Until 1989 it was official Communist policy in easter: Europe to absorb Gypsies into the “ruling” working class. But many Gypsies fought to maintain their separate identity. This book 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 eighteen months of observation of daily life ina 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 survival of the Gypsy way of life remains one of the great puzzles of modern European history. How has this despised and feared people protected itself through five hundred years of persecution? The Time of the Gypsies evokes the rhythms of the Gypsies’ daily lives and leads the reader to the clues that unlock the secrets of Gypsy survival.
Author(s): Michael Stewart
Series: Studies in the ethnographic imagination
Publisher: Westview Press
Year: 1997
Language: English
Commentary: scantailor made
Pages: 302
City: Boulder, CO
Tags: hungary;gypsy culture;timeofgypsies0000stew
The Time of the Gypsies
Contents
List of Tables and Illustrations
Foreword, Maurice Bloch
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text
1 Introduction: The Lowest of the Low
Post-Communist Gypsies, or Roma
Communists and Gypsies
Modernity and Diversity
The Local Setting and the Problem of Difference
“Gaiety in the Face of Despair”
Part One The Gypsy Way
2 Gypsy Work
An Origin Story
The Free Lunch
Gypsy Horses
3 A Place of Their Own
Gypsy Settlements
Work
The Ethics of Communal Life
Idioms of Community and Identity: Romanes
4 “We Are All Brothers Here”
A World Apparently Made of Men
Alternative Images of Sociality: Nonbrotherly Relations
Breaking Down the House
The Nature of Community and the Means of Resistance
5 Breaking Out
“If Only We Lived Alone”
Šošoj and Čaja: Getting Rich on One’s Own
Čoro and Luludji’s Story: Upwardly Mobile Gypsies
The Rejection of Differentiation
Part Two Beyond the Ghetto
6 Making Workers Out of Gypsies
Assimilation as Proletarianization
“The Living, Form-giving Fire”
The Parquet Flooring Factory
Redemption Through Labor?
7 Gaźos, Peasants, Communists, and Gypsies
Cigány
Gaźo
Peasants Who Are Masters of Themselves
Disorderly Persons
Communists and Gaźos
Gypsies, Peasants, and Communists
8 Staying Gypsy in a World of Gaźos
“My Heart Was Cut in Two”
The Real and the Imaginary
Part Three The Reinvention of the World
9 Sons of the Market
Horses, Men, and Rom
Market Society
A Day at the Market
The Economics of Horse Dealing
The Pure Dealer, or Middleman
Dealers as Managers of Men
10 A Passion for Dealing
From Dependence to Autonomy Through Luck
Trade and the Construction of Society
11 Brothers in Song
Celebrations
Slow Songs
True Speech
Song and the Ritualization of Equality
12 The Shame of the Body
Dirty Gypsies
The Purity of the Rom Body
Shame and the Gendered Person
The Modest and the Shameless Body
Beyond the Body
13 Conclusion: Marginality, Resistance, and Ideology
The Sources of the Rom Adaptation
Rom Identity, Ethnicity, and Ideology
A Sealed Ideology and Its “Open Sesame”
Glossary
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
About the Book and Author
Index
