ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 brings into focus the next generation of analogies between Roma, whiteness and educability developed by scholars from the perspective of recapitulation theory, which achieved its absolute monopolistic position in European race science between the 1890s and the 1920s. The core aspect of recapitulation theory is a division of individuals into “savages,” “barbarians” and the “civilized,” applied to Central Europe (especially its “colonial” or postcolonial past sentenced as in-betweenness in the global racial order) to indicate the region as neither white nor non-white. This ambiguous status was either proven or contested within the anthropological research on “White Gypsies” – those whose anthropological profile provoked racially minded scholars to generate analogies between Roma and Slavs. In terms of adaptation, the racialization of Roma in Central Europe in the early twentieth century moved from the single-track language of reproducing the Grellmannian approach to a multitrack medium for producing new and more complex knowledge. The increase in the variety of approaches toward the racial definition of Roma was determined by the pathways taken to indicate the position of peripheral Europe in the global racial order.
