SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 14 NUMBER.

3 (DECEMBER 2004)

Theorising Power and Resistance

among "Travellers"^

Christian Karner

This paper (re-)examines the literature on Traveller communities in the United

Kingdom by combining parts of Michel Foucault's and Michel de Certeau's
theoretical legacies. Following an ethnographic summary, I demonstrate the
relevance of Foucault and Certeau for a critical understanding of the Travellers'
structural predicaments and ideological resistance in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. I argue that Foucault's outline of modern power, surveillance and
classification sheds new light on the impact of social control agencies and the
implementation of legislative changes, such as the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, on
(semi-)nomadic and/or self-employed groups. The implications of more recent
legal developments are discussed as symptoms of postmodernity and the further
ideological marginalisation of "non-consuming nomads". I then argue that some
of Certeau's key concepts, including the "strategies/tactics" distinction, illuminate
the Travellers' modalities of resistance and symbolisms of difference. Completing
a two-way dynamic between theory and data, the article also shows that existing
empirical material on Travellers highlights some of the weaknesses in Foucault's
and Certeau's respective thought. Finally, I turn to Foucault's "analytics" to
account for intra-group power and resistance, and hence to challenge the
common portrayal of Foucault as a "theorist of domination" in juxtaposition to
Certeau as a "theorist of subversion".

Keywords travellers; power; resistance; surveillance; Foucault; Certeau; differ-

ence; identity

Tony Gatlif's (1997) film Gadjo Dilo—winner of five awards at the 1997
Locarno Film Festival—tells the story of Stephane, a young Parisian travelling
to Romania in search of a mysterious "Gypsy"^ singer. He is taken in by Izidor,
an elderly Rom, who declares at the beginning of the film that "for us

1. The author would like to express his gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for making the research
underlying this article possible through a "Special Research Fellowship".
2. The use of inverted commas is intended to acknowledge and guard against the pejorative
connotations the term often evokes when used as a stigmatising label by outsiders. This being said.
Travellers have a history of using the term "Gypsy" for the purpose of self-/group identification

ISSN 1035-0330 print; 1470-1219 online/04/030249-23

Carfax Publishina ® ^^^^ Taylor & Francis Ltd
T,^o,&F,.n*c,<H,p ^ DOI: 10.1080/1035033042000285086
250 KARNER

Gypsies, there is no justice". Stephane is gradually accepted by the com-

munity, he learns to speak Romanes, records traditional Gypsy music and falls
in love with Sabina—a woman ostracised within the group for leaving her
husband. The film also portrays the daily hostility endured by the Roma at
the hands of sedentary Romanians. This climaxes tragically in a pogrom
against the Roma and the destruction of their camp. The final scene shows
Stephane and Sabina taking to the road. Stephane destroys his painstakingly
recorded tapes of Gypsy music and buries them according to Rom custom,
thus negating the initial objective of his travels. Sabina watches on in delight
from the back of Stephane's car, whose incorporation into the Rom com-
munity appears to be complete.
Gadjo Dilo may be read as a metonymic representation of the Travellers'
long history of survival in the face of persecution. This history of tragedy and
struggle is most widely associated with the Travellers' inclusion in the Nazi
category of ethnic/ideological "undesirables" and their systematic
"extermination" during the Holocaust, as well as with Communist state
policies of enforced assimilation in Eastern Europe (for example, Bancroft
1999; Guy 2001). However, forms of marginalisation and oppression of
Travellers and their own strategies of resistance have also been evident in
Western democracies (for example, Sibley 1981; Hawes and Perez 1995;
Kenrick & Clark 1999; Kiddle 1999; Mac Laughlin 1999) and there is empirical
evidence suggesting that "the Gypsy" is the most vilified of all social pariahs
in Europe and North America (Hancock 1997). Indeed, the literature reveals
the centrality of power relations shaping the lives of Traveller communities.
In this paper, I look at Travellers in the United Kingdom (albeit not exclu-
sively) from a novel theoretical perspective that draws on and combines
some of the arguments proposed by Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau
(although again not exclusively). I hope to demonstrate that an engagement
with Foucault and Certeau offers new insights into how power impacts on
'Traveller Gypsies" and into their forms of resistance. However, the analytical
dynamic of what follows is intended to work both ways: as an ethnographic
case study. Travellers also reveal some of the theoretical weaknesses in
Foucault's and Certeau's respective frameworks and inadvertently problema-
tise a common portrayal of the two thinkers.
The bulk of the material re-examined in this paper can be found in the
existing literature on UK Travellers. However, I have added relevant docu-
ments published by a number of county councils and publications by
Traveller organisations to this database. This was further complemented with
some data obtained in informal, semi-structured interviews with Travellers at
a local caravan site.^

(Jenkins 1997) in a context-sensitive manner (see Okely 1983) and there is evidence of "a new pride
In identifying oneself as a Gypsy" among English Travelling families (Kiddle 1999, 19).
3. Interviews were loosely structured around a series of questions concerning my informants'
definition and perception of their way of life, their experiences with local authorities and their
strategies of maintaining a sense of much-valued independence.
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 251

Ethnographic Contexts

Kiddle has argued that it is impossible to identify "a single pure strain of [the]
'true Gypsy'" (1999, 19). Despite ideological preferences for ethnic endogamy
and a (semi-)nomadic lifestyle. Travellers look back on a history of some
intermarriage and/ or assimilation to sedentary society. Corroborating Kid-
dle's argument, other authors similarly underline the futility of attempting to
isolate a self-contained ethnie genealogically "traceable" to a single exotic
origin (Acton 1974, 18; Okely 1983, 34f; Hawes &and Perez 1995, 7). In
opposition to earlier ("racially") essentialising accounts (for example, Vesey-
Fitzgerald 1944) as well as to common stereotypes, Acton emphasises
intra-group diversity:

The ancestors of the Romani-speaking peoples left India some one thousand
years ago ... [B]efore the end ofthe fifteenth century their presence is recorded
in the British isles... Today, they live throughout the world, sometimes intermar-
rying, sometimes not, disunited politically, heterogeneous culturally... Only a
minority of the world's Romani-speaking communities are nomadic today; large
groups, in Eastern Europe in particular, have been more or less sedentary for a
long time. (1974, 1)

In a national context, a linguistic/regional typology distinguishes between

(partly) Romani-speaking English and Welsh "Gypsies", (partly) "Cant"-speak-
ing Scottish Travellers, and (partly) Shelta-speaking—a language of Celtic
origin—Irish Travellers (Barnes 1975, 232). There is, however, historical and
anthropological evidence of considerable linguistic and cultural diffusion and
overlap between these groups (for example, Acton 1974, 57; Rehfisch and
Rehfisch 1975, 272f).
In light ofthe unduly reifying conventional demographic categories of race
and ethnicity, Judith Okely has suggested an alternative definition of the
heterogeneous groups often subsumed under the label 'Traveller Gypsy".
They share, according to Okely (1983), an ethnic ideology''—and its manifold
symbolic expressions—emphasising the significance of descent, self-employ-
ment and an ideal (if only a regular practice among certain sections) of
(semi-)nomadism. While resisting the pressures to assimilate to the sedentary
and "proletarianised" way of life. Travellers are also economically reliant on
the dominant social order,

have never been self-sufficient... [and] can only survive as a group within the
context ofa larger economy and society, within which ... they exploit geograph-
ical mobility and a multiplicity of occupations. (Okely 1983, 30)

4. By way of establishing working definitions, I here take "ethnicity" as a concept utilised mainly by
census takers and political authorities, connoting clear group boundaries and internal homogeneity
implicitly assumed to be ascribed by birth. On the other hand, the term "ethnic ideology"
emphasises the role played by discourses of group membership and culturally endorsed practices
in the social construction of identities. It also acknowledges the ubiquity of power, both within and
outside the group thus delineated, and the exercise of individual agency.
252 KARNER

Occupational adaptability is reflected in a long list of economic pursuits,

ranging from "traditional" occupations such as seasonal agricultural labour
(e.g. fruit and potato picking), the selling of pegs, flowers and lace, fortune
telling and work at fairgrounds, to more "modern" economic niches such as
"scrap dealing (or metal recycling), tarmacing, carpet selling, dealing in
second-hand cars, garden clearance and tree felling" (www.slamnet.org.uk/
traveller communities.html).^ Thus, simultaneously insistent on the value of
self-employment and dependent on such niches within the capitalist econ-
omy, many Travellers derive a sense of identity by distinguishing between
the "Gypsy self" and the "non-Gypsy" (gorgio or gaujo) "other" (for example,
Acton 1974; Okely 1983; Hawes and Perez 1995; Kiddle 1999). In my
Foucauldian/Certeauian analysis, I return to the Travellers' ideology^ of
symbolic boundary maintenance and their (bodily and otherwise practiced)
construction of cultural separateness.
Despite Travellers' heterogeneity, a number of broad socio-economic and
cultural patterns can be discerned. The two-generation nuclear family—al-
though with some variation and contextual adaptability—constitutes the
basic economic unit among English Travellers (Okely 1983, 60), whereas Irish
Travellers have a history of "several patrilineaily related nuclear families
typically three generations deep" residing, travelling and working together
(Gmelch 1975, 259). Fredrick Barth has documented the social organisation of
the Norwegian Taters, whose lineages, affinal relations, households, bands
and regional groupings facilitate context-specific cooperation, or "a wide net
of contacts desirable in a roaming mode of life" (1975, 298). There is
significant socio-economic stratification among Travellers (for example, Okely
1975; Barnes 1975; Hawes and Perez 1995; Mac Laughlin 1999), reflected in
differences in wealth, property (including the number, design and size of
caravans) and migratory patterns.^ The Travellers' history of struggle against
"coercive assimilation or domination" (Mac Laughlin 1999, 134) has always
required ways of adapting to legal-political as well as social change.
Significant developments since 1945 have included a series of legal changes,
some of which I will discuss shortly, the economic and social impact of
increasing urbanisation (for example, Gmelch 1975; Mac Laughlin 1999, 142;
Kenrick and Clark 1999) and the near-total motorisation of Traveller com-
munities. Contrary to predictions of their probable acculturation in the face
of such developments (Vesey-Fitzgerald 1944, 175ff), Travellers have re-
sponded to changing social conditions—and more often than not very

5. A similar breadth of occupations is documented elsewhere in the literature (for example, Acton
1974; Okely 1983; Kiddle 1999) and was confirmed by my own sample of informants.
6. I here adopt the definition of the term "ideology" suggested by Martha Augoustinos (1997) as
"language and behavioural practices" that interact with existing relations of power, either helping
to reproduce or subverting them.
7. Okely has demonstrated that English Travellers of high economic status travel the longest
distances and for the longest periods of time (1983, 150).
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 253

considerable hardship—in a number of different ways® and frequently with

ingenuity and determination.
Much of what follows is of most immediate relevance to the "Traveller
Gypsies", whose ethnic ideology of descent, self-employment and, preferably,
(semi-)nomadism Judith Okely (1983) has described compellingly. Certain
parts of my analysis, however, imply a broader definition that emphasises a
structural position of social exclusion, self-identification and economic mar-
ginality shared with other groups including the even more widely demonised
"New Age Travellers" (Sibley 1997, 228) as well as "Fairground Travellers, or
Showmen" (Kiddle 1999, 96ff.).

Theoretical Background

Given the widely acknowledged centrality of (external) power structures and

their subversion in the lives of Travellers, it is surprising that existing analyses
have made little (if any) use of the contributions of Foucault and Certeau as
influential recent theorists of power and resistance, respectively. To account
for the systemic marginalisation and/or persecution of Travellers, previous
theoretical studies have drawn on Bauman's appropriation of Simmel's
concept of "the stranger" to European modernity (Bancroft 1999) and on
Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "the nomad" as a challenge to
"territorialization" in general and to the "capitalist spatiality" theorised by
Lefebvre in particular (Halfacree 1996). Illuminating though such work has
been, "the stranger" subsumes all ethnic minorities/diasporic groups and
reveals little that is particular to the Travellers' structural position and
predicaments. An emphasis on nomadism, on the other hand, glosses over
contemporary ethnographic complexities. Temporary or permanent settle-
ment, which does not automatically or invariably result in assimilation or
exclusion from the group, has been widely reported (for example, Acton
1974; Okely 1983) and was corroborated as a widespread and acceptable
occurrence by my own informants.^ Indeed, the person thought of as the
archetypal Traveller—an old man I was repeatedly told I had to talk to "to
find out about the Traveller life"—had lived at the same caravan site for 20
years, without travelling but while strictly adhering to the symbolisms of
pollution and cleanliness obsen/ed by Okely and re-examined later. While
"the stranger" thus constitutes too general a category, a theoretical focus on
nomadism imports the anachronistic and over-romanticised notion of all
Travellers as active and permanent nomads. It is my contention that an
alternative and more revealing theoretical vantage point can be arrived at by
(selectively) drawing on some of Michel Foucault's and Michel de Certeau's
respective contributions.

8. For a discussion of different responses to social change, see Acton's ideal typical differentiation
of conservatism, cultural disintegration, cultural adaptation and "passing" (1974, 35fO.
9. Also see http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/sense_of_place/documentaries.html.
254 KARNER

Given the ambition and volume of both Foucault's and Certeau's scholar-
ship, a comprehensive overview of their work^° would clearly exceed the
space available here. Both thinkers were extraordinarily eclectic,^^ crossing
disciplinary boundaries with the same ease as they traversed historical
epochs and confronted a variety of conceptual challenges. Carrette defines
the theorisation of the "temporality and construction of ideas" through the
notion of "discourse"—"a group of statements [with] a certain modality of
existence", "belonging to a single system of formation"—as central to
Foucault's entire enterprise (Carette 2000, 10). The most explicit formulation
of this is found in The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1991a [1969]),
which also marks the beginning of the transition from Foucault's earlier
archaeological to his later genealogical work. The former investigates "the
historically changing and specific ... conditions of possibility of knowledge,
the determining rules of formation ... operat[ing] beneath the level of inten-
tion or thematic content"^^ (Best and Kellner 1991, 40). His later genealogical
analyses shift the emphasis onto "institutions and forms of power", the
"political events, economic practices and processes" (Best & Kellner 1991, 46),
within which power is exercised and discourses are formulated. It is to this
genealogical "project" that my selective use of Foucault's wide-ranging work
will turn, drawing on his analysis of social control in modern disciplinary
society as articulated in Discipline and Punish (1991b [1975]) and, to a lesser
extent, on The History of Sexuality (1998 [1976]).
Michel de Certeau's empirical and conceptual breadth is similarly impress-
ive, including analyses of sixteenth-century mysticism (Giard 1998a, xiv), of
May 1968 (Certeau 1997a), and a seminal investigation o f t h e psychological
and institutional conditions of possibility underlying The Writing of History
(Certau 1988a). While Foucault preoccupied himself with the histories of
madness, the human sciences, medicine, the prison and sexuality, Certeau
also straddled disciplinary boundaries, advocating "a critical theory of so-
ciety" based on hitherto "unknown connections" between history and
theology, psychoanalysis and ethnology (Giard 1997, xi). Arguably, however,
Certeau's most influential contribution—and the aspect of his work I draw
upon in the following analysis—is found in his preoccupation with "the
power of the weak", ruses of resistance, and the art of subversion. This
project is exemplified in the two volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life
(Certau 1988b; Certau and Giard 1998), the second of which he co-authored
with Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol.

10. For more detailed summaries of Foucault's work, see for example Best and Kellner (1991, 34fO
or Carrette (2000, 7-24); for Certeau, see Godzich (1986) or Giard (1998a, xiii-xlv).
11. Both Foucault and Certeau "disliked" and attempted to resist being labelled, classified or
"pigeon-holed" as individuals (see Foucault 1991a, 17) and as theorists (for example, Best and Kellner
1991, 30; Chartier 1997, 39).
12. This early (archaeological) project is most clearly exemplified in Foucault's The Order of Things
(1989 [1966]) and its analysis of successive "systems of thought", or "epistemes", specific to the
Renaissance, Classical and Modern eras, respectively.
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 255

Like Foucault, Certeau is acutely aware of social actors' structural position-

ing and the institutional/ ideological conditioning of the production of
knowledge (for example, de Certeau 1988a, 1997b, 77). The theoretical
"relationship" between the two thinkers is often portrayed as based on
Certeau's partial self-definition vis-a-vis Foucault. Influenced by Foucault, yet
also partly disagreeing with him (Chartier 1997, 42f), Certeau takes Discipline
and Punish as paradigmatic of Foucault's thought and comments thus:

If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming ... more exten-
sive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being
reduced to it, what popular procedures (also "miniscule" and quotidian) manipu-
late the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade
them. (1988b, xiv)

Certeau therefore suggests that Foucault overestimates the effectiveness of

social control and largely ignores the trickery of those who resist the
tentacles and mechanisms of power in their daily practices. Godzich adds to
this charge by juxtaposing Certeau's "conception of discourse" (as a "form of
social activity") to what he portrays as Foucault's "hegemonic one":

Foucault's descriptions present a vast machinery of power; de Certeau's pit

individual or small-group efforts against this machinery as a mode of interaction
that constitutes the lived experience of these peopie. He is, therefore, more
attentive to the actual working of power as well as to the tactics... that the
neutralization of such vast powers requires. (Godzich 1986, xiv)

I now turn to Foucault's work to (re-)investigate the nature of some of the

control mechanisms that impact on the lives of Travellers. I then offer a
"Certeauian" reading of the ruses Travellers employ, consciously or not, to
evade external powers and surveillance. In the first instance, my argument
thus supports the notion of Certeau's work as a necessary addition to
Foucault's framework. However, the analytical pendulum will then swing
backwards, using ethnographic material to highlight shortcomings in both
theoretical edifices. Based on a discussion of intra-group power relations, I
will conclude—contrary to Godzich—that Certeau ultimately remains locked
in a somewhat static account of a power-bloc being subverted from below/
within, whereas Foucault's later "analytics of power" (1998 [1976], 82ff)
provides a more accurate framework for thinking about the ubiquity and
multi-dimensionality of power and resistance.

1968: Control, Classification and the "Panoptic Gaze"

Mac Laughlin argues that "anti-Traveller racism" developed against the

backdrop of the modern nation state in nineteenth-century Western Europe
256 KARNER

and its corollaries—"a new geography of power and surveillance,... a new

moral education, and ... extended administrative control over the timing and
spacing of human activities" (1999, 141). The argument that modernisation
and industrialisation made the marginalisation and persecution of Travellers
more pronounced, a process that continued—as we shall see—well into the
twentieth century, is corroborated elsewhere:

As industrialisation and urbanisation spread across [Britain], a series of Public

Health Acts, Highway Acts, a Commons Act and measures against peddlers and
vagrants ali contained specific clauses directed against Gypsies. In 1889, the year
county councils were created, infectious disease controls and sanitary provisions
were directed against caravans. Local councils were given powers in 1899 to
regulate commons and in 1908 a Children Act enforced compulsory education
for travelling children. (Hawes and Perez 1995, 14)

These legislative changes reveal the issues over which the struggle between
the forces of assimilation and cultural "survival" have since been fought: the
control of space, ownership of—and access to—land, ideas of hygiene and
cleanliness, education.^^ Modernity thus started a process of political en-
croachment on Travellers that has continued ever since. It is in Foucault's
work that the arguably most systematic study of modern power, its modali-
ties, "logic" and multiple sites of enactment can be found. And it is there, I
suggest, that a new understanding of the Travellers' lives "resides".
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault outlines a new economy of social control
that coincided with the rise of capitalist society. Describing a "closer penal
mapping of the social body" and system of "constant policing" and surveil-
lance (as epitomised in Bentham's panopticon) (1991b, 78fO, Foucault
analyses what he terms the "carceral network" of modernity. Power, he
argues, is omnipresent—being "exercised rather than possessed" (Foucault
1991b, 26) in numerous institutions. Prison inmates, pupils, soldiers, hospital
patients and factory workers are all subject to the same "panoptic schema",
in which surveillance is (perceived to be) constant without the supervised
individual in turn being able to see their supervisor. Importantly, the
"microphysics of power" also manifest themselves in the permanent and
"meticulous control ofthe operations ofthe body" (Foucault 1991b, 137). The
result is a "disciplinary society". Stressing the productive nature of power,
Foucault argues that "discipline 'makes' individuals" and that "normalization"
fabricates "obedient" as well as "delinquent" or "pathological" subjects
(1991b, 170, 296 ff).
In Outsiders in Urban Societies, David Sibley refers to a number of social
control agencies including "teachers, social workers, police and local govern-
ment officers... who impinge on the economic and social life of outsiders"

13. The late-nineteenth-century campaigns by the social reformer George Smith for legislation
concerning the registration and control of wagon and caravan dwellers were symptomatic of this
trend. However, these particular campaigns were ultimately unsuccessful, largely thanks to the
defensive mobilisation by "travelling Showpeople" (Kiddle 1999, 96f).
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 257

(1981, 21). In the process, state policies concerning peripheral minorities are
enacted, which in the case of Travellers have ranged in different national/his-
torical contexts from dispersal, control and boundary maintenance, economic
and social marginalisation, to enforced assimilation and genocidal per-
secution. In the more narrowly delineated British context, the
implementation of recent legislative changes yields itself to a Foucauldian
reading. The 1968 Caravan Sites Act "imposed a duty on county authorities
and London boroughs to provide sufficient sites to meet the numbers of
Gypsies and Travellers... in the area" (Hawes and Perez 1995, 22). The Act
and its effects on Travellers have been widely described as a mixed blessing
at best (for example, Hawes and Perez 1995; Kiddle 1999), as site provision
was often based on grossly underestimated numbers of "Gypsies residing in
or resorting to an area" (for example, Moore 1993). Other criticisms have
focused on the ideology underlying the 1968 legislation. While it was an
improvement relative to the 1960 Caravan Sites and Development Act, which
had made (hard to obtain) planning permissions and site licences legal
requirements for residential caravans to be parked on private land, some
authors argue that the 1968 Act ultimately intended for Travellers to settle
(for example, Sibley 1981, 95ff; Okely 1983, 111). A hidden assimilationist
agenda was suggested by the so-called "designations", for which county
councils could apply to the secretary of state once it was deemed that
"sufficient site provision" for local Travellers had been made. If granted, such
designations empowered councils to evict Travellers from unauthorised sites.
At the same time, "the district councils in each county were to be responsible
for the management of sites" (Hawes and Perez 1995, 23). The 1968 Act
therefore enabled local authorities to control "space", access to land and the
running of sites, all of which are crucial in the lives of Travellers. Non-con-
formist strategies of stopping in unauthorised places were in turn
criminalised (Hawes and Perez 1995, 23).
In Foucault's account, (modern) social control works through the
"fabrication of disciplinary individuals". This is achieved through normalis-
ation and the discursive opposition of "obedient individuals" to pathological
subjects. Foucault also argues that the "carceral network" punishes, disci-
plines and aims to reform the "delinquent". He lists correction, classification,
modulation, work, education, technical supervision and auxiliary institutions
as the "seven universal maxims of the good 'penitential' condition" (Foucault
1991b, 269f). Given the assimilationist subtext to the 1968 Act, official site
management and the formation of county council liaison groups and officers,
the principles of correction and technical supervision as well as the creation
of auxiliary institutions were all part of the implementation of the Act.
Similarly, (semi-)permanent settlement in officially designated locations facil-
itates the more efficient control of Travellers' work and the provision of
education to their children.^" However, it is the maxim of classification that
14. This is by no means to suggest that all of these have always been or continue to be merely
external discourses and values imposed on Travellers and unanimously rejected by them. There is
258 KARNER

is arguably t h e most fundamental in Foucault's schema. The 1968 Act was

indeed careful t o define—and hence classify—who was t o be included in t h e
new provision, namely "persons of nomadic habit, whatever their race or
origin" t h o u g h excluding travelling Showmen (Kiddle 1999, 25). Based o n
non-ethnic "markers", t h e Act thus defined a nomadic way of life as t h e
criterion of inclusion in t h e new category of (official) caravan site-dwellers.
Classification also entailed modulation, the (person-/group-)specific
"treatment" of—or response t o — t h e subjects constructed in t h e act of
categorisation. Put another way, t h e 1968 Act defined specific persons, those
"of nomadic habit", as t h e subsequently (only) legitimate inhabitants of t h e
sites n o w t o be managed by local authorities. In other words, all of Foucault's
"seven universal maxims of t h e g o o d 'penitential' condition" were part of t h e
1968 Act and its implementation.
Even more telling was t h e (anticipated) spatial order of t h e new sites. Part
II of t h e Caravan Sites Act included a "design for a gypsy trailer site" (Sibley
1981, 32), which envisaged a rectangular area symmetrically subdivided into
an even number of "cells" each consisting of four 30-foot x 10-foot caravan
"standings". The plan also anticipated a toilet block per cell as well as one
scrap c o m p o u n d and one recreation area per site. As Sibley has argued:

Cartesian geometry in environmental design ... [forms] the stock response of

authority to non-conforming minorities judged to be deviant... and conflicts
with the spatial arrangement that the client community creates for itself.'' (1981,
31)

Crucially, the originally anticipated (and since then constructed) sites fit
Foucault's panoptic schema: strategically placed street lights and, impor-
tantly, a wardens' block and office have made surveillance more efficient and
potentially constant.
While the spatial organisation at caravan sites provided by councils since
1968 conforms largely to Foucault's panopticon, thus supporting his argu-
ment that modernity has witnessed its diffusion "throughout the social body"
(1991b, 207ff), the case of the Traveller also reveals a shortcoming in the
theory. His argument that the history of social control has seen the radical
transformation of medieval spectacles of punishment into modern mecha-
nisms of normalisation based on surveillance implies a radical rupture
between "traditional" and industrialised social formations. This is of course
consistent with Foucault's discontinuous view of history, within which differ-
ent epochs correspond to distinct epistemes, discursive formations and ways

in fact ample evidence of Travellers' "skilled" use of social welfare provision (for example, Okely
1983), for example. Similarly, education cannot be decried as a sedentary imposition only, as many
Travellers articulate the value (or ideal) of "schooling without assimilation" (for example. Kiddle
1999). As early as 1966, the Gypsy Council defined "equal rights to education, work and houses" as
one of its key objectives in its founding manifesto (Acton 1974, 163).
IS. Also see Okely (1983, 85fO for a pertinent criticism of the cultural inappropriateness of council
sites to the Travellers' symbolic universe discussed in the next section of this paper.
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 259

of exercising power. The Travellers, however, inadvertently reveal that

panoptical mechanisms of control are less unique to (the state institutions of)
industrial modernity than Foucault suggests. Okely provides the following
account of Travellers' "traditional" spatial order:

When Gypsies choose the layout, they place the trailers in a circle, with a single
entrance. The main windows... face inwards. Every trailer and its occupants can
be seen by everyone else.... [T]here is no need for privacy and protection from
Gypsy neighbours. Few draw curtains, even at night. Within this circle of group
solidarity, there can be no secrets. (1983, 88; italics added)

Unlike in Bentham's panopticon, there is no central inspection tower. Yet,

Okely reveals a quasi-panoptical system operative on "traditional" Gypsy
camps. Constant and mutual surveillance within Traveller communities^* and
the control function of gossip and ostracism documented in the literature
(for example. Miller 1975) suggest that panopticon-like mechanisms of power
and discipline do not merely define the prisons, hospitals, schools, factories
and army barracks of modern society. Industrial modernity and its spatial
logic have increasingly encroached upon Travellers, as shown by 1968 Act. At
the same time, "traditionally Gypsy" spatial organisation was/is constructed
around a "panoptic gaze" of its own. While the "traditional" circular camp
layout may be hard to pin down historically, it suggests that Foucault's
schema of historical periods and corresponding mechanisms of power
imposes too absolute a grid. In the same way as elements of "the society of
the spectacle [are] still prevalent today" (Baert 1998, 127), panoptical power
is not the exclusive invention and defining characteristic of industrial
modernity and its institutions only.^''
In 1994, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act repealed the site
provision measures enforced by the 1968 Act, thus effectively "criminalising"
the Travellers' way of life and increasing assimilationist pressures (for exam-
ple, Halfacree 1996; Clark 1999).^^ Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's
appropriation of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, we may offer a tentative
explanation for the historicity of this reversal of the earlier "era of [relative]
consensus" (Hawes and Perez 1995). Bauman defines postmodernity by "two
mutually complementary weapons" of social integration—consumerist
"seduction" and "panoptical repression":

15. The anthropological record of course reveals sinriilar mechanisms of social control in many other
"traditionalV'pre-modern" societies.
17. This also echoes one of Certeau's critical comments on Foucault, in which he faults the latter for
overestimating the homogeneity and coherence of "historical blocks" and for overlooking the
"evident heteronomy that lies beneath'" (de Certeau 1986, 176ff).
18. Some more positive recent developments have inciuded the 1998 Human Rights Act and the
drafting of 'The Traveller Law Reform Bill" at Cardiff University Law School and in collaboration with
Traveller organisations (see www.cf.ac.uk/claws/tlru/bill.hmtl). There have also been local efforts
aimed at community empowerment through initiatives to increase access to health and educational
services, as for example reflected in the setting up of a "Nottingham Health Action Zone" by the
local council, the NHS, Traveller organisations as well as local ("Gypsy") families.
260 KARNER

[R]epression is indispensable to reach the areas seduction cannot... reach: it

remains the paramount tool of subordination of the considerable margin of
society which cannot be absorbed by market dependency and hence ... consists
of "non-consumers"... people whose business of life does not transcend the
horizon of survival. Goods serving the latter purpose are not... attractive as
potential merchandise. (1992, 98)

There are trends towards the increasing "sedentarisation" of Travellers,^'

television sets—as arguably one of the key-symbols of consumerism—are
omnipresent at many caravan sites, and Travellers' have always occupied a
(marginal) niche within the dominant economic order. Yet, their ideological
preference for a nomadic lifestyle positions them very much on the periphery
of postmodern society as depicted by Bauman.'^" Nomadism, if only as an
ideal and hence a perpetual possibility, subverts panoptic surveillance.
Similarly, widespread (although certainly not universal) economic hardship
and the spatial implications of living in a caravan put severe limits on a
family's "consumption potential".^^ The question thus arises if Bauman's
concept of "non-consumers" provides an apt description of Travellers and a
possible explanation for their "repression" exemplified by the 1994 Act. Do
an ideological preference for geographical mobility and consumer "under-
performance" amount to a two-fold subversion of a social formation based
on "surveillance" and "seduction"? If so, one of my informants personified
this ideological challenge. Sixty years old, he had travelled transnationally,
without caravan and largely by himself all his life, washing shop-windows for
a living. Owning less than what would be considered the absolute minimum
"requirement" by sedentary consumers—two bamboo sticks, a plastic bucket
for cleaning shop windows and a bag hardly bigger than the average
handbag—he told me: "my spirit lets me know when it's time to move on
and where to" (interview, 26 July 2003). Indeed, it seems hard to imagine
anybody ideologically further removed from house-dwelling society and
more elusive to the postmodern mechanisms of "panoptical surveillance and
consumerist seduction". The challenge appears to be all the more powerful
if actively chosen rather than seen to be ascribed by ethnic membership. This
is suggested by the chronic "demonisation" of New Age Travellers, con-
structed as "folk devils" (Halfacree 1996) in the hegemonic discourse of
neo-liberal capitalism:

[Unlike "Gypsies",] New Age Travellers conjure up no romantic associations. They

cannot claim exotic origins.... The ascription covers a loose grouping of people

19. Or, in the nostalgic words of one of my informants, "the travelling life isn't what it used to be,
many families have houses these days" (interview, 2 August 2003).
20. I do not here draw on Bauman's more recent work, in which what he now terms "liquid
modernity" is described as "post-Panoptical". He also speaks of the "revenge of nomadism over
territoriality" (Bauman 2000,13). While this captures multinational business, middle-class commuters
and electronic communications, it does not apply to the Travellers' continuing—and arguably
intensifying—marginalisation.
21. See, for example. Kiddle (1999, 38ff.).
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 261

...who have decided to travel or, if sedentary, to live without many of the
material comforts of mainstream society.... [A]n image of dependency com-
bines with popular associations ... to create a pariah group. (Sibley 1997, 228)

Voluntarily opting-out, "deciding to travel" and to shop for no more than the
essentials may be the ultimate ideological affront against the dominant social
order in times of postmodernity.

'Tactics of Resistance"

The operation of mechanisms of power does not guarantee their effective-

ness. The panoptic layout of council-licensed caravan sites notwithstanding.
Travellers at a local site have created spaces between and behind caravans
that are hidden from the (potential) gaze of surveillance. Similarly,
classification—which Foucault defines as integral to the fabrication of disci-
plined subjects—can be contested." For example, "Anglo-Roma Gypsies" and
"Irish Travellers" are "recognised" or, perhaps more accurately, discursively
reified as "ethnic minorities" under the 1976 Race Relations Act.^^ However,
an organisation called "Friends, Families and Travellers" rejects the arbitrary
exclusion of Scottish and New Age Travellers from the official "definition":

We feel that being a Traveller is [largely] a matter of personal definition. We do

not feel it is right to [discount] someone's Traveller identity because they have
settled. Equally, we do not believe it is right to refuse [to acknowledge] someone
as a Traveller because they do not come from a long history of Trav-
ellers. ... [Tlhe right to be a Traveller is the right to a way of life ... a basic human
right equal to all. (www.groundswelluk.net/ ~ fft.htm)

The question arises whether Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life
can be re-appropriated to advance the analysis presented thus far. Its two
volumes provide an investigation of the tactics employed by consumers,
readers, inhabitants of urban neighbourhoods and, most famously, pedestri-
ans "walking in the city" to slip (if only temporarily) through the web of
power in which their lives are embedded. Practice, according to Certeau, uses
ideas and commodities provided by the dominant socio-economic order in
indeterminate ways, thus allowing for the construction of autonomous
meaning, the exercise of agency and the possibility of (symbolic) resistance.

22. Althusser defines the act of naming as a fundamental ideological practice, through which "the
individual is interpellated as a subject" (1994, 130f). First names and surnames, address as well as
date and place of birth are among the key categories of classification/identification. However,
address and (to a lesser extent) place of birth are of limited utility in the case of nomadic Travellers.
Moreover, Okely shows that "Gypsies" operate with an alternative system of first names, nicknames
and flexible surnames, which the authorities neither understand nor control (1983, 174f).
23. See my earlier comments on the essentialist assumptions frequentiy underlying official
definitions of ethnic groups and their limitations with regard to Travellers. Also see Wetherell and
Potter (1992) for a discussion of the discursive construction of "raciaKTethnic" categories.
262 KARNER

Although he does not specifically address Travellers, parts of Certeau's

theoretical framework complement—and shed new light on—the existing
ethnography of "Gypsies".
According to Okely, the crucial characteristic of the Travellers' ethnic
ideology is the symbolic boundary maintenance between the "Gypsy self"
and the non-Gypsy or "Gorgio other". Okely underlines that existing power
relations and the Travellers' structural marginality provide the inescapable
context to their symbolism of difference. Her actual analysis, however, draws
on Claude Levi-Strauss (1966, 1970) and Mary Douglas (1966) and can
therefore broadly be described as structuralist. She shows that the Travellers'
cultural logic keeps the categories of "self" and "other" strictly separate. The
insides of camps, trailers, and bodies all symbolise the "ethnic self", which
must be kept separate from, and uncontaminated by, the "outside" (symbolic
of sedentary/Gorg;o society). Every "crossing" or blurring of the self-other/in-
side-outside boundary is a source of pollution that must be guarded
against—hence the pronounced preference for endogamy and Travellers'
rituals of cleanliness. The latter, Okely shows, emphasise the importance of
keeping the inside of trailers spotless (while little regard is paid to the
outside), of using different bowls for washing eating utensils (which come in
contact with the inside of the body) and clothes/ body parts (which are in
constant danger of pollution through contact with the outside), respectively.
Biological processes (e.g. birth, menstruation and death) in which parts of
"the inside come outside" (Okely 1983, 211) are seen as a source of danger
and pollution. The same symbolism also underlies the Travellers' construction
of cats and other animals that lick their fur, thus ignoring the bodily
boundary separating the inside from the outside, as unclean (mochadi).
Okely's structuralist reading of a culturally specific pattern of classification
is given a further dimension, rather than contradicted, by some of Certeau's
comments on the enactment of (modern) power and sites of resistance.
Elaborating on Foucault's notion of "docile bodies" (1991b, 136fO as the sign
and "achievement" of disciplinary society, Certeau argues that every "law" is
"inscribed on bodies" thus "making the body tell the code":

This is an immense task of "machining" bodies to spell out an order. Economic

individualism is no less effective than totalitarianism in carrying out this articula-
tion of the law by means of bodies. It just proceeds by different methods.
(1988b, 148)

Certeau thus suggests that laws would be powerless, were they not capable
of transforming "bodies into signs". The relevance of this to an understand-
ing of the Travellers' symbolic universe is inadvertently revealed in Okely's
observation that all "Gypsy" taboos "follow from the separation of the inside
of the body" (1983, 83). Not only is the body thus the signifier of primary
cultural significance, but a Certeauian reading also suggests that a law is
inscribed on it. Gorgios frequently (and ethnocentrically) stereotype Travellers
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 263

as "unhygienic" or "dirty". Okely's study corroborates Mary Douglas's (1966)

insistence that dirt is merely "matter out of [cultural] place". Building on
Certeau, we may add to this by suggesting that conflicts over cleanliness and
hygiene reveal more than diverging patterns of cultural classification: a clash
of alternative ideologies, a conflict of different "laws" inscribed on the bodies
of their respective subjects. Travellers articulate "separateness" through the
bodily enactment of their ethnic ideology or "law". At the same time,
opposition by local authorities to Travellers' ideas of cleanliness (see, for
example, www.buckscc.gov.uk/gyspies) can then be seen as a reaction
against an ideological challenge articulated through the bodily inscription of
an alternative "legal code". "Cleanliness" and "dirt" are therefore about
power, and its (bodily) inscription, as much as about culturally constructed
systems of classification.
Regarding the modalities of power and resistance, Certeau contrasts
"strategies" to "tactics". He associates "strategies" with domination and
defines them as:

the calculus of force-relationships ... possible when a subject of will and power
(a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated ... [and
possesses] a place ... serving as the basis for generating relations with an
exterior (1988b, xix).

"Tactics", on the other hand, can rely on no such "spatial or institutional

localization" serving as a power base. Thus, operating on territory that
"belongs to the [powerful] other", tactics "manipulate time" within constrain-
ing structures, play "clever tricks" to score temporary "victories of the 'weak'
over the 'strong'" (Certeau 1988b, xix).^" Although his empirical focus lies
elsewhere, Certeau's "strategies-tactics distinction" provides a conceptual
grid for analysing some Travellers' practices. The nomadic ideal and the
ever-present possibility of "moving on", occupational adaptability coupled
with a strong preference for self-employment, and the conspicuous absence
of a work/leisure distinction (Okely 1983, 49fO all reveal "tactical" qualities:
with space being largely controlled by the dominant house-dwelling powers.
Travellers do indeed "manipulate time"—through their alternative work
routine that resists sedentary (/"proletarianising") control and, if nomadic, by
deciding when to travel and how long to

24. De Certeau describes the "tactical character" of talking, walking, reading, shopping, cooking—in
short, "the ruses of pleasure and appropriation"—and workers' "subversion of the established order"
through perruque, the diversion of time "owed" to factory owners (1988b, xix ff).
25. When first negotiating access to a local caravan site, I experienced some of the trickery
employed by Travellers to elude outsiders regarded as potentially troublesome (seemingly including
the inquisitive sociologist). Polite though their reactions were, they were also understandably
suspicious and I soon found myself perpetually referred to an elusive Mr Lee or the very organisation
that had recommended this particular site as "ideal for interviewing Travellers". When I thought that
had finally "secured" my first informant, suspicion soon resurfaced. A middle-aged Traveller inquired
thus: "what are you gonna do with this then, write it up in a paper like?" When I replied that I was
indeed interested in writing about Travellers, he referred me to yet another person, who turned out
264 KARNER

The nature of British Travellers' political mobilisation since the 1960s also
yields itself to a Certeauian reading in so far as it reveals a noticeable
preference for "tactics"—and hence the "manipulation of time" by the "weak"
against the "strong"—over "strategies" (which would require a "spatial"
power base).^^ Tracing the history of the Gypsy Council from its formation in
a Kentish pub in 1966 (and a series of developments leading up to it), Acton
(1974) reveals the relatively limited appeal of Gypsy nationalism. (Ethnic)
nationalism aims at "making cultural and political units congruent" (Gellner
1983, 48ff) or, in other words, at making ethnic groups politically sovereign.
As it constitutes a territorial and institutional power base, the modern nation
state is clearly defined by "strategic" characteristics. With some exceptions,
noticeably the novels and political activities'^ of the Canadian Gypsy
nationalist Ronald Lee, Traveller calls for an independent Romanestan have
been few and far between. Most political mobilisation has been aimed at the
reform of existing state structures (rather than the construction of new ones)
to make them more accommodating to the Travellers' way of life, thus
favouring civil rights campaigns over independence movements. In Britain,
nationalist ideas have been an "inspiration to a small group" of Travellers but
never a mass ideology (Acton 1974, 240). More recently, Gay-y-Blasco (2000)
has documented a comparable lack of territorial (or nationalist) aspiration
among Spanish "Gypsies", whose "tactics" of symbolic boundary mainte-
nance have not metamorphosised into calls for a separate state. Opting for
"tactics" rather than "strategies", most Travellers' resistance—patterned, col-
lective and persistent though it is—manifests itself mainly in time and
practice rather than in a preoccupation with a specific space, the (defended
or fought for) power base that nationalism fetishises.
Certeau's work therefore enables us to conceptualise the modalities of
Traveller resistance, as in the case of their bodily "inscription" of an ethnic
"law" or the only marginal appeal of Romani nationalism. As we shall see
next, however, this cannot be taken as corroboration of Godzich's portrayal

to have left the site two days previously. While underlining the value of long-term ethnographic
fieldwork (for example, Okely 1983) for the purposes of establishing trust and working towards
Geertzian "thick descriptions", such "tactics" employed by Travellers also reveal an acute aware-
ness—and occasional distrust—of being the object of academic enquiry.
26. In light of the preceding analysis, I am not, of course, denying the significance and centrality of
space in Travellers' lives. However, by introducing Certeau's distinction I am drawing attention to the
institutional control of and power over space exercised by sedentary society, notably (local)
government and private landowners. Two recent conflicts over land access and stoppage places
illustrated some Travellers' "tactics of resistance" against such external institutional constraints. The
first incident took place in Warwickshire and involved a group of Traveller families (and children)
protesting against their then seemingly imminent eviction from a piece of land they owned but for
which they had been refused planning permission [BBC News, 7 January 2004). The second incident
centred around a group of Travellers stopping in a recreation area in Cambridge, to which a local
paper—while acknowledging the problem of there being a "national shortage of sites"—protested
by appealing to local government to exercise its power and by invoking a discourse delineating "us"
(i.e. local residents) from "them" (i.e. allegedly encroaching as well as "littering" Travellers) (Cam-
bridge Evening News, 31 March 2004).
27. See Acton (1974, 230ff).
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 265

of Certeau as a theorist of resistance in contrast to Foucault as a theorist of

domination.

Intra-group Power

Given that I have drawn on Foucault to illuminate sedentary power and on

Certeau to make sense of Travellers' "tactics of resistance", my analysis thus
far seemingly conforms to Godzich's (1986) contrasting description of the
two theorists. However, a closer reading of the later contributions offered by
Foucault and Certeau, "held up against" UK Travellers as an empirical
"case-study", suggests that the contrast is oversimplified and unfounded.
Inequalities and conflicts among Travellers—be they gendered, generational
or status-related—call for an understanding of power as ubiquitous. I shall
thus conclude by suggesting that Foucault's "analytics" (1998 [1976]) offer a
more complete account of the multi-dimensionality of power and resistance
than Certeau's rigid oppositional schema (i.e. powenresistance :: strate-
gies:tactics).
In volume 2 of The Practice of Evetyday Life Certeau and Giard summarise
the contested territory that is "ordinary culture":

By itself, culture is not information, but its treatment by a series of operations as

a function of objectives and social relations. The first aspect of these operations
is aesthetic, an everyday practice opens up a unique space within an imposed
order... The second aspect is polemical: the everyday practice is relative to the
power relations that structure the social field. (1998, 254)

Travellers combine, as we have seen, the aesthetic with the polemical in their
own "tactics of resistance". Certeau and Giard provide a terminology for the
jouissance of travelling—the poetry or "aesthetics" of (semi-)nomadism and
self-employment emphasised by many Travellers (Okely 1983, 128fO—as well
as for its "politics". The latter constitutes a set of patterned practices and
symbols that are profoundly counter-hegemonic to the ideology of sedentary
society. Travellers' everyday practices constitute, on Certeau and Giard's
polemical level, a counter-ideology. Their lived rejection of dominant values
amounts to, in Roland Barthes's (1993) terminology, a powerful "de-naturalis-
ation" of (post-)modern "common sense" and hence presents an ideological
challenge for (post-)industrial societies.
This much being said, ethnographic material on Travellers also reveals
some blind-spots in Certeau's theoretical edifice. Much of his work, the most
obvious exception being his essays on the events of May 1968 (Certau
1997a), exhibits a strikingly individualist flavour. Walking in the city, reading,
living in a neighbourhood are all (potential) tactics of resistance engaged in
by individual social actors. The "case" of the Travellers, however, suggests
that the most powerful challenges to an imposed order (in the sense of
266 KARNER

being historically enduring and a noticeable "nuisance" to the authorities) are

collective rather than idiosyncratic and situational. The Travellers' ethnic
ideology, as described by Okely and already re-examined, epitomises such
diachronically persisting and communal subversion. Second, Certeau's stud-
ies of the "art of resistance" largely focus on one axis of power only: the
fundamental divide between the strong or dominant and the weak but
resisting. However, ethnographic material on the Travellers demonstrates
that power, surveillance, struggle and resistance d o not stop at the external
boundaries of the caravan site, but that they also define human relations
w i t h i n the g r o u p and the nuclear family (i.e. across generations and between
spouses):

There is a paradox embedded in the Gypsy women's role. [At home], she is
hedged in by restrictions, expected to be subservient to her husband and
cautious with other men. Yet nearly every day she [goes] out to 'enemy' territory
[to] knock on doors of unknown people and establish contact with new cus-
tomers ...There exist formal restrictions on the woman's activities ... [such as
husbands] discouraging their wives from learning to drive [which] would give
them considerable independence: "I'm not having you running about, I want to
know where you are."... Nonetheless such controls... are either trivial or unen-
forceable. I discovered that women frequently conducted business with men
alone and stressed the advantage. (Okely 1983, 205)

The dynamics of exercising and resisting power thus also define micro-con-
texts and intra-group relations.
Given Certeau's emphasis on individuals' ability to temporarily evade
power, we may expect to find an account of domestic power relations and
struggles in The Practice of Everyday Life. Surprisingly, however, patriarchy
remains under-theorised. There are traces of family power structures in the
ethnographic contributions to the second volume. Going to a cafe in the
Lyon thus emerges as a male prerogative (Mayol 1998, 51). Giard observes
that men's cooking is confined to extraordinary occasions as they are "not
tied to kitchen work by an implicit contract" (1998b, 219). She captures the
"ways of operating" in the kitchen of generations of women "ceaselessly
doomed to both housework and the creation of life, excluded form public life
and the communication of knowledge" (Giard 1998b, 153). Such outright
acknowledgement of patriarchy notwithstanding, the remainder of Giard's
account focuses exclusively on the "pleasures of cooking". A possible expla-
nation for this avoidance of explicit discussions of patriarchal power emerges
from a chapter on "Private Spaces" co-authored by Giard and Certeau.
Replete with idyllic metaphors, the "domestic space" is described as an
"abode to which one longs to 'withdraw',... once there, 'one can have
peace'". 'The most private and dearest place" is "a protected place ... where
the pressure of the social body on the individual body does not prevail"
(Giard 1998, 146f). Giard and Certeau argue that it is only under conditions
of oppression or utopianism that "panoptic surveillance" encroaches on this
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 267

enclave of domestic privacy. This account is clearly over-romanticised—vic-

tims of domestic violence or women coerced into daily household chores can
hardly be said "to have peace"—and irreconcilable with the feminist insist-
ence that the "personal is political". Foucault's The History of Sexuality, on the
other hand, presents a theoretical framework within which power and
resistance are defined as multi-dimensional and ubiquitous. His "analytics"
(Foucault 1998, 92ff) includes a number of propositions suited to an under-
standing of how relations of patriarchal, inter-generational, intra-group and
inter-group power intersect in a multi-layered matrix. "Power", Foucault
states, "is everywhere", "exercised from numerous points" it constitutes a
"multiplicity of force relations". Yet, "where there is power there is resist-
ance", more often than not "mobile and transitory points of resistance,
producing cleavages... fracturing unities". Foucault also insists that "there is
no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled" (1998,
94), thus avoiding Certeau's dichotomous logic and its relative neglect of
power differentials among "the ruled". There is ample empirical evidence of
inequalities and conflicts among Travellers. These include (socio-economic)
status differences (for example, Barnes 1975; Okely 1983), inter-family feuds
and lineage factionalism (for example, Rehfisch and Rehfisch 1975; Barth
1975; Kiddle 1999), gendered power relations (for example, Gmelch 1975;
Miller 1975) and inter-generational conflicts over the value and desired
extent of children's education (for example. Kiddle 1999). Although only one
particular example, Okely's earlier quoted account of Traveller husbands'
attempts to control their wives' activities, and the women's "micro-tactics of
resistance" conforms to the Foucauldian definition of both power and
resistance as multiple and omnipresent. Interestingly then, it is the later
Foucault rather than Certeau who provides a theoretical vantage point from
which to view intra-group power relations as well as resistance in such
micro-contexts.
Contrary to some long-established criticisms (for example, Couldry 2000,
116fO, Ransom argues compellingly that Foucault's work—if taken in its
entirety—does not preclude agency and the subversive construction of
alternative subjectivities. The History of Sexuality certainly supports Ransom's
case, for it is there that Foucault records a "multiplicity of points of
resistance". Ransom continues:

[C]ritical possibilities are very much tied to an argument about how "subjectivity"
comes about in the first place.... In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes a
variety of normalizing practices not so he can prove to us that we have been cast
in stone ... Rather, he tries to give us an experience of a certain kind of
rationality that could help change our relationship with ourselves ... [That] will
change when powers that have worked secretly are revealed.... Foucault's
highest aspiration, however, was to create a situation in which we could
participate in determining—though not dictate—the direction and shape of the
"next truth". (1997, 57f)
268 KARNER

It is my (similar) contention, then, that Foucault ultimately provides a more

complete framework than Certeau for the analysis of power and resistance in
multiple contexts and on several levels of social reality. Yet, parts of his work
display a "lack of sociological contextualism" (Swingewood 2000, 200),
which—given his persistent use of historical sources—is somewhat paradoxi-
cal. My earlier analysis suggests that, glancing backwards and forwards (in
time), Foucault was perhaps overly preoccupied with his essentially historical
project of identifying epistemes and configurations of power and discourse
corresponding to successive eras. Some of his contributions thus contain
elements of reification, extrapolating a seemingly all-encompassing logic of
power and thought from a given epoch (also see Baert 1998, 127). Given
Foucault's insistence in The History of Sexuality on the omnipresence of
"points of resistance in the power network" (1998, 95), this criticism clearly
applies more to his "archaeological phase" and to Discipline and Punish than
to his later work. Yet, the Travellers' counter-ideology and symbolism of
cultural separateness show that some resistance is indeed collective, pat-
terned and persistent rather than—as Foucault suggests—"mobile and
transitory" (1998, 96). Different "truths" and subjectivities, so the Travellers
teach us, can be encountered in synchronic space as much as in by-gone or
anticipated times.^^ They are among "us" (i.e. the "sedentary and proletari-
anised") and have been, for a long time, subject to external mechanisms of
power and control, skilled in the "art of resistance" and internally "structured"
by inequalities of their own.

Concluding Remarks

This article has aimed to reflect the mutually enriching effects of a synthesis
of cultural theory and empirical data, resulting in a two-way "traffic" of
correction, modification and re-thinking. I thus argued that Foucault's ac-
count of modern social control mechanisms advances our understanding of
the impact of sedentary power on Travellers, while Certeau provides a
framework suitable for analysing their "tactics of resistance". However, em-
pirical material on the Travellers was also shown to highlight some
weaknesses in these seminal contributions and, significantly, to question the
validity o f t h e not infrequent juxtaposition of Foucault to Certeau as theorists
of domination and subversion respectively. Foucault's "analytics", I con-
cluded, provides the ultimately more comprehensive and empirically
illuminating framework in so far as it enables us to account for power and
resistance across the ethnic boundary separating "Gorgios" from "Gypsies" as
well as in the micro-contexts of intra-group relations.

28. Also see Hardt and Negri's (2000) synthesis of Foucault's thought on disciplinary power with
Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the "rhizome" for a theory of contemporary movements of
resistance against the postmodern Empire.
 POWER AND RESISTANCE AMONG 'TRAVELLERS" 269

My argument is of wider relevance to the post-war history of social and

cultural theory. Existing analyses of Travellers drawing on neo-Marxism (for
example, Sibley 1981) or structuralism (for example, Okely 1983) have here
been complemented, rather than challenged or superceded, by post-
structuralism. A conceptualisation of structuralism and post-structuralism as
analytically complementary, rather than—as often assumed—successive and
incompatible stages in the history of ideas, seems to be already implied in
Foucault's definition of "the 'mind' as a surface of inscription for power, with
semiology as its tool" and "the submission of bodies through the control of
ideas" (1991b, 102). Articulated in Foucault's later genealogical "phase", this
argument inadvertently reconciles the structuralist focus on semiology, the
mind and classification with the post-structuralist emphasis on power. I
suggested a comparable "reconciliation" in my Certeauian reading of the
bodily inscription of the Travellers' ethnic ideology. Rather than contradicting
Okely's structuralist extrapolation of a cultural logic, this analysis was pre-
sented as an illuminating addition emphasising power alongside—rather
than instead of—classification.
Thus we return to Gadjo Dilo. Tony Gatlifs (1997) cinematic portrayal of a
community of Roma in Eastern Europe resembles the picture painted in this
paper: that of a group of people constrained and encroached upon by
sedentary "forces", skilled in the arts of resistance and survival, while also
internally "structured" by inequalities of power (as most clearly reflected in
Sabina's status as "an outcast among the oppressed"). This paper has focused
on a different geographical context and, through a Foucauldian/Certeauian
reading, has attempted to shed new light on Travellers' resistance against the
panoptical gaze and the classifying logic of industrial modernity as well as,
perhaps more topically, against the consumerist logic of postmodernity.
Stephane and Sabina's nomadic "escape" and symbolic refusal to turn Rom
music into a commodity thus emerge as a metonymic representation of
Travellers' opposition to the normalising hegemony of sedentary society.

University of Nottingham, UK

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