The article on the Romani migration from Slovakia to the territory of the Czech Republic is based on the field research realized by the organization „Člověk v tísni" (People in Need) in
the year 2003. Analysis of this probe has shown that the non-asylum Romani migration was in the year 2003 much stronger than the migration of asylum seekers; that in the case of non-asylum migration this was in the first place an innovation migration, while in the case of
asylum seekers it was a so called survival migration. The non-asylum migration was usually a chain migration either of individuals or families and utilises family relations in the country of
origin as well as in the country of final destination. The information is being handed on not only through families, but also in settlements; some of them even specialize in some kind of
migration. The migration of Romani between the Czech Republic and Slovakia is bid-irectional, but more Romani migrate into the Czech Republic then to Slovakia, due to better economic situation there. Romani migration is a dynamic phenomenon and because of its character, based on close family relations of Romani residents on Czech and Slovak territory, it will for sure continue in future.
This interdisciplinary work explores current controversy over the collective identity of Romani and reasons for their social predicament. The first position, associated with Romani studies and identity politics, sees all Romani as a part of an ‘ethnic group’, and connects their plight to ‘racial’ discrimination and intolerance. Some anthropologists and social policy-makers call this ‘primordialism’ and deconstruct the notion of a unitary and natural ‘Romani nation’, maintaining most ghetto inhabitants are only classified as ‘Romani’ and their identity derives from their ‘sociál exclusion’. Matching policies are advocated. The author combines contemporary anthropological approaches to the identity construction with theories of discourse to conceptualize the debate, completing the framework with self-reflection of social science. The method of Critical Discourse Analysis is applied in examining corpora of academic and specialized writing, policy papers and media texts for the discourse construction of identity. Arguing that both discourses are differentiated instantiations of the same diagram of power normalizing ‘troublesome’ subjectivities, the author touches upon the ethical responsibility of scientists deconstructing essentialist representations of identities and circulating their ovm constructs instead.