustice. This perspective is what furthers the idea that "equality is neither provable nor disprovable," and that racism equality "is not a scientific but a political idea, and it is valid only when one *assumes* it" (Barzun 1965: xi).

The individualization of the argument against genetically informed perspectives relies on both implicit and explicit negation of biologically based knowledge about humans. One of the most consistent manifestations of rejecting biological causes and explanations has emerged from critical disability studies. Its proponents recognize the importance of the task to explain any attempt to apply genetics to the understanding of "minorities" as "a biological imperialism, [which] would successively eliminate the insights of sociology, psychology, psycho-analysis and other nonbiological sciences, by instituting genes as the first cause of various human experiences and behavior" (Shakespeare 1995: 23). This argument has begun to be reproduced within Romani studies, along with attempts to introduce the intersectionality of race/ethnicity and disability as a part of multifaceted practices of discrimination, including those using sociobiology as a source of legitimacy for "positioning the Roma as *incurably other*" (Karagianni 2022). This critical reaction against geneticization continues to be a part of the emancipatory movement of educators who, for example, promote the inclusion of Romani children in schools (Tzouriadou et al. 2021). Among the experts in Central and Eastern Europe, the limits of such a view are directly related to the many gaps in the dissemination of leftist critiques of sociobiology by biologists such as Richard Lewontin, Stephan Gould, and the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.

Opposing biology as potentially discriminating through pathologizing Roma to anti-discriminative social sciences has found many advocates among experts who aim to advance the Romani language, including overcoming its multiple and deeply rooted stigmatizations. While these experts disapprovingly cite Čvorović, Rushton, and Bakalář, and even label their positions as eugenic (Kuo 2020), they do not provide critical analysis and do not touch upon public acceptance of these ideas.

Following the mission to enlighten, experts replace the false, biologized view on Roma with a positive and "true" image (Kyuchukov et al. 2015: 447). Focusing on the implications but not on the arguments emanating from sociobiology makes this critique insufficient for overcoming geneticization, especially in the context of its popularity among many educators. Even the apologists for this approach have convinced others of the desirability to oppose their position with the culture of schooling and the role of society in achieving desirable readiness to approach Romani children with the respect to their cultural and linguistic experience (de Villiers 2017: 322). This practice of avoidance in unpacking the geneticization of Roma reverberates with a more general trend, namely, the resistance to the infiltration of social research by genetics from many social scientific scholars (Burt 2022).

The deeply rooted biologization of the social sciences and, in particular, the use of organicism and the metaphor of the organism as a response to the need to prove the validity of social science can hinder critical recognition of the impact of epistemologies, not particular "pseudo" theories: "[A] train of distinguished scholars has struggled to secure a science of society modeled on the precise practices of the natural sciences" (Levine 1995: 240). While the adaptation of biological concepts aimed "to sanitize rhetoric and cleanse ambiguities of [social sciences]," the inroads made by sociology should be explored as an additional channel for interconnecting academic and public views on human individuals and collectives – especially taking into account the interdisciplinary cooperation between biologists, sociologists, and demographers within the development and practice of reproductive politics.

Along with this uneasy interrelation between biology and social science, the palpable presence of epistemic violence within these knowledge systems calls for systematic revision of methods and research questions produced within anthropology, sociology, and psychology (Guhin and Wyrtzen 2013). This task requires moving beyond mere boundaries between biology and social sciences. Such boundaries, we argue, reinforce the most simplistic, neo-liberal approach to solving the dilemma of nature vs. nurture, which, consequently, has been misused in educational and other politics regarding Roma. But can biology really provide social science with its own experience of overcoming epistemic filters in the fight against racism?

#### *Transformative negation: Genetics in search of justice*

One of the earliest responses from the side of Western biological scientists to racially minded applications of sociobiology stemmed from the mission to protect sociobiology and its particular models, such as the r/K strategy, from non-scientific application and appropriation. The heyday of this critical campaign came at the beginning of the 1990s, when sociobiology began to lose its authority both among scientists and the public, not only as a result of scientific critique, but significant media attention as well as public protest. The main thrust of this critique was the deficiency of "authors" like Rushton and Lynn, but not sociobiology itself, which could indeed be a developing discipline.

Lynn (1989) directly argued that one of texts by Rushton (related to the intersectionality of race and class as factors of reproduction) should not have been published in the *Journal of Research in Personality* because it lacked any sustained evidence. Lynn specifically emphasized the "missing evidence" with regard to one of the central issues of sociobiology, namely, the interrelation between culture and genes: "While it is possible and (if you accept sociobiology) even probable that genes influence culture, the possibility of genetically based cultural differences between the races is just a hypothesis" (Lynn 1989: 5).

Judith L. Anderson (1991), a behavioral ecologist, however, provides two arguments against applying the r/K strategy to human populations, in which sociobiology is an example of anti-scientific usage of theoretical constructions on the interrelation between human "races" and local populations, and the relationship between population dynamics and organismal traits. What is remarkable is that neither argument considers the rejection of the idea of "race": "[H]uman races are made up of many separate local populations, each of which has occupied a specific habitat and ecological niche and therefore has experienced its own selection pressures. Therefore the r/K model makes no predictions about entire current human races" (Anderson 1991: 52). Anderson

produces this noticeable boundary work in order to explain Rushton's racialization and her own neutrality through the difference in their professional affiliation: "[As] an ecologist by training I do not imagine that psychologists will share my degree of concern over the inappropriate use of ecological theory in this context" (Anderson 1991: 51).

Another argument aligned with deconstructing Rushton's work as pseudoscience involves the use of concepts as such as IQ as "a modern, western contrivance, developed on empirical rather than theoretical grounds, solely to predict classroom success, one of the concepts related more to pragmatic than scientific considerations" (Silverman 1990: 4). But along with this and other critical remarks, Irwin Silverman, a Canadian clinical psychologist, mentions the novelty of sociobiology implemented by Rushton in "pulling together an array of anatomical, physiological, maturational, and behavioral differences among races" (Silverman 1990: 6).

Joseph L. Graves Jr., an African American evolutionary biologist, pushes the boundary between science and pseudoscience even further with his figurative assessment of Rushton as "a spider spinning a pseudoscientific web of incorrectly stated hypotheses supported with dubious evidence" (2002: 131−54). Rushton's master work, *Race, Evolution, and Behavior*, is compared with other works already labeled as overtly racist, such as Herrnstein and Murray's *The Bell Curve* (1994). These moves are part of the mission to purify evolutionary biology from such unscientific approaches, a move that remains predominant: "[W]e must vigorously oppose Rushtonism due to his blatant distortion of the methods of evolutionary biology in general and life history theory in particular" (Graves 2002: 134). Graves consistently highlights the failure of Rushton, who takes no pains to differentiate between phenotypic correlations and specific patterns of evolutionary selection. He concludes that "Rushton implicitly accepts the socially constructed rule of genetic hypo-descent (the one drop rule) as the basis of a biologically valid racial classification scheme" (Graves 2002: 144).

This manner of critiquing the misuse of biology serves to reproduce epistemic bubbles among biologists and sociologists alike. Recognizing biology as already emancipated from racism, and understanding "race science" as an output of misusing the arguments and evidence provided by "true" natural and biological science resonates with a too-literal understanding of the stance that "race" is a socially constructed concept. Such an assertion charges biologists with the struggle against reproducing scientific racism and of differentiating science from pseudoscience. This position, based on an uncritical belief in the ongoing development of biology, runs the risk of insensitivity to the continuing reproduction of potentially (or even actual) racist views among biologists and medical experts. In CEE countries, this view has reached an even more extreme position, manifested in an apparent vacuum of critical approaches, either transformative or radical, on the part of biologists.

Ethnographer Adriana Petryna (2003) characterizes the devotion of many post-socialist colleagues to the idea of medical science as ensuring progress (along with ignoring the call for its critical acceptance as a part of institutional violence) as a "nativist" model of science that undercuts its positivism. Taking into account the historically determined interconnection between socialist genetics and the global politics of surveillance over reproduction, including repressive political measures regarding Roma introduced in the mid-1960s, it is reasonable to extend Petryna's argument to the role of socialist genetics in developing the global order of health security. This extension would then certainly include one of the most blatant manifestations, the transnational network of overtly racially thinking adherents of sociobiology.

#### **Conclusion**

Nurturing manifold prejudices, the geneticization of Roma should be seen as a driving force behind hermeneutical, societal, and economic inequality, one that limits Roma in their own knowledge production. Not only does the misuse of genetically informed arguments attribute inherited inferiority to Roma, but just as importantly, attempts at a critique of such arguments to help to maintain this marginalization, despite the best (albeit sometimes paternalistic) intentions.

If the harm produced by racially minded scholars seems to be self-evident, their operation as an epistemic bunker challenges the effort to question geneticization as a source of epistemic vice. Operating as a network epistemology, geneticization and its influence on racial prejudice ensures the reproduction of a biologized view on Roma. Furthermore, its ongoing acceptance and application by practitioners of the groups most essential for providing either discriminatory or anti-discriminatory social policy, including educators and public health practitioners, persists. An appropriate response to such a well-preserved and widely accepted overt racism can be nothing other than a pluralistic or "kaleidoscopic" approach, based on incorporating multiple perspectives to build an epistemic equilibrium, the "interplay of cognitive forces, without some forces overpowering others, without some cognitive influences becoming unchecked and unbalanced" (Medina 2013: 50).

Such a consciousness obliges those who contribute to the deconstruction of geneticization to practice epistemic virtues such as open-mindedness, epistemic humility, and curiosity. However, these expectations remain unmet. The critique of geneticization, as of now, comes from social scientists and those experts who present themselves as fonts of biological knowledge. Both camps mostly operate in epistemic bubbles that legitimize their own approach to producing knowledge. Attacking the misuse of genetically informed arguments performs boundary work in their field of expertise, instead of promoting the catalyzation of processes designed to overcome epistemic deficit in producing knowledge about Roma.

Among the most important of these deficits has been a racialized view of family, reproduction, and social life. It is clear that the desired systematic practice of negating scientific racism requires a revision of approaches to the subjectification and scientific objectification of Roma. Interdisciplinary cooperation between social scientists and biologists is one of the first steps to overcoming the hermeneutic inequality of Roma, through practicing interactionism and embracing a social-connection model of responsibility for geneticization, in which responsibility for scientific racism lies not with one discipline, but several.

#### **References**

#### 132 victoria shmidt and christopher r. donohue

Nguyen, C Thi. 2020. Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme 17 (2): 141–61.

This publication is licenced – unless otherwise indicated – under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate any modifications.

Published with the support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): 10.55776/PUB1109

## **Reviews**

Reviews

**Így muzsikáltunk. Déki Lakatos Sándor cigányprímás élet- és családtörténete [That's how we made music. The life and family history of the Gypsy first violinist Sándor Déki Lakatos].** Ágnes Szokolszky. Személyes Történelem [Personal History], 2023. 296 pp. ISBN:<PHONE_NUMBER>-27-7

#### Reviewed by Tamás Hajnáczky

At the international level, there is a growing emphasis on the "Roma voice" in the historical studies of Gypsies. These research efforts have been brought even more to the fore by the "Roma Interbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars" project1 – led by Elena Marushiakova – which has explored the topic from the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War. One of the main strengths of the project, funded by the European Research Council, was that it extended the period of research into the "Roma voices" by almost a century. Although we have recently had more and more material giving us access to "Roma voices," these are mainly from genocide survivors, people who worked in socialist heavy industry, or members of the emerging Roma movement. A substantial exploration of the personal sources related to Gypsy musicians in Hungary is still awaited. Ágnes Szokolszky's much needed oral history book is intended to contribute towards filling this gap, as she has interviewed the world-famous Gypsy first violinist Sándor Déki Lakatos about his personal and family history in an insightful and sensitive manner. On the one hand, it gives an insight into the Gypsy music society of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and then of the Horthy era – with a lengthy discussion of the role of Gypsy musician wives – all told through the narrative of a Gypsy first violinist. On the other hand, it introduces us to the world of Gypsy musicians of the Eastern Bloc and the post-socialist transition. The richly illustrated volume is rounded off by a concluding study that reveals the past of Gypsy

Tamás Hajnáczky is an ethnic and minority policy expert at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, H-1091 Budapest, Kálvin Square 9 and a senior research fellow at the Archiepiscopal College of Veszprém, H-8200 Veszprém, Jutasi Street 18/2. Email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
*Romani Studies* 5, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2024), 135–43 issn 1757-2274 (online) doi: https://doi.org/10.3828/rost.2024.7 Published open access under a CC BY licence. https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/

1. For more information on the project and publications, see "Roma Interbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars," *University of St Andrews*, https://arts. st-andrews.ac.uk/romainterbellum/.

musicians through the prism of the history of the Gypsy first violinist Lakatos's dynasty. Ágnes Szokolszky's unique volume is an indispensable addition to the libraries of those concerned with Gypsy history, but will also be of interest to a wider academic audience.

Sándor Déki Lakatos was born in 1945, into a family of Gypsy musicians, and descended from a family of renowned Gypsy musicians on both his mother's and father's side. He can trace his ancestors back to the 1700s, among whom he can only name two who were not involved in Gypsy music; one was a sailor, while the other was a judge at a regional high court. From the moment of his birth, his life was permeated by Gypsy music, as it is today, and one of his children, Sándor Déki Lakatos Jr., also chose this path in life. In the hospital, as soon as he was born, his uncle gave him a violin bow. According to tradition, if the infant holds the bow correctly, he will become a Gypsy first violinist. According to his uncle, the newborn Sándor Déki Lakatos held the violin bow perfectly and was thus destined to become a Gypsy first violinist, which he recalled as follows:

So, I was brought up in this family of first violinists, I had my own violin by the age of two and I toddled about with it day and night. If I remember correctly, it was made of tin, it was a toy violin. And as the old people practiced, so did I, but of course I didn't know anything. I wasn't allowed to play football when I was a child, though I didn't obey because I loved football. But I wasn't allowed to play sports or ride a bicycle, I was only allowed to ride a scooter, nothing else. I was brought up to take care of my hands. Well, I was very careful. That was always a problem for me in gym class. Because I wasn't allowed to do somersaults and jumps and the like.

The socialist system that emerged in Hungary after the end of the Second World War, under the pressure of the Soviet Union, had a profound impact on the Gypsy music society. The stories of Sándor Déki Lakatos give us a first-hand personal insight into this situation. The nationalization that began in the late 1940s and affected many people also affected Gypsy musicians, with several relatives of the Gypsy first violinist having their homes confiscated by the single-party state. The cafés were closed as symbols of the "old nobility," and the expressions "Gypsy music," "Gypsy orchestra," and "Hungarian song," which were reminiscent of times gone by, were stigmatized. Sándor Déki Lakatos summarized the first years of the socialist takeover and its impact on Gypsy musicians, as follows:

At the beginning of the 50s, the cafés were closed down, as they were the settings of the old-world gentry. There was no place to play music anymore. You couldn't play music in restaurants at all for a few years. An awful lot of Gypsy musicians were out of work, they could go to work as labourers, in factories. Dad said, "they threw Gypsy music out of the window with the pool tables." Because you, as a Gypsy

musician, café musician, were a servant of the old nobility. Song as a genre was also stigmatised. You couldn't even say "Gypsy music" or "Gypsy orchestra" because that too was a reminder of the old days. But some big "folk" bands were organised centrally, with Gypsy musicians playing in them. Gypsy music had to be marketed as folk music. (p. 74)

In the early 1950s, the authorities created several folk orchestras for Gypsy musicians: the Hungarian Radio Folk Orchestra, the State Folk Ensemble, the Budapest Folk Orchestra, and the Folk Orchestra of the Ministry of the Interior's Danube Art Ensemble. Gypsy musicians were only allowed to work through the National Centre for Light Music (OSZK). They were obliged to join the trade union, as this was the only way to obtain a contract, and in the absence of a contract, Gypsy musicians were declared public menaces. Sándor Lakatos Déki's father, Sándor Lakatos, was asked to conduct the Hungarian Radio Folk Orchestra, which often led to friction with the ideology of the single-party state and its functionaries. Gypsy music was banned from radio programmes – only folk songs were allowed to be played – and the pre-recorded programmes were scrutinized by the watchful eyes of censors. Sándor's father regularly appeared on live programmes, where he once played a song called "Ezüst tükrös kávéházban" [In the Silver Mirrored Café], after which the artistic director, a communist party member, was furious and said: "I'll break your hand and your leg, what are you playing?" (p. 88) Sándor Lakatos was eventually disciplined for the song about the café, a month's wages were docked, and he was threatened with immediate dismissal if it happened again. He once performed at an event and the communist party leader, Mátyás Rákosi, asked him afterwards if he was a party member because if he was, he would give him the Kossuth Prize – the highest state award in the cultural field. Sándor Lakatos was not a party member, so he was given one day to apply for and receive his party membership. In the end, he did not comply with this "unrefusable" request and was not awarded the prize. Soon afterwards, the Hungarian Radio demanded that Sándor Lakatos and his entire orchestra join the communist party, which the Gypsy first violinist and his musicians again refused to do. They were therefore dismissed from the Hungarian Radio Folk Orchestra because they were classified as "untrustworthy persons."

After the 1956 revolution, the dictatorship in Hungary was somewhat eased, the new party leader János Kádár loosened the grip of the socialist system and the so-called "goulash communism" began. Sándor Lakatos, who had refused to join the party, for his outstanding musical merits was sent to Moscow with his son and the Gypsy orchestra to play at a meeting between János Kádár and the first man of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. During his days in Moscow, Sándor Déki Lakatos was surprised to realize that they could sell almost any of their clothes on the streets of the city:

Well, you know, it was a very interesting world for me, when I first saw it. Especially the fact that they would grab you on the street and try to take off your shirt, your shoes, everything, and try to buy it. Dad sold all his nylon shirts. The ones we took out for three weeks, no dry cleaning, no nothing, you just had to go down to the street, you had a shirt on, they came and paid. I had a suit that was made from my dad's suit. … And if you please, I was about 160 cm tall, I was walking around in that suit. A young man came up to me, about 170-175 cm tall and said he would very much like to buy my suit. Well, I say, it's small for you. Never mind, he'll buy it anyway. (p. 116)

In the socialist era, the Mátyás Cellar in downtown Budapest was turned into a protocol locale by the communist state. High-ranking foreign politicians (e.g. Gromyko, Tito), international celebrities, and Western film stars (e.g. Roger Moore, Elizabeth Taylor) dined there. János Kádár, the party leader himself, regularly dined there with his wife. Sándor Lakatos started playing with his Gypsy orchestra in the downtown restaurant in 1964, and his son Sándor Déki Lakatos started in 1967. The younger Gypsy first violinist was under contract with the Mátyás Cellar for almost four decades, from that year onwards, with some interruptions, making his person and his music inseparable from the iconic restaurant. With the consolidation of the socialist system, the situation of Gypsy musicians improved somewhat, as the single-party state needed them. They became an integral part of state representation and had to do their share in entertaining tourists from abroad. Furthermore, the authorities not only allowed, but also decided to send Hungarian Gypsy musicians to Western European countries or distant continents to bring home the stable foreign currencies they earned there. Against this background and with the aim of obtaining more Western currency for Hungary, the Mátyás Cellar was opened in Vienna in 1971. First Sándor Lakatos, then his son, was asked to play with his Gypsy orchestra in the newly opened Hungarian restaurant. Being in Vienna, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, did not mean complete freedom for the Gypsy musicians. In the Viennese restaurant where he performed every night, Sándor Déki Lakatos had to avoid informants:

at least fifty percent of the waiters in the Mátyás Cellar in Vienna were from the Ministry of the Interior.  It was kind of a secret, although I had one who said quite openly, "I have to go report now." But they were professionals, the cream of the profession. (p. 142)

His wife did not get a passport after repeated attempts, lest they remain abroad. The manager of the Mátyás Cellar "whispered" to Sándor Déki Lakatos that his fiancée would only get a passport if he bought an apartment in Hungary, because the Ministry of the Interior considered it a guarantee that they would come home. In the end, the Gypsy violinist bought an apartment in Budapest and his wife was allowed to go to Vienna with him.

By the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, bled dry by the Cold War, became increasingly apparent, and the Kremlin's grip on the countries of the Eastern Bloc, including Hungary, loosened. In 1989, Hungary underwent a regime change that signalled the end of the state socialist system. One of the notorious scandals and abuses in the years following the regime change was privatization, whereby much state property changed hands. This period, and the decline of Gypsy music were described very expressively by Sándor Déki Lakatos. Privatization also affected the catering industry: restaurants and the Mátyás Cellar became private property. One by one, Gypsy bands were dismissed from the restaurants because the new owners did not consider it economically viable to hire them. Or they were hired on the basis of ad hoc contracts and asked for invoices instead of being provided a stable livelihood. At the same time, esteem for Gypsy musicians declined rapidly, as the Gypsy first violinist stated:

When we went in, we were not allowed to use the main entrance. We spent the ten-minute break per hour at the staff entrance. The door opened directly on to the street, in winter the air was minus ten degrees and we sat there sweating from the performance. We were not allowed to use the paid car parking in front of the restaurant, because the guests needed it. … The manager, a young "genius" who hadn't even been born when I was already playing music in this house [Mátyás Cellar], told me that I wasn't allowed to sit at the customer's table during my break, even if they specifically asked me to. … I asked him that if I didn't know how to behave in a restaurant, how could I have made music here for forty years?

Due to the humiliating conditions, Sándor Déki Lakatos finally felt he had to resign from the Mátyás Cellar 2011, where he had played for nearly 40 years as the celebrated Gypsy first violinist. Pondering the waning of Gypsy music in Hungary, he was optimistic about the fate of the genre because, as he put it, "the talent is there!"

**Ifj. Munczy Béla I. világháborús naplói [Béla Munczy Jr.'s World War I war diaries].** Anita D. Szakács (ed.). Sopron: Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Győr-Moson-Sopron Megye Soproni Levéltára, 2020. 194 pp. ISBN:<PHONE_NUMBER>-54-3

#### Reviewed by Tamás Hajnáczky

In recent years, there has been notable academic interest at the international level in historical sources written by or stemming from Gypsies or Roma organizations from the early twentieth century. The flagship of these research efforts has been the project entitled "Roma Interbellum − Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars," led by Prof. Elena Marushiakova. As a result, numerous publications and studies were published, involving researchers from more than a dozen countries.1 The Hungarian studies have focused on Gypsy musicians and the associations and newspapers they founded, partly based on contemporary interviews, minutes, and documents from Roma people. One of these sources is the publication by Anita D. Szakács, historian and archivist. It is a war diary written by Béla Munczy Jr., a Gypsy musician, when he was on the front lines during the First World War. It has been preserved for posterity by the Hungarian National Archives of Győr-Moson-Sopron County, Sopron, Hungary. It is a rare treasure as there are hardly any sources about the Great War written by a person of Gypsy origin. In her excellent work, the historian has broken this silence by giving a voice to a Gypsy musician of yore. These are the main virtues and novelties of this publication. At the same time, it must be emphasized that it is not only the battlefields of the World War that are written about, but also the conditions, role, and everyday life of Gypsy musicians and Gypsy bands in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

Anita D. Szakács has done an extremely thorough job in publishing the war diary. In about 70 pages she describes the history of the family of the Gypsy musician who wrote the diary and has richly illustrated the book with contemporary photos. Relying on archival sources and contemporary Austrian and Hungarian newspapers, she presents the reader with a detailed account of the eventful past of the Munczy family. According to surviving documents from the late eighteenth century, they settled in Sopron County as "new serfs" and

Tamás Hajnáczky is an ethnic and minority policy expert at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, H-1091 Budapest, Kálvin Square 9 and a senior researcher fellow at the Archiepiscopal College of Veszprém, H-8200 Veszprém, Jutasi Street 18/2. Email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
*Romani Studies* 5, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2024), 140–43 issn 1757-2274 (online)

1. For more information on the project and publications, see "Roma Interbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars," *University of St Andrews*, https://arts. st-andrews.ac.uk/romainterbellum/.

worked the land. By the mid-nineteenth century, sources already describe them as earning their living by playing music. Among the more distant relations there were famous Gypsy first violinists who travelled all over the continent and sometimes even performed for monarchs and princes, even amassing considerable fortunes. The historian has added more than 300 explanatory footnotes to the war diary, and the source publication concludes with a list of abbreviations and an index of place and personal names.

The diary of the Gypsy musician takes the reader into the raw, inhuman reality of the Great War, into the trenches reeking of corpses, human excrement, and rubbish, into the endless cries of the wounded, and the sight of mangled corpses. Béla Munczy witnessed all this first hand, as he was repeatedly deployed at the front or had to carry the dead. Among other things, he wrote of an event when,

about five [shells] hit the trenches and had a terrible effect. One stretcher carrier was said to have been cut in two at the waist (I didn't look at him because I can't bear to look at such things), another (I saw involuntarily) had his right hand cut off and flesh hanging from his thigh and another wound on his back. The poor soul was wailing so much! His hand was hanging from a finger's width of skin. How much it must have hurt. By the time they got him to the aid station he had already bled to death. His name was Bors! …  A real slaughterhouse!" (pp. 105–6)

He reported on the first use of mustard gas in the Great War and the terror it caused among the soldiers. Because of the gas used in combat, they were trained with gas masks and given special training on how to survive a gas attack. Added to this was the war propaganda, with demoralizing pamphlets being dropped from aircraft by the enemy. The "peaceful" days were punctuated by officers shouting orders, which gave the soldiers not a moment's peace. They had to take part in weapon cleaning and firing practice, bayonet fighting, and grenade throwing exercises. This constant rotation of tasks was often supplemented by the cleaning of quarters, the cleaning of clothing, and the inspection by officers.

Not only were the soldiers subjected to the endless horrors of war, witnessing the wounded and the dead, but they also had to endure inadequate food, a lack of drinking water, and harsh living conditions. In his war diary, Béla Munczy gave daily accounts of the meals they received, once or twice mentioning that they were fed deliciously and abundantly, but mostly with a harsh comment, "For lunch there was goulash with barley. Something for animals!" (p. 102), "Dinner was dishwash-water which they called soup." (p. 133), "It was a very poor lunch, a little slop with a few beans and potatoes thrown in" (p. 111). They were regularly given tinned food and hard toast, but

it was not uncommon for their mess kit to be empty at midday. Sometimes they ate cabbage or barley soup for days or weeks, sometimes they only got mouldy bread. In addition, there was a regular shortage of drinking water, so they often resorted to distilled water or the murky water from cisterns. Exhausted by thirst and hunger, they lay their heads down either in the open air, on hard barrack bunks, or in caverns or burrows in the damp ground.

Through Béla Munczy's war diary, we can gain insight not only into the horrors of the First World War, but also into the sometimes privileged, sometimes despised position of Gypsy musicians in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy's army. When Gypsy musicians were conscripted into the army, they were not necessarily assigned to Gypsy bands and were often given weapons instead of instruments. The luckier ones were organized into bands, under the patronage of a senior officer, which gave them many advantages. In this respect, too, the first violinist was the leader, and as he was given the rations of a non-commissioned officer, had the privilege of liaising with officers, and could sometimes be given a lower military rank. It should be noted that the Gypsy bands were not sent to the front line to fight but were allowed to remain in the relative safety of the defence lines. However, they were often not exempt from camp service, which on good days meant carrying food or helping in the kitchen, and on bad days meant hard physical labour, of which the author of the war diary wrote, 'this work of picking and hoeing is not for musicians, it makes the hands turn to wood!" (p. 88) Or when he had to load sacks and wood on a cart all day long, he remarked that it was work for peasants. While on duty Gypsy musicians were also sometimes subjected to the scornful remarks of officers, of which the short dialogue quoted is a typical example,

I was digging in the morning. I had a bit of a disagreement with the platoon leader on duty.  I replied that it was my job. He replied that it was not an honest profession. I protested, of course, and he said, "Perhaps you don't agree?" Of course, I don't! Then he came at me and shoved me in the chest. (p. 168)

The diarist also recalled an incident in which the captain expressly forbade him to be assigned to field duty, but an aide-de-camp ordered him to do his share of the work. The Gypsy bands also had the advantage over the regular soldiers in that they could earn some money in the army by playing for the officers or non-commissioned officers. With this income, they could buy cigarettes or supplement and diversify their meagre, often monotonous meals. They could never know in advance how much the officers would reward them for their music after a night of revelry, and their pay was usually at the whim of the merrymakers. Often, they would get one or two crowns, or a packet of cigarettes, but it was not uncommon for them to get several tens of crowns, and sometimes a few pints of beer, a jug of wine, or a plate of food would be added to their pay. More than once, however, they returned to their lodgings empty-handed and were not even offered a drink. Only occasionally did they play music for the soldiers as part of official events. However, officers in the mood for music were known to order them out of their beds in the middle of the night to sing a few tunes.

The Gypsy musician identity and the conflict between Gypsy, or more precisely, Gypsy musician and peasant (*gádzsó/gadjo*) also appears in Béla Munczy's memoirs. The Gypsy musician often expressed his contempt for the peasants, for example, by strongly criticizing their musical taste, "My nature cannot comprehend the peasants' tune, it's in vain. They sing as if they were cattle bellowing at the top of their lungs" (p.  The peasants didn't even notice, they slept there like at home! And anyone who complains is mocked!" (p. 76) A platoon leader, seeing the conditions, found a bed in another lodging area for the Gypsy musician, and Béla Munczy noted in his diary about this person: 'this is a good man, not a peasant!" (p. 76) The Gypsy first violinist, who held the rank of sergeant, was often stern with the band members, but Munczy did not mind this, as "one would rather take orders from a Roma than from a peasant." (p. 171) However, some officers' antipathy towards Gypsies also surfaced sometimes as they called Gypsy band members "dirty, stinking Gypsies" (p. 173) and slapped them or made disparaging remarks about their origin during drills, "When I reported to him [company commander], he repeated the drill with me a few times.  (p. 172)

In conclusion, Anita D. Szakács's volume is a valuable addition to the libraries of researchers studying Gypsy culture, and it will also be of interest to a broader academic audience. It could serve as a valuable reference book in higher education or as an indispensable reference in the field of popular history.

## *Thematic issue of* Romani studies *35.1/2025*

## *Religion and Roma social inclusion*

*Guest editors*

Stefan Tobler, "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu, Romania<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Marius Parno, West University of Timișoara, Romania<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### *Call for papers*

In many countries, religion continues to be a significant factor in society. The question of what role religion and religious actors have played and continue to play on the long road to social inclusion of the Roma is therefore important.

This can be a positive or a negative role. In the past, religious actors – together with the majority of society – have often contributed to the marginalization or even exclusion from social life of the Roma. The research on the topic of slavery in the Romanian principalities is just one example, suggestive of one of the first periods when this phenomenon began to be debated and legislated in this part of Europe. There are currently very different trends on approaching this field of research. An important role is played by the fact that a significant part of Roma has chosen a new religious affiliation in recent decades, moving towards various protestant churches. This change has an influence on whether and how social inclusion succeeds. The aim of the planned issue of Romani Studies is to illustrate this range of possible attitudes. Several research projects have already been carried out in this sense, including SIRONA 2010 in Slovakia and PARI (2021–2024) in Romania.

We encourage contributions from different disciplines in social sciences and humanities, like history, sociology, religious studies, social work, anthropology, Romani studies. Submitted papers could touch one of the following issues:

## **Final date for abstracts: 15 April 2024**

Only the authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full paper. **Please also include a list of the bibliographic references you are working with.** An invitation to submit a full paper does not constitute a commitment for publication; all papers will be subject to anonymous peer review following the submission. The special issue is planned to be published as open access.

## **Final date for papers: 15 September 2024**

Feel free to contact the guest editors with any queries regarding the issue. If you would like to contribute, please send the title of your contribution and an abstract of the paper by 15 April 2024 to stefan.tobler@ev-theol.ro


**Acknowledgements**

best pendulum clocks ever realized [13] were probably not differentially stable better than 10−9 at the target 104 s averaging time, which means that 60 dB improvement is necessary. Although this is granted on paper by projected S/N and *Q*, actually achieving it is still a big challenge. On the positive side, it is worth pointing out here that energy-induced amplitude changes [11] do not affect frequency if operation is kept at the minimum period isochronous point and that an approach to oscillation support aimed at overcoming pulse stability problems by moving to a sine-wave excitation system similar to that employed in high-stability

**Table 1.** Accuracy budget projection based on 1-m-long 4 μm tungsten fibres, 6-mm-diameter suspension cylindrical profiles, a swing amplitude of 0.01 rad, and a 5 mm tungsten bob. The position of field masses' gravity center is assumed

This said, it can be seen in **Table 1** that most geometrical contributions to uncertainty impose quite loose requirements at the target accuracy level of 10−5, with the sole exception of size and positioning of field masses, which must be guaranteed at high accuracy. While other contributions enjoy relaxed specifications granted by parabolic minima which are specific of this configuration, the latter do not and must comply with specs which are similar to any other big G experiment. However, the expectation that accuracy on G may be limited by control on this single geometry contribution ushers the possibility of doing even better than 10−5 if resources were to become available to improve the accuracy of field masses. A summary of such uncertainties is reported in **Table 1**, as listed in Ref. [1], where the reader can find more details and

A new experiment was presented for the determination of the Newtonian constant. It is based on a time and frequency metrology approach consisting in the measurement of the small frequency difference between two freely oscillating pendulums via their time delay rate of change. A system of dense field masses is moved back and forth between the two, alternately increasing one frequency and reducing the other and vice versa. The increase in resolution by averaging is fast in this case because the limiting noise is white delay noise, which yields *σy*

quartz oscillators will remove one of the worst contributions to instability.

**Effect Relative bias Uncertainty Conditions**

Field masses' density 0 5∙10−6

known with <300 nm uncertainty.

70 Metrology

Shift at bob's vertical position 6.7∙10−4 <10−6 < 50 μm uncertainty in *a*, w Bob's vertical position 0 2∙10−6 0.2 mm full tolerance Bob's lateral position 0 1.7∙10−6 0.2 mm full tolerance

Non-isochronism −1.8∙10−5 < 10−7 Operation at minimum period

Spacing between twin masses 0 6∙10−6 0.4 μm gap uncertainty Field masses' dimensions 0 6∙10−6 1 μm uncertainty

a deeper discussion on accuracy.

**7. Conclusions**

The author wishes to thank for encouragement and discussions Robert Drullinger, Stephan Schlamminger, and Bill Phillips of NIST and Valter Giaretto, Mario Lavella, and Lamberto Rondoni of the Politecnico di Torino. Special thanks go to Luca Maffioli for his master's thesis on the pendulum analysis and to Meccanica Mori of Parma for the TIG welding of the thin steel tubes to the experimental chamber. The author also wishes to acknowledge the support of the US Department of Commerce and NIST through the Precision Measurements Grant Program, Award ID number 70NANB15H348.