“Struggle” for Trust – Unintended Consequences of an “Integration Project”

Abstract

This article has resulted from multiple years of cooperation of the research team Bittnerová, Doubek, and Levínská that examines issues related to Roma education in the context of social exclusion. Its main topic is to search for an understanding and interpretation of the failure of the project aiming to develop a social centre intended to serve as a basis for providing social services to needy residents of the researched site. The failure of “integration” is not just the refusal of embracing intercultural differences but the symbolic refusal of the impoverished status of the whole town, with the local Roma being the most glaring symbol of that impoverishment. This theoretical point is the theory of cultural models of Strauss and Quinn. “Romahood” is seen as a radial family resemblance category driven by a prototype in the context of distributed culture.