Presentations of Romanies in the Czech Media: On Category Work in Television Debates

This article concerns categorizations of Romanies in Czech media. We analysed four television debates which were broadcast in the Czech Republic between 1990 and 1995. All of them concerned Romanies, and Czechs and Romanies participated in each of them. The analytic technique we used was membership categorization analysis (MCA), associated with Sacks (1992), and with contemporary ethnomethodology. Our analysis focused on how descriptions of Romanies were used and warranted, and how the membership categorizations both changed in arguments and resisted change. We found that participants did not simply describe Romanies, they warranted the descriptions and, in doing so, presented some of the descriptions as matters of common knowledge and others as facts. Not all `common knowledge' of Romanies was, however, held in common by both Czechs and Romanies. Czechs know Romanies as those who do not live like normal people, who create problems and commit crimes, but the facts about Romanies as unique people with a valid form of life are only known to Romanies.