The paper has resulted from a several-year cooperation of the research team Bittnerov á, Doubek, Levínská (2011) that examines issues related to Roma education in the context of social exclusion. Its main topic is search for understanding and interpretation of the failure of a project aiming to develop a social centre intended to serve as a basis for provision of social services to the needy residents of the researched site.
What are the implications of "integration" activities? The failure of "integration" is not just refusal of embracing intercultural differences but symbolic refusal of the impoverished status of the whole town the local Roma being the most glaring symbol of that impoverishment. The theoretical point is thetheory of cultural models of Strauss and Quinn (2001). "Romahood" is seen as a radial family resemblance category driven by a prototype (Wittgenstein, 2001; Lakoff, 1990) in the context of distributed culture (Schwartz, 1978).