ABSTRACT
The book’s historical ethnography of social power aimed at producing an alternative, critical form of knowledge distinct from that produced by the state and transnational organisations of development (e.g. WB, UNDP, EU), which seem to bring under the same discourse of governance distinct Roma populations who experience different socio-economic conditions, leadership and forms of selfgovernment. Fixed categories (e.g. ‘exclusion‚ ‘marginalisation’, ‘poverty’) establish symbolic power, in Bourdieu’s (1991) words, relations of subordination in relation to a majority and the state, which are easily transformed into categories of governance of the subaltern, constituting the ‘governed’.
