Forgot by multiculturalist and multinationalist literature, Romani people are misrecognized by European states and deeply discriminated in some of them. This paradox, between patterns that accommodate ethnicities, cultures and nations, and their omission of a people who needs cultural protections and political rights within an exclusion context, results of misunderstanding of Romani claims and their representations of community. On the political sphere, their claims are expressed with other words than ethno-cultural entrepreneurs or nationalist parties generally use. Two irreconcilable conceptions of community and domination of nation-state induce the marginalization of Roma, consequence of that gap. Then, representatives and advocacy associations develop an ‘indigenization strategy’ which aims cultural accommodations, but this is another kind of reification that marginalizes them. To integrate the Romani claims into a comprehensive pluralism, my contribution describes these registers with a method which combines political theory and sociology of knowledge.
