Let’s start by clarifying some basic terms. Would it be correct to say that all Roma are Roma but not all Roma are Roma?
yes, generally speaking that’s correct. when we say that all Roma are Gypsies, I would correct it a bit and say that all Roma are often called Gypsies by others, sometimes by themselves, but not always. In general, today the term “Gypsy” is one that outsiders use to refer to both Roma and non-Roma people, such as travellers. so when we say that the Roma are Gypsies, it is not about what they are or are not, but about how people perceive and refer to them. the reference is often associated with a particular perception, some of which are true and many of which are not. for example, when people associate Roma with people who travel, then most Roma are not Roma because most do not travel and have never traveled. romanis refer to themselves as ‘rom’ in their language. to them what that means is a particular set of values, family structure, beliefs and language etc. others refer to them as gypsies because they select a particular image that they apply to the Roma people but also to other people, in particular the traveling communities.
You are reading: Books about gypsy culture
can you give us a brief summary of the history of the Roma people?
this is a bit problematic because the history of the Roma people is not documented from the beginning, and what is documented has been done by outsiders. so what we know is selective and partly inferred.
early roma history can really only be inferred from the language, which is indian, so we know the population originated from india. To some extent, we can pinpoint using linguistic analysis the regions of India they came from and also the time of their exodus, but these are very crude estimates. We assume that the Romani people originated in central India, then settled in the northwestern regions of India, and later migrated to Anatolia around the 10th century. that is as far as we can go from the linguistic evidence. Circumstantial evidence to support this is that we know there was a general movement of people from India specializing in particular trades that ended up in various parts of Central and West Asia and the Middle East. It is important to note that the exodus of the Roma was not an isolated phenomenon, but was part of a general movement, especially of artisan castes, out of India.
later, with the decline of the byzantine empire around the 15th century, groups of roma moved into central and western europe and also into parts of the north. their presence in the Balkans was largely documented by outsiders in tax records and court proceedings, especially during the Ottoman period, and their migration is documented in edicts issued against Gypsies in European states. those who emigrated were very conspicuous for their foreign appearance and used to exploit the superstitions of the local populations by offering services such as divination, but they were also active as craftsmen producing tools and other goods. however, although there was this westward and northward movement with the fall of the Byzantine Empire, most Roma remained in the Balkans.
what is the number of Roma now and where do they live?
It is very difficult to say since there are no reliable statistics. estimates vary from three million to more than 10 million; reality probably lies somewhere in between. The largest Roma populations are found in south-eastern Europe, both in terms of actual numbers and as a proportion of the population as a whole, in countries such as Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece and Turkey. the further west you go, the population starts to decrease.
Are there Roma communities in North America and South America?
Yes, there are large communities in both North and South America that are descended from immigrants who left Europe primarily in the late 19th century. There is also a significant Roma community in Australia.
You have selected five books on Roma culture and history. How much scholarship is there on the subject?
There are studies and in recent years there has been much more interest. today there are very well attended annual meetings of scholars who specialize in roma studies and there is an academic journal called roma studies, which i edit, which was founded in 1888. but if you look at the subject areas, a lot of it is ethnographic and linguistic. the linguistic study of the gypsies is the most consolidated discipline, dating back more than 200 years. there is much less representation in political science and history; Roma history is not really present in university history departments. moreover, most of the historical research that exists is limited to the study of sources in a particular region during a particular period.
Are there Roma archives that historians can consult or is it just an oral historical tradition?
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no, there is no file. now there are activists documenting oral histories, but there is very little. and of course oral history only goes back a generation or two, and even then there are gaps. the most notable is the genocide of rome that took place in the second world war. we still have survivors alive today, but telling the story of what happened has been taboo in Roma families, in part because many of those who survived the concentration camps were forcibly sterilized. this is especially traumatic in the context of Roma society, which is very family-oriented. For years, survivors never spoke of their ordeal, and only recently did some start talking to people, whether historians or documentarians, who wanted to document what happened.
The history of the Roma people tends to be written by non-Roma people, based on documents, often about their persecution, compiled by non-Roma people. we also have official records, such as tax payments, that provide information on occupations and movement patterns. there are also literary representations that give an idea, although again from an external perspective, about the appearance and organization of Roma families. sometimes there are also records of some positive government measures, such as letters of safe conduct, permission to settle, and edicts granting particular rights to Roma in specific places. these are the kind of documents that can be referred to when reconstructing Roma history.
Increasingly, professional historians working with the Roma are being challenged by a very vocal group of Roma activists presenting their own narrative of Roma historiography that is not so much based on evidence-based research, but on a attempt to reshape and redefine a gypsy identity and project it backwards in history. these people express themselves a lot through ngos, schools and the media and as a result we have all sorts of ghost narratives of Roma history appearing on the internet and elsewhere.
Your first book looks at how the Roma population in Russia adapted to life under communism. please tell us more.
This is a very interesting book because it looks at the first recognition of the Roma as an ethnic or national minority anywhere. It’s kind of ironic that it happened in the Soviet Union, but that said, it only lasted a few years, from the late 1920s to the late 1930s.
The book focuses on the activities of a small circle of Roma activists and how they managed to create a special status for the minority after the communist revolution. it was really a survival strategy. Gypsies were always a free-enterprise, self-employed people, and the new Soviet economic structure introduced serious impediments to their continuing to live as they had for generations. the authorities had also decided to ban Roma cultural performances and characterize them as degenerate. Their entire way of life was being called into question and they needed to somehow figure out a way to fit in.
Of course, there was no tradition of political activism within the Roma communities, so these activists had to reinvent the Roma to try to convince the authorities that they were a nationality like any other. they did so by taking advantage of popular stereotypes. they suggested that the Roma were backward and needed special support to become good socialist citizens and argued that they could only gain such support if they were recognized as an individual ethnic group. Through this argument they managed to establish special schools and teacher training programs, as well as industrial and agricultural groups for the gypsy people. What particularly impresses me, because of my work on the Romani language, is that they also, for the first time, started a state program to create a Romani literary language. to this day, there has never been a comparable number of Roma-language publications produced in any country. Between four and five hundred books were published in Romani, including translations by Pushkin and others, but also political propaganda and educational material. unfortunately much of it was destroyed in the late 1930s.
what happened then?
It was then that centralization intensified and there was a general change in liberal nationalities policy. the only institution that survived was the Roman theater, which still exists. it is an irony of history that this traditional image of Roma as performers on stage is the only thing allowed to survive from the whole experiment.
Tell us about your second choice.
The focus here is on how the Roma are portrayed in modern media, particularly the prejudice and incitement that is spread. The book also examines the new right in Europe and how it uses the Roma as scapegoats, and how its narrative is finding resonance with government institutions. has a particularly strong focus on central and eastern europe.
each chapter has a different author; they are mostly beginning researchers who entered the area of Roma studies in the last decade or so. in the past, Roma studies researchers were mainly interested in ethnography and linguistics. we now have a generation that is more interested in how society treats Roma as a minority, and what that treatment says about that society as a whole. The book’s publisher, Michael Stewart, has played a major role in nurturing this generation of early-stage researchers from across Europe. he has organized annual summer schools in Roma studies and many of the book’s contributors are graduates of these.
the authors show how the expansion of the eu has provoked the search for a new nationalist ideology in many of the new member states. there is a sense of disappointment with the eu membership and there is a frustration and anger, which has been fueling the rise of the new right, with a kind of political correctness being foisted on them with its emphasis on minority and human rights . this frustration often leads to aggression against the Roma minority. they are often the first to lose their jobs because they tend to be less qualified and also because of general discrimination. having lost their jobs, they are accused of being dependent on benefits and of being a burden on the state and society. resentment is further fueled by the traditional image of Roma as shy to work.
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While we’re on the subject, although this is not explicitly discussed in the contributions to the book, we might add that, paradoxically, Roma can also be seen as objects of envy. they are perceived as free from the mundane routines and sexual morality of society at large, and their music and lifestyle are perceived as creative and colourful. thus, they can be seen as the “other” in a positive rather than a negative sense, except that the positive is exoticized far beyond reality. for example, his supernatural powers are exaggerated. I personally know several Roma who make a living, or have made a living in the past, by reading the future. but none of them really believe that there is any truth to their fortune-telling, it’s just business. the people who are actually superstitious are their non-Roma clients. It is an irony that the society projects supernatural powers on the Roma, but it is actually an expression of the society’s own superstition.
Much has been written about Spain’s Jewish and Muslim minority populations, but little scholarly attention has been paid to the Gypsies. what does this book tell us?
This book analyzes the Spanish archives and is really a model for writing Roma history. To write a book about the Roma experience in Spain, you not only need fluency in Spanish, but you also need to be able to recognize when Roma people are referenced in documents. they do not call them by the name that the gypsies call themselves and very rarely do they find anything in the romani language. Spanish sources, like most of Europe in this period, also generally refer to the Roma as Egyptians.
the history of gypsies in spain is full of edicts that expel them wholesale from specific provinces over and over again. this was especially the case after the economic and military crises when there was a general sense of insecurity. the main concern of the authorities was that the Spanish indigenous population would actually join the gypsy communities. this often comes up in these edicts and sanctions would be imposed on people caught associating with them. thus, it seems that the Roma were tolerated in particular occupations of the economy but that the Spanish authorities feared that the local population would go their way if they associated too much with them. therefore, across that, there was a general association between attitudes towards Roma and crime prevention. basically, the concern for the Roma became a concern for crime prevention, because people without a fixed address were considered to be prone to crime. this led to a vicious circle: expulsion led to nomadism, which was then criminalized. however, one of the really interesting things that pym notices is that most of the ban orders don’t seem to have been honored. they are repeated year after year in the same provinces, and it seems that nothing was really done to enforce them.
today, you still have a gypsy population of around half a million in spain. this is partly because the Roma were very effective in moving back and forth across the borders of the various provinces to avoid trouble and also because they were able to seek protection from their persecutors. during the Spanish inquisition they were protected by local nobles and even local clergy in various places, who were sympathetic to their plight or who could profit financially by helping them. The reason many Roma moved to Andalusia in the south of Spain seems to be because there were much larger estates there, so they had much more freedom to move about without being noticed by the authorities. that region also had many people of Muslim descent who were also viewed with suspicion during the inquisition, so the Roma were not being persecuted there.
His fourth book analyzes Romani music. please tell us more.
I chose this book for two reasons. First of all, nothing is more associated with gypsy culture than music. it is the first meeting point that many people have directly or indirectly with the gypsies. secondly, the author is one of the leading ethnographers of gypsy society. is steeped in Romani language and culture, and this is an exemplary investigation into a central aspect of Romani culture.
what carol silverman shows us here is that roma music is really world music. gypsies are essentially artists and although they have their own styles and ways of organizing their music, they simply play for the public. there is no such thing as music that is inherently gypsy – there are different types and styles of music for different purposes. That in turn is very true of Roma culture in general, which Silverman calls “cultural hybridization” and a “cosmopolitan culture.”
this book deconstructs the idea that gypsy culture is something primordial, essential and something exotic that has been preserved throughout the centuries from india. while you can say that about certain aspects of their culture, most notably the language, we can’t see them as a museum exhibit that never changes. Roma culture is very dynamic and they have absorbed influences and have made creative use of these influences; in fact, they are leading figures in the creative development of the cultures of other peoples, especially in the area of music.
We are talking about your final selection now and a study of a Romanian village.
This is one of the best ethnographies of a Roma community and, interestingly, one of the only modern communities in Romania, which has one of the largest Roma populations in the world. Very little has been written about the history, culture and language of Roma in Romania, so this is an important contribution.
ada engebrigsten lived in a village in transylvania for more than a year and observes relations between roma and non-roma by spending time with both. in many ways it is a classic ethnography. he describes customs such as marriages and funerals and closely examines work patterns within the Roma community. He also discusses the impact of modern influences such as NGOs and church missionaries. One of the most interesting chapters is on what she calls “Roma cosmology”: the internal value system that divides honorable and dishonorable behavior, good fortune and misfortune, the inside and the outside, and the top and bottom of the world. Body. the idea of good and bad maps onto some very abstract notions, especially regarding behavior towards strangers. this is really a core element of Roma culture and understanding it is essential to understand the inner world of this community.
One of the things I like about this book is that, although it doesn’t commit to a particular theoretical approach, it reminds me very much of the structuralist ethnographies that were popular in the 1920s and 1930s; The works of Claude Levi-Strauss and others who saw value systems in communities as systematic and structured in some way. many modern ethnographies from the 1980s are very focused on a postmodernist and poststructuralist approach, trying to do away with these systematic approaches. As I say, although Engebrigsten does not specifically commit to a theoretical framework, I think there is an aspect of the structure that she brings to the discussion. she considers that Roma actions and beliefs are not random, but fit into a general whole.
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