European kinship is usually conceptualised as one of the elements that forms the boundary between nature and culture. However, this implicitly assumed biogenetic basis of membership in a particular descent group is not evident in the case of kinship among inhabitants of a Roma settlement. The nature of their kinship can be described as the incorporative process of women and pristašis into descent groups. The fundamental criterion for an expectant partner in marriage is to be 'lačhe' (good, proper, appropriate). The division of people in a Roma settlement into two basic groups (lačhe versus degešis) does not mean that these people form endogamous groups defi ned by procreation. It is rather a matter of moral ideas about what makes people good or bad. Two complementary principles play an important role in these ideas. The fi rst principle relates to the natural base, the second to the process of socialisation. In this respect, fajta does not just refer to a cognatic descent group, but also has another dimension, which cannot simply be defi ned in terms of procreation and which indicates a shift towards a common basis. This can be demonstrated in the example of pristašis, which is a long-term process of incorporation in which fajta, as the domain of nature, shifts to the frame of culture. Despite of the diffi culty of determining whether people were born or socialised into a particular fajta, kinship in a Roma settlement should be studied within the wider organisational complex that on the one hand makes some people related and homogenous and on the other hand excludes other people from this relatedness.

Th e article deals with translational concept of Bruno Latour, focusing on some epistemological issues that arise from the consideration of translation as object of interest. Th ese issues can be reduced to the question whether the fi nal form of translation involves only the knowing subject, or the studied reality as well. Based on the solution to this question, we can distinguish between linguistic and nonlinguistic approaches. Latour's attempt at systematic conceptualization of translation can be seen as a defl ection from the linguistic tradition in favor of nonlinguistic forms involved in the program of the ontological turn. In this sense, the text describes primarily the issues of reductionism, asymmetry, generalized symmetry, agency and the role of researcher in the research process. In Latour's view, this process is not the matter of facts, but matter of concerns, in which ontological politics consists of negotiation over what makes up the real world.

The article deals with the implementation of the basic infrastructure into the area of an Eastern Slovakian Roma settlement. The infrastructure is conceptualized as an assemblages of material objects, practices and knowledge organizing the existing social relationships, and contributing to the exclusion and marginalization of Roma people. Based on the fieldwork, author discusses the consequences of the infrastructural building (public water supply system, public lighting and electric network) and how do they contribute to the forms of disconnections creating the differences between local majority and people who live in the described Roma settlement.

This article focuses on the building of a pathway that serves as a basic platform for remembering a forgotten pilgrimage site in the West Bohemian Region. It examines the building of the pathway as a transformation process from an original idea to the final form, which was made possible through negotiation between various actors. It provides the potential to explore the building of memorial landscape, which implies how specific places of remembering are transformed and exported into the form of a pathway. In respect to this principle, the subject area of the pathway is inscribed into the place of remembering typical for the intersection of different frames of reference. Thus, I argue that memory is formed not as a prescribed form of remembering, but rather as a free variation conditioned by the affective potential of a marked place, offering a direction for possible remembering.

This article focuses on the use of critical discourse analysis in ethnographic research on homosexual and transsexual identity in eastern Slovakian Roma settlements. Critical Discourse Analysis offers a methodological and analytical system for handling the identifi cation process of these actors. Using some premises of Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, the author attempts to demonstrate how homosexual and transsexual individuals (labelled using native categories such as homosexaulis, gayos, buzerantos, kerado, or tato) are identifi ed, and how this process of identifi cation is linked to existing social practices. In the analysis the author focuses on analytical issues, including the problem of identifying buzerantos and the semiotic aspects of identifi cation methods that can be observed in the context of conjunctural events of social practice. Other issues the author deals with include how this identifi cation process relates to genre, style and discourse, how subjectivity is involved in discourse, and in what ways members' resources are changing the limits of discourse. The fi nal point analysed is the practice of homosexuality and transsexuality as an alternative discourse type, which challenges the strategies of stigmatisation and changes the classifi cation frames governing what is appropriate or inappropriate.