Introduction

This chapter discusses local articulations of global inequalities in relation to the local social hierarchies that reproduce the position of the inferior other and assign it obstinately to Roma populations. These hierarchies consolidate and legitimize themselves through racializing practices and repertoires of representation of Roma people as essentially inferior others. In Rotoieni, the north-eastern Romanian town I discuss here, the inferiority projected onto Roma bodies and the spaces they inhabit is often articulated locally in terms of olfactory otherness. I reflect on dominant sociocultural norms as conveyed through olfactory politics, taking into consideration the historical and sociocultural elaboration of the olfactory as ‘the most denigrated sensory domain of modernity’ (Howes 2006: 169). The chapter's main focus is on how Roma women deal with and negotiate these dominant norms in a context in which olfactory politics contribute to the reproduction of social hierarchies.

My contribution to this volume comes from this chapter's discussion of dominant norms and the ways in which they impinge upon lives marked by inequality, thus reproducing and adding to inequality. In a first step, I outline the circumstances in which European Roma have been constructed as essentialized others and discuss how inequalities derived from these circumstances have shaped related local manifestations. I then look at Roma women's engagement with the domestic space and their engagement in the production of liveable places of belonging. I discuss in particular two domestic activities: the practice of bleaching the interior walls of their houses and the practice of hanging wall carpets. As a final step in my argument, I discuss how Roma women deal with the dominant norms concerning the olfactory in the particular local context of Rotoieni.

Arjun Appadurai (2004), who defines poverty as ‘inequality materialized’ (64), points out the ambivalent relationship that the excluded, the disadvantaged and the marginal have to the dominant cultural norms in the societies in which they live (ibid.: 65). He argues that these people are encouraged, and I would add expected, to subscribe to norms that underpin their own degradation, undermine their dignity and exacerbate their inequality further (ibid.: 65–66). Noting how dominant norms constitute one way in which global inequalities manifest locally, this chapter concludes that global inequalities impinge on the domestic sphere which, at the same time, is the arena where Roma women both reshuffle and negotiate those dominant norms.