Influence of István Kemény’s Works on the Hungarian Sociological Gypsy-Research from an Anthropologist’s Point of View

The paper examines the context of power and knowledge dominating cultural anthropology and domestic sociological Roma research from the perspective of the Hungarian Roma research in Cultural Anthropology. The main question of my paper is how these connections influence the questions and interpretation frames of the researches done in this field. The first part of my paper shows the relationship of power and knowledge in Cultural Anthropology, where the heritage of colonization is the most important factor. I focus primarily on the uneven relationships between researcher and informants, and the anthropological writing as a representation of the „Other”. These problems seem very important in the case of Hungarian Roma studies, too. The next section of my paper discusses Hungarian Roma studies in Sociology through Istvan Kemény’s works that I consider paradigmatic in the field. The area of Roma studies in Hungarian Sociology typically focuses on the relations between power and knowledge, which offer a different politicization than that in Anthropology. The Roma studies of Kemény can be seen as a criticism towards the state socialist system. I claim that this kind of criticism towards the system has determined the perspectives, questions and frames of Roma studies in Sociology. My paper shows that due to these determinations, a lot of important problems have remained invisible for research in this field.