European Educational Research Journal, Volume 3, Number 3, 2004

Cultural Intersections:
the life story of a Roma cultural mediator

FRANCESCA GOBBO
University of Turin, Italy

ABSTRACT The article presents the life story of a young Roma cultural
mediator who narrates (1) her life and professional decisions, still rather
uncommon among young Roma women, and (2) the impact of her education
and work experiences and achievements on her self perception. The narratives,
from which the life story emerges, express the young Romas efforts to
interweave two different cultural perspectives; furthermore they emphasize how
cultural diversity can be a way to be and to relate to others. The life story is told
as a personal project negotiated between the Roma and the Gag cultural
heritages; the cultural constraints within and without cultural boundaries are
highlighted, while character traits and imagination are presented as the main
turning points in the young womans life.

Introduction
Traditionally a country of immigration, since the 1990s Italy has been currently
defined as a multicultural society owing to the growing number of immigrants
and refugees from near and faraway countries: their ways of life and worship,
language and physical traits are deemed to have introduced diversity into
Italian culture and society. In turn, such an acknowledgement has made a
number of Italians sensitive to other forms of diversity, particularly that of
long-established local minorities such as the nomadic groups that we sedentary
people call Gypsies.
In an effort to assess and answer the needs of immigrants, refugees, and
their families, many local governments are relying more and more on the
multiple skills of cultural mediators, and thus they will agree to support and
organize courses for the training of immigrants, refugees and local minorities in
the field of cultural mediation together with non-profit governmental
associations. Most cultural mediators are from Northern Africa, South America
and Eastern Europe, but some Roma and Sinti have also participated in the

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training and now work as interface between refugee Roma families from
former Jugoslavia and the city administrations, the schools, the national health
service, and so on.
In addition to cultural mediation training and job opportunities, some
local governments and/or non governmental organizations promote
intercultural education workshops or in-service training courses: the targets are
teachers as well as high school students who are invited to participate and to
learn about diversity and the prejudices against it obtaining both at the local
and national level. Almost always, young university graduates and some
cultural mediators are responsible for carrying out the intercultural education
projects and for evaluating the outcomes of their efforts; in turn, in-service
training sessions are organized from time to time for those who volunteer as
out-of-school (i.e. community) educators.

The Research Project

Where it All Began: the in-service training course as an interactional context
The above policies and the local educational institutions that make their
implementation possible can be found in most Italian cities and towns, though
Roma and/or Sinti cultural mediators most often work in urban areas where
old and new (i.e. refugees) Gypsy population gathers, such as Venice, Milan,
Turin, Florence, Rome, Naples, among others. Having had the opportunity to
meet some Roma cultural mediators during an in-service training course, I
decided I would ask one of them a considerably articulate young Roma to
narrate how she became a professional person and how she managed to
straddle two worlds in what seemed to me a successful way. My request was
made toward the end of the course when, after expressing sincere appreciation
for what she had contributed to it, I explained I was interested in understanding
(i) what changes in her life had been and had come about, (ii) what effects (if
any) they have had on her self perception both as an individual and a member
of a group that might hold a preferred image of a culturally appropriate future,
(iii) how was competence and practice in Italian culture achieved so as to
complement professional competence and practice as a mediator. The life story
approach seemed particularly suited to gain access to the way ... people
understand themselves as it is founded on the capacity to listen to them when
they speak in their own voice (Scheffler, 1991). Special attention has been
given to the narrators point of view. It is that which governs the storys
development together with her beliefs and desires, while her vocabulary
shapes the episodes recounted and defines the current problem to be faced
(Scheffler, 1991).
Since narratives always imply an audience (albeit as small as one, see
Wolcott, 1994) and an interpretive relation, the in-service training meetings
need to be briefly taken into consideration as they were providing an
interesting though not unexpected interactional context even before the life

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story project started. The first time I met the course participants, I was told that
one of the Roma cultural mediators invited to the meeting had called to inform
she was unable to do so because of an emergency at one of the so called
nomads campsites where she also works. I had not met her yet and I
commented it was a pity she was not with us; having only read books about
her culture, I counted on her intimate knowledge of Roma way of life to
confirm, to update or to criticize what I had learned, and to highlight current
cultural conflicts or changes, if that was the case.
At the next meeting Sanela [1] arrived on time and explained what had
prevented her from joining us the week before. She is a thin, young woman in
her mid-twenties who dresses and looks like other young women of her age.
Only her deep, raspy voice makes one guess her family comes from former
Yugoslavia. She waited to speak until almost the end of the meeting and when
she did, it was with a very good command of Italian and a sophisticated
vocabulary. If she was used to speaking about her people and culture in front of
high school students who would often hurl unpleasant questions at her during
the intercultural education workshops, she must have done so with a skill
equal, if not superior, to that of those young native speakers. Since one of the
meetings main goals was to assess how effective every workshop educator had
been in terms of making students understand Roma culture and reflect on the
prejudices they might have about it, it was quickly evident that the young
Roma had been successful at those tasks an achievement that all the other
educators readily acknowledged and praised.
As for myself, I wondered about her education: she had obviously
attended school but had she gone beyond compulsory schooling (age 6-14)?
From the way she spoke, I guessed she had, yet I could not be sure:
anthropological studies on the Roma I had read stated that it is not usual for an
adolescent Roma to choose longer schooling instead of marriage and
childbearing.
Because of my role in the meetings, I was expected to guide the
participants to look at everyday experience as a culturally shaped one. Because
none of them had taken a course in cultural anthropology, I decided to avoid
technical terms and invited everyone to present, to compare and to discuss the
cultural differences and similarities they had encountered in everyday life. By
doing so, I hoped that possible differences in education would play such a
limited role that none (and Sanela, in particular) might feel marginal to the
ongoing conversation.
At that point, my own interaction with her was already well under way,
and I was quite aware that such an interaction was fuelled by prejudices
cloaked in my bookish knowledge, on the one hand, and, on the other, by my
expectations of what she would tell us: she had been assigned the role of the
expert insider, in the company of whom much ethnographic research was,
and often still is, carried out.[2] Yet, even though a play of us and them had
already begun to be played (thanks to the laudable in-service training course),

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the authoritative and articulate way Sanela spoke about her people and culture
made her both a member of them and us.
She could not attend all the scheduled meetings, but whenever she came
she would intervene as a Roma who had mastered much of the cultural world-
view that we claim as ours. In fact it was soon clear to me that she was telling
us aspects of Roma culture according to a presentation format she must have
successfully tried in her own workshops with students. Such a format allowed
her to situate herself-as-a-narrator at a special distance from the we/us Roma
acting in her presentation: in the interactional context of our meetings, she was
the knowledgeable guest who was also constructing (and giving us) an image of
herself as a culturally intersected individual who is aware of the different facets
which composed her identity.
In such meetings, I realized that we-as-her-audience at the same time
played the role of the other the Gag, that is. Each of us could see herself-as-
other in the mirror her words held in front of us, though it must not be
overlooked as I already hinted that the educational tour toward
understanding she led us into was organized according to conventional steps
and goals that had been established by, and within, our culture, not hers.

Telling Ones Story as a Cultural Mediator to an Intercultural Educator

After Sanela agreed to do the life story project, we met three times outside the
in-service training course during a period of about a month and a half. Given
her work commitments, the first two meetings were rather hurried, lasting
about one hour each, and I was not allowed to tape the conversation but only
to take written notes. Instead, the last meeting took place on a Saturday and it
was almost a day long affair: we met for a pizza, went to a park, discussed the
difficulties in finding an apartment we both had, visited one of the citys
landmarks, went to the market to buy a bathing suit for her summer vacations,
drank a few coffees, and eventually sat down in another park for a conversation
that lasted almost two hours.
The three narratives of different length (and recorded at different times)
provide an opportunity to notice how a life story is subject to revision by its
narrator and it thus is a discontinuous oral unit (Linde, 1993). In particular, the
third narrative gives interesting indications on a strategy that uses Roma
cultural ways to interpret why it is possible, indeed legitimate, to explore, to
learn and to live in another cultural world, namely ours.
At the first meeting Sanela didnt even wait for the two of us to sit down
that she blurted: we two live in two different worlds.[3] When I asked her to
explain the meaning of the sentence, she answered in an unexpected way,
namely by referring to a young man she knows: he is a Roma, but she felt he is
neither fish nor fowl. At school, his classmates called him a Gypsy, at home he
was called a Gag. As in a mirror, the young mans ambiguous image seemed
to reflect the narrators one and prompted her to make sense of the situation
thanks to other metaphors: Sanela feels as if she were a bridge, better yet a

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phone through which cultural differences can be made to communicate with

each other.
Along the process of distinguishing and connecting cultures that
characterizes at least part of her everyday life (Im my own cultural mediator
she added), she learned to appreciate the way the Gag face and resolve
conflicts: the Gag, theyre able to discuss problems; instead, the Roma cannot
do that, they quarrel, they fight. While they [the Roma] say theyve more
freedom than the Gag, it isnt really so ... as soon as one of them learns
anything about another the news get spread around. Privacy and ability to
argue, rather than gossip and violence, are the positive cultural traits and
attitudes Sanela singles out within Gag culture. Additionally, her training as a
cultural mediator also allows her to present them relativistically: arguing is
substantially different from fighting yet structurally similar to it, when the
Roma idiomatic ways are juxtaposed to the Gag cultural idiom.
In the sentences I jotted down quickly but accurately, she sounded as if
the Gags more desirable ways of dealing with personal and interpersonal
relations could have been (and still are) a good reason for crossing the cultural
divide. However, an even better reason was given to me during our second
meeting, when she translated her personal and professional projects into a
Roma traditional saying: pang naj nai sa isti.[4] The saying Sanela invited me
to write down checking afterwards if I had spelled the words correctly was
presented as an instance of Roma lore, but it was also a cautionary measure to
make this Gag listener remember the difference between the collective
dimension of culture and a persons singular life developing from the choices
that to a greater or lesser extent can be made.
The narrative of the mediation Sanela was weaving between those two
different worlds took a sharp turn the third time we met: before the narrative
started, she had complained about the various kinds of obstacles she kept
metaphorically bumping into, but she had also emphasized how she could
count on her friends for help and support. Unlike the previous two meetings,
she expressed doubts about reaching a satisfactory independence soon, and she
no longer spoke of two worlds, but of two different social classes. Also, she
mentioned that at times she felt as an outsider to the world she had been born
into, and worried about achieving the goals she had set for herself. With such
emotions coming to the foreground, it is probably not surprising that the
revision she made in her life story only partially supports the originally
idealized reasons (privacy, argumentation) for her professional and life choices.
Instead she connected the latter to the Roma culture and to her familys
upbringing, and more specifically to the Romas relation with what she called
reality, namely the way things are.
At the beginning of the taped narrative, I had asked my earlier question
again (Why did you say youre between two worlds?) and her answer
developed in an interesting direction: at first it was because my culture is
different, with its own ways, customs, language, yours is another one, so
necessarily there are two worlds, two social classes. Then, in reply to a long

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interjection of mine (But one could choose to stay in ones world. How did it
happen that you moved into a different one, better, that you keep moving
between one and the other?), she introduced a character trait (Linde, 1993) that
accounts both for her major life turn and for perceiving herself as different: I
liked to study and unfortunately I must admit that curiosity is an ugly beast.
Of course, I wanted to know if curiosity was part of Roma culture.
Sanela laughed: they are the most curious persons in the world. ... But like
anywhere else, I think, because curiosity is gossip. In my case, it meant
knowledge. I commented that in fact curiosity seemed to have a very
different meaning for her. She sounded very serious then, as if the matter was
of the uttermost concern to her: its different. Its different, its different, but
then individuals, each individual, is different, each has its own mind, each has
its own reasons, and so I cannot say that they are all the same, that curiosity
means the same for all of them, perhaps its the way I look at it. But in my case
its knowledge, which is quite similar [to curiosity] if you think about it, after all
its wanting to know how it went, maybe I want to know in order to learn.
Sanela qualifies her own singularity and the source of her life turns in
terms of a desire to know, a restless drive toward knowledge; yet she also
interprets them as connected to the collective cultural dimension since they
translate a Roma attitude and behavior into what makes her, and her life,
distinctive. It is of further interest that in her narrative she indicates the Roma
by the pronoun they: though she is aware of the risk of generalizing about her
people (I cannot say that they are all the same, that curiosity means the same
for all of them) and is also wary of her own point of view (perhaps its the way
I look at it), the linguistic choice provides Sanela with a degree of formal
distance from her group and culture (they and I), and highlights what is here at
stake for her a capacity to translate the original ties and ways into a life and an
identity she can call her own.

The Life Story as a Crossroad of Personal and Sociocultural Meanings

Stressing the role of curiosity in her life had led Sanela to stress the
importance of learning for her. I was ready to listen to her school experience,
but, first, I had to follow her into what at first appeared as a detour: she
portrayed herself as slow according to Roma standards and expectations. Is
this new character trait seemingly in contradiction with the previous one? As it
will be seen, her slowness is to be interpreted as a way to stress both the two
cultures interdependence and their necessary difference: Im a really strange
case because Im very slow ... Ive been like this longer than anybody else
[among the Roma], I needed more time to understand things [concerning the
future of a young Roma]. In referring the way her Gag and Roma girl friends
look at her behavior and attitude, she sounded amused: they say [to me]
maybe youre a Gagg, youve been kidnapped from the cradle, they [the
Roma] brought you among the Roma, or they exchanged you with another
baby at the hospital.

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The fact that Sanela is a Roma has to be taken into account even if it
means bringing stereotypes and prejudices to the forefront: if the other
contributes to the definition of self in a crucial way, this constitutive
interdependence takes on a special relevance when it concerns the Roma
because it results in a form of explicit hierarchical opposition each group is
aware of. Anthropologists Piasere (1996) and Gomes (1997) posit that the Roma
represent the other by definition for the sedentary populations among which
they came to stay for a while before resuming travelling, and who call them
Gypsies ignoring the deep differences existing between one nomadic group
and another. Conversely, Roma, Xoraxan, Sinti, Kalderash and so on, will call
us-as-others by the name of Gag, in fact they will consider us as the other
(Piasere, 1991). As I learned from another life story, if Gag usually keep
Gypsies at a safe distance, Roma and other groups will make sure that social
interaction with Gag will not ensue in personal and collective pollution
(Gobbo, 2003a).
Growing up as a Roma child, Sanela could not but be confronted with
Gag culture, look at it from the outsiders status the Gag historically assign to
the Roma, and learn that such status was going to be a part of her identity she
would have to reckon with, and that it could not but shape the narrative of her
life if someone would ask her for one. As a child she might even have learned
to watch out for Gag ways: perhaps she listened to family members and
campsite residents utter warnings such as beware of the Gag, they come to
kidnap our children. I may add that such warnings based on the fact that,
according to their evaluation, social assistants might decide to take a child away
from the family context (Gobbo, 2003a) find an exact replica in the ones
resonating among the Gag beware of the Gypsies, they come to kidnap our
children that are meant to discipline unruly children by scaring them.
Sanela resorts to this kind of lore when she explains the character trait
that makes her appear different both to Roma and Gag: to the Gag I am
strange, because I dont think as a Roma. I feel sorry when they make these
comments, I sincerely dont know why, but in the end I believe that everyone
is made her or his own way. ... For instance, some days ago they [the Roma]
saw me in a long skirt right now [in summer] I tend to wear long dresses and
skirts and so they say at last, youve decided to be on our side. How come?
My Gag friend said to them you dont understand, in summer she wears long
skirts because they are cooler, instead in winter she wears pants. In other
words, she hasnt changed, shes nuts as always. What a pity, said the Roma
laughing, and I felt disappointed. Since I wondered aloud if her friends are
stereotyping her, she replied by reformulating what she had just said: no, they
look at me as some kind of nuts, a Roma who wants to become a Gagi, its as
if an alien wanted to become an earthling.
However the Roma dont prevent anyone from leaving the group, but
when one decides to do so, she/he is given a choice: to stay either with us [the
Roma] or with them [the Gag], [because] its very difficult to be in between.
Which is what is happening to me: I couldnt take it any longer. The job has

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provided her with a professional identity (I work from morning to evening)

and with a taste for doing things on her own (to go out with her girlfriends, to
go on vacation by herself, to travel across Italy); the latter, and the ensuing
behavior, is criticized by the local Roma community because it goes counter to
cultural and gender expectations.
Because she stressed she had decided not to follow those cultural
expectations, I then asked her to tell me what it meant to grow up as a Roma
child: she described the child she had been as torn in half, and used her school
experience to illustrate what growing up meant for her. School provided her
with the role of the outsider: I was never seated at my desk but I was always
outside the classroom. I could not sit still and this is peculiar of the Roma. No
[Roma] child can endure staying inside the classroom, not one. If they sit still,
then when they arrive home they sort of explode. Sometimes they do this in
the classroom as well. And some teachers treat them as if they were ... badly
educated, uncivilized, without culture, but its because they are locked inside,
because we are used to stay outside, thats the way we grew up.
But Sanela also sounded wary of the benign attitude some other teachers
might show towards Roma and Sinti children: in this case, the latter are not
assigned the same tasks as their classmates and are instead often invited to
draw, to play or to take a break outside the classroom. She had also received
sheets of paper to draw on, sometimes I would sit outside the classroom while
those inside were working hard, I used to watch what they were doing by
peeping through a crack in the door. ... Once I had finished my drawing I used
to slide the sheets under the door ... and then I would take a tour of the school
all by myself. It seemed I could do as I pleased and the teachers never objected.
No one ever said to me sit there and work!. They dont do it, so the child
becomes used to easy tasks and to very limited expectations on the part of the
teacher.[5]
The pupil Sanela perceived the marginal status school assigned to Roma
children and the lack of expectations teachers had for them; that experience is
vividly remembered in her narrative and the cultural mediator can still perceive
it when she visits classrooms to try and solve problems together with teachers.
Because of her current job, she expanded the objective of the narrative (a life
story of her educational and professional achievements) to address the status of
Roma pupils in general: once more she did this by alternating pronouns
(they/I), this time to indicate how her identification had been constructed
through the acknowledgement of exclusion hers and others. Not
surprisingly, the past tense and the we/I pronouns she uses to recollect her
past school experience slid almost naturally into they/the children she now
works with, and into the present tense. In her story, almost paradoxically but
not surprisingly, the educational experience becomes an effective barrier to
learning and inclusion for most Roma pupils, because it sets the pupils apart, it
teaches them to be by themselves, to feel more comfortable that way, and to
remain attached to their ascribed identity.

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For Sanela things didnt quite go that way, though: I found myself caught
in between [the Roma and the teachers, each group thinking ill of the other]
because at last I felt it was a pleasure to learn and I owe this to my support
teachers! They were so patient because, frankly, we were unruly. But they held
on: if we wanted to study they would have us do just what the other children
did. They would give us units to work on and they helped us to become
better. Though she portrays herself as an outsider (literally outside the
classroom most of the times), she also sees herself as a pupil who insisted on
having her right to education respected: her drawings sent to the class under
the door are messages coming from her determination to be included, while
the learning she achieves with her beloved support teachers proves her ability
to turn a socially defined limitation into an opportunity to succeed and to
appreciate knowledge.
Precisely at this point of her narrative, Sanela offered a somewhat
unexpected interpretation of the role of Roma culture in activating and
sustaining school attendance: it was her older sister who wanted me and my
little sisters to go to school. It was too much of an effort to take care of the
three of us. She was eighteen and she had to care for the little ones. I was ten
years younger than she, and there were two other younger sisters. In our
culture one starts taking care of younger siblings when one is about ten, so one
learns to do so early enough. This way, when eventually one decides to get
married, she already knows how to care for them. The parents goal is that the
older girls begin to think as responsible adults do, but even if this is her
cultures expectations, she didnt like the prospect, unlike her sister (a very
patient person): I didnt want to stay with them [her younger siblings], I
would cuddle them, play with them for half an hour, at most, but not any
longer.
Since I asked her what it meant for Roma teenagers to be treated as
responsible adults, Sanela answered me by pointing out the chasm she sees
between Roma and Gag culture on how to bring up children and to make
them into adults. She acknowledged that shunning the hard, often violent side
of reality, and shielding the young from it as the Gag do can be a pleasing
and attractive choice, but if one looks at it from a different cultural perspective
(the Romas) such choice has no educational value. Implicitly recognizing that
the Gag cannot always count on democratic and peaceful ways to prevail in
everyday life, Sanela did not believe (nor did she approve of) that deprecating
and eschewing violence can be a good way to educate the young to become
adults.
By contrast, Sanela emphasized the Roma belief that reality is the way it
is and oned better face it since it is a more effective educational means: this is
the way the world is, why pretend with young people violence does not exist?
... They must learn by themselves, by seeing.[Gag] parents must understand
that a child cannot be kept as a China doll. With us it is different: children live
as if they were China dolls until they are seven or eight, but afterwards they
must be let free. When he is nine or ten, if there is a fight [in the campsite], his

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parents arent likely to cover his eyes, instead they tell him to look. Its normal
for two people not to agree on something. ... The world is dangerous ... If you
hide this [from the children], how are they ever going to understand that it is
like that? ... This is why there are two worlds [the Romas and the Gags] and
Im aware of this now. But before, I longed for the other world, [children there]
were more cuddled, more protected, and maybe I wished to be protected. ...
With us, it isnt so. There is no time, and this is why I longed to be on the other
side. But now I realize I was wrong, and there is bitterness in my words. From
her narrative, in Roma culture there is no time to have time for oneself in
the sense of being able to evaluate what choices can be made within the
cultural framework a person is born into; on the contrary, such framework
and thus the collective dimension is thought to prevail precisely because
there is no time.
Later, when I transcribed the narrative, I realized that my next question
(are emotions more controlled among the Gag than among the Roma?)
could be perceived as requiring the reflective stance just attributed to the other
side, but Sanela would not let herself be detoured; in fact, she seemed to think
an example was needed that could help me understand [6] the crucial point she
was trying to make. Thus she compared the two different worlds (and the two
different philosophies characterizing them) by what seemed a touching
metaphor to me: take a little bird, its bad to put it in a cage. A little bird is
made to fly. Fish is for the water, human beings are for the earth. If there is a
shark awaiting for someone, maybe it was meant to happen, it cant be kept at
bay forever. Its no good, no good. Because, if the little bird is kept in a cage,
how does it know it has wings to fly? How? Therefore its wrong.
As her story shows, Sanela believed she had to try her wings, and the
narrative that followed introduced what she defined as her major turning point
in her life. Curiously enough, such an event emerged from a question of mine
that seemed off the point, when compared with her answer. After remarking
how good her Italian was, and commenting she had a knack for acting [7], I had
asked her about books she had read in school, and whether or not she liked
reading: we were invited to read [by the good teachers in primary school], but
I didnt like it. When I was about sixteen I was hospitalized for a minor surgery.
There I met a woman doctor I instinctively liked, and eventually we became
friends. ... She gave me books to read and she gave me the most beautiful one I
ever read, and she told me she was like that in her childhood ... and this book, I
still love it very very much. Its Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Its so very beautiful!
The book is about a seagull but in fact it talks of a human being who feels, who
knows hes different from others of his kind. I tell you again: its the story of the
little bird, if it is not let to fly how will it know it has wings and he has them to
fly? I kept saying to myself if I get married, if my life becomes just like anybody
elses life, who will know if I can be of any use, of any help in this world, or if
Ill end up in a long skirt, with kids and a husband to care for.
Not sure I remembered Jonathans story (Bach, 1970), I started to say
Jonathan but Sanela continued: he was special! I was impressed by him

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because I could find a part of myself in that character. It was like looking at
myself in a mirror, and so I felt between two worlds, I kept reading and re-
reading the book. I was taken by it: the first time one reads just to read, the
second time one reads to understand the meaning of the words. ... I felt I must
not stop, [or] Ill be twenty five and Ill be like the others. ... I said lets try,
lets give it a try and make some changes within myself and the community.
But it didnt work. Now that Ive left [the campsite], that Im outside [my
family], it feels as if Im watching things from a window ... The other side [the
Roma] means a quiet life, a family life ... I realize this now, I long for it, but
things went in another direction. And yet there were some who had succeeded.
I thought I could try ... Why not?.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull soaring higher and higher in the sky provides
an example of how crucial imagination is for all of us in order to think of other
life options, of different life prospects each of us-as-agents can first envisage and
then try to enact (Greene, 1978; Hanson, 1986; Appiah, 1996; Nussbaum, 1997).
Powerful imaginary characters can indeed inspire a person who believes
her/his human potential need not be restricted to a cultures so called script
(Gobbo, 2003b, 2004). However, if Sanela acknowledged the role of Jonathan
Livingston Seagull in her life and life choices, she did not ignore the difference
between imagining a different world or a different self, and an everyday
experience where a persons projects can be a lonely endeavor and a persons
own voice will have to reckon with its own perceived fragility.
The singularity of Sanelas life story is narrated by weaving personal
choices (that move her away from the culture she was inculturated in and to
the Gags way of life and values) together with a positive stance towards
selected aspects of Roma culture and a limited acceptance of established
community canons and expectations. In her narrative, change does not obtain
because bridges have been severed (as the metaphor goes) behind this young
Roma, but rather because she sounds willing to build new ones and to restore
others. Out of metaphor, in this way she maintains a more than meaningful
connection with the Roma tradition in which and not just in the Gag one, as
the modernization/acculturation perspective would have Sanela says she
finds reasons and (at times) support for what shes accomplished already and
for what she plans to accomplish regardless of the efforts and pain it will exact
from her: when I was a kid I was told that Cain was our forefather ... and that
because of what he had done, the Roma will never have a homeland. We dont
even have a flag ... it just does not exists. ... Ad yet, I said to myself I wanted to
try, I went on studying, I wanted to get a high school diploma, but it was as if
problems and obstacles kept multiplying themselves: one time, it was my
classmates, the other time it was a teacher. I didnt get along with some of the
teachers ... In the end I felt as if a spell had been put on me.
Perhaps it is not by chance that Sanela narrated her post-primary school
career as an epic: first of all, there was her struggle against familys expectations
that she would marry soon and settle along the well established cultural lines.
She negotiated further schooling by following the accepted Roma rules (usually

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applying to boys mostly): she would skip the three years middle school (so as
not to cause anxiety to her parents) and attend the one year adults course
established about 25 years ago to upgrade the Italian working class education.
She narrated this experience in enthusiastic terms and as one of the major
achievements in her life: after receiving the diploma, she was so determined to
go on to high school that she applied to as many different schools as possible, in
as many different towns as possible. She did so without consulting with anyone
but by making inquiries instead all by herself about the kind of school to
attend. Later on, after having left high school, she decided to enrol in a private
school for community work more or less the same way: having taken her
brother to the hospital, by chance her attention was attracted by a brochure left
on a table that described the school and the goals it had. Reading the brochure
made Sanela want to get a training that could help her be of some use, of some
help in this world. As for the high school experience, it meant another round
of struggles: in her narrative, Sanela portrays herself as a good student who
strives hard to meet the school standards in terms of learning and manners
(showing how knowledgeable she is about the culture of the school), and who
is able to gain the support and the appreciation of many teachers willing to
spend some of their free time to help her with school work, on the one hand.
On the other hand, she finds herself up against more prejudices and tokenism
than she had expected and that say more about us than about her
understandable missteps. In fact, she met again that benign attitude that upset
her so much today when she thinks about her primary school years: others
who were not my teacher would sometimes come to chat with me, because to
them it was strange to have a Gypsy as one of the school students. ... The
whole school came to me. ... By now, Im used to it.

Conclusions
As Linde (1993) points out, a life story and its coherence are created by
interconnecting many linguistic and social levels. A life story besides
expressing ones sense of self is a very important means by which we
communicate our sense of self to others, or negotiate it with others. Life stories
are also used to claim or to negotiate group membership and to demonstrate
we can follow a groups moral standards; they involve large scale systems of
social understandings; and, finally, they teach us about the dialectical
relationship between culture, society and the individual (Ferrarotti, 1981;
Olangero & Saraceno, 1993).
In Sanelas life story, not only are the meanings of two different cultural
worlds intertwined so as to form a new original pattern, but the revisions and
changes she subjects them depend on the cultural frame she chooses to lean on.
Though some new meanings are drawn from the other side the Gags other
new ones depend on her friendlier interpretation of Roma culture. In her third
narrative, she makes the greatest effort to show that her life project can also be
understood in terms of Roma culture, by squarely setting the character traits

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she evokes and describes within it. Furthermore, if a life storys adequate
causality is rooted in a character trait itself rooted back in time (Linde, 1993), I
would say that in this case the time depth lies in the cultural reinterpretation
Sanela makes. Yet, it should not be overlooked the role imagination plays in
the process of becoming aware of herself-as-an-individual, of herself as
someone with projects and goals. The latter are presented through a story
that of Jonathan Livingston Seagull in the story, an effective narrative device
that highlights a singular aspect of her life, on the one hand, and, on the other,
it makes us listeners, and readers, wonder how many might have shared the
narrators imaginary identification.
Sanelas narrative moves between two cultural orientations that at
different times command either her criticism or her appreciation. Because of
her desire to know and her yearning for time, she rewards Gag culture: in
your culture there is such a thing as an adolescent. With us, instead, you live as
a child up to a certain day and then you are an adult not an adolescent. A
stigmatized trait being slow according to Roma cultural standards turns
into what can make her pass as a member of the other culture, namely an
adolescent, and redefine her behavior according to Gag criteria. In fact, what
can be a matter of embarrassment to her people, for Gag it becomes a
recognizable, legitimate condition (even with a place in psychology books), and
a password for participating in the other society and culture. However, while
Sanela assigns herself this recognition, she can also present her slowness as
strange, because she can still see it from the point of view of Roma culture.
In the end, what she wishes is once more narrated by intertwining the
two cultural perspectives in a subtle way, and by recognizing that such work
can be difficult if not impossible at times. She wants to be able to make her
own decisions: I didnt want to go from one family to another [because of
marriage]. ... I dont like to be ordered around and so I left. She is aware of the
risk of becoming an outsider to her own people after having being one to the
Gag: its difficult to be in between. ... This is what my parents make me
understand .
After reflecting on the conversations I had with her, and after giving a
sense of how they went and the meanings that were involved and exchanged
[8], it seems to me that the image of cultural intersections best describes what
Sanela did with the different cultural ways she has learned. Her narrative of life
and work aims at finding a delicate balance between different and at times
opposing cultural heritages, and it indicates that becoming a multiculturally
competent person is a process not to be taken for granted nor an easy one.
Intersections (or crossroads, in life story jargon) are points in time and in
relations that require a person to make choices [9] in order to grow: while
Sanela says she has always made them by herself, she also emphasizes the role
of education and imagination in answering her own hopes and dreams, on the
one hand. On the other hand, she is convinced that she owes a lot to her
parents and to her older sister for having given her the opportunity to become
the person she is. Thanks to her father, with whom she has a strong

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relationship nourished by respect and admiration, whenever I had a question,

my father was there, like an open book. He would start talking with me, he
would explain everything very clearly as if I had to make a cake, and had to
know the ingredients and how much of them to use. ... I think Im very rich
inside thanks to all my father gave me. Perhaps it can be finally hypothesized
the gratitude she expresses towards her family is directed to the Roma culture
as well: one learns how to walk thanks to her mother, her father, who hold her
by the hand and will do so till she has learned to move around. If she learned to
walk, then she knows how to walk. Her life seems to be inspired both by
fathers wise and caring words if one doesnt make any mistake, one doesnt
learn [anything] and try your way, but remember Im here and Im keeping an
eye on you from a distance and by something shes read, namely that
children are their familys, but they do not belong to it, a sentence that
reminds listeners and readers alike of a third kind of cultural intersection, that
of the imagination.

Notes
[1] To protect the privacy of the life storys narrator, a pseudonym has been used
instead of her real name; for the same reason, the courses location and positive
initiatives are only presented in a very general way.
[2] The reference is to the book by Casagrande (1960).
[3] She referred to the indication I had given her to reach the place of the
appointment: I had said to look for a white canopy in front of the building
where I was waiting, but she had instead looked for a white curtain. The
Italian word tenda that I had used is in fact the same, but it has those two
different meanings. For a moment, I thought the linguistic ambiguity had been
interpreted as symbolic of the two different cultural contexts from which our
conversation would take place.
[4] The meaning is that even though the five fingers belong to the hand, none of
them is the same. Interestingly enough, a year after my conversation with
Sanela had taken place, I happened to mention this saying to an audience of
teachers and cultural mediators. One of the latter a young man from
Morocco pointed out that the very same saying exists in Moroccan culture
and language.
[5] In saying this, Sanela is not speaking of the teachers she respected and loved,
namely the so called support teachers whose concern for learning, high
expectations of the children and ability to make pupils understand the
importance of knowledge, she still remembers vividly. In Italian schools,
support teachers are responsible for the learning and socialization of
handicapped children.
[6] Sometimes she thought I was slow to understand or to remember what she
said. The first time she noticed it she attributed my shortcomings to the
distance between her culture and mine as well as to my bookish knowledge.

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[7] All along her narrative she played various parts the good teachers who had
helped her to overcome learning difficulties and those who had instead
suggested she would be better off by being in a different classroom, or by
choosing a different school (i.e. less academically demanding), the petulant
school personnel, the well meaning though patronizing headmistress, the
Roma and Gag surprised or upset by her choices, and so on by using verbal
tones and expressions, vocabulary and demeanor (as far as this was possible
since we were seated on a park bench) almost always appropriate to each of the
characters portrayed, with some amusing effects on the side.
[8] This article is based on about half the material transcribed and previously taped
during the third meeting.
[9] The word intersection contains the Latin root secare and so it reminds us how
often (at least in Italian language) a turning point in a persons life is described
through the metaphor of a more or less deep cut. In the case Sanela the cultural
cuts are symbolic and affective, but they are not made once for all, as it can be
noticed even at the communicative level: in fact, her narrative makes turns and
re-turns between the two cultural sides and her life story does not proceed in a
linear direction as an ideology of progress would make us believe.

References
Appiah, K.A. (1996) Race, Culture, Identity: misunderstood connections, in
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Bach, R. (1970) Jonathan Livingston Seagull. New York: Avon Books.
Ferrarotti, F. (Ed.) (1981) Storia e storie di vita. Bari: Laterza.
Greene, M. (1978) Landscapes of Learning. New York: Teachers College Press.
Gobbo, F. (2003a) Listening and Asking: on collecting the story of J., paper presented at
ECER 2003, Hamburg, 17-20 September 2003.
Gobbo, F. (2003b) Lintercultura tra antropologia e filosofia, in F. Gobbo (a cura di)
Multiculturalismo e intercultura. Padova: Imprimitur.
Gobbo, F. (2004) Potenziale interculturale e conversazione educativa, in
AA.VV. Passaggi e soste. Atti del VI Convegno dei Centri Interculturali. Torino: Citt di
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Gomes, A.M. (1997) Una ricerca di etnografia della scuola: la scolarizzazione dei
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Imprimitur.
Hanson, K. (1986) The Self Imagined. Philosophical Reflections on the Social Character of
Psyche. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Linde, C. (1993) Life Stories. The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Nussbaum, M.C. (1997) Cultivating Humanity. A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal
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Olagnero, M. & Saraceno, C. (1993) Che vita . Luso dei materiali biografici nellanalisi
sociologica. Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica.

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Piasere, L. (1991) Conoscenza zingara e alfabetizzazione, in L. Piasere Popoli delle

discariche. Saggi di antropologia zingara. Roma: CISU.
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Background Readings
Agar, M.H. (1986) Speaking of Ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Denzin, N.K. (1989) Interpretive Biography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Riessman, Kohler C. (1993) Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Widdershoven, G.A.M. (1993) The Story of Life, in R. Josselson & A. Lieblich (Eds) The
Narrative Study of Lives, Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

FRANCESCA GOBBO is Professor of Intercultural Education at the University

of Turin (Italy) where she also teaches Anthropology of Education. She has
always been concerned with cultural and educational changes in Western
societies and in their multicultural school systems, and she studies them with
an interdisciplinary approach centered on ethnography. She has carried out
ethnographic research in an Arbresh community of Calabria, among the
Waldensians (a religious minority of Piedmont) and the fairground and circus
families in Veneto. She coordinates ethnographic inquiries in Italian
multicultural schools, and in out-of-school educational institutions. She
translated and edited important works in the field of anthropology of education
and of ethnography of education in Italy and in Europe. She was Visiting
Scholar at, Harvard University (Spring 2001) and at the University of California,
Berkeley (Fall 1995). She is a member of IAIE and of EERA and director of the
international journal Intercultural Education.
Correspondence: Francesca Gobbo, Dipartimento di Scienze delleducazione e
della formazione, Via G. Ferrari 9/11, 10124 Turin, Italy
(francesca.gobbo@unito.it).

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