Roma and Gypsy "Ethnicity" As A Subject of Anthropological Inquiry

AN42CH24-Stewart ARI 22 July 2013 12:22
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Review in Advance first posted online
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C E
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A
D V A
Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity”

as a Subject of Anthropological
Inquiry
Michael Stewart
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2013.42. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
Department of Anthropology, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT,

United Kingdom; email: m.stewart@ucl.ac.uk
by Monash University on 09/04/13. For personal use only.
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2013. 42:415–32 Keywords

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at minorities, Europe, mimesis, methodological nationalism
anthro.annualreviews.org
This article’s doi: Abstract

10.1146/annurev-anthro-092010-153348
Anthropological interest in Romany and Gypsy populations is now intense;
Copyright c 2013 by Annual Reviews. but for the first seven or so decades of Anthropology, the field was left en-
All rights reserved
tirely to amateur folklorists. Roma and Gypsies may often “not want in”
(Gmelch 1986), but they also seem not to fit into existing academic mod-
els. Examining various ways in which Romany sociality challenges existing
anthropological models, this article assesses the contribution of three ex-
planations of Romany persistence: historical, sociostructural and culturalist.
Roma always live immersed within and dispersed among dominant majority
populations, and yet their adaptation remains surprisingly successful in the
long historical view. The enormous diversity of Romany social forms, as well
as Roma evasion of the trap of nation-state/ethnic figurations, continues to
provide a potent source for anthropological reflection and theorization.
415
Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print
INTRODUCTION
As I conclude the writing of this article, a 20-year-old Eastern European Romany man languishes
in the pretrial, remand system of the United Kingdom, charged with the statutory rape of his wife,
age 11. In self-defense, he explains that he was doing nothing more criminal than following the
traditions of his community in which girls from the age of 10 or 11 marry slightly older boys.
The authorities agree that the couple are in love and their sexual relations are consensual, but
the full might of the British legal system is being brought down to break up this common law
marriage and separate a family whose behavior has shocked and offended immigration officials
and social workers. In 2012, Romany cultural difference disturbs and inflames the repressive zeal
of the civilizing state just as it did in the 1960s (Acton 1974) and in the 1930s (Milton 2002). And
today it is not just the officially enshrined torchbearers of decency who voice their objections to
Romany practice: Across Europe, waves of anti-Gypsy politics are being carried high on a rising
tide of resentment and hostility to this, the largest, European minority (Marinaro & Sigona 2011,
Picker 2012, Stewart 2012).
It is no exaggeration to say that, in these increasingly worrisome times, the emergence of a

large number of young scholars working on Romany communities and the challenges they face
offers one of the few reasons to hope that the current plight of the Roma may have a foreseeable
end. In this brief survey, I provide an overview of the history of the involvement of anthropologists
and scholars working in neighboring disciplines on Roma and Gypsies as well as an assessment of
some of the profitable directions of current research.
Why Did Roma and Gypsies Emerge So Late as a Legitimate Field of Study?
Although the field of Romany studies is now respectably represented within anthropology and
empirical sociology, and indeed across the social science spectrum by full-time academics in most
countries of Europe (as evidenced by the newly created network of Romany expertise assembling
more than 200 scholars; see http://romanistudies.eu/), one of the most curious aspects of this field
is that for most of the past century, unlike the amateur folklorists, professional anthropologists
ignored what one would have thought were the fairly obvious theoretical returns from studies
of Roma and Gypsies. It was only in 1975 that three pioneer studies appeared (Gropper 1975,
Rehfisch 1975, Sutherland 1975). For good reasons, however, scholars in this field place Okely
(1983) at the root of the explosion of work that continues today because in her original ethnography
she carried out a rigorous assault on the received opinions and unnoticed blind spots of what had
passed for studies of Gypsies until then. Okely repeatedly notes how her approach diverged from
the dominant “Gypsiologist” paradigm in which “racial theories,” which had long been discarded
in the mainstream academy, lived on unchallenged (pp. 15–18, 24–25, 215–16, 227). At that time,
the field of Romany studies in Britain, France, and America was overwhelmingly dominated by the
approach of folklore and, moreover, its amateur incarnations (e.g., Fraser 1992; see also Herzfeld
1982). One can see that it took some courage indeed for a doctoral student at the University of
Oxford in the 1970s to declare that her field of study was a mere 60 km up the newly opened
motorway from London to a parking lot on the edge of a main road. Neither academic field
nor physical location promised much. In Bernand Arcand’s unforgettable remark, it would have
seemed to many of her contemporaries that Ms. Okely had chosen “neither a good tribe nor even
a good beach”—but how wrong they were.1
1
The remark was actually made in respect of a fieldwork among Bradford Asians that the prospective fieldworker had failed
to observe the injunction that if you cannot get yourself a good tribe you might as well get yourself a good beach!
416 Stewart
Today one can find monographic works on Roma/Gypsies in nearly every country of Europe
and many places outside Europe as well, the most important of which include the United
Kingdom (Okely 1983, Rehfisch 1961, Tóth 2008), Ireland (Gmelch 1979, Ni Shuinear 1994,
Helleiner 2003), France (Formoso 1986; Missaoui 2003; Poueyto 2011; Reyniers 1994, 1998;
Treps 2003; Williams 1982, 1993), Italy (Piasere 1995; Tauber 2006, 2008; Toninato 2012), Czech
and Slovak Republics (Abu Ghosh 2008, 2010; Budilova & Jakoubek 2005; Hubschmannova
1978; Jakoubek 2004; Jakoubek & Budilova 2006; Lacková & Hübschmannová 2000; Scheffel
2004, 2005), Hungary (Horváth 2005, Jároka 2012, Kovai 2010), Finland (Grönfors 1979),
Norway (Barth 1975 [1955]), Bulgaria (Marushiakova 1992), Romania (Berta 2007, 2009;
Engebrigtsen 2007; Fosztó 2009; Hasdeu 2007, 2008; Könczei 2012; Könczei & Lăcătus 2002;
Kovalcsik & Boros 2000; Nagy 2002; Olivera 2007, 2011; Pulay 2011), Poland (Kaminski 1980,
Kapralski 2004), Macedonia (Silverman 1988, 1995), Russia (Lemon 2000, 2002), Serbia (van
de Port 1998), Slovenia ( Janko Spreizer 2004), Holland (Cottaar 1998), Spain (Arias 2001, Gay
y Blasco 1999, Manrique 2009, Pasqualino 1998), Brasil (Fotta 2012), and Greece (Theodosiou
2010, 2011). Students from political science (Barša 2001, Sigona & Trehan 2009, Simhandl 2009,
Vermeersch 2006), from cultural studies (Belton 2005, Van Baar 2011), from literary criticism
and media studies (Andreşoiu et al. 2008, Baumann 2000, Canut 2010, Iordanova 2008, Saul &
Tebbutt 2004, Toninato 2012, Willems 1997), from sociology (Alcalde 1997; Bancroft 2005;
Beremenyi 2011; Blaschke 2004; Delépine 2007; Durst 2002, 2010; Havas et al. 1995; Hermanin
2011; Ladányi 1993; Ladányi & Szelényi 2001, 2006; Legros 2010; Magyari-Vincze 2008;
Missaoui 2003; Rughiniş 2011; Sigona 2005; Szalai 2003; Szelényi & Ladányi 2003; Vidra 2011;
Virag 2010; Vitale 2009; Vitale & Claps 2010), from international relations (Klı́mová-Alexander
2005), from linguistics and sociolinguistics (Bakker & Corthiade 1991; Matras 2002; Réger
1999; Szalai 1999; Treps 2003, 2009), history (Achim 2004; Asséo 2002; Dupcsik 2009; Fings
& Sparing 2005; Fraser 1992; Fricke 1996; Ioanid 2000; Luchterhandt 2000; Mayall 1988,
2004; Opfermann 2007; Petcuţ 2009; Pomogyi 1995; Thiele 2008; Zimmermann 1996), and
musicology (Marian-Bălaşa 2002; Beissinger 2005; Kovalcsik 1985, 1987, 2010; Stoichiţă 2010)
have made significant contributions to understanding the place of Roma in European societies.
And the revived journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, now known as Romani Studies, under Yaron
Matras’s editorship, provides a truly multidisciplinary forum for the field.
Historical Neglect
The one-time neglect of this field within Anthropology came about for three main reasons, all of
which go back to the interesting reasons for why Roma and Gypsies are difficult to fit into exist-
ing social science schema. The first lies in the residual trace of an anthropological-evolutionary
approach, especially in the study of hunters and gatherers, which has remained perhaps the sole
area in modern anthropology in which evolutionary and sociological approaches overlap (see, e.g.,
Gellner 1998, Woodburn 1982). The problem for potential fieldworkers was the total lack of fit
between the role allocated to hunter-gatherers within the discipline (as amber-sealed represen-
tatives of Early Stone Age civilization) and the urbanized, motorized, and, in truth, somewhat
domesticated way of life of the European Gypsies who nonetheless displayed a formal similarity to
some of the hunter-gatherer populations (as described by, e.g., Okely 1983, pp. 52–53; Rao 1987;
Rao & Berland 2004; Gmelch 1986; and in very different modes, Vekerdi 1981, Day et al. 1998).
The second reason Gypsies were difficult to imagine as a viable subject of ethnographic
inquiry in the mid-twentieth century was their incompatibility with the Radcliffe-Brownian
notion that anthropologists studied “societies” as naturally existing entities with a quasi-organic
unity (and not one arbitrarily imposed by the observer). We know with hindsight that this model
www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 417
of more or less clearly bounded sociocultural systems relied on an image taken from the world
of nation-states with people A on territory A and people B on territory B [the criticism of which
dates from as early as Evans-Pritchard (1940) and Leach (1954) but was truly incorporated into
disciplinary practice only decades later, as in Clifford (1988), Spencer (1990)]. Gypsies, who
always live immersed inside and dispersed among majority populations and are invariably bi-
or multilingual, did not fit the “one culture, one territory, one social structure” model at all. In
many respects they resembled the populations among whom they lived, and yet, in general, they
were seen and saw themselves as distinct populations. It took the publication of Frederik Barth’s
(1969) seminal work, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Cultural Difference,
to lay the ground for the field’s transformation.
A third, perhaps less important reason that anthropologists were wary of approaching fieldwork
in this area was the difficulty of adapting the traditional scientific ethnographic method to working
with a population that seeks invisibility. In a telling incident, a world-class anthropologist was
taken on a wild-goose chase across Europe by an expert informant who had promised him access
to Romany families the latter knew intimately. The latter was all too aware that the kind of formal
study of his friends would put a sudden end to his relations with Roma (see de Heusch 1965;
see also Yoors 1967, 1971). A new, younger generation of anthropologists, who had inherited a
confidence in their method, thanks to the very positivism of their predecessors’ work, were able to
adopt a more informal and soft-pedaled approach to ethnographic investigation. This generation
learned to do “fieldwork without notes” (Okely 2008; and see Gay y Blasco 1999; Kaminski 1980;
Piasere 1985, 1995; Stewart 1997; Williams 1984).
ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES: THREE TRADITIONS AND

THEIR OVERLAPPING TRAJECTORIES
For the past 40 years, anthropological approaches to Roma and Gypsy populations have over-
whelmingly been concerned with explaining the survival of the Gypsy way of life and its associated
populations. The reason for this focus lies in the truly fascinating sociological puzzle that Gypsy
persistence presents. Gypsies live dispersed among majority populations who, at least in the mod-
ern era (Asseo), tend to despise them; they are always more or less familiar, indeed intimate,
with the cultural world around them and yet they reproduce their communities with apparent
ease; and they do so without shared religion, without any form of ritual or political leadership,
and without overarching or underpinning political organization. Three types of explanation have
been offered for this phenomenon: historical explanations, which focus on the distinct origins of
Gypsy populations and treat them in effect as an unassimilated foreign ethnic group with a distinct
ethos; structural explanations, which locate the persistence of Gypsy populations in the way they
have occupied particular niches within the changing European division of labor, a subset of which
structuralist approaches are the Foucault-inspired positions that focus on the effects of the label-
ing strategies used by state institutions; and finally, culturalist explanations, which consider the
internal coherence of Gypsy or Romany value systems in a self-declared holistic approach. Each of
these approaches illuminates aspects of Romany and Gypsy experience, and each comes up against
the limits of a notion of ethnicity drawn from a model of autonomous and quasi-autochthonous
nation-states. In this sense, one of the things the anthropology of Roma and Gypsies has taught
is how much of an ideological notion the very notion of ethnicity itself is (Stewart 1995).
In anthropology, adherents of what I characterize as historical explanations are rather rare,
though Sutherland (1975) briefly refers to Indian roots of Romany distinctiveness. These expla-
nations are more common in linguistic studies, where a powerful, I would say irrefutable, case is
made for the continuity of language and linguistic forms across generations (Matras 2004). But the
418 Stewart
association of these approaches with the racialist folkloric approaches and the theoretical tedium
of a narrative history of migrations (Fraser 1992), as well as the blatantly political uses to which
explanations in terms of origins are put (Hancock 2002; see also Matras 2004), has repelled an-
thropologists from having much truck with an interest in origins. Matras’s suggestion, however,
that social scientists should make a formal distinction between communities who speak or have in
the recent past spoken Romany and others who are classified as Gypsies or Gypsy-like by majority
society (such as the Irish Travellers or German Jenische) has not been properly addressed—in
part because of the existence of such groups as the Baiesi in Romania, whose physiognomy and
social position resemble those of other Romany groups but whose dialect of Romanian shows not
a trace of Romany influence (see, in filmography, Budrala).
Although historical approaches have won little favor, the popularization of a political-ecology
approach, derived from Leach (1954) and Evans-Pritchard (1940), but promulgated and opera-
tionalized by Barth (1969), allowed British anthropologists, at least, to be able to imagine a the-
oretically adventurous entry point into Romany experience and society.2 Barth famously argued
that because cultural variation is continuous the notion of distinct cultures should be abandoned. A
focus instead on boundary-making processes would allow anthropologists to show how, while lan-
guage, religion, and clothing constantly change, distinct self-ascribed groups may be maintained.
By focusing on the politics of differentiation in a given ecological niche, Barth effectively carved
out the valley that most British students in the field were to walk through, although two other
influences should also be mentioned. Evans-Pritchard (1940) (among whose former pupils Okely
carried out her doctoral research) had provided a truly Durkheimian account of social structure
understood as a series of conceptions of what constituted the social. The ideas that a social sys-
tem exists fundamentally in the representations of its actors and should never be reduced to the
expression of some putatively more real or fundamental social facts on the ground provided the
basis for liberating the whole field. It meant that the lay-by outside Coventry is no different from
the swamp in the Wadi. The traveler site is just one other location on the earth where humans,
with similar imaginative capacities, set about trying to construct meaningful and enduring social
relations among themselves. The second crucial influence was Mary Douglas’s (1966) work on
purity and pollution. By happy coincidence, many Romany populations used just such categories as
key features in their self-definition as a people distinguished from the non-Gypsies or Gazhe, and
so Douglas provided the means to analyze the symbolic content of boundary work in a compelling
and plausible fashion (Miller 1975).
Okely’s most renowned contribution was, of course, the hypothesis that English Traveler
Gypsy culture has an indigenous origin at least as significant as the role of any foreign, imported
culture. Whatever the standing of this theory now [and clearly for Romany-speaking Gypsies, a
historical-linguistic link to South Asia is beyond question (Matras 2002)], the inspiration had been
to reject and effectively reject the obsessive and totally paralyzing concern of the folklorists with
origins and, in particular, exotic origins. As Okely (1983) pointed out, the wretched notion of the
“bastard” or “hybrid” in the “lorists’” work was the direct descendant of ideas onto which the
Nazi racial scientists latched (pp. 15–18). Here, Okely drew on the outstanding earlier work by a
young sociologist who had presented the emergence of Romany ethnic politics in the context of
twentieth-century public policy and the struggles for recognition of minority rights (Acton 1974).
As an early campaigner for new legislation to force local authorities to offer land to Gypsies,
Acton laid siege to and utterly overran the castle of the Gypsy Lorists with its motte and bailey
constructed around a racialist distinction between “pure Romani” and “Didicois.” After Acton,
2
See, the interview conducted by Alan Macfarlane at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/barth.htm.
it was clear that the pure Romani are the Gypsies over the hill one sees on holiday, whereas the
dirty family at the bottom of the road, or living in the lay-by, are inevitably seen as Didicoi—so
one man’s Roma were another man’s bastards or hybrids—depending on social positioning.3
Acton had launched the study of Gypsy politics as those of an ethnic minority like any other,
a particular case of ethnic mobilization within the British polity; however, Okely’s work implied
that Romany mobilization was most unlikely to take the same form as that of other ethnic groups
such as immigrant Asians and Muslims because these were populations that wanted “in” and, in
Gmelch’s terms, Roma and Gypsies were populations that “did not want in” (1986). Acton’s work
had come straight out of what were the beginnings of ethnic and racial studies in Britain, and he
stressed continuities between Romany and non-Gypsy cultures. Okely re-enchanted the British
Gypsies, and today, even in sociology programs, it is Okely’s account of these matters that holds
sway.
Following from Okely and, inevitably, defining themselves in contrast, Stewart (especially in his
1988 unpublished University of London thesis, but also 1997) and then Engebrigtsen focused on
the way integration into non-Gypsy society and the substance of relationships with non-Gypsies
shaped the Romany social order. This approach led to perhaps the most general statement of
the political-economy approach in the field: an attempt to characterize Romany figurations in
terms of attitudes toward temporality and the creation of an expansive present, attitudes which
were analytically linked to the experience of marginalization and social exclusion (Day et al.
1998).
Both Stewart and Engebrigtsen stress the partly illusory nature of Romany autonomy and
the real relationships of dependence between Rom and Gaze that are misrecognized in daily
interaction. Engebrigtsen is the only ethnographer so far to have had the moral courage and
stamina to carry out consecutive fieldwork among both Rom and peasants in the same village and
provides powerful testimony about the challenges she thus faced (Engebrigtsen 2007, pp. 8–11).
This study leads her to a fine sense of the mutual misrecognition that enables Rom and Gaze,
peasant and Gypsy, to live alongside one another and share the same social space. More than any
other work (apart from Horváth 2012 and Kovai 2012), this text points to the everyday sources
of current anti-Gypsy sentiment in Eastern Europe (see Stewart 2012) and the inadequacy of a
human rights/racism discourse to comprehend developments since 1989.
A Dumontian Approach
As the authors of Lillies of the Field (Day et al. 1998) concede, no necessary link can be found
between the kind of presentism found in so many Romany populations and the political order.
This admission indicates a more general problem with the whole social determinist approach
characteristic of the British sociostructural school. The Italian scholar Leonardo Piasere
(1985) and the French author Patrick Williams (1984)—who wrote their theses side by side in
Paris—jointly set out in a direction that led them away from a primary focus on how ethnic
boundaries are maintained. The dominant influence in their approach has been Louis Dumont’s
notion of holism and hierarchy (1970 [1966]). Dumont himself had, of course, been inspired by
reading Evans-Pritchard’s early work but not in the way the English followers had understood it
(Dumont 1975 [1968]).
At the heart of Williams’s work lies an ethnographic insight encapsulated in an article
contrasting economic strategies in Paris and New York: Whenever possible, the Rom tend to
3
Acton’s broader contribution also derived from his long-term practical commitment to field building and his heroic seminar
work from his offshore base in the University (former Polytechnic) of Greenwich.
420 Stewart
seek invisibility, to find a curtain behind which the non-Gypsies cannot observe them and will
never know the wonderful secret and pleasure of their way of life.4 It was with the publication of
Williams’s second monographic work (1993), this time addressing French Manouches (who are
closely related historically to the German Sinte), that he articulates, in an indirect fashion, his
dissatisfaction with the British sociostructural approach. The moment arises with the chapter in
which he turns to consider the “Manus among the Gadzos.” Williams notes that
there is a temptation to see specific traits in terms of adaptation. After all, it is hard to overlook the
fact that Manus affirmation has to occur in the midst of another society, and thus there cannot fail to
be some correlations between the nature of this society and the nature of this affirmation, or, more
precisely, between the nature of the latter and the fact that it is expressed within a world defined by
others. But I don’t think that these correlations can be limited to a deterministic interpretation. (2003
[1993], p. 29)
In the gentlest possible way, Williams rejects the deterministic explanations of Okely, Stewart,
and others (e.g., more recently, Olivera) who would derive or, in his view, reduce Gypsy or Romany
ways of life to a response to their economic or political niche and their relations with the non-
Gypsy world. Okely had, for instance, explained English Gypsy pollution beliefs as expressions of
the socioethnic boundary. In this matter, Stewart (1997) had argued that such beliefs are better
understood as sui generis gender representations (pp. 229–31), but the overall cast of his argument
was strictly reductionist. Against this type of reasoning, Williams (2003) makes a crucial, if subtle,
distinction. It is absolutely true, he says, that the Manus live “in the world of the Gadzos” but not
“in the same world as the Gadzos.” So they relate to the whole world outside their own, nature
included, through their relations with the Gadzos. But, while coexisting with the Gadzos the Manus
detach “themselves from them . . . put. . .themselves at a distance, which precisely cause them to
become Manus and the Gadzos to become Gadzo” (p. 29).
The implication of this position is the same as Leach’s (1954) assertion that Kachins and Shan,
though both forming “groups” in some loose sense, were not really the same sort of thing and
that to call both these identities “ethnic” would miss a profoundly important aspect of the change
involved when one transforms into the other (p. 288). Indeed, in the strict academic sense of the
term, it is meaningless to talk of the Manouches as an ethnic group like any other in France, for they
do not conceive of themselves as the structural equivalent of the Bretons or the Italians of Savoie or
the Catalans of south-central France.5 The challenge this limitation poses to traditional theories of
Roma as an ethnic minority like any other [as in Acton’s account, but more recently, Barany (2002)
and Pogony (2004)] should not be underestimated. This places ethnographers of the Roma in a
tricky relationship with some of the more simplistic “Roma Rights” activists, who hope to build a
civil rights–type movement among Europe’s Roma. Indeed on numerous occasions anthropolo-
gists have noted the dramatic difference between the huge and transformative effects of genuinely
successful mobilizations of Roma—such as those associated with the neo-protestant churches—and
the almost total irrelevance of the “ethno-political” movement (Gay y Blasco 2000, Williams 1991).
Today, many scholars view Romany value systems as phenomena sui generis rather than sys-
tems determined by the relationship between the Gypsies and the non-Gypsies ( Jacobs & Ries
2008). Gay y Blasco, who works on Spanish Gitanos, is particularly noteworthy for her rigorous
4
Williams was, one can infer, influenced by Gropper’s great ethnography of New York Romany families, which was probably
the most accurate single general ethnography written about the Roma by someone who had years of experience working with
her informants. Gropper’s work is memorable above all for the detail and depth of the ethnographic observation, but her
theoretical stance—a Boasian concern with the cultural integration of Romany values—fits well with a Dumontian holism.
5
See also Stewart 1995 (1988).
demonstration of the construction of the Gitano notion of the person around a set of values that
are to be understood in their own right and not as a reflection of social or ethnic conflicts or
boundary-making processes. In particular, conceptions of the righteousness of male behavior and
the modesty of female behavior ground and constitute Gitano practice (2005, 2011). Her examina-
tion of ideas and practices around conception and the construction of a specifically Gitano female
body provide a splendid point of entry to those unfamiliar with this work (Gay y Blasco 1997; see
also Okely 1975).
How far this culturalist approach can be taken is, however, a moot point. Gay y Blasco’s own
work on the gendered Gitano body suggests that Romany representations are not entirely sui
generis. In an examination of the manipulation of biology by the Gitanos, Bay y Blasco (1997) tells
us that the “emphasis on proper sexual behavior gains much of its strength through comparison
with the Payo life-style. To the eyes of the Gitanos, the Payos break all the moral rules and
particularly those that have to do with relations between men and women. . . . ’Evils’ such as
premarital sex and divorce are thus rampant among Payos because the women lack self-control and
the men fail to control them” (p. 525). At first look, this view seems to be a familiar point from the
literature. Okely had pointed to the disdain of non-Gypsy gendered behavior in England. But the
novelty here lies in the observation that in post-Franco Spain, the Gitano stance is, in a certain way,
a claim to Spanishness, or at least a conservative version of it. Like the Rudari Gypsies in Romania,
who claim to be descendants of a putative ancestral Romanian population—the Dacians—and thus
assert that they are more Romanian than the Romanians, and also like the Hungarian musicians
who take such pride in having been “ambassadors for their country” under socialism ( Jároka 2012),
this kind of claim looks distinctly like an assertion not just of moral superiority in general, but also
moral superiority in terms which the non-Gypsy population recognizes.
Gay y Blasco’s work also began to formalize insights that were still not fully addressed in
the literature: the structurally weak ties that bind individuals together in any group of shared
action and the absence of any sense of an overarching society among the Gitanos. These are
central social facts and render largely irrelevant the approach toward ethnic relations found in
the “community studies” school (Cohen 1985); thus, for the Romany-speaking Rom at least the
kind of typology so compelling outlined by Wimmer (2008) for “ethnic interactions” is largely
irrelevant in these cases—however well it captures the social processes found among groups of
Gypsies who “do want in” (e.g., Havas, Jároka, and Virág). Because no fixed groups exist that come
together or are represented in any context to provide the correlate of the notion of community,
studies show no position of leadership and politics has to take a very different form. As Blasco has
recently argued, a sense of emotional commonality—and more broadly, I would argue, an idiom
of commonality as opposed to identity or corporate interest—lies at the foundation of Romany
sociality. Tauber picks up this point with her observation that the terms widely used in politically
correct speech Roma and Sinte in English mean “Roma” and “relatives” because the term Sinte in
German Romany means “related persons” as in the common phrase, “amare Sinte” (“our family”).
The primary, familial referent of the term that is simultaneously used for the wider population
poses an enormous challenge to any person or movement who wants or claims to represent “the
Sinte” or “the Gitanos” as an ethnic group of people because the very notion is incoherent and
misrepresents the everyday politics of distinction that maintain the very ways of life the activists
wish to defend.
Identification as the Source of Commonality?

The materialist suggestion that Romany social adaptations are to be understood in the local
sociopolitical context in which they have emerged has found a particularly strong form in the work
422 Stewart
of a group of post-Foucauldian Dutch scholars, Willems (1997), Lucassen (1996), and Cottaar
(1998), who have brought a whole new perspective to those who would write histories of Romany
populations in Europe. For these scholars, the construction of a generic Gypsy identity is a work
of fantasy carried out by folklorists, ethnographers, and those who follow them. These, deluded
by the phantasmagoria of methodological nationalism, have, in constructing a folkoric picture
of a unified “Romany people,” provided a kind of smokescreen for the real work of identification
that has been carried out by police forces and state officials who, over the past 200 years, have put
so much effort into determining who is and who is not “a Gypsy.” Curiously, this Foucauldian
perspective is, from the point of view of young Romany activists, a potentially liberating insight:
the history of the Gypsies is as much a history of those who classified people as “Gypsy” as it is of
those thus labeled. Belton, the British Romany scholar and activist who seeks to mobilize “hybrid”
identities of local class formation and Gypsiness, and so takes “Gypsy” issues out of an “ethnic
ghetto,” draws inspiration from this work to attack the distinction between real Gypsies and false
Gypsies who keep popping up in the literature (e.g., in a linguistically plausible form in Matras
2004).
But it is the theoretical contribution of Lucassen’s (1998) cross-disciplinary work that has been
most relevant to revitalizing the anthropological study of Romany social forms. Approaching the
Roma as part of a larger population of migrant laborers and mobile self-employed, Lucassen
provides in one sense a radical restatement of Okely’s iconoclastic hypothesis about indigenous
origins. But his work on the development of the police category of “Zigeuner” goes much further
than historical suggestion and hypothesis (Lucassen 1996). He shows how a system of “wanted
notices” and police circulars in southwestern German states in the nineteenth century was devel-
oped to deal with the mobile population of criminals and travelers who tended to evade identi-
fication through being able to change names and identifying paperwork from one jurisdiction to
another. Lucassen argued that in socioeconomic terms there is nothing to distinguish the people
who appeared in books such as Dillman’s (1905) synthetic “encyclopedia” of Gypsy families, pub-
lished by the Bavarian ministry of the interior, from others who do not appear there with the Z
letter by their names. The only significant distinguishing feature was that those people who trav-
eled in families rather than as single men (or, occasionally, women) tended to be labeled Zigeuner.
Lucassen wondered why this was the case.
The explanation lies in poor law and welfare arrangements that made local authorities finan-
cially responsible for the care of the poor and so gave them a significant interest in finding ways
to exclude categories of people who might otherwise fall on their charity. The combination of
an interest in excluding nonlocals with early police interest in that hard-to-identify mobile mass
led, in Lucassen’s book, to the distinctive treatment of the Zigeuner of the German lands. This
approach unquestionably provides crucial data to understand the distinctive German state policy
toward Gypsies as well as the genealogy of Nazi persecution of the Gypsies (Gelattely & Stoltzfus
2001, Lewy 2000, Zimmerman 1996). The fact that the “traditional” Criminal Police (kripo) rather
than the Nazi-created political police (Gestapo) played the leading role in this genocide becomes
comprehensible in this context.
The suggestion, however, that being treated as a pariah group leads Gypsies sooner or later
to acquire the sense of having something in common with others, that identity is little more
than an effect of identification, is more dubious.6 Historical work (Fricke 1996, Opfermann 2007)
demonstrates that in the early eighteenth century Zigeuner who appear in court records regularly
have a sense of cultural distinctiveness, of belonging to a separate population from the bauer
6
The influence of this approach on the sociologists János Ladányi and Iván Szelényi (especially, 2003) is, of course, transparent.
(farmers) who speak the German tongue. The notion that eighteenth-century speakers of the
zigeunerishce sprache shared nothing but an official label with the speakers of German Romany
today beggars belief is barely credible. Whatever the undoubted role of stigma and procedures of
stigmatizing and categorizing as “Gypsy,” studies in this vein limit our understanding of what it
means today and has meant in the past to be Rom, to have sinte.
Roma and the Anthropology of Ethnicity in Europe Today

Roma are overwhelmingly overrepresented in eastern Europe, and it will inevitably be from this
region that the most interesting work arises in the years ahead, with more than 20 doctoral students
currently at work or having recently completed their work. Van der Port’s study of Serbian
attitudes toward Gypsy musicians—which turns the tables in exemplary fashion and provides a
far richer account than did previous work [e.g., Trumpener’s (1992) Saidian approach] of the
logic of ethnic stereotyping and the way that the Gypsy musician allows Serb customers to live
about a bacchanalian fantasy of orgiastic self-destruction—is just one example of the benefit of
ethnographic investigation.
As Pronai (2003) recognized many years ago, one of the bridges that any Eastern European
anthropology must build is one that crosses the field of Romany studies. But whereas anthropol-
ogists working abroad (Stewart, Engebrigsten, Berta) have tended to focus on the more exotic
Romany-speaking Roma, indigenous ethnographers (Abu Ghosh, Budilova, and Jakoubek for
Czech and Slovak republics; Gay y Blasco for Spain; Foszto for Romania; Horváth, Jároka, and
Kovai for Hungary) have grappled with the theoretically more challenging cases of monolingual
or apparently more assimilated Gypsy populations whose enduring distinction is a puzzle to both
assimilationist states and cultural anthropology. The latter, whom Romany speakers have tended
to represent as sellouts, challenge the model of ethnicity that all authors discussed above have used.
Some have said that anthropologists act as psychoanalysts of the social order, and Horváth and
Kovai’s superb investigations of the quiddity of the Hungarian Gypsy life-worlds has culminated
in what I believe to be the most original contribution to the ethnography of Eastern Europe for
many years: a set of papers exploring the radical shift in the past few years from a village order in
which more of village life increasingly appears to be dominated by the presence of a now openly
named Gypsy (Horváth 2012, Kovai 2012). In the recent communist past, the Gypsy/Hungarian
distinction provided the basis of all social interaction between members of these two categories in
Hungarian villages, but this fact was never named and so no one was ever called a Gypsy directly.
This meant that Gypsies lived in the village under a constant pressure, that they should not behave
in such a way as would force someone to call them a Gypsy. They lived with the false promise that
if they became educated, acquired wealth, lived like “normal people” (read Hungarian peasants),
then they would be treated as such. But the promise was illusory. Now, however, thanks to
economic, demographic, and, above all, political changes, the promise of assimilation has been
taken back and “the Gypsy” is constantly named and the Gypsies more or less happily bring their
Gypsiness to the public space. In consequence, the majority feel (quite unreasonably in many re-
spects) that they are engaged in a battle for territory with this newly named presence, the Gypsies,
who are taking over their institutions (the school, the bars, economic life). They feel their space
constantly encroached upon by this previously unnameable but ever-present social force (see also
Wimmer 2002).7
7
The term that is used in the village and in the article is the abstract Hungarian noun, a cigányság with a sense like Deustschtum
in German—almost untranslatable into English.
424 Stewart
There is one last broader area in which the study of Roma may offer novel contributions to
anthropological thought. The study of nations and ethnic groups has, as many have noted, been
deeply compromised by the nationalist assumptions of researchers (Wimmer 2008). Nowhere is
this more obvious than in the notion that each ethnic group has its own peculiar genius, its geist or
spirit, something that it brings out of its own breast as mother’s milk for its citizens. The essential
feature of this spirit is that it is unique, original, and not replicable by others. In reality, history
affords no such populations; the real processes of human history involve an endless exchange and
transfer of cultural patterns from words through languages to political and religious institutions.
This point has been forcefully argued by Harrison (2006), starting from the observation that in
many New Guinean societies successful mimesis has high cultural value (pp. 153–54). The study
of cultural creativity and the sources of social diversity can be powerfully recharged through study
of a population who—unlike most Europeans, swept along in the nationalist mythology—are
not only uninterested in their own supposedly unique cultural genius but, moreover, positively
celebrate their ability to adapt, adopt, and mimetically assimilate practices they find among their
neighbors. Nationalist ideology makes us see this alternate view as trivial and uninteresting, just
as folklorists used to study Gypsies as a means to carry out a kind of oral archaeology on obsolete
national culture (e.g., Nagy). But of course most of human history (including the spread of the
modular “national idea”) illustrates the central role of mimesis in human history. Certainly there is
nowhere better in Europe to study the workings of this foundational human capacity than among
the Roma.
One of the most striking things, looking back over 40+ years of anthropological research, is
the discovery that each of the major studies has produced a picture of the unique adaptation of
the particular group of Roma studied such that the very nature of the social varies in each case
(Williams 2011a,b). In one setting the social is built up around idioms of “brotherhood and luck”
(Stewart 1988, Olivera 2007); in another setting, around silence and respect for the dead and
overcoming the challenges this poses to daily life (Tauber 2006, Williams 2003 [1993]); elsewhere,
around the construction of moral, gendered behavior (Gay y Blasco); and yet elsewhere, around
notions of the pure Romany body (Sutherland, Kaminski), which provide the grounds for
establishing an image of enduring social relations. Yet elsewhere again, the same is achieved
around vendetta and feud (Fotta 2012, Grönfors 1979). For this reason, collections of essays use
inelegant constructions in their titles, such as “Some Gypsies in Europe” (Stewart & Williams
2011), to avoid the implication that any one body of work will give the reader an overview, a
generalizable model of how “The Gypsies in Europe” live (see also Piasere 2011, Stewart &
Rövid 2010). But in each case the Roma in question have found a solution to the double challenge
of preserving cultural continuity in a situation of immersion in and dispersal among a more
powerful and richer majority world and have done so by constructing a conception of social value
that places the social beyond the reach of dominant society (see also Olivera 2010, Piasere 1994).
This remarkable achievement has protected Romany communities from the depradation brought
on them by generations of the civilizing process, both those imposed by modernizing states and
those now encouraged by sympathetic nongovernmental organizations that would like to foster
a process of ethnogenesis among the Roma. The analytic riches and understanding offered by
a full description of this achievement well justifies the investment of further anthropological
resources.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
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139 min. Columbia Pict.
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AN42CH24-Stewart ARI 22 July 2013 12:22

Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity”

Department of Anthropology, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT,

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2013. 42:415–32 Keywords

This article’s doi: Abstract

It is no exaggeration to say that, in these increasingly worrisome times, the emergence of a

www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 417

ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES: THREE TRADITIONS AND

www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 419

www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 421

Identification as the Source of Commonality?

www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 423

Roma and the Anthropology of Ethnicity in Europe Today

www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 425

Ling., Univ. Amst.

2010, pp. 13–35

New York/Oxford: Berghahn

www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 427

Magyari-Vincze E. 2008. Romani women’s multiple discrimination: through reproductive control. In

www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 429

in North Italy. See Jacobs & Ries 2008, pp. 155–77

of difference. Identities 17(4):327–47

www.annualreviews.org • Roma and Gypsy “Ethnicity” 431

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