ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 traces the crystallization of the epistemic community of those who took a leadership position in producing knowledge concerning “Gypsies” and depicting them as a self-isolated group of “primitives,” a key signifier for racializing Roma until now. The sustainable reproduction of racial assimilationism concerning Central European Roma after 1945 stemmed from the multilevel interrogation of national and global agendas concerning surveillance over unreliable populations. Anthropologists from Central European countries operated as the main agents connecting intracountry and international levels of policy making concerning Roma. Emancipated from the pressure of Soviet neo-Lamarckism, Yugoslav scholars played a central role in reestablishing physical anthropology as an intercountry epistemic community in the 1950s; Czech scientists obtained a leading position among Central European colleagues only later – in the second half of the 1960s. Several international initiatives – UNESCO statements aimed at eliminating racism in the 1950s, the global agenda of demographic policy making in the 1960s and the International Biological Program between the 1960s and 1970s – provided an organizational framework for fixing whiteness as a source of the normative gaze upon Roma. Moving beyond the borders of science, this approach directly influenced practices of education and shaped public discourses concerning Roma in Central Europe.
