Country of residence

Slovakia

Brief introduction

Doctoral student, Institute of Ethnology, Slovak Academy of Sciences

Education

MA in Ethnology 2011, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Philosophical Faculty, Comenius University, Bratislava

Academic profile

My current work deals with a comparison of two Slovak minorities: Roma and Jew. Until 2011 I devoted to pursue a structure of hierarchical relations within a community on an example of Roma ethnic minority group. I depicted and explained the current lifestyles of this group, community constituting elements and inner group member bounds. My purpose was to study identity and find group member attitudes to cohabitation. My intention was to point moments when authorities and their function surfaces. Material basis of the work is an anthropological terrain research – participating observation and semi-structured interviews. I tried to verify that the length of cohabitation of a territorially closed group facilitates an improved and eased mutual communication. I tried to distinguish between validated authority competency and enforced authority. Both might open a realm for mercenary contracts, supervision and takeover of a responsibility for the others. Persons, between which proceeds a capital distribution tend to constitute exclusive ties, out of which is the rest expelled. The uniqueness of my work is to dwell in an intimate insight into otherwise conservatively private community, whereas the structure of authorities is often deliberately concealed as a protection of this small group in the context of an extraordinary firm community.

Publications

• Bachelor thesis: The relationship between majority and minority on an example of a village and her Roma settlement
• Master thesis: Authority structure in the separated Roma community
• Kusá, M.: Die fahrende Bevölkerung: Zigeuner 2010

Keywords

Ethnicity, social network, community, Roma, Jews

Contact

magdalenakusa@gmail.com browse members list