Displays

Since tsarist times, Roma in Russia have been portrayed as both rebellious outlaws and free-spirited songbirds--in each case, as if isolated from society. In Soviet times, Russians continued to harbor these two, only seemingly opposed, views of "Gypsies," exalting their songs on stage but scorning them on the streets as liars and cheats. Alaina Lemon's Between Two Fires examines how Roma themselves have negotiated these dual images in everyday interactions and in stage performances. Lemon's ethnographic study is based on extensive fieldwork in 1990s Russia and focuses on Moscow Romani Theater actors as well as Romani traders and metalworkers. Drawing from interviews with Roma and Russians, observations of performances, and conversations, as well as archives, literary texts, and media, Lemon analyzes the role of theatricality and theatrical tropes in Romani life and the everyday linguistics of social relations and of memory. Historically, the way Romani stage performance has been culturally framed and positioned in Russia has served to typecast Gypsies as "natural" performers, she explains. Thus, while theatrical and musical performance may at times empower Roma, more often it has reinforced and rationalized racial and social stereotypes, excluding them from many Soviet and Russian economic and political arenas. Performance, therefore, defines what it means to be Romani in Russia differently than it does elsewhere, Lemon shows. Considering formal details of language as well as broader cultural and social structures, she also discusses how racial categories relate to post-Soviet economic changes, how gender categories and Euro-Soviet notions of civility are connected, and how ontological distinctions between "stage art" and "real life" contribute to the making of social types. This complex study thus serves as a corrective to romantic views of Roma as detached from political forces.

This 2001 book is an attempt by a social scientist to explain the predicament of Gypsies (or Roma), Eastern Europe's largest ethnic minority, and their relationship to the region's states and societies. Barany examines the Gypsies' socioeconomic and political marginality and policies toward them through seven centuries and in seven East European states. He illuminates the reasons why the Roma have consistently occupied the bottom of social, economic, and political hierarchies regardless of historical period or geographic location. Barany argues that the current nostalgia of many Gypsies for the socialist period is easy to understand, given the disastrous effect of the post-communist socioeconomic transformation on the Roma's conditions over the last decade. He explains the impact of Gypsy political mobilization, and the activities of international organizations and NGOs, on government policies. This pioneering multidisciplinary work will engage political scientists, sociologists and historians, as well as students of ethnic and racial studies.

What does civilization mean to the inhabitants of a Serbian town after yet another bloody war on the Balkan Peninsula? How was it possible that people who had been friends and neighbors for so long ended up killing each other? And how do they deal with this barbarity in the post-war period? The figure of the gypsy, who often appears in Serbian popular culture, has always been invested with the mysterious power to unveil the mendacious undertones in the program of civilization. Wherever he appears - in jokes, songs, tales, literature, or movies - the civilized order is unmasked. This motif can be seen most dramatically in bars and taverns, where gypsy musicians lead their Serbian customers in veritable celebrations of unreason. "This is real," Serbs say about these gatherings where the canons of propriety and civilized behavior are overthrown with obvious relish. "This is life." The author, who spent several months in Serbia investigating these wild meetings, relates the 'unreason' of the behaviour in these bars to the atrocities committed during the war which broke out during his stay. Highlighting how the program of civilization brings with it the need to construct an image of humankind more compatible with the lessons of history, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild may be read as a case-study of how war-infested societies cope with wartime traumas.

Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930, is the first book to explore fully the British obsession with Gypsies throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Deborah Epstein Nord traces various representations of Gypsies in the works of such well-known British authors John Clare, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and D. H. Lawrence. Nord also exhumes lesser-known literary, ethnographic, and historical texts, exploring the fascinating histories of nomadic writer George Borrow, the Gypsy Lore Society, Dora Yates, and other rarely examined figures and institutions. Gypsies were both idealized and reviled by Victorian and early-twentieth-century Britons. Associated with primitive desires, lawlessness, cunning, and sexual excess, Gypsies were also objects of antiquarian, literary, and anthropological interest. As Nord demonstrates, British writers and artists drew on Gypsy characters and plots to redefine and reconstruct cultural and racial difference, national and personal identity, and the individual's relationship to social and sexual orthodoxies. Gypsies were long associated with pastoral conventions and, in the nineteenth century, came to stand in for the ancient British past. Using myths of switched babies, Gypsy kidnappings, and the Gypsies' murky origins, authors projected onto Gypsies their own desires to escape convention and their anxieties about the ambiguities of identity. The literary representations that Nord examines have their roots in the interplay between the notion of Gypsies as a separate, often despised race and the psychic or aesthetic desire to dissolve the boundary between English and Gypsy worlds. By the beginning of the twentieth century, she argues, romantic identification with Gypsies had hardened into caricature-a phenomenon reflected in D. H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gipsy-and thoroughly obscured the reality of Gypsy life and history.

Throughout the twentieth century, Spanish people have deployed conflicting sexual moralities in their struggle for political supremacy within the state. The Spanish Gypsies or Gitanos, who live at the very bottom of the Spanish socio-economic scale, have appropriated this concern with gender morality and, in the process, have reinvented themselves as the only honourable Spaniards. Although the Gitano gender ideology has a distinctively Spanish flavour, it revolves around a conceptualization of the female body that is radically different from that of other Spaniards.The subtle exploration of these acts of cultural invention is one of the original features of this important new ethnography. Another even more striking aspect of the work is the author's vision of the 'impermanent' nature of the Gitano social order and the absence of any representation of 'community' or 'society'. Unlike their non-Gypsy neighbours, Gitanos do not use concepts of tradition, territory or social harmony as bases for their singularity. Instead, they focus on the evaluation of personal moral performances in the present. In a cultural universe where all activities are markers of shared identity, and where personhood is always sexed, men and women continually enact the superiority of Gypsies over non-Gypsies. Through dress, manner and the management of emations, or at wedding rituals where the virginity of young brides is put to the test, the body works as the site of these processes.

The book explores the notion of Gypsy and Traveller ethnicity and provides a critique of the conceptual basis of racial and ethnic categorisation. An analysis of the post-war housing situation is given in order to illustrate a connection between social and economic conditions, legislation affecting gypsies and travellers and the visibility and general consciousness of the gypsy and traveller population. The originality of the book lies in its argument that the position of gypsies and travellers largely arises out of social conditions and interaction rather than political, biological or ideological determinants. It puts forward the notion of an ethnic narrative of traveller identity and illustrates how variations of this have been defensively deployed by some travellers and elaborated on by theorists. Belton focuses on the social generation of travellers as a cultural, ethnic and racial categorization, offering a rational explanation of the development of an itinerant population that is less ambiguous and more informative in terms of the social nature of the gypsy and traveller position than interpretations based on 'blood', 'breed', 'stock', ethnicity or race that dominate the literature.

For many of us, one of the most important ways of coping with the death of a close relative is talking about them, telling all who will listen what they meant to us. Yet the Gypsies of central France, the Manus, not only do not speak of their dead, they burn or discard the deceased's belongings, refrain from eating the dead person's favorite foods, and avoid camping in the place where they died. In Gypsy World, Patrick Williams argues that these customs are at the center of how Manus see the world and their place in it. The Manus inhabit a world created by the "Gadzos" (non-Gypsies), who frequently limit or even prohibit Manus movements within it. To claim this world for themselves, the Manus employ a principle of cosmological subtraction: just as the dead seem to be absent from Manus society, argues Williams, so too do the Manus absent themselves from Gadzo society--and in so doing they assert and preserve their own separate culture and identity. Anyone interested in Gypsies, death rituals, or the formation of culture will enjoy this fascinating and sensitive ethnography.

The struggle for survival by Gypsies in Britain is introduced in this sociological perspective that includes a look at government policy and the discrimination that follows gypsy caravans. With a full description of the Gypsies and Travellers' historical origins and current community groups, this text explores their complex relationship with British society, from dealing with local authorities and human rights issues to moving into permanent brick-and-mortar residency and seeking representation in local and national governments.

There are some seven million gypsies in Europe. An often obscured and mythologized people, this volume provides a wealth of definitive, factual information about these typically hidden people and their unique culture.

This is the first book to address the issues of Traveller culture - history, language, ethnicity and nomadism - as examined by a wide range of contributors including anthropologists, linguists, community workers and Travellers. May McCann is a lecturer in social anthropology at the Queen's University of Belfast, Séamus Ó Síocháin is a lecturer in anthropology at St Patrick's College, Maynooth and Joseph Ruane is a lecturer in sociology at University College Cork.

How do objects mediate human relationships, and possess their own social and political agency? What role does material culture - such as prestige consumption as well as commodity aesthetics, biographies, and ownership histories - play in the production of social and political identities, differences, and hierarchies? How do (informal) consumer subcultures of collectors organize and manage themselves? Drawing on theories from anthropology and sociology, specifically material culture, consumption, museum, ethnicity, and post-socialist studies, Materializing Difference addresses these questions via analysis of the practices and ideologies connected to Gabor Roma beakers and roofed tankards made of antique silver. The consumer subculture organized around these objects - defined as ethnicized and gendered prestige goods by the Gabor Roma living in Romania - is a contemporary, second-hand culture based on patina-oriented consumption. Materializing Difference reveals the inner dynamics of the complex relationships and interactions between objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards) and subjects (Romanian Roma) and investigates how these relationships and interactions contribute to the construction, materialization, and reformulation of social, economic, and political identities, boundaries, and differences. It also discusses how, after 1989, the political transformation in Romania led to the emergence of a new, post-socialist consumer sensitivity among the Gabor Roma, and how this sensitivity reshaped the pre-regime-change patterns, meanings, and value preferences of prestige consumption.

A minority and the state looks at the relationship between Travellers, or 'Gypsies', and the wider settled society in Britain throughout the twentieth century. This detailed study considers the ways in which the state has tried to create and enforce legislation to regulate their lifestyles, as well as the Travellers' responses, and resistance, to these efforts. The book is a much needed history of Britain's travelling communities in the twentieth century, drawing together detailed archival research at local and national level to explore the impact of state and legislative developments on Travellers, as well as their experience of missions, education, war and welfare. It offers a new perspective on British ethnic history by arguing that Travellers' experiences should not be understood as the history of a nomadic group, but in terms of the wider history of British minorities.

Gypsies and Travllers in Britain are at a crisis point where the survival of their way of life into the new millennium is in doubt. This book describes the Gypsy and Traveller population in Britain as it is, as well as the stereotypes that abound and show how, although harassed as a minority, they have not, in practice, had the protection which the law should afford to minorities. Gypsies and Travellers are still on the verge of society. It discusses the legislation that has been brought in to control their movements and reviews their relationships with the police as well as local and central government agencies. Finally, it looks at the emerging interest the European organizations are taking in the nomad populations.

Roaming the countryside in caravans, earning their living as musicians, peddlers, and fortune-tellers, the Gypsies and their elusive way of life represented an affront to Nazi ideas of social order, hard work, and racial purity. They were branded as "asocials," harassed, and eventually herded into concentration camps where many thousands were killed. But until now the story of their persecution has either been overlooked or distorted. In The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Guenter Lewy draws upon thousands of documents--many never before used--from German and Austrian archives to provide the most comprehensive and accurate study available of the fate of the Gypsies under the Nazi regime. Lewy traces the escalating vilification of the Gypsies as the Nazis instigated a widespread crackdown on the "work-shy" and "itinerants." But he shows that Nazi policy towards Gypsies was confused and changeable. At first, local officials persecuted gypsies, and those who behaved in gypsy-like fashion, for allegedly anti-social tendencies. Later, with the rise of race obsession, Gypsies were seen as a threat to German racial purity, though Himmler himself wavered, trying to save those he considered "pure Gypsies" descended from Aryan roots in India. Indeed, Lewy contradicts much existing scholarship in showing that, however much the Gypsies were persecuted, there was no general program of extermination analogous to the "final solution" for the Jews. Exploring in heart-rending detail the fates of individual Gypsies and their families, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies makes an important addition to our understanding both of the history of this mysterious people and of all facets of the Nazi terror.

Brian Belton's powerfully original book examines Gypsy lives against the framework of social theories that illustrate how identity arises out of the cultural complexity of individual biographies, families, and communities. Addressing the lack of contextual and social perspectives in the existing literature and the underlying assumption of a consistent Gypsy lineage, he explores the subject of identity to include the broader social context in which the population exists. He argues that Gypsy identity is created and maintained not only by tradition and heredity, but also by social and ideological factors that give rise to the "ethnic narrative" of Gypsy identity. Growing up in an English Gypsy family, Belton offers a unique "outsider-insider" perspective to Questioning Gypsy Identity, writing what are essentially stories of people--how they are made, their social force, and what they collectively create.

In early eighteenth-century texts, the gypsy is frequently figured as an amusing rogue; by the Victorian period, it has begun to take on a nostalgic, romanticized form, abandoning sublimity in favour of the bucolic fantasy propagated by George Borrow and the founding members of the Gypsy Lore Society. Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period argues that, in the gap between these two situations, the figure of the gypsy is exploited by Romantic-period writers and artists, often in unexpected ways. Drawing attention to prominent writers (including Wordsworth, Austen, Clare, Cowper and Brontë) as well as those less well-known, Sarah Houghton-Walker examines representations of gypsies in literature and art from 1780-1830, alongside the contemporary socio-historical events and cultural processes which put pressure on those representations. She argues that, raising troubling questions by its repeated escape from the categories of enlightenment discourses which might seek to "know" or "understand" in empirical ways, the gypsy exists both within and outside of conventional English society. The figure of the gypsy is thus available to writers and artists to facilitate the articulation of dilemmas and anxieties taking various forms, and especially as a lens through which questions of knowledge and identity (which is often mutable, and troubling) might be focussed. .

Written in a lively and accessible style, and illustrated throughout with photographs, The Roma Cafe is a poignant and intriguing analysis of the diverse problems facing Central and Eastern Europe's gypsy populations, including the largely unacknowledged legacy of the Roma Holocaust.Engaging with a broad range of issues including racism, stereotyping, and political and economic transition in the ex-Communist states, Professor Istvan Pogany challenges the most common preconceptions about the Roma. He also looks at the specifics of individual Romani lives, particularly in Hungary and Romania.Highlighting the difficulties that all marginal peoples face, Pogany explains how the Roma have been devastated by the economic transition from Communism to open markets in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. Mass unemployment, poverty, lack of education, as well as widespread anti-Roma discrimination and inadequate legal protection, have left the Roma facing intense hardship and marginalisation since the collapse of state socialism.However, this book is not just a catalogue of the challenges that the Roma face -- it is also a celebration of Roma cultures and of the acceptance of difference -- something that is more important than ever in our multicultural societies.

Based on first-hand accounts from Roma communities, Romaphobia is an examination of the discrimination faced by one of the most persecuted groups in Europe. Well-researched and informative, it shows that this discrimination has its roots in the early history of the European nation-state, and the ways in which the landless Roma have been excluded from national communities founded upon a notion of belonging to a particular territory. Romaphobia allows us to unpick this relationship between identity and belonging, and shows the way towards the inclusion of Roma in society, providing vital insights for other marginalized communities.

Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language; the places her family stopped and worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lores of their people. But his own experience of life on the road was limited to Ford Transit journeys from West Sussex to Hampshire to sell flowers. In a bid to better understand his Gypsy heritage, the history of the Britain's Romanies and the rhythms of their life today, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the atchin tans, or stopping places – the old encampment sites known only to Travellers. Through winter frosts and summer dawns, from horse fairs to Gypsy churches, neon-lit lay-bys to fern-covered banks, Damian lives on the road, somewhere between the romanticised Gypsies of old, and their much-maligned descendants of today.

Until 1989 it was official Communist policy in eastern Europe to absorb Gypsies into the "ruling" working class. Since 1989, the Gypsies have become the scapegoat of postcommunism. More Gypsies have had their houses burned and have been killed in racist attacks in the first six postcommunist years than in all the time since World War II. Today the Gypsies have taken the place of the Jews, feared when poor and isolated in ghettos and hated even more than their skill as traders hasbrought them unaccustomed wealth and entry to walks of life previously forbidden to them.The Time of the Gypsies is about the refusal of one group of Gypsies--the Rom--to abandon their way of life and accept assimilation into the majority population. It is a story about the sources of cultural diversity in modern industrial society and about the fear and hatred that such social and cultural difference may give rise to. The core of the book, based on the author's eighteen months of observation of daily life in a Gypsy settlement, describes the cultivation, celebration, and reinvention of cultural difference and diversity by a people deemed by their "social superiors" to be too stupid and uncivilized to have a culture at all.The author, who is the only journalist to have lived in a community of eastern European Gypsies and learned their language, takes the reader on the journey of discovery that he himself made. The answer to seemingly trivial puzzles, such as why the visiting Gypsy woman sits on the author's hat, all become part of the explanation of how this uniquepeople, without a homeland but unlike any other diaspora population with no dream of a homeland, has sustained itself.

In this book Judith Okely challenges popular accounts of Gypsies which suggest that they were once isolated communities, enjoying an autonomous culture and economy now largely eroded by the processes of industrialisation and western capitalism. Dr Okely draws on her own extensive fieldwork and on contemporary documents. The Traveller-Gypsies is the first monograph to be published on Gypsies in Britain using the perspective of social anthropology. It examines the historical origins of the Gypsies, their economy, travelling patterns, self-ascription, kinship and political groupings, and their marriage choices, upbringing and gender divisions. A detailed analysis of pollution beliefs reveals an underlying system which expresses and reinforces the separation of Gypsies from non-Gypsies. Explanations for beliefs are sought in their contemporary meaning as opposed to their alleged Indian origin. None of these aspects are analysed independently of the wider society, its policies, beliefs, and practices. This book will be invaluable for teaching purposes, both as a study of a Gypsy community per se, and for its discussion of the problems involved in carrying out fieldwork within the anthropologist's own society. It will also interest the general reader and the academic specialist; social anthropologists, sociologists, historians, geographers, planners and all those concerned with minority groups.

Written by a Romani (Gypsy), this introduction to Roma life, health, food, culture, and society provides an insightful look at this despised by mysterious minority originating in India. Extensively illustrated, it looks at the people, their history since leaving India 1,000 years ago, and their rejection and exclusion from society in the countries where they settled. It offers candid advice on rejecting prejudices and stereotypes and getting to know the Roma as individuals, with short biographies of Roma in many different walks of life.